I cannot believe this crap happens and people get away with it. It’s just one more example of how we do not police agriculture giants. According to an article in the New York Times, in 2004 a plant manager from one of Mexico’s Tyson Chicken plants (do you eat chicken? If you don’t get it from a farm/farmer’s market there is a good chance it’s Tyson Chicken; they’re HUGE) sent a letter to Tyson HQ (located in Arkansas) asking what he should do about the 30,700 pesos (about $2700) per month being sent to the wives of the veterinarians they had on staff to certify the meat as suitable for export to meet safety standards. This sounded like a bribe to him, and it had been going on for years.
Of course, Tyson executives (including the president of Tyson International, the vice president for operations, and the vice president for internal audit) had a meeting about this deplorable practice. And came to the very reasonable conclusion that they should not be making payments to people who do not work for them – particularly if they are the wives of safety inspectors. So instead they told the plant manager to get invoices directly from the veterinarians themselves so they could make the checks out to them as an honorarium.
Yes, you read that right. They decided to not send bribes to the wives, but directly to the safety inspectors. When a different plant manager complained that he felt uncomfortable with this practice (I would like to point out that this is the Mexican people in charge of the plant telling the American corporate office that they are making them do something illegal and corrupt) he was told to keep doing what he was doing. Two years of chicken from bribed safety inspectors later, a legal team finally got involved and Tyson voluntarily turned themselves in. They got $5.2 million in fines (in 2009, Tyson had a revenue of 26.7 billion to give you an idea of how badly that chump change didn’t wound them). I wonder how much money they made off of the chicken in the unknown number of years they’d been bribing inspectors.
But that’s not what really bugged the writer of the NYT article, and he makes a really interesting point. Nobody at the company got blamed. No names were released. Nobody lost their job. No individual was fined or sued. The company shareholders paid a pittance for a mistake that could’ve cost people their lives and not a single person got even a slap on the wrists.
How does this stop corruption? If nobody has to take responsibility for their actions and the fines are such that mega-corporations can take them in stride without blinking, what’s stopping them? Ethics?
Do you know where your food comes from? The company that happily lied for years about food safety claims that none of that chicken went into the American market (because apparently it’s okay to send un-inspected chicken to other countries, just not here), but I’m not sure why they think we’d believe anything they say.
I’m editing a novella I wrote that’s partially inspired by my frustration with corporate corruption (particularly within the agriculture industry), and a reader asked me to better describe this future dystopia I was writing about with its environmental destruction and corporate greed because the setting was unclear. I’m working on clarifying it (she’s totally right; I rushed a lot of description that I needed to spend more time on), but I wasn’t sure how to tell her it wasn’t a FUTURE dystopia I was talking about. Nothing I mentioned (aside from a conspiracy I added to give the story a single villain) wasn’t pulled from a headline TODAY. And now I’m afraid of sounding like a nut when I send it back to her and the clarity I’m adding shows a picture of modern life.
Is modernity not an exciting enough setting? Am I getting too political if I don’t set it in the future? Fiction is about truth, but not necessarily about reality. It’s more important to appear real than it is to be real – because people often don’t believe reality. Reality has too many coincidences. Reality is often incredibly far-fetched. Fiction can’t be. Fiction has to make sense. It has to have solid internal logic. The characters have to be deep enough to be realistic, but shallow and consistent enough that the audience can get a solid sense of them in the few hours they spend with the narrative. If I can’t write in such a way that people will believe my world, even if it is real, then I need to change the setting.
Cluck cluck cluck cluck cluck cluck, gulp!