This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "Strangers In Their Own Land" by Arlie Russell Hochschild. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.
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What is corporate exploitation? How does corporate abuse harm people and why is it tolerated?
Corporate exploitation is when corporations abuse their power, go unregulated, and cause harm through their actions. Common forms of corporate exploitation are environmental deregulation, worker exploitation, and illness such as cancer clusters.
Read more about corporate exploitation and what it means.
Corporate Exploitation and Abuse
In Louisiana, the GOP’s electoral dominance has resulted in a business climate that enables polluters to operate with a free hand. Because of the state’s fiercely pro-business, anti-regulatory politics, the petrochemical industry knows that it has little to fear from state regulatory agencies or the pliant and cooperative state legislature.
Because of this, ordinary Louisianans (most of them loyal Republican voters) have suffered extraordinary abuse at the hands of a largely unregulated corporate sector during periods of corporate abuse including:
- Pollution and environmental degradation
- Labor exploitation and hazardous working conditions
- An alarming rate of pollution-related cancer diagnoses
Example #1: Environmental Degradation
According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and environmental watchdog groups, Louisiana is one of the most polluted states in the country. The state’s wetlands, for example, are in an extremely vulnerable condition. Since 1930, Louisiana has lost an area of its wetlands equal in size to the entire state of Delaware. This is one of the largest forms of corporate exploitation.
This can largely be attributed to the power and influence of the extraction industry, particularly the oil and petrochemical industries. These sectors are notorious for hazardous working conditions where employees are routinely exposed to potentially lethal chemicals. Companies are also known to dump industrial waste into the streams and bayous in instances of corporate abuse.
The ravages of Louisiana’s largely unfettered extraction industry have destroyed an entire way of life. Since before the area was even part of the United States, generations of Cajuns (French Creole-speaking people, descended from 18th-century Acadians deported from Canada by the British), had been able to make a living from the land and water. Even today, older residents recall the days when they were able to live a self-sufficient life, growing beans and vegetables on their land and catching fish, turtles, and frogs from the nearby bayous.
But with the arrival of companies like Firestone and Pittsburgh Plate Glass (PPG) in the years after World War II, industrial pollution poisoned the land and water. Instead of aquatic wildlife, the bayous began to yield industrial waste and bits of rubber from the tire plants. Agriculture and husbandry became impossible when farm animals began to die after drinking the fouled water.
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- What drives right-wing politics in America
- How a lack of empathy is increasing the partisan divide
- Why Republican politicians remain popular even if their policies don't help their voters
