Corporate Accountability: Is it easier to blame the big names?

In the November issue of Ethical Corporation, Mallen Baker asks why international companies get knocked when things go wrong, but smaller companies remain anonymous. Comparing the BP disaster with the trapped Chilean miners, he examines the media coverage of both and why the focus on the latter centred on the human interest of the rescued miners rather than on the negligence of the mining company they worked for.

People die in mines all the time, the article says, but mostly in mines operated by companies that are widely unknown.

”The irony is is that multinational corporations in the extractives sector have probably done more than most to address corporate resonsibility issues.

This point was made at a session on extractive companies I attended recently at the House of Lords, held by GoodCorporation by sheer coincidence on the day that the miners began to emerge.”