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From Berlin to Fremont: Victories against Deutsche Wohnen and Tesla
Welcome to our first newsletter celebrating victories from corporate campaigns around the world!
Berliners sent a powerful message to corporate landlords like Adler, Deutsche Wohnen, Heimstaden, the Pears Group and Vonovia in late September when over one million city residents voted to seize some 240,000 housing units from mega landlords and turn them into city-owned affordable housing.
"The whole city said: 'We don’t want speculators to have a say in our housing.' And that’s a decision that political leaders simply can’t ignore," Kalle Kunkel, an activist with the Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen campaign, told Euronews. Although the vote was not legally binding, the opinion of 56.4% of those who went to the polls, sends a powerful message to the new city government — which has already (unfortunately) indicated that it will not implement the measure.
"While some may bristle at the nature (and perhaps radicalism) of the socialisation campaign in Berlin, it has also shown us the power of tenant activism and community organising," Alexander Vasudevan, an associate professor in human geography at the University of Oxford, wrote in the Guardian newspaper. "What is needed are creative, large-scale solutions that tackle housing insecurity and empower residents to challenge their increasing marginalisation and vulnerability."
CorpWatch salutes the vote as one small step towards tackling one of the most pressing issues of our time. The city of Berlin already owns and manages 325,000 apartments and it could do more. Many cities in the United States are doing the same from Dallas, Texas, and Missoula, Montana, to Gary, Indiana, where hundreds of apartments have been bought in recent months by municipal authorities to keep them affordable. Such steps are a welcome change to the days of Margaret Thatcher who pioneered a devastating privatization of 1.8 million council-built homes in the UK, that paved the way for London's housing crisis today.
In other good news, auto-maker Tesla has been ordered to pay $137 million in damages to Owen Diaz, a Black elevator operator at the company plant in Fremont, California, who accused the company of ignoring his charges of discrimination and racial abuse. The decision has given ammunition to activist shareholders.
"After this week’s headlines and many other employee allegations of racial discrimination, we, as investors, need a look under the hood," Kristin Hull, CEO of Nia Impact Capital told the company annual meeting. "Bias, discrimination and harassment in the workplace create unknown and uncompensated risks for investors, inviting unnecessary legal, brand, financial and human capital issues to a company."
Thanks for helping hold corporations accountable! The CorpWatch Team
Pratap in Tokyo, Tyler in Santa Barbara, Victoria in London, Elena in Calgary, and Elisa in Andalusia |
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New Stories
From the CorpWatch newsdesk, here are our two latest stories: |
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Gulliver
This week on Gulliver - our brand new database of global corporate wrongdoing - we'd like to feature two of our latest profiles: Facebook and Amazon, two companies that are always in the news.
Social media company Facebook is in the dock after yet another brave insider and whistleblower — Frances Haugen — spoke out against how the company harms children and destabilizes democracies.
And Amazon, a retail behemoth whose real business is data — Big Data. It is infamous for its use of low paid warehouse workers and delivery drivers who are tasked with delivering a wide variety of products to online shoppers. |
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Video chats with activists
Next up in our regular series of video interviews with activists and organizations: |
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Mid October 2021
Anne Schröeter of the European Center for Constitutional Rights (ECCHR) will be talking to us about a new project mapping the European arms companies that are exporting weapons used in the bombing of Yemen, creating the world's worst man-made humanitarian crisis. |
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Late October 2021
We've been invited to speak with Steven Donzinger, a New York lawyer who successfully took on Chevron's deliberate dumping of billions of gallons of cancer-causing waste into the Ecuadorean Amazon. He was recently sentenced to 6 months in jail by a U.S. judge in a decision condemned by UN. |
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The interviews will be live-streamed on our Facebook, YouTube and Instagram channels so please keep an eye on those sites for broadcast times! We will also archive them on our website, in case you can't join us in person. Keep your eyes peeled for the date announcements! |
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 | | Watch the full interview here. |
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Last, but not least, here is our latest infographic - based on our article on Amazon's plans for a new headquarters in South Africa. Design by Elisa Emch. |
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