Corporate Watch

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The Corporate Watch logo. Corporate Watch logo.jpg
The Corporate Watch logo.

Corporate Watch (The Corporate Watch Co-Operative Ltd.) is a research group based in the UK. It describes itself as a "research group that helps people stand up against corporations and capitalism." And as a "not-for-profit co-operative providing critical information on the social and environmental impacts of corporations and capitalism." It was established in 1996. [1]

Contents

Corporate Watch is run as a workers' co-operative. [2] It is incorporated as a company, limited by guarantee, and registered in the United Kingdom, number 03865674.

Research

Corporate Watch has two main research approaches:

Corporate Watch encourages "individuals and groups to contact us with information and requests about companies they think need looking into." [4]

Training

Corporate Watch also provides training and resources so that more people can learn how to investigate companies. These include:

Research areas and notable investigations

Environment

Housing

A core strand of Corporate Watch's work has been investigating landlords and property developers in support of tenants' groups and people opposing the "gentrification" of their neighbourhoods. Examples include:

"Covid Capitalism" and vaccine profiteering

During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 Corporate Watch published two series of articles and reports on "#CoronaCapitalism" and "Vaccine Capitalism". The "Covid Capitalism" articles investigated companies profiting from the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, including outsourcing companies winning UK government contracts with little scrutiny. [19] An article "Six ways that capitalism spreads the crisis" argued that the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, and responses to it, were closely connected to structures of global capitalism. [20]

The "Vaccine capitalism" series looked at the profits being forecast by pharmaceutical companies Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca. [21] Corporate Watch argued that these companies were making "huge profits" from vaccine sales, even though most R&D into the vaccines was heavily subsidised by public funds. (It included AstraZeneca in this critique, arguing that the company's claims to be forgoing profits from its vaccine were hollow in several respects.) [22] It identified the source of these high profits in the intellectual property system that allows major corporations to patent drugs such as vaccines. [23]

"The UK Border Regime"

Corporate Watch produces research in support of migrant campaigns, and groups opposing immigration raids, immigration detention and deportations. In particular, it produces regular reports on the companies profiteering from the UK's "Border Regime". These include:

Corporate Watch's book The UK Border Regime, published in 2018, brings together much of the group's research on this area. It outlines how the UK immigration authorities work together as part of an overall "regime" with private sector contractors and collaborators, and also other players including lobby groups and media outlets pushing anti-migration messages. [36]

Some recent reports have looked at:

Collaborations and re-use by media

Research by Corporate Watch is often reused by news outlets, and some Corporate Watch investigations are co-published with commercial media outlets. Examples include:

Publications

Corporate Watch also publishes books, all of which are copyright free or licensed under Creative Commons licenses, and can be downloaded from the website. [3]

Corporate Watch Capitalism book front cover small.webp

A list of other Corporate Watch publications can be found here

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">No Border network</span> Associations of free movement

The No Border Network refers to loose associations of autonomous organisations, groups, and individuals in Western Europe, Central Europe, Eastern Europe and beyond. They support freedom of movement and resist human migration control by coordinating international border camps, demonstrations, direct actions, and anti-deportation campaigns.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Serco</span> British company

Serco Group plc is a British multinational defence, health, space, justice, migration, customer services, and transport company. It is headquartered in Hook, Hart, England. The company operates in Continental Europe, the Middle East, the Asia Pacific region, including Australia and Hong Kong, and North America. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Home Office</span> Ministerial department of the UK Government

The Home Office (HO), also known as the Home Department, is a ministerial department of the Government of the United Kingdom. It is responsible for immigration, security, and law and order. As such, it is responsible for policing in England and Wales, fire and rescue services in England, Border Force, visas and immigration, and the Security Service (MI5). It is also in charge of government policy on security-related issues such as drugs, counterterrorism, and immigration. It was formerly responsible for His Majesty's Prison Service and the National Probation Service, but these have been transferred to the Ministry of Justice.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Migrant Help</span> Charitable organization

Migrant Help is a United Kingdom-based national charity that has been supporting migrants since 1963.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Villawood Immigration Detention Centre</span> Immigration Detention Centre in Sydney, Australia

Villawood Immigration Detention Centre, originally Villawood Migrant Hostel or Villawood Migrant Centre, split into a separate section named Westbridge Migrant Hostel from 1968 to 1984, is an Australian immigration detention facility located in the suburb of Villawood in Sydney, Australia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lendlease</span> Multinational construction and real estate company headquartered in Australia

Lendlease is a multinational construction and real estate company, headquartered in Barangaroo, New South Wales, Australia.

Since 1945, immigration to the United Kingdom, controlled by British immigration law and to an extent by British nationality law, has been significant, in particular from the Republic of Ireland and from the former British Empire, especially India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Caribbean, South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Hong Kong. Since the accession of the UK to the European Communities in the 1970s and the creation of the EU in the early 1990s, immigrants relocated from member states of the European Union, exercising one of the European Union's Four Freedoms. In 2021, since Brexit came into effect, previous EU citizenship's right to newly move to and reside in the UK on a permanent basis does not apply anymore. A smaller number have come as asylum seekers seeking protection as refugees under the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention.

Mitie Group PLC is a British strategic outsourcing and energy services company. It provides infrastructure consultancy, facilities management, property management, energy and healthcare services. It has a head office at The Shard in London and more than 200 smaller offices throughout the United Kingdom and Ireland. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Migration Watch UK</span> British think-tank and campaign group

Migration Watch UK is a British think-tank and campaign group which argues for lower immigration into the United Kingdom. Founded in 2001, the group believes that international migration places undue demand on limited resources and that the current level of immigration is not sustainable.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Illegal immigration to the United States</span> Immigration to the United States in violation of US law

Illegal immigration, or unauthorized immigration, occurs when foreign nationals, known as aliens, violate US immigration laws by entering the United States unlawfully, or by lawfully entering but then remaining after the expiration of their visas, parole or temporary protected status.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Immigration detention in the United States</span>

The United States government holds tens of thousands of immigrants in detention under the control of Customs and Border Protection and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wonga.com</span> English payday loan provider

Wonga.com, also known as Wonga, was a British payday loan firm that was founded in 2006. The company focused on offering short-term, high-cost loans to customers via online applications, and began processing its first loans in 2007. The firm operated across several countries, including the United Kingdom, Spain, Poland and South Africa; it also operated in Canada until 2016, and in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands through the German payments business, BillPay, between 2013 and 2017.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harsha Walia</span> Canadian activist and writer

Harsha Walia is a Canadian activist and writer based in Vancouver. She has been involved with No one is illegal, the February 14 Women's Memorial March Committee, the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre, and several Downtown Eastside housing justice coalitions. Walia has been active in immigration politics, Indigenous rights, feminist, anti-racist, anti-statist, and anti-capitalist movements for over a decade.

Immigration Enforcement (IE) is a law enforcement command within the Home Office, responsible for enforcing immigration law across the United Kingdom. The force was part of the now defunct UK Border Agency from its establishment in 2008 until Home Secretary Theresa May demerged it in March 2012 after severe criticism of the senior management. Immigration Enforcement was formed on 1 March 2012, becoming accountable directly to ministers.

Mears Group plc is a housing and social care provider. It repairs and maintains over 700,000 social homes across the UK.

The UK Home Office hostile environment policy is a set of administrative and legislative measures designed to make staying in the United Kingdom as difficult as possible for people without leave to remain, in the hope that they may "voluntarily leave". The Home Office policy was first announced in 2012 under the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition. The policy was widely seen as being part of a strategy of reducing UK immigration figures to the levels promised in the 2010 Conservative Party Election Manifesto.

The Windrush scandal was a British political scandal that began in 2018 concerning people who were wrongly detained, denied legal rights, threatened with deportation, and in at least 83 cases wrongly deported from the UK by the Home Office. Many of those affected had been born British subjects and had arrived in the UK before 1973, particularly from Caribbean countries, as members of the "Windrush generation".

The COVID-19 pandemic in U.S. immigration detention has been covered extensively since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. More than 38,000 people were detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the time of the outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States. ICE's response to the outbreak in detention facilities has been widely characterized as substandard and dangerous. Harmful practices have been reported in numerous facilities managed by third-party private contractors with ICE. For example, reports found that HDQ Neutral disinfectant was used over 50 times per day in un-ventilated areas, which caused pain, bleeding, and severe illness to numerous people held in Adelanto Detention Center, a private prison managed by GEO Group Inc.

After Exploitation is a UK-based non-profit organization using investigative methods to track the unpublished outcomes of modern slavery survivors. The group uses Freedom of Information requests to collate cases of wrongful deportation, detention, and failures by agencies to refer slavery victims for support.

Joe Biden's immigration policy initially focused on reversing many of the immigration policies of the previous Trump administration, before implementing stricter enforcement mechanisms later in his term.

References

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  2. 1 2 3 "About Corporate Watch". Corporate Watch. Retrieved 2022-02-17.
  3. 1 2 "Products Archive". Corporate Watch. Retrieved 2022-02-17.
  4. "Need Help?". Corporate Watch. Retrieved 2022-02-17.
  5. "Corporate Watch: training" . Retrieved 17 February 2022.
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