Gulliver

CoreCivic was originally named Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) when it was founded in 1983. (It was renamed in 2016). As the second largest private prisons provider in the United States, it runs several dozen detention facilities with a capacity of some 75,000 inmates. It also provides electronic monitoring as well as prison transport.

Detention centers and prisons run by the company have been accused of inhumane living conditions, medical negligence, physical and sexual abuse, overcrowding and understaffing. CoreCivic guards have been accused of excessive use of force and the prolonged use of solitary confinement. Migrants have sued the company in the U.S. on multiple occasions for forcing detainees to work for minimal wages as low as $1 a day.

Denka is a chemical company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Founded in 1912 in Hokkaido, it is the world’s largest manufacturer of neoprene, which is used to make a variety of products such as adhesives, beer cozys, gaskets hoses and wetsuits. It also makes cement and plastics like styrene. The company’s most controversial asset is a neoprene factory named the Pontchartrain Works facility, built by Dupont in 1968 in the town of Reserve, Louisiana. The 2018 U.S. National Air Toxics Assessment found that cancer risks in St. John the Baptist parish were as high as 1,505-in-1 million, 50 times higher than the U.S. national average. In a one mile radius around the plant, the population is 94 percent Black. The company was forced to withdraw claims that U.S. government risk levels for chloroprene were 156 times too high after a peer-review of company research showed major flaws. Later it emerged that Dupont sold the plant in order after learning that the government was likely to impose strict controls on the plant.

Deutsche Bank was founded in 1870. It has paid out $7.2 billion in fines for its role in the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis and $2.5 billion in fines for its role in the global interest rate fixing scandal. It has also paid out $125 million to the U.S. to drop investigations into bribes paid out to officials in China, Italy, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as manipulating prices of precious metals. The Banking on Climate Chaos report estimates that Deutsche Bank provided over $74 billion in fossil fuel loans between 2016 and 2021 for projects such as Energy Transfer Partners’ Dakota Access Pipeline and Exxon’s ultra-deepwater drilling project off the coast of Guyana.

Deutsche Post, better known as DHL, is the successor to the Deutsche Bundespost, the German postal service that was privatized in 1995. It paid out $13.5 million for misclassifying hundreds of delivery drivers in California as independent contractors, and $1.5 million for wage violations of airport workers in Los Angeles, Miami, and New York. Similar suits are pending in Tennessee. It has also been sued for underpaying East European drivers who make deliveries in Germany and are forced to live in their trucks because of low wages. In Turkey, DHL was accused of firing 30 workers were members of the Tümtis trade union for attempting to organize workers.

DomusVi is one of Europe’s largest private elder care home providers and has expanded its operations to China and Latin America in recent years. It has been the target of countless protests, investigations and lawsuits in Spain, France and Chile by workers as well as relatives of residents for issues ranging from understaffing to neglect of patients to union repression. Those affected by DomusVi accuse it of “slavery-like” working conditions, “treating residents as if they were numbers” and “doing business with the dead”. Through its complex network of subsidiaries based in tax havens like Jersey and Luxemburg, the company has been shown to evade paying taxes in several European countries.