Unocal’s pipeline dream

Pact with oppressive regime draws unwanted spotlight

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Last February, when Unocal of Los Angeles and France’s Total inked a $1 billion contract with the dictatorship of Burma to build a 250-mile gas pipeline to Thailand, they must have figured they could weather any public relations storm.

They knew the country’s creepily named State Law and Order Restoration Council had a brutal record. The U.S. State Department has reported that the SLORC “forced hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ordinary Burmese…to ‘contribute’ their labor, often under harsh working conditions, to construction projects.”

But the oil giants were also aware that press coverage of Burma had been scant. Who’d notice a little business deal? Still, when the SLORC began clearing a path for the pipeline, allegations immediately surfaced from human rights watchers that the SLORC’s workforce actually comprised slave labor pulled from nearby fields.

In May, a small but vocal group of Unocal stockholders protested the pipeline deal, unsuccessfully urging the company to follow other U.S. corporations (Eddie Bauer, Levi Strauss) and pull out of Burma. Then in July, the SLORC ended the six-year imprisonment of Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, following intense international pressure. (The leader of Burma’s democracy movement, she supports trade sanctions against the junta.) A month later, director John Boorman’s Beyond Rangoon introduced Burma’s fledgling democracy movement to a worldwide audience.

And while Unocal and Total claim they have no knowledge of slave labor being used on the construction project, the location of the pipeline offers a troubling omen. It was just kilometers away, after all, that Japan maintained the brutal POW camps immortalized in yet another film, The Bridge on the River Kwai.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

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And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

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