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Subsidiary companies, economic boycott, and big tobacco: the case of Phillip Morris

Carlo Filicie's article "On the Obligation to Keep Informed about Distant Atrocities" makes the argument that Americans have an obligation to know about the actions of our government and the governments of other countries, both within the United States and abroad (Human Rights Quarterly, Volume 12 Number 3; August 1990).

"One has a prima facie obligation to help prevent harm, especially major, avoidable suffering and death, whenever helping to do so requires only trivial sacrifices, such as buying fewer or no luxury items, spending less time watching television, etc., and whenever there is some chance that one's efforts will produce at least some success" (Filicie 169).

Filicie contends that as humans, we have a duty to try to help others in need, especially if those needs arise from the actions of a government. Because a democratic government is a representative of its people, the actions of that government reflect the individual citizens of the country. "One must know about faraway moral atrocities if one is to attempt to remedy them" (Filicie 167).

In a similar vein, companies within a capitalist society are the economic representatives of a society; in this form of economics, citizens vote with their dollars. The companies for whom Americans vote do represent the values of the American people, leading to an obligation to keep informed about the actions of any company that an individual may economically support.

However, not all facets of a company are apparent just through their brand-name labels in a store. Oftentimes, a conglomeration of individual name brands are owned and operated by one company. Phillip Morris owns and operates Kraft, Nabisco, Pepperidge Farms, Oscar Meyer, and Miller Brewing brands in addition to its line of tobacco products. Although the products themselves do not list Phillip Morris as the mother company (oftentimes, food items will list Kraft or Nabisco with no mention of the tobacco company), when an individual purchases these items, he/she is financially supporting the tobacco company that he/she may be consciously trying to avoid. In order to learn all the products that a particular company produces, the consumer must often investigate information beyond that which is given to the average consumer.

In this situation, numerous values are at stake. Individuals in American society have a right to a clean, healthy work environment. However, companies in a capitalist economic system have a right to produce and to profit. The ethics surrounding tobacco itself are questionable; while tobacco does harm its users, those people who buy and consume the product do make a conscious choice to smoke cigarettes, cigars, or pipes or chew tobacco. However, the individuals surrounding the smoker do not always have an option of not being around the second-hand smoke, which can be more harmful than first-hand smoke. Also, tobacco remains legal to individuals over the age of eighteen in our society. This product that Phillip Morris produces and sells is legally sanctioned.

Even if the consumer does know all the products that Phillip Morris owns, he/she must then weigh his/her options not only from the standpoint of not wanting to support tobacco but also the ramifications of his/her boycott. Phillip Morris employees 178,000 people worldwide, of which sixty percent are in the tobacco sections of the company. What will happen to these employees should the company start losing money or reshape its organization? In addition, Phillip Morris also donates $100 million annually to various philanthropic organizations and charities, from the Red Cross to the United Negro College Fund. Should the company lose money or file for bankruptcy, what will happen to these organizations without the large donations from Phillip Morris? Although the American public has known for decades that tobacco is physically harmful, individuals do choose to smoke. Shouldn't they bear individual responsibility for their actions? However, tobacco companies admitted that the nicotine in cigarettes was specifically designed to addict smokers as quickly as possible. How does individual accountability fit into a product designed to make them repeat customers?

Should an individual decide that he/she does not want to support Phillip Morris and its subsidiary companies, that person must then decide on a plan of action and a course to take. In writing about the Holocaust, David Blumenthal's The Banality of Good and Evil: Moral Lessons from the Shoah and Jewish Tradition (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1999) argues that bystanders are as culpable as perpetrators, because the inaction of the citizenry allowed the Nazis and their accomplices to commit the horrid acts for which they are remembered. In an economic vein, by not doing anything, the American citizenry is de facto condoning the actions and products of these conglomerations.

On the most basic level, any consumer can boycott the Phillip Morris; he/she can buy similar products owned by a competing company. For example, instead of purchasing Oscar Meyer lunchmeats, he/she can buy Boars Head or a generic store brand. The Civil Rights Movement is perhaps the best example of economic boycott as an impetus for social change. During the Civil Rights Movement, African-Americans and their white supporters used economic protests to effect social change within the South. From lunch-counters at Woolworths to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, civil rights workers encouraged companies to change their business practices by displaying the amount of money that African-Americans could bring to, or take away from, any particular company, providing an economic impetus for change. In order for this economic boycott to work, however, large amounts of people must be involved; individuals can sign petitions, write their congresspersons, and try to persuade other individuals to become involved in the protest.

Greenleaf's essay "The Servant as Leader" focuses on the power of individual persuasion. Greenleaf recounts the story of John Woolman, a member of the Society of Friends, who silently and individually crusades for the Quakers to ban slavery: "Man by man, inch by inch, by persistently returning and revisiting and pressing his gentle argument over a period of thirty years, the scourge of slavery was eliminated from this Society, the first religious group in America formally to denounce and forbid slavery among its members" (Greenleaf 21).

Likewise, should enough individuals become involved in the persuasion of others, then perhaps individual economic boycott can amount to significant losses and changes within the Phillip Morris corporation. Greenleaf asks, "One wonders what would have been the result if there had been fifty John Woolmans, or even five…persuading people one by one with gentle nonjudgmental argument that a wrong should be righted by individual voluntary action" (21-22). Marge Piercy's poem "The low road" also encourages the gentle art of persuasion. In the final stanza of her poem on individual involvement, Piercy writes:

"It goes on one at a time
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more." (ll 38-44)

[ Posted by Wendy Tegge at June 1, 2001 09:20 AM | More Opinion articles ]

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