Talk:Lever Brothers

Mission?

How do the style and content of this article fit with RW’s stated mission? Anonymous User (talk) 20:00, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

It could fall under "Explorations of authoritarianism…" part of the mission, but it's excessively detailed and is mostly copied from WP. As @Spud said, it could become a candidate for deletion. Bongolian (talk) 05:33, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Excessively long and detailed is right. No wonder this section on forced labour was largely removed from the Wikipedia article on grounds of giving undue weight to it. It's longer than all of the rest of that article put together. I can't help thinking that this would be more missional if Unilever were still doing dodgy things today. But, as far as I know, they aren't knowingly pushing pseudoscience or religion or anything like that. I also think it would be more missional if Unilever today refused to acknowledge that they'd ever used forced labour in Africa, in spite of evidence proving that they had, or refused to apologize for it. A heavily edited version of this might be better off going on the Belgian Congo page instead. Spud (talk) 12:15, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Amnesty International did find scandal regarding Unilever's ties with Wilmar. https://www.amnestyusa.org/files/the_great_palm_oil_scandal_embargoed_until_30_nov.pdf However, their involvement here does not seem as direct as was the case in the Belgian Congo.

The New York Times lists a few other scandals as well. Some problems with tea estates. Failure to clean up a contaminated factory in India. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/business/unilever-finds-that-shrinking-its-footprint-is-a-giant-task.html

The English-language version of Jules Marchal's book on the subject of palm slavery in the Belgian Congo is 223 pages long, and it's an abridged version of the French language original. The Congo still has not recovered from colonialism, and an exploration of their past helps to better understand their current problems.

Ashy Waves (talk) 16:13, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Additionally, details such as Ryckmans' description of the quota system help provide examples that could be used to refute some of the ridiculous things some economists say about slavery, such as, "Well, in order to compel the slaves to produce (such as picking cotton), the owners and their subordinates would have to announce minimum standards of output, below which the slaves would be punished. In setting this threshold, the owners couldn’t be too unreasonable, because frequent physical punishments would reduce the health of the slaves." https://www.mises.ca/slavery-could-not-last-in-an-otherwise-free-market/

And there are still some who describe Leverhulme as, "committed philanthropist, using his wealth to support a variety of charitable causes". https://www.leverhulme.ac.uk/about-us/history-trust

Another example of a website describing how wonderful Lever allegedly was, "Lever made a large contribution to the lives of ordinary people. He built Port Sunlight to provide his workforce with good housing. He campaigned for better welfare and a shorter working day, and supported building, education and medical projects." http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ladylever/history/lever.aspx

Ashy Waves (talk) 17:05, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

And there's the Unilever website, which mentions nothing about forced labour and instead claims that their culture and purpose has always been to, "make cleanliness commonplace; to lessen work for women; to foster health and contribute to personal attractiveness, that life may be more enjoyable and rewarding for the people who use our products", a quote which apparently comes from William Hesketh Lever.

https://www.unilever.com/about/who-we-are/our-history/

Like, they're not coming right out and saying, "no we didn't use forced labour", but that certainly doesn't sound like an admission or apology either.

Ashy Waves (talk) 17:11, 20 March 2018 (UTC)