Contact: John Harrington – 707.252.6166
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 26, 2005
Napa, California
China: Human and Labor Rights Shareholder Resolution Filed at IBM
A shareholder resolution calling upon IBM to implement the China Business Principles has been introduced by a Napa, California-based socially responsible investment advisory firm.
Harrington Investments, Inc., is calling upon IBM to commit to a set of principles guaranteeing human and labor rights in its operations in the People's Republic of China. The same resolution received over 10% of the shareholder vote in 2004, but IBM was successful in excluding it from the proxy material to company shareholders in 2005.
Originally developed by Global Exchange, Amnesty International, and the International Labor Rights Fund, the China Business Principles primarily address labor and human rights issues relevant to U.S.-based industrial companies operating in China. The Principles, however, also specifically address the issue of U.S. companies providing computer technology to enable the Chinese government to control and censor Internet communications and deny human rights.
Harrington is concerned that technology sales to the Chinese government by numerous western companies, as well as China's Lenovo Group's purchase of IBM's PC division, will increase the communist government's access to U.S. technology. This could be used to identify and store the names of human rights dissidents in the country and create a sophisticated "pass system" similar to the national identification system created by the notorious apartheid South African government to control the movement of the population within the country.
Other U.S. companies have received criticism for assisting the government to filter words such as "democracy" or "Tibet," block banned websites, and identify dissidents through their Internet and email use. U.S. technology companies identified by the International Center for Human Rights and Democratic Development report entitled: China's Golden Shield: Corporations and the Development of Surveillance Technology in the People's Republic of China include Cisco Systems and Sun Microsystems. In Losing the New China, Ethan Gutmann also identified Cisco, Ericsson, Motorola, Nokia, and Nortel as companies providing the Chinese government with censorship and surveillance technologies. Other U.S. companies identified as Chinese government contractors or providing services or products to Chinese government agencies include Oracle and Microsoft.
"IBM, which provided Nazi Germany a punch card and card-sorting system in 1933 to automate Hitler's 'final solution' by identifying and moving Jews to concentration camps, and assisted the South African racist government to automate apartheid, is now providing technology to the authoritarian Chinese government," said John Harrington, President and CEO of Harrington Investments, Inc. "It's ironic that this same company is also outsourcing U.S. programming jobs to China."
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