Ethical Concept

The Ethics of Industrial Disasters in a Transnational World: The Elusive Quest for Justice andAccountability in BhopalAuthor(s): Ward MorehouseSource: Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Fall 1993), pp. 475-504Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40644786 .

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Alternatives 18 (1993), 475-504

The Ethics of Industrial Disasters in a Transnational World:

The Elusive Quest for Justice and Accountability in Bhopal

Ward Morehouse*

The Basic Hypothesis

This article examines the behavior of the perpetrator of what is generally regarded as the world's worst industrial disaster - the gas leak from Union Carbide's pesticides plant in Bhopal, India, which has been called the "Hiroshima of the chemical industry." It seeks to look beyond that tragedy at remedies for and prevention of such behavior.

Among the dictionary definitions of ethics is "a treatise on morals." This paper is intended to be just that - morals being defined as "moral conduct or teachings" and the adjective moral as "right and proper" and "concerned with establishing principles of right and wrong in behavior."1

I offer the central thesis of the paper as hypothesis rather than theorem not because I have any doubts about its veracity but rather because I have not yet examined enough cases to know how widely it can be applied. But there is abundant evidence - only some of it presented here so as not to try the reader's patience and endurance - that Union Carbide Corporation's behavior toward the victims of the Bhopal disaster was essentially immoral.

I have yet to come across any other instance of a recent and major industrial disaster involving a large corporation in which the prevailing character of the behavior of the perpetrator of the disaster toward the victims has been any different, although certainly there are varying

♦Council on International and Public Affairs, 777 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017. This is a revised version of a paper prepared for the Second Comparative Science and Culture Conference, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts, May 8- 10, 1992. Research for this paper was supported in part by the American Institute of Indian Studies.

475



476 The Ethics of Industrial Disasters in a Transnational World

degrees of immoral behavior. I suspect that this hypothesis is generally true of large institutions. Certainly there are on the face of it all too many instances of similar behavior by multilateral financial institutions and national governments toward their victims - for example, the World Bank toward the oustees from the Narmada Dam Project in India or the US government toward victims of radiation poisoning in the Marshall Islands.2 In a dozen cases from as many different Asian countries, presented to the third session of the Permanent People's Tribunal on Industrial and Environmental Hazards and Human Rights, similar patterns of immoral behavior were exhibited by perpetrators of these disasters, which ranged from multinational corporations to government agencies.3

Indeed, in the Bhopal tragedy, Union Carbide is hardly the only bad actor. There is little redeeming and much that seems to me to be wicked in the behavior of the government of Madhya Pradesh (the state in which Bhopal is located) toward its own citizens. In many respects, the government of India is only slightly less "wicked." These are essentially the conclusions reached by the Permanent People's Tribunal, which, although not a court of law but of public opinion, came the closest to giving the victims their "day in court" - something they certainly have not yet experienced after almost a decade in any established court of law in either India or the United States. Having received both oral and written testimony from victims, workers, experts, and others at all three sessions of the tribunal (Yale, Bangkok, and Bhopal), the Bhopal session of the tribunal concluded that "Union Carbide Corporation, its subsidiary, Union Carbide India Ltd., and key officials of both are clearly guilty of having caused the world's worst industrial disaster" and that "The Government of India and the Government of Madhya Pradesh are also clearly guilty of violating the rights of the victims, not only under international human rights law but also under the Indian Constitution."4

I shall concentrate here on Union Carbide because I have had more opportunity to observe its behavior somewhat more closely than that of other actors, bad or otherwise, in the still unfolding Bhopal tragedy. By focusing on Union Carbide Corporation - the US parent of the Indian subsidiary, Union Carbide India Ltd. - I also introduce a transnational dimension: a large US industrial corporation operating in another and seemingly distant social and political context. Furthermore, concentrating on one major actor - the ultimate perpetrator of this disaster - also enables me to achieve somewhat greater focus in my examination of remedies for and prevention of such immoral behavior.



Ward Morehouse 477

The World's Worst Industrial Disaster: Â Chronicle

Genesis

Union Carbide's operations in India go back to the beginning of this century, when it began marketing its products there. It was one of the very few US companies active in India prior to independence because India, as a colonial possession, was considered to be the protected preserve of British companies. In 1924, an assembly plant for batteries was opened in Calcutta. By 1983, Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) had fourteen plants in India, which manufactured chemicals, pesticides, batteries, and other products.

Union Carbide's operations in India were conducted through a subsidiary, Union Carbide India Ltd. (UCIL). UCC, the parent US company, held 50.9 percent of UCIL stock; the balance of 49.1 percent was owned by various Indian investors, including public sector financial institutions. Normally, foreign investors have been limited to 40 percent ownership of equity in Indian companies, but the Indian government waived this requirement in the case of Union Carbide because of the sophistication of its technology and the company's presumed potential for export.

Managerial control of UCIL was exercised by Union Carbide through its Eastern Division, headquartered in Hong Kong. UCC has a reputation among observers of US corporate management of having a relatively centralized decisionmaking style. The precise nature of the control exercised by the parent company over its Indian subsidiary will be determined only if UCC is compelled, in a court of law, to reveal the actual character of that control. Otherwise, it will strive to maintain - however fanciful it may seem - that it had an arm's length relationship with its Indian subsidiary, just happening to be one of several large investors! Much closer to the mark, I believe, is the report of a delegation of international and Indian trade union officials who made an on-the-spot investigation of the Bhopal tragedy in April 1985 and observed that "Bhopal workers and national union officials maintain that even minor production and maintenance decisions were made by Hong Kong."5

In 1969, Union Carbide set up a small plant in Bhopal to formulate a range of pesticides and herbicides derived from a carbaryl base. The impetus for this initiative was the government of India's wholesale embrace of the Green Revolution agricultural strategy, characterized by chemical and energy intensity and high use of manufactured inputs.

Until 1979, UCIL imported both methyl isocyanate (MIC) and alpha naphthol from UCC. Those two chemicals were reacted in the final stage of producing carbaramate pesticides. MIC was the principal gas




that leaked from the Carbide plant in Bhopal to create the disaster. In 1979 the company commissioned its own facility to manufacture MIC in Bhopal. That facility was located in the existing plant to the north of the center of the city, adjacent to a residential neighborhood and barely two kilometers from the railway station.

An explanation for the December 1984 disaster has to be sought not so much in Carbide's decision to manufacture MIC but in the manner in which it did so. (Carbide claims that it was pressured into manufacturing MIC in Bhopal by the government of India's policy of urging foreign companies to "indigenize" their production by making more of the intermediates in India rather than importing them and simply assembling or mixing the components of the end product at the final stage of the production process.) At the design stage itself, a controversy arose regarding the question of whether substantial storage capacity for MIC was required (as it was at the so-called "sister" plant to the one in Bhopal, located near Charleston, West Virginia) or whether nominal storage, determined solely by downstream process requirements, would suffice. UCC, which provided the basic design of the plant, supervised its engineering, and defined operating procedures to run it, insisted on the larger storage requirement. UCIL, on the other hand, felt that nominal storage was preferable in that it was inherently safer.

According to the affidavit filed in the Federal District Court in New York by Edward Munoz, a retired vice-president of the Union Carbide Corporation and managing director of Carbide's Indian subsidiary at the time this decision was made, the parent company overrode its Indian subsidiary and insisted on large-scale storage. The apparent motivation was the hope that a significant market for MIC as a bulk chemical for sale to other chemical companies would develop in South and Southeast Asia. This was the case with Carbide's MIC production in the United States, where only some MIC was actually used by Carbide downstream in making its own products, and the balance was sold in bulk to other chemical companies.

As a result, three tanks measuring forty feet in length and eight feet in diameter, code numbered E610, E611, and E619, were built, each with a storage capacity of 15,000 gallons. One of these was a reserve tank to be kept empty and used for the transfer of material in the event of an emergency involving either of the other tanks.

The Three Mile Island of the Chemical Industry

On the night of December 2, 1984, tank E610 erupted, rapidly spreading deadly gases over the sleeping city of 800,000 people. We shall never



Ward Morehouse 479

know the precise number that died on that fateful night, but some estimates place the death toll as high as 10,000. Even the Indian government's conservative figures acknowledge some 2,000 deaths during the disaster (essentially those for whom death certificates were issued, apparently a small minority of those that actually died during the massive tragedy). At any rate, victims are continuing to die at the rate of fifty or more a month from gas-related causes, so that the official death toll now has risen to more than 4,000 - with more having died since the disaster than in it.6

Bhopal was not an accident. It was a disaster waiting to happen. It is also a textbook case of corporate failure to meet even the most minimal standards of proper social performance. These standards surely include avoidance of destruction of human life and well-being, not to mention protection of the physical environment. Outright killing of people is a crime everywhere in the world, and in any "civilized" social order human safety must take precedence over conventional criteria of economic performance, including the company's bottom line.

But exactly the reverse occurred in Bhopal. Where there were choices to be made, the Carbide management opted to maximize profit and minimize loss, even though they knew that they were playing with innocent people's lives.

flawed Design and Construction

The dominance of economic over social performance criteria is manifest from the conceptual stages of planning and designing the pesticide facility in Bhopal. As we have noted, the US management hoped to duplicate in Asia the profitable line of business it had in the US - manufacturing MIC not only for its own use but also for other industrial customers. As we also have noted, management specifically overrode the wishes of Carbide's Indian subsidiary and insisted on storing MIC in large 15,000-gallon tanks rather than in the small individual containers that were favored by its Indian managers and that would have been much less dangerous.7 Other companies, including Bayer in Germany, Mitsubishi in Japan, and DuPont in Texas, used either "closed-loop" systems in which there is no MIC storage or storage in much smaller quantities for immediate use. However, such storage would have eliminated the possibility of developing a "merchant market" for MIC in India and other Asian countries.8

The damning record of willful neglect of the safety of its workers and the surrounding community in Carbide's desire to maximize profits by minimizing costs goes on and on. The safety systems were underdesigned and could not have contained a runaway reaction of




MIC in such large storage tanks. One such system, which was supposed to "neutralize" any escaping gases, was the vent gas scrubber. At the height of the runaway reaction, MIC and its reaction products were flowing through the scrubber at more than 200 times its capacity!9

The flare tower - a device that was supposed to "burn off any escaping gases - was not equipped with a backup ignition system.10 Even if it had one, the flare tower would not have had the capacity to handle such a huge volume of escaping gases as occurred in Bhopal.11

Finally, the water spray system, which was supposed to deal with any gases that escaped through the vent gas scrubber and the flare tower, did not have enough water pressure to reach the highest point of emission.12 All of these conditions were known to the Carbide management and its engineers13 - or should have been known if the Carbide plant were going to manufacture, store, and use such a highly toxic and unstable compound as MIC. And, of course, they could have been corrected, but only at an increased cost of construction and operation of the pesticide manufacturing facility in Bhopal.

Even the plant location was dictated by a preoccupation with cost- cutting. Although an unpopulated site outside the city of Bhopal had already been designated as an industrial area for hazardous facilities, Union Carbide insisted on building the acutely hazardous MIC production and storage unit at an existing Union Carbide facility upwind from a heavily populated section of the city.14 The major reason for this was that substantial economies in the operation of the MIC unit would be possible because it could draw on the infrastructure and common services of the existing facility.

Dangerous Operation

Not only in the design and construction of the plant but also in its operation, the Carbide record of shameful neglect of even the most minimal standards of responsible social performance was evident. Although liquid MIC should be stored at zero degrees centigrade to minimize the possibility of a runaway reaction, the storage tanks at the Bhopal plant were at ambient temperature because the refrigeration unit for the tank had been disconnected. The freon gas in the refrigeration unit was being used elsewhere at the plant!15

Union Carbide's operations manuals state that the maximum fill permitted for MIC storage tanks is 50 percent to allow room for expansion in the case of a pressure-generating reaction. But the MIC tank in Bhopal was filled to 75-87 percent capacity.16 Furthermore, that tank was supposed to be a backup intended only for emergency transfers in the case of a runaway reaction in two other neighboring



Ward Morehouse 481

storage tanks.17 Even the flare tower was inoperative when the leak occurred because a faulty section of pipe had been removed and not replaced.18

A similar record of Union Carbide's callous disregard for the safety and well-being of its workers and the surrounding community is reflected in the company's personnel policies and procedures. Between 1980 and 1984, the work crew for the MIC unit was cut in half, from twelve to six workers, and the maintenance crew was reduced from six to two workers. The maintenance supervisor position had been eliminated from the work shift on duty at the time of the disaster.19 The quality of plant personnel was also adversely affected by high rates of turnover, and several workers in key positions in the MIC unit were not properly trained to handle their responsibilities. To top it off, operating manuals were available only in English. Although a few plant operating personnel could read some English, it was a foreign language for them, and many could read only Hindi, their native language.20

These problems were known to senior Carbide management in the United States and cannot be blamed, as the US-based Carbide management has tried to do, on its Indian subsidiary. Indeed, the Bhopal plant had long been plagued with serious accidents involving severe injuries and at least one death (see Table 1). These accidents were reported to the US management and led to a safety audit in 1982 by a team sent from the United States.21

Table 1. Previous Accidents at Union Carbide's Bhopal Plant

• In 1976, workers reported five serious accidents at the plant resulting in blindness to one worker and chemical burns to another.

• The alpha-naphthol storage area had a huge fire on November 24, 1978, which was controlled only after ten hours; it resulted in a loss of about Rs 6 crores ($5 million).

• Plant operator Mohammed Ashraf was killed by a phosgene gas leak on December 26, 1981. Two other workers were injured.

• Another phosgene leak in January 1982 caused twenty-eight persons to struggle between life and death for several months.

• In August, a chemical engineer received burns over 30 percent of his body from liquid MIC.

• Three electrical operators were severely burned while working on a control system panel on April 22, 1982.

• On the night of October 5, 1982, methyl isocyanate escaped from a broken valve and seriously affected four workers. Several people




living in nearby colonies also experienced burning eyes and breathing trouble due to the exposure. Two similar incidents were also reported in 1983.

Carbide unfortunately did little to see that steps recommended in the 1982 safety audit to correct these problems were taken. Despite the safety audit having described both "major" and "less serious" concerns with the plant, the corporation never, as far as can be determined, conducted a formal follow-up survey.

Union Carbide had actually been warned of the possibility of a runaway reaction involving an MIC storage tank three months prior to the Bhopal leak. In July 1984, Union Carbide operational safety and health inspectors in Institute, West Virginia, conducted a safety audit of the MIC II unit there. The findings of the report released in September 1984 warned plant managers that a runaway reaction could occur. The internal company report was not made public until after the Bhopal leak had occurred, and then only because US Congressman Henry Waxman released it.

Warren Anderson, the chairman and chief executive officer of Union Carbide at the time of the disaster, responded that the report described a "worst case scenario." Had the warnings in the report been heeded, and the suggested action plans implemented in Bhopal (including more frequent sampling of storage tanks for impurities), perhaps the Bhopal disaster could have been averted. But Union Carbide did not even send the report to the Bhopal plant. Instead, according to Carbide's director of health, safety, and environmental affairs, "a simple change in operating procedures completely eliminated the concern and eliminated the need for extensive changes in the equipment" in Institute. In Bhopal, there was no such simple change in procedures.22

The US management also set overall corporate policy within which its Indian subsidiary was supposed to operate. But the crowning piece of evidence is that, because the Bhopal plant was losing money and the market for the pesticides it was producing had not developed as Carbide at first hoped it would, the US management had decided to dismantle the plant in India and relocate four of the units, including the MIC unit, to Mexico or Indonesia. The plan met with strong resistance from UCIL management and therefore was aborted.23

The Mounting Human Toll

For some victims, it seems almost as though the lucky ones were those who died immediately after being exposed to the deadly gases from the Union Carbide plant. The suffering, both physical and psychological,



Ward Morehouse 483

of the surviving victims has been intense and protracted. Instead of help and sympathy for their suffering, the victims have more often than not been subjected to neglect, harassment, and abuse.

It was initially thought that the major impact of MIC on human beings was on their eyes and lungs. Both of these vital organs indeed were seriously damaged in tens of thousands of those exposed to the gas, and ominous new medical evidence is surfacing to indicate much more serious long-term threats to human health. Other vital organs such as the kidney, spleen, and liver have also been damaged, as have the reproductive systems of women. There is also evidence of genetic mutation affecting the offspring of those exposed, thus creating a new class of victims as yet unborn. At least as alarming is evidence of damage to the victims' immune systems, leaving them far more susceptible to a wide range of diseases endemic among poor people in India, such as tuberculosis.24

Indeed, almost all of the seriously affected victims of the Carbide gas leak are poor. The explanation is simple: those who have a choice rarely live downwind of a dangerous industrial plant. For many of these people, the effects of exposure to MIC and other gases have destroyed their ability to earn a living. In the past, they worked as casual laborers, but they are no longer able to sustain vigorous physical effort.

In all, the Indian government has registered more than 600,000 claims against Carbide. Many of these are for economic losses because the economic life of the city essentially stopped for several weeks after the disaster. Carbide has asserted that most of these claims are spurious but has not revealed evidence to support its claim.25 The government said that it was screening these claims to determine which were valid. But just as that process was getting under way, the government suddenly agreed to an out-of-court settlement of $470 million with Union Carbide in February 1989.

That settlement provoked widespread public indignation and was immediately challenged in court by victim groups, and ultimately by a new government. It was subsequently upheld in October 1991 by the Indian Supreme Court, which also reinstated the criminal charges that were quashed by the February 1989 settlement.

Quite apart from allowing Union Carbide to evade any meaningful accountability for having perpetrated the world's worst industrial disaster, this unfortunate settlement is, on the face of it, totally inadequate in meeting the needs of the victims. Indeed, it is not even sufficient to meet the needs for health care and monitoring of the gas-exposed population (variously estimated from 200,000 to 500,000 persons); those health-care and monitoring needs have been conservatively estimated to cost at least $600 million over the next




thirty years.26 If the entire amount of the settlement were used for health-care monitoring, there would be nothing left for other vital needs of the victims such as vocational rehabilitation, environmental sanitation, and decent housing, let alone cash compensation for all of their pain and suffering.

For all of the physical suffering, economic deprivation, and emotional trauma that victims have experienced, they have sought not only cash compensation but also vocational rehabilitation, improved housing and environmental sanitation, and, perhaps above all else, adequate health care. That their needs have been largely ignored for almost a decade is the fault of local, state, and national governments in India and of Union Carbide. The governments claimed to have done much but in fact have done little.27

But it must be remembered that it was Carbide's pesticide plant that caused all of this human suffering in the first place and Carbide is, therefore, ultimately responsible. Carbide's performance toward the victims has been cynical and self-serving. While claiming to have made numerous offers to help the victims that were spurned by the Indian government, it ignores the government's view that Carbide's principal offers always came with unacceptable strings attached, such as the insistence on detailed reporting on the medical conditions of the victims as a means of Carbide's acquiring evidence to use in its defense in the event of a trial in the courts.

Evasion of Accountability

Carbide's behavior in putting profit considerations ahead of human life and well-being clearly and inevitably led to this massive disaster, and its behavior since the disaster has been dedicated not to justice to those it harmed but to evading accountability for its actions. Thus far at least, it has been all too successful in achieving the latter objective.

The Carbide management, once it realized the enormity of the disaster it had created, adopted a mode of "crisis management" focused on "damage limitation" to the corporation. Indeed, Carbide's response to the Bhopal disaster has become the subject of discussion and study at business schools at leading universities where crisis management is considered to be an important element in the curriculum in the preparation of future corporate managers.28 Carbide's performance in dealing with the world's worst industrial disaster is well worth examining in terms of the capacity of large corporations to evade serious accountability for their actions when those actions are harmful to others.

Union Carbide's response to Bhopal has followed two interrelated



Ward Morehouse 485

tactics: delay and denial. The company has sought to delay both provision of relief and justice to the victims while postponing any legal judgments against it. In the meantime, it has mounted a vigorous public relations campaign, which has claimed moral responsibility for the disaster while simultaneously denying any other type of responsibility, such as liability or responsibility for the actions of its subsidiary. As indicated above, the corporation has also attempted to deny that serious harm was caused to the victims.

Forum Dodging: How Carbide Placed Itself Beyond the Law

Carbide and its high-priced lawyers began with their efforts to avoid a US jury trial over the claims brought by the victims and their survivors against the company for grossly negligent behavior. (Carbide, by its own admission, has spent in the neighborhood of $50 million on legal fees in connection with Bhopal.)29 In the Federal District Court in New York, where various actions brought by lawyers representing the claimants and by the government of India on behalf of all of the victims were consolidated, the company argued that the US courts were not the proper forum for the trial and that Indian courts were quite able to deal with such massive and complex litigation. This maneuver chewed up more than a year and shifted the litigation to India.

Once the case was in India, Union Carbide switched its argument. It claimed the Indian courts were no longer capable and the company's rights of due process were being violated time and again. Virtually every decision of the trial court, even on minor procedural matters, was appealed - not just to the State High Court but even to the Indian Supreme Court. With the supreme court decision to uphold the February 1989 settlement of financial claims against Union Carbide as "full and final," it appears that there never will be a trial to determine liability for this terrible disaster, except to the extent that the issue arises in the criminal prosecutions of Carbide, its Indian subsidiary, and various officials of both companies, if those charges are in fact tried.

The question of due process proved to be an extremely potent Damocles sword, which Carbide and its platoon of Indian and US lawyers used to try to intimidate the Indian courts and the government of India as the sole legal representative of the victims in India. The Federal District Court in New York, when ordering that the litigation be sent to India for trial, specified that Union Carbide must agree to accept the jurisdiction of the Indian courts provided "minimal requirements of due process" were met.30 The US Court of Appeals, to which Carbide appealed the district court decision, deleted the word "minimal" as well as the requirement that Carbide be subject to US judicial rules




of discovery in the Indian courts.31 Thus, Carbide was able to threaten at every turn in the Indian courts that its due process rights were being violated and that, by refusing to obey Indian court orders, it would force the government of India to chase it back into the US courts in order to compel it to obey those orders, thereby using up large additional chunks of time.

From the beginning, this was a key element in the Carbide strategy: to outlast the victims. This is the same strategy followed by asbestos manufacturers and insurance companies since the 1950s - a lesson not wasted on Union Carbide. (In fact, Union Carbide followed a similar tactic in the 1930s in the Hawk's Nest tragedy, which has been characterized as the worst industrial disaster in the United States.)32

The Bhopal District Court, recognizing the inherent injustice of a legal battle in which one party with deep pockets can outlast the other, ordered Union Carbide to pay substantive interim relief of $270 million. Predictably, Carbide refused to obey the court's interim relief order. It appealed that order to the Madhya Pradesh High Court. When the high court in effect upheld the lower court ruling, the company refused to obey the order yet again, appealing this time to the Indian Supreme Court. This appeals process used up more than a year of additional time. It was, in fact, the appeal of the lower court orders on payment of interim relief that the supreme court was hearing when it "ordered" the February 1989 settlement.

Union Carbide as Victim or Vidimizer

As if these maneuvers were not enough to evade some meaningful fulfillment of its often-claimed "moral responsibility" for the world's worst industrial disaster, Union Carbide engaged in another deceitful maneuver by claiming that the gas leak from its pesticide plant was caused by "sabotage" by a disgruntled employee. It has never identified that employee, although it claims to know who he is. In any event, its Indian subsidiary has now admitted that the sabotage theory was false, arguing instead that three employees caused the disaster through negligent behavior.33

But as a public relations ploy, the sabotage theory was admirable, for it enabled Carbide's management to argue that it was not the victimizer but the victim. This tactic is not unknown among corporations or government agencies engaging in reckless behavior that causes widespread harm. All too frequently, the blame is laid on a worker or workers, as Carbide continues to do in this case.



Ward Morehouse 487

Bhopal and Corporate Irresponsibility

With the upholding of the February 1989 settlement, any further legal action in the Indian or US courts appears to be effectively foreclosed, except for the criminal charges reinstated by the October 1991 supreme court decision. With that possible exception, Carbide appears to have effectively evaded its responsibility for the world's worst industrial disaster. As we have seen, the amount of the settlement is totally inadequate to meet the needs of existing, let alone future, victims. It is trivial compared to settlements or court awards in other major industrial disasters, given the huge number of dead and injured. Compare the figure of $470 million offered to more than 600,000. claimants in the Bhopal tragedy with the $2.5 billion offered by the Johns Manville Corporation for some 60,000 claims of injury caused by exposure to asbestos (an amount many think to be far short of that needed to help future victims); the $2.48 billion fund created by A. H. Robins to settle 195,000 claims relating to Dalkon Shield injuries (likewise thought to be far below needed amounts); or the $108 million the Monsanto Company was ordered to pay the family of a single chemical worker who died of leukemia due to benzene exposure. Just how trivial is the amount of the February settlement in relation

to Carbide's resources and capacity to pay is reflected in the reaction of the New York Stock Exchange the day the settlement was announced. Carbide's stock price rose $2.00 a share! All of the amount except some $20 million was covered by Carbide's liability insurance and small amounts it had set aside each year while the litigation dragged on.34 The company's management was thus able to announce, with apparent satisfaction, that its strategy of containment had worked and that the settlement would have no significantly adverse impact on the company's finances.35 The remaining cost of the settlement was in fact met by a 43 cent per share charge against dividends in 1988 - a year in which Carbide had record profits of $662 million.

The Plight of the Victims

Not only are gas-exposed victims continuing to die at a rapid rate, but morbidity rates are rising, according to studies conducted by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR). The medical evidence accumulates on the increasingly serious and multiple long-term health effects of MIC on human beings. It is yet another measure of the immorality of Union Carbide's behavior in this disaster that the company should have been using such a deadly chemical for which the human




toxicity is simply unknown. At least that is the situation if we are to believe Carbide, which keeps insisting that it has released all of the information it has on the toxic effects of MIC.36

MIC and its reaction products, which escaped from the Carbide plant on that fateful night in December 1984, have had a particularly adverse effect on the lungs of the victims. One study indicates that 98 percent of the gas-exposed population (which itself numbers between 500,000 and 600,000) was found to be having difficult or labored respiration after exertion. This is a particularly critical impairment for a universe of individuals who earned meager wages primarily through hard physical labor. Many of them are no longer able to do the work they did before the disaster, and very few have any other less physically demanding alternative. Recurrent respiratory infections afflict 73 percent, chest pains plague 42 percent, and 24 percent of the gas- affected population have Reactive Airway Dysfunction Syndrome (RADS). By contrast, in the control population used in the ICMR studies, such symptoms were found in only 2 percent of the population.

But the lungs are not the only vital organ affected. The liver, spleen, and kidneys have also shown adverse effects. And although there were few, if any, cases of blindness from exposure to the gas from the Carbide plant during and right after the disaster, almost a decade later there is a far higher incidence of cataracts than in a comparable population. Yet other adverse effects of the gases to which the people of Bhopal were exposed are a miscarriage rate more than twice that of a control population of comparable socioeconomic status and a much higher rate of stillbirths. There is also widespread evidence of damage to women's reproductive organs.

At least as dismaying as the foregoing are overall morbidity trends among the gas-affected people of Bhopal. According to the ICMR studies, morbidity increased from 15 percent in May-November 1987 to more than 30 percent in November 1989-March 1990. All of this misery has been visited on persons whose sin was to live downwind of a pesticide plant that was designed and operated by an irresponsible corporate enterprise driven by the imperative to maximize profits and minimize losses at the expense of the well-being, indeed survival, of the community in which the plant was located.37 If morality, as specified in its dictionary definition, is behavior that "conforms to right ideals or principles of human conduct," then surely Union Carbide's behavior toward the Bhopal victims was and is immoral.

As if having to cope with the immoral behavior of Union Carbide were not enough, these truly innocent victims have had to deal as well with behavior that is qualitatively no better at the hands of local government. That story is beyond the scope of this paper, but suffice



Ward Morehouse 489

it to say that the administration of interim relief, health-care services, and the review and processing of claims for personal injuries or economic losses from the gas-leak disaster have been characterized by corruption, bribery, apathy, and abuse of the fundamental rights of India's citizens as set forth in the Indian constitution and as recognized in international human rights law. (Of course, the victims' human rights were violated in the first instance by Union Carbide.)

As the People's Union for Civil Liberties said in a report of an investigation into the Madhya Pradesh government's "anti- encroachment drive" in 1990-1991, the victims had been "revictimized" (in this context by having their houses demolished).38 It is no consolation to the victims of this disaster that such revictimization appears to be quite common among victims of other large-scale industrial disasters. If there is any redeeming feature to this sad tale of immorality, it is the determination of some of the victims to resist oppression and to continue to demand justice and accountability, in spite of their disabilities. By far the most vigorous leadership in this continuing struggle has come from the women victims of Bhopal.39

"Moral Responsibility in an Immoral Institution

Virtually from the time of the disaster, Union Carbide insisted that it accepted "moral responsibility" for the world's worst industrial disaster. Indeed, if Dan Kurzman's journalistic account of the Bhopal catastrophe is to be taken at face value, Warren Anderson went to Bhopal immediately after the disaster, genuinely moved by a sense of compassion and a desire to provide as much help as possible as quickly as possible to alleviate the vast suffering that his company had caused in that ill-fated city.40

But whatever sense of compassion may have animated Warren Anderson's initial response to the disaster, harsher realities soon took command. Rebuffed in its early efforts to arrive at a settlement and confronted with claims for injury, pain, and suffering on a scale commensurate with the enormity of the disaster, Union Carbide and its top officials who dealt with the Bhopal tragedy became consumed with defending the company's due process rights while it sought to negotiate a settlement that would be as protective as possible of the interests of the company and its shareholders.

My impression, based on a brief personal encounter with Robert Kennedy, Warren Anderson's successor as chairman and chief executive officer of Union Carbide (Anderson retired in 1986 at the age of 65), at the 1988 Carbide annual meeting in Danbury, Connecticut, is that




the Carbide senior management saw the problem by that time as essentially a commercial transaction in which a price was negotiated, the price then paid, and the matter closed. There remains a vast gulf between, on the one hand, Carbide's perceptions of the value of human life in India, the extent of death and personal injury, and the cost of dealing with these phenomena, and, on the other hand, the expectations of the victims themselves, voluntary groups working with the victims, and Indian government officials. But nowhere have I been able to discern in the company's calculus a recognition of the victims' demand for meaningful accountability on the part of those who have destroyed their lives and caused them such anguish.

In fact, some observers of the behavior of large industrial corporations such as Union Carbide would argue that, whatever may have been Anderson's initial impulses, the company management had no alternative but to behave in this manner. Had they been genuinely forthcoming and made truly disinterested offers of help on a scale appropriate to the magnitude of the disaster, they would almost certainly have been confronted with suits by shareholders seeking to hold the management accountable for mishandling company funds, which, at least theoretically, are the collective property of the shareholders. To the extent that such circumstances effectively constrain the actions of senior officials of large corporations in dealing with mass industrial disasters, the assertion that these institutions behave immorally toward their victims becomes all the more apparent.41

Carbide's problems in coping with the Bhopal disaster appear to have been compounded by the company's own internal culture. An effort to describe this social reality has been made by Dan Kurzman in his book, which, however, carries the story only up until late 1986, and by Wil Lepkowski, senior editor of the Chemical and Engineering News, in various articles in that journal as well as in a chapter in a forthcoming book being edited by Sheila Jasanof at Cornell University. Lepkowski sums up Carbide's perception of itself and its role in Bhopal in these words:

A compassionate company, victimized by employee sabotage at a plant it did not control 10,000 miles away; a company that did everything possible to bring succor and just compensation to the victims of Bhopal only to be hampered at every point by Indian politics and activist assaults; a company that finally agreed to a $470 million settlement far in excess of the actual needs of victims.42

Lepkowski has this to say about Carbide's "moral responsibility" for



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the Bhopal tragedy, which it transmuted into "a sense of self righteousness":

Instead of being morally responsible, Carbide became moralistic, even close-minded about Bhopal. To Carbide, the settlement was a closure that allowed it to walk away from India, to evade the fuller atonement that moral responsibility implies. Bhopal could have been the opportunity for Union Carbide to display legal and moral innovation: A disaster one company decided not to turn its back on. Instead, it negotiated not commitment to continuing stewardship at Bhopal, but an uncreative, even antiquarian, way of notarizing its moral responsibility for what was (and is) a unique, ongoing tragedy.

In the summer of 1989, during a long interview at Washington's Metropolitan Club and later in his office, I asked Ronald Wishart [a Union Carbide vice-president involved at different times after Bhopal in US government relations and public relations] whether Carbide bore any long term responsibility to atonement for Bhopal. The answer given by Wishart, a World War II ambulance driver in India and a former Presbyterian church elder, was that atonement implied guilt, which Carbide never intended to admit.43

Reflective of this corporate culture and the paranoid behavior it engenders is the celebrated case of the internal Carbide memo on an environmental activist organization known as the Citizens Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste (CCHW). That memorandum described CCHW as "one of the most radical coalitions operating under the environmentalist banner" with "ties into labor, the communist party, and all manner of folk with private/single agendas."44

This matches my own experience in dealing with Carbide, including red-baiting epithets of "ideological extremism" uttered in my presence by Carbide's vice-president and chief counsel. In our book, Abuse of Power, which details Carbide's sordid health, safety, and environmental record over three-quarters of a century, we describe several instances of suspected attempts by Carbide to muzzle its critics. One such incident is not suspected but known to have occurred: an effort by a member of Union Carbide's board of directors to persuade Robert Abrams, New York State attorney general, not to appear at a news conference in New York City in April 1989 with a delegation of Bhopal victims touring the United States to protest the February 1989 settlement between Carbide and the government of India.45

Carbide's angry denunciation of Abuse of Power is itself a further case in point. The statement on the book distributed at Carbide's 1990 annual meeting asserts:




So it [the book Abuse of Power] goes for page after page. Union Carbide is pictured as callously uninterested in protecting its workers, the public or the environment. We reject that charge categorically. Union Carbide is a leader in its safety and environmental programs. We can accept no less a position.

The company statement then goes on to impute to us as authors the most evil of ideological heresies by concluding:

What really seems to be the aim of the book is the dissolution of US corporations with affiliates and subsidiaries around the globe. We see no evil in providing jobs, products and services. It is regrettable that diatribes such as Abuse of Power seek to impute evil to our free world economic system.46

The issue of the transnational character of the situation is significant for our hypothesis. We do know that the safety systems at Carbide's Bhopal plant (let alone the manner in which the plant was operated, with the apparent knowledge and implicit approval of the US parent company) were substantially inferior to corresponding facilities in Bhopal's sister plant in Institute, West Virginia. We also know, from Carbide's calculations of the value of life in India, that they put a much lower price tag on lives in India than those in the United States.47

But Carbide's behavior has not been much different toward victims of its industrial disasters in the United States. Consider, for example, its response in the Hawk's Nest tunnel disaster, another first for Carbide (generally considered the worst industrial disaster in the United States), and compare it with Carbide's response in Bhopal, even though the two disasters are separated by half a century:

Union Carbide obtained rights to all documents from the plaintiffs' attorneys as part of the out-of-court settlement agreement, including figures on the number of men who died. They are still the only ones with any accurate figures on the death toll of workers. Estimates range from 65 (the figure given by the President of Rinehart & Dennis) to 2,000 (an opinion given by Senator Holt at the Congressional Hearings in 1936). . . .

The settlement for the Hawk's Nest tunnel workers constituted a grim precedent for Carbide's behavior in an even more awful disaster. The case was settled out-of-court at about 3 percent ($130,000) of the $4 million originally sought, and that meager amount had to be divided between the claimants and their attorneys.

In February 1989, Union Carbide settled claims in the world's worst industrial disaster out-of-court with the Indian government



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representing the Bhopal victims for $470 million, a fraction of what was originally sought by the government ($3 billion), and not enough to cover the victims' health needs, much less provide compensation. As in the Hawk's Nest cases, the company was able to drag out litigation until it was too late for many of the victims who died awaiting their "day in court." Apparently, in both instances, Carbide effectively blackmailed the remaining victims into settling for trivial sums. Many of the names of Union Carbide's victims at Hawk's Nest and at Bhopal will never be known, and though it is hoped that "they shall not have died in vain," the company persists as a reminder that workers and communities may continue to be exploited at the hands of such irresponsible corporations.48

In spite of Carbide's efforts to cover up the Hawk's Nest disaster, much of the story of that grim tragedy has been pieced together by Martin Cherniack in a doctoral dissertation at Yale University and subsequently has been published in a meticulously documented book.49

Our treatment of the Hawk's Nest disaster in our book Abuse of Power drew Carbide's ire, showing that, even after more than half a century, feelings of guilt persist. In one of several false or distorted allegations about the content of our book - presented in Carbide's statement as "errors" - Carbide stated:

The authors claim that disregard for worker safety on a tunneling project in West Virginia in the 1930's led to so many deaths from silicosis that they were buried in mass graves. The construction company that actually did the work employed some 5,000 people over the length of the project. There were 19 deaths attributed in some way to silicosis. There certainly were no mass graves.50

Drawing upon congressional hearings into the incident in 1936 and a 1975 article in The Washington Monthly, what we actually said was:

Sometimes workers would be buried just hours after their death, presumably so that an autopsy could not be performed. In most cases, pneumonia was cited as the cause of death. One black woman whose husband was buried just a few hours after his death, had his body exhumed. There were three other men stacked on top of him.

The undertaker, Hadley White, admitted that the company paid him $55 per person, twice the normal rate, but said he had only buried 33 persons on his farm.51

The reader will find no reference to "mass graves." In this passage and elsewhere in our chapter on Hawk's Nest, we describe efforts made




to cover up silicosis as the real cause of death, with pneumonia or tuberculosis often being cited by company doctors and medical witnesses employed by the company. That Carbide asserted a figure of nineteen deaths attributed to silicosis, even if it is an incorrect figure (as it almost certainly is), suggests that they have kept records of this tragic forerunner of Bhopal. On one factual matter Carbide and we do agree - that the total work force on the tunnel project numbered around 5,000 persons.

Remedies for and Prevention of Immoral Behavior

The presentation to this point is all that is really needed to test the central hypothesis of this paper that large industrial corporations (and doubtless other large institutions such as government bodies) treat victims of industrial disasters immorally, despite their rhetoric and evasive actions to the contrary. But anyone whose moral indignation is aroused by this shameful tale of immorality will want to consider whether there are any ways of changing corporate behavior so as to enhance accountability to their victims.

Industry self-regulation (presently touted by Carbide and other leading US chemical manufacturers as industry's response to the Bhopal disaster in the form of what is proving thus far to be no more than a public relations ploy known as the Responsible Care Program of the Chemical Manufacturer's Association) and government regulation do not work. If they did, there would not have been 6,982 accidents involving toxic chemical releases beyond the perimeters of industrial plants in the United States alone that were documented over a five- year period in a recent study for the US Environmental Protection Agency - accidents that killed more than 135 people and injured nearly l,500.52

Among measures that would help assure greater accountability and perhaps diminish the intensity of immoral behavior are such initiatives as worker and community hazard indemnity funds, comprehensive health and environmental evaluation of hazardous products, clear and readily enforceable rights for workers and communities surrounding hazardous industrial facilities to know what is really going on in those facilities and to act (even to the extent of shutting down the operation of such facilities if they are being run in a careless and negligent manner), and criminal sanctions for corporate accountability. Other legal strategies include strict or absolute liability where especially hazardous facilities are involved, multinational enterprise liability for



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the acts of subsidiaries and joint ventures, and ground rules that specify the judicial forum for litigation involving transboundary events.

Extra-legal strategies could include public education campaigns and consumer boycotts, or even direct action, as when the residents of Phuket in Thailand burned and effectively destroyed a new chemical plant about to open after their repeated entreaties to the World Bank and other agencies to keep the plant out of their community were ignored. We also argue that the time has come to recognize that multinational corporations (MNCs) are at least fully coequal to nation- states in power and resources. (The fifteen largest corporations in the world today have gross incomes greater than the gross domestic products of more than 120 countries!) At a minimum, MNCs should be subject to the same international human rights standards as national governments, although clearly we have a vast distance to travel before it can be said that the basic human rights of hundreds of millions of people in the world are adequately protected and violators of those rights promptly and meaningfully punished. Just how difficult is the task of establishing accountability using

existing mechanisms is reflected in the only remaining hope the Bhopal victims have of some small measure of justice and accountability to Union Carbide for all of the pain and suffering Carbide has caused them. This hope involves the criminal charges that were reinstated by the Indian Supreme Court in its October 1991 decision, which upheld the unjust February 1989 financial settlement that never should have been quashed in the first place - plea bargaining under Indian criminal law is not permitted for serious charges such as culpable homicide, even though it is in the United States. A courageous judge in Bhopal, Chief Magistrate Gulab Sharma, and a resolute prosecutor in Delhi, K. Madhavan, a joint director in India's Central Bureau of Investigation, were moving forward with determination. But Madhavan has since taken early retirement, disgusted with political interference in his handling of another celebrated case that involved alleged bribery by the Swedish arms manufacturer Bofors at the highest levels of the Indian government. The trial has been reassigned to another Bhopal Sessions Court judge, Wajahat Ali Shah, and the outlook is again uncertain.53

In the meantime, Union Carbide insists that it, in the words of its vice-president and general counsel, Joseph E. Goeghan, "has never agreed to submit to the criminal law jurisdiction of the Indian courts."54 That statement is factually incorrect, as I pointed out to Goeghan and his superior, Robert Kennedy, the current chairman and chief executive officer of Union Carbide, at Carbide's annual meeting in April 1992. Carbide specifically agreed "to submit to the jurisdiction of the courts




of India" in the May 12, 1986, decision of Judge John F. Keenan in the Federal District Court in New York, in which Keenan granted Carbide's motion for dismissal of the litigation against it for damages in US courts and its transfer back to India. The reader will note that there was no limitation in that agreement to civil law jurisdiction. Furthermore, Carbide was aware that criminal charges were involved as early as December 7, 1984, when, according to Dan Kurzman, Warren Anderson was presented with a list of the charges being made against Carbide, its Indian subsidiary, and officials of both companies (including Anderson himself).55

For my troubles in raising such a question, I was treated to an indigant lecture by Goeghan, in which he asserted that US corporations and their officials are never subject to the criminal jurisdiction of other countries under "international law" and that the only courts whose criminal jurisdiction he would recognize were US courts. Goeghan's answer is, of course, wrong on several counts. Reciprocity is a basic principle under international law. If the US government can try Manuel Noriega in a criminal court in the United States for actions taken on foreign soil, it is difficult to see why Warren Anderson and Union Carbide (corporations are considered legal persons under US law) cannot be tried in India on criminal charges of culpable homicide. (In Noriega's case, furthermore, the US government arrested him in Panama and brought him forcibly to the United States to stand trial. India thus far has talked only about initiating extradition proceedings to get Warren Anderson to come to India.)

My colleague, Clarence Dias, president of the Center for Law and Development and an international human rights lawyer, notes additionally that "the criminal trial restitution is part of the settlement package. You can't take one portion and leave aside all the others."56

Nonetheless, it is clear that Carbide intends to take a hard line on criminal charges, almost certainly compelling the Indian prosecution to chase them back into the US courts in order to get them to submit - if indeed the US courts will order them to do so. Thus additional years will pass, more victims will die, and more lawyers will earn huge fees before there is even a possibility that Carbide might be held accountable for its role in this tragic industrial disaster.

Of course, the problems of the Bhopal victims are compounded by the circumstance that they are almost all poor and therefore voiceless. It appears that the socioeconomic status of victims of industrial disasters has a bearing on the degree, if not the kind, of behavior corporate perpetrators of these disasters exhibit toward them. Only a few of the survivors of Bhopal victims have received even meager compensation from the Carbide settlement money. (Some victims and their survivors



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have been receiving for the last three years even more meager "interim relief of Rs. 200, or about US$7 a month, initially from government of India funds, and more recently out of interest on the Carbide settlement money.) By contrast, the relatives of all of the three hundred or so middle-class victims of the June 23, 1984, Air India crash off the coast of Ireland were speedily provided with compensation of nearly Rs. 1 million (about US$35,000 at current exchange rates) each.57

Toward a New Ethics and Politics of Corporate Accountability

The larger question posed by this saga of the world's worst industrial disaster is how we go about making multinational corporations (and other large institutions such as governments and international agencies) behave ethically; that is, how do we make them truly accountable to those whose lives are most directly affected by their actions? There is no single answer, of course, nor will limitations of space permit me to articulate a full-blown response to this question. But at least some basic contours of that response can be sketched.

The struggle for real corporate accountability must begin with empowerment of risk bearers - for example, workers and communities surrounding hazardous facilities like the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal - and that means effective political mobilization at the grassroots. Indeed, the Bhopal tragedy provides some measure of affirmation of this proposition. The little positive treatment of the victims that has occurred has come about almost entirely through the victims engaging in politics of protest, which at times became disorderly as the victims, especially women, were ruthlessly attacked by the police. But nonetheless occasional results were achieved, of which by far the most notable is interim relief, originally advanced as a demand by victim groups before the Bhopal District Court, which would have tried the case of civil damages against Carbide if a trial had been held.

But grass-roots organization and political mobilization are only a part of the challenge, albeit the foundation on which all else rests. Critically important in support of such mobilization are solidarity links nationally and internationally. Here again, the Bhopal case is instructive, although it can hardly be said that these links were able to overcome the concentration of corporate and government power with which they were confronted. Nonetheless, at different times, especially in the earlier stages, Bhopal support groups within India's voluntary sector, especially in Delhi, played an important part, as does, to this day, the Bhopal Group for Information and Action. And international links have been cultivated through a variety of means,




such as the International Secretariats of Trade Unions, which sent a trade union delegation to Bhopal in 1985 to conduct their own investigation of the disaster, and, until the present, the International Coalition for Justice in Bhopal, a network of seven organizations around the world campaigning in support of the demands of the Bhopal victims for justice and accountability.

But we need to look beyond this kind of effort in formulating new standards of ethical behavior and creating institutional mechanisms that will assure that these standards are observed and provide for punitive action. The standards setting is the easy part, and a significant beginning has been made through the work of three sessions of the Permanent People's Tribunal, which has led to the formulation of three charters of rights of victims, of communities, and of workers in hazardous industries. The final session of the Tribunal on Industrial and Environmental Hazards and Human Rights, which is scheduled for London in late 1994, will seek to codify these charters into a single instrument on rights of victims, of communities, and workers and responsibilities of governments and corporations.58

Parallel efforts to formulate standards of ethical behavior are also gathering momentum. Consider, for example, the articulation of "ethical priorities" in large-scale development projects, which has led Robert Goodland of the World Bank's Environment Department to insist that "selection of any but the least damaging project is unethical."59 In a similar vein, Communities Concerned About Corporations, a US- based network of workers, communities, victims, and religious investors, is striving to formulate standards of "ethical production," especially in the petrochemical industry, as one element in a larger strategy to curb corporate power and make it more accountable to those most directly affected by what corporations do.60

The real challenge lies in developing effective techniques to assure that these standards are actually met, and when they are not, that violators are promptly and meaningfully held to account. We should have no illusions that this challenge will be met easily, but we must keep before us that homely wisdom that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a but single step. And there are some of those "single steps" occurring, typically in the form of campaigns to re-assert "people's sovereignty" over the huge global corporations that increasingly dominate the global political economy. Some very tentative steps were made at the recent World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna toward an international criminal court, whereas others have been arguing for an international court for environmental crimes and an international court (and a system of regional courts) to which victims of human rights violations could appeal directly.



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In the meantime, citizen tribunals such as the Permanent People's Tribunal or the International People's Tribunal on the G-7, which recently issued an indictment of the Group of Seven major industrialized nations in Tokyo, present alternative mechanisms for those who are victims of immoral behavior by large institutions to present their cases.61 Yet another small initiative in this direction is the campaign now being launched to insist that the United Nations system once again undertake monitoring of the behavior of multinational corporations but in a manner much more effective than the work of its Centre for Transnational Corporations in the past.

Yet another approach, at least in the United States, is to address the immorality of corporate enterprises when they injure or kill innocent victims at a still more fundamental level. Among those engaged in this task is Richard Grossman, a long-time environmental activist and author of a classic work on job blackmail in US industry, entitled Fear At Work. He has argued that we must reassert the sovereignty of the people over "social property," which has increasingly fallen into the exclusive domain of corporate decisionmaking - namely decisions on investment, production, and the organization of work. The instrument for achieving this goal, he believes, is through the corporate charters, which, at least historically in the United States, were seen as licenses given by the state on behalf of people for some identifiable public purpose. This means challenging corporate power at its vital center. Grossman and his fellow worker, Frank Adams, sum up their argument in these words:

Today, we need to ask one another if we haven't spent enough time, energy and money niggling with these well-guarded, intentionally- constructed, meticulously insulated corporations. Don't we harm ourselves and the Earth when we let the very real monster of corporate law block our paths? Don't we demean the tradition of active citizenship when we give our rights away? Wouldn't it be liberating and exhilarating to reclaim our civic rights?

We can start, state by state, by listing the criteria for charters we will allow to be issued. Then, armed with our criteria, we can insist that elected officials revoke the charter of every corporation that fails to agree in writing to our standards. If our elected representatives will not cooperate, we can vote them out of office or petition to recall them. In the future, anyone who wants to do business in our states must first come to the people directly with their plan for the organization of work, resource use, products and technology, along with the rights of workers and communities.62

Ultimately, of course, moral behavior is heavily influenced by the




distribution of power in human institutions and social relationships. And this is precisely why it is so difficult to bring about an outcome different from that which has occurred, at least thus far, in the world's worst industrial disaster as well as hundreds of others all over the world that have occurred with dismaying regularity over the past century or more.63 So until we reach a Utopian stage of human evolution in which power is less heavily concentrated in the hands of corporate and other perpetrators of industrial disasters, we must be prepared to continue resistance against the immoral behavior of these large and powerful institutions and ponder the words, slightly paraphrased, of Czech author Milan Kundera: "The struggle of people against power is a struggle of memory against forgetting."64

The victims of the world's worst industrial disaster can never forget. We must not either.

Notes

1. Dictionary definitions are taken from Webster's New International Dictionary, Second edition (Springfield, Mass.: G & C Merriam, 1959).

2. Based on testimony presented to the Permanent People's Tribunal on Industrial and Environmental Hazards and Human Rights, Yale University Law School, April 1991. See also the report of the Independent Commission on the Narmada Project by Bradford Morse and Thomas Berger (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1992).

3. Permanent People's Tribunal on Industrial and Environmental Hazards and Human Rights, Findings and Judgements: Third Session, Bhopal and Bombay, October 19-24, 1992.

4. Ibid., p. 25. See also Ward Morehouse, "Bittersweet Justice: Permanent People's Tribunal," Frontline (Madras), January 1, 1993.

5. The Trade Union Report on Bhopal (Geneva and Brussels: International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and International Federation of Chemical, Energy, and General Workers' Unions, July 1985). This section on the Genesis of the Bhopal disaster is adapted from Ward Morehouse and M. Arun Subramaniam, The Bhopal Tragedy: What Really Happened and What It Means for American Workers and Communities at Risk (New York: Council on International and Public Affairs, 1986), pp. 2-3.

6. Morehouse and Subramaniam, note 5, pp. 24-25; "Furor Over Selling of Lives Cheap," The Hindu, February 26, 1989. One method of estimating deaths is based on the number of death shrouds sold in Bhopal in the days immediately following the catastrophe (7,000 by one count). A senior UNICEF official, after a week of investigating conditions in Bhopal shortly after the disaster, commented that many doctors and other health officials privately reported to him that they believed the death toll was around 10,000.

The remainder of this section is adapted from David Dembo, Ward Morehouse, and Lucinda Wykle; Abuse of Power: Social Performance of Multinational Corporations: The Case of Union Carbide (New York: New Horizons Press, 1990), chapter 10. For a perceptive examination of the tragedy and the



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responses it generated, including the perceptions of the victims themselves, see Shiv Visvanathan, "Bhopal: The Imagination of a Disaster," Alternatives XI (1986): 147-165. Detailed accounts of the disaster itself are given in a number of different sources, including Morehouse and Subramaniam, note 5, especially chapter 1 ("What Happened at Bhopal") and chapter 2 ("The Impact of Bhopal"); and Vijaya Shankar Varma, "Bhopal: The Unfolding of a Tragedy," Alternatives XI (1986): 133-145.

7. Edward Munoz, Affidavit, January 24, 1985, US District Court, Southern District of New York, MDL626.

8. The Trade Union Report on Bhopal, note 5, "Methyl Isocyanate: The Chemistry of a Hazard," Chemical and Engineering News, February 11, 1985, p. 32.

9. Ibid., p. 9. 10. Union Carbide, Operating Manual Part I: Methyl Isocyanate Unit, October

1978. 11. According to the plant manager, "The flare tower is not designed to

handle anything but a small quantity of MIC such as perhaps a few hundred litres an hour." Praful Bidwai, "Plant Design Badly Flawed," Times of India (December 1984).

12. The Trade Union Report on Bhopal, note 5, p. 9. 13. See, for example, L. A. Kail, J. J. Poulson, and C. S. Tyson, "Operational

Safety Survey, CO/MIC/Sevin Units, Union Carbide India Ltd. Bhopal Plant," May 1982; and Union Carbide, note 10.

14. See discussion on siting of plant in Morehouse and Subramaniam, note 5, p. 3.

15. The Trade Union Report on Bhopal, note 5, p. 9. 16. Ibid., p. 8. 17. Union Carbide, note 10, p. 81. 18. The Trade Union Report on Bhopal, note 5, p. 9. 19. Ibid., p. 10. 20. Ibid. 21. Kail, Paulson, and Tyson, note 13. 22. Union Carbide, "Operational Safety/Health Survey MIC Unit Institute

Plant." Survey dates: July 9-July 13, 1984; report date: September 10, 1984; and action plan date: October 10, 1984. Cited in Philip Shabecoff, "Union Carbide Had Been Told of Leak Danger, New York Times, January 25, 1985; and Ron Winslow, "Union Carbide Moved to Bar Accident at U. S. Plant Before Bhopal Tragedy," Wall Street Journal, January 28, 1985.

23. Dan Kurzman, A Killing Wind: Inside Union Carbide and the Bhopal Catastrophe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987).

24. N. Anderson, M. Kerr Muir, V Mehra, and A. G. Salmon, "Exposure and Response to Methyl Isocyanate: Results of a Community Based Survey in Bhopal," British Journal of Industrial Medicine 45 (1988): 469-475; Diana Anderson, Shobha Goyle, B. J. Phillips, A. Tee, et al., "Effects of Methyl Isocyanate on Rat Muscle Cells in Culture," British Journal of Industrial Medicine 45 (1988): 269-274; Wil Lepkowski, "Methyl Isocyanate: Studies Point to Systemic Effects," Chemical and Engineering News, June 13, 1988; "Bhopal Disaster: India Publishes Medical Data," Chemical and Engineering News, November 30, 1987; "Toxins Present in Gas Victims' Bodies," Times of India, October 28, 1987; Anil Sadgopal and Sujit K Das, extracts from A Preliminary Report of Concern Regarding Persistence of Toxins in the Bodies of Bhopal Gas Victims, submitted to the Supreme




Court of India on October 26, 1987; "Methyl Isocyanate Tests: New Evidence of Lasting Lung Damage," Chemical and Engineering News, March 3, 1986; "Among Seriously Affected Mutagenesis Changes Not Ruled Out," Madhya Pradesh Chronicle, February 22, 1986; and "Immune System Flaws Are Found at Bhopal," New York Times, October 30, 1985.

25. "British TV Revisits Bhopal," Chemical Week, July 27, 1988. 26. Citizens Commission on Bhopal, "A Program for the Compensation,

Restitution and Rehabilitation of the Bhopal Victims," December 1985. 27. One of the better investigations of the victims' plight was produced as

a documentary by the British Granada TV program "World in Action," entitled "Bhopal- Tragedy Without End," August 1988.

28. One example is the Industrial Crisis Institute set up by a faculty member from the School of Management at New York University. A conference organized by the institute in 1986 included Warren Anderson as one of the speakers.

29. Transcript of Union Carbide Annual Meeting, April 22, 1987, p. 38. 30. Order of ludtre lohn F. Keenan, May 12, 1986, p. 63. 31. US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Decision on Appela, January

14, 1987. 32. Martin Cherniack, The Hawk's Nest Incident: Americas Worst Industrial

Disaster (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986). 33. "Carbide Comes Up With New Theory in Bhopal Case," Pioneer, February

27, 1993. 34. "Union Carbide Agrees to Settle All Bhopal Litigation for $470 million,"

Wall Street Journal, February 15, 1989. 35. Union Carbide Annual Report, 1988, p. 49. 36. Rajiv Locham, "Health Damage Due to Bhopal Gas Disaster: Review

of Medical Research," Economic and Political Weekly, May 25, 1991, pp. 1322- 1323. Carbide's assertion that it had released all of the toxicological information in its possession on MIC was again repeated by its vice-president and general counsel, Joseph Goeghan, in a meeting with representatives of the Bhopal victims in New York on May 6, 1991; see transcript of that encounter (in typescript).

37. Ibid. All medical data on the victims in this section are drawn from Rajiv Lochan's article, based primarily on studies undertaken by the Bhopal Gas Disaster Research Centre of the Indian Counsel of Medical Research, although several other studies of both the victims and the toxicology of MIC have been undertaken under the auspices of other research institutions, both Indian and foreign, during the years since the disaster. For a more recent summary of medical evidence, see Ramana Dhara, "Health Effects of the Bhopal Gas Leak: A Review," Epidemiologia e Prevenzione, no. 52 (1992).

38. People s Union for Civil Liberties, Encroachment on Civil Rights: Report of an Investigation into 'Anti-encroachment Drive' " (reproduced as Appendix II in Bhopal Group for Information and Action, Compensation Disbursement Problems and Possibilities: A Report of a Survey Conducted in Three Gas Affected Bastis of Bhopal (Bhopal: BGIA, January 1992). See also other sections of this BGIA report for data on the current status of processing compensation claims of the victims.

39. Claude Alvares, "In the Shadow of Despair,' The Illustrated Weekly of India, December 24, 1989. See also Bhopal Group for Information and Action, Voices From Bhopal (Bhopal: BGIA, n.d.).

40. Dan Kurzman, A Killing Wind: Inside Union Carbide and the Bhopal



Ward Morehouse 503

Catastrophe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987), especially chapters 2 and 3. The story of the Bhopal litigation in the United States and India is given from varying perspectives in a number of other books, including Morehouse and Subramaniam, note 5; Larry Everest, Behind the Poison Cloud: Union Carbides Bhopal Massacre (Chicago: Banner Press, 1986); Sanjoy Hazarika, Bhopal: The Lessons of a Tragedy (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1987); Tara Jones, Corporate Killing: Bhopals Will Happen (London: Free Association Books, 1988); Paul Shrivastava, Bhopal: Anatomy of a Crisis (Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger Publishing Co., 1987).

41. Key legal documents have been reproduced and lengthy introductions analyzing different phases of the litigation are contained in a three-volume series from the Indian Law Institute: Upendra Baxi, Inconvenient Forum and Convenient Catastrophe: The Bhopal Case (Bombay: Tripathi, 1986); Upendra Baxi and Thomas Paul, Mass Disasters and Multinational Liability: The Bhopal Case (Bombay: Tripathi, 1986); Upendra Baxi and Amita Dhanda, Valiant Victims and Lethal Litigation: The Bhopal Case (Bombay: Tripathi, 1990).

For numerous insights into not only the litigation but many other aspects of the disaster, see the various articles in the special issue of the Lokayan Bulletin 6, nos. 1/2 (1988), "Bhopal- An Interim Appraisal."

42. Wil Lepkowski, "The Restructuring of Union Carbide Since Bhopal," manuscript for forthcoming book edited by Sheila Jasanof at Cornell University.

43. Ibid., pp. 16-17. 44. Ibid., p. 17. 45. Dembo, Morehouse and Wykle, Abuse of Power, note 6, pp. 111-113. 46. Union Carbide Corporation statement on Abuse of Power. See note 6. 47. Morehouse and Subramaniam, note 5, on safety systems in Bhopal and

Institute; Pari Shafieri, doctoral dissertation, University of California at Riverside, 1990; Kurzman, A Killing Wind, note 40, on the value of Indian lives.

48. Dembo, Morehouse, and Wykle, Abuse of Power, note 6, pp. 28-30. 49. Cherniack, note 32. 50. UCC statement on Abuse of Power, note 46. 51. Dembo, Morehouse and Wykle, Abuse of Power, note 6, p. 28. 52. Ibid., p. 138. The remaining discussion of measures to achieve greater

corporate accountability is drawn from chapter 13 of Abuse of Power (see note 6). For a more recent but highly biased and pro-industry account of the Responsible Care Program, see the special issue of Chemical Week, July 7-14, 1993.

53. "Carbide Comes Up With New Theory," note 33. See also various other news reports on recent developments in the criminal case against Carbide and its officials and the adjudication of victim claims, such as Business and Political Observer April 9, 1993; Times of India, March 7 and 30, 1993; Patriot, April 3, 1993; The Hindu, April 9, 1993; Economic Times, February 25 and April 1, 1993; and Hindustan Times, April 9, 1993.

54. As quoted in Wil Lepkowski, "Union Carbide - Bhopal Saga Continues as Criminal Proceedings Begin in India," Chemical and Engineering News, March 16, 1992, p. 8.

55. Kurzman, A Killing Wind, note 40, p. 117. 56. As quoted in Lepkowski, note 54, p. 8. 57. Claude Alvares, "The Greater Bhopal Tragedy," The Illustrated Weekly of

India, December 1, 1985.




58. Permanent People's Tribunal (Bhopal Session), Draft Charter of Rights of Communities; Draft Charter of Rights of Workers in Hazardous Industries; Draft Charter of Rights of Victims, October 6, 1992.

59. Robert Goodland, "Ethical Priorities in Environmentally Sustainable Energy Systems: The Case of Tropical Hydropower," paper prepared for International Colloquium on Energy Needs in the Year 2000 and Beyond: Ethical and Environmental Perspectives, Montreal, May 13-14, 1993.

bO. Communities Concerned About Corporations, bounding Declaration and other papers on ethical production, April-July, 1993.

61. International Peoples Tribunal to Judge the G-7, Indictment (revised provisional text), July 7, 1993.

62. Richard Grossman and Frank Adams, "Dog Days at Company Headquarters: Business Accountability and the Corporate Charter," E Magazine, p. 47. For a fuller explication of Grossman's thinking on corporate charters as a means of making companies truly accountable, see his April 4, 1992, letter to John Cavanagh at the Institute of Policy Studies, as well as Grossman and Adams, Taking Care of Business: Citizenship and the Charter of Incorporation (Cambridge, Mass.: Charter Ink, 1993).

b3. See appendix 5, "The Worst But Not the first: Major Industrial Disasters in This Century," in Morehouse and Subramaniam, note 5. For a recent and somber assessment of the struggle of people against power, see Rajni Kothari, "The Yawning Vacuum: A World Without Alternatives," Alternatives 18 (Spring 1993): 119-139.

64. Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgrtting, Michael Henry Heim, trans. (New York: Knopf, 1981).



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