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The Political, Social, and Legal Environment of Business Case Study Analysis: Union Carbide Corporation and Bhopal A single slip in action may cause lasting sorrow. A slight mistake in operation at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal of India causes a lot of deaths and injuries. What a tragedy it is. Undoubtedly, there must be something wrong with the management of the plant. In addition to the plant, the governments related in India that issued permits and provided incentives for the plant, Bhopal community officials who permitted slum dwellers to move near the plant in illegal settlements, Indian environmental and safety inspectors should also be responsible for this. The governments related in India issued permits because people need jobs, or people would starve to death. This was one reason in my opinion. Soft money from Union Carbide plant may be another reason for issuing permits. It was clearly that the governments in America would not issue a permit to Union Carbide plant under such circumstances, which lacked of severe environmental standards and permitted slum dwellers to live near the plant and so on. Such actions were the fuses leading to more deaths. Before the major gas leakage from the MCI unit on December 3, 1984, some people were killed because of phosgene gas leakage. However, no one took it seriously in spite of the report by media. One of the reasons that people ignore this was because people didn¡¦t know the potential danger of the chemical plant. The other reason was that there are not enough environmental inspectors to cover so many plants in India. Besides, those inspectors had a record of loose enforcement. Consequently, danger emerged just as the saying goes ¡§Nothing comes of nothing.¡¨ As for the management of Union Carbide¡¦s Bhopal plant, some steps indeed needed to be improved. Let us take a look at the whole process of the gas leak and see what actions can be improved. The first mistake in my opinion was that R. Khan, an operator in the MIC complex, neglected to insert a slip blind above the point of water entry. This omission violated instructions in the MIC processing manual, the technical manual that set forth procedures established by the chemical engineers who set up the plant. Obviously, the plant failed to emphasize the importance of obeying the processing manual and the danger of disobeying ... ... middle of paper ... ...nk he should be responsible for the whole case. In other words, he should resign for the whole incident. Generally speaking, the legal system didn¡¦t play a very active role in this case. First of all, the India government could do more on digging the truth of the gas leak out and set a more strict standard to regulate such dangerous plants in case that another crisis. Second, I didn¡¦t see any one who worked in the Union Carbide¡¦s Bhopal plant should be responsible for that tragedy. Does it mean that all that the India court wanted was money or it just wanted to reduce trial and subsequent appeals because it might have taken more than twenty years? To sum up, Union Carbide handled the crisis cleverly but not well enough because it knew what would the India government and court react to this incident. Union Carbide controlled the whole situation and took lead of the lawsuits itself. The India government and court didn¡¦t help those victims as much as they needed instead. The function of government, designed to protect its people, disappeared in this case. BIBLIOGRAPHY ¡§Union Carbide Corporation And Bhopal,¡¨ in Steiner and Steiner, pp.147-161.
Arnold & Porter chose to sue Pittston rather than the Buffalo Mining Company because the value of the corporation allowed for adequate compensation to the victims. Author and head lawyer for the plaintiffs, Gerald M. Stern, writes that the original goal was sue to sue for $21 million for the disaster to have a material effect on the cooperation (51). To avoid responsibility Pittston attempted to prove that the Buffalo Mining Company was an independent corporation with its own board of directors. The lawyers for the plaintiffs disproved this claim by arguing the Buffalo Mining Company never held formal meetings of the board of directors and was not independent of the parent company. During this case Pittston’s Oil division had applied to build an oil refinery in Maine. The ...
The United States Enrichment Corporation (Producer). (2013). USEC issues WARN act notices to Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant workers [Video file]. Retrieved from http://www.usec.com/news/usec-issues-warn-act-notices-paducah-gaseous-diffusion-plant-workers
The author describes each chapter with a surreal narration. It begins with “A Fable for Tomorrow”, which starkly declares a bleak future of every U.S village if they erred to use pesticides. “The Obligation to Endure” describes the lack of public awareness and how it would become grievous. She justly reasons that if the public might suffer from long-term misfortunes due to insecticides usage, they have a right to know the facts. Felicitous “Elixirs of Death” describes the nature of insecticides in three apt words. Chemical structures of common biocides are explained in an uncomplicated fashion. A series of three successive chapters is dedicated to Earth and its components. These chapters include the closely inter-connected ecological cycles, existing in the water, mantle and soil horizons. Pesticide dispersal in soil followed by its access into the ground water table and the waterways is an inconceivable process. The book promulgates the escape of biocides from their place of application, and their integration into natural bodies. All her chapters thereafter revolve around the various short-term and long-term effects of biocides on the biosphere. Rachel Carson had stated countless dire cases wherein complete ecosystems faced annihilation. The influx of detrimental chemicals extended their reach over animals and plants, and were causing human mortalities as well. Humans are a part of
Such blatant cases of misgivings are hardly a rare sight in the cesspool that the Indian media is. And we are a spoilt bunch of junkies. Junkies so hopped on to smoking a pile of irrelevant garbage and dying for a fix every now and then anyway because otherwise, the tolerance bleeds us dry from the inside.
The harmful effects of using hexavalent chromium to human health and the environment was known by PG&E, however they misinformed the people of Hinkley that they were using chromium 3 which was actually beneficial and safe to use. They kept deceiving the people who were being affected by the side effects that hexavalent chromium had. The company lost one of the largest lawsuit in American history and ended up paying $333 million to the people of Hinkley as a compensation for what they had done. Which again shows that the company officials would do anything in order to satisfy their own greed and need for money, no matter what the
In that case, unions have already blamed the fiasco. That is because the fiasco make the decision to outsource much of the company’s IT jobs, as Indian staff are paid little compared with their British counterparts.
Between March and June 2006, three loads of 28,000 tons of Coker Naphtha were put on board Probo Koala, a cargo ship owned by Trafigura. Caustic soda and other chemicals are used to clean the Coker Naphtha to make it into gasoline. This process of cleaning the Coker Naphtha produced 500 tons of toxic waste. Later Trafigura was facing a problem of how to safely dispose of all this toxic material. Amsterdam Port Services, a Dutch waste management company agreed to treat and dispose of the waste. While the company was transferring the waste, a foul smell was released onto the city. The company decided to check into the product that they were going to deal with. Amsterdam Port Services discovered that the toxic waste was much more polluted than they thought, which required a more complicated and time consuming treatment. The company wanted more money to treat the toxic waste, but Trafigura did not want to pay the asking price. This left Trafigura with no company to dispose of their toxic
In May 1982, three American engineers from the chemical products and household plastics division of UCC came to Bhopal. Their task was to appraise the running of the plant and confirm that everything was functioning according to the standards laid down by UCC. The report revealed that the Bhopal plant has lacked a lot of securities and workmanship. The report described the surroundings of the site as being 'strewn with oily old drums, used piping, pools of used oil and chemical waste likely to cause fire. It condemned the shoddy workmanship on certain connections, the warping of equipment, the corrosion of several circuits, the absence of automatic sprinklers and the risk of explosion in the gas evacuation flares. It also reported leaks of phosgene, MIC and chloroform, ruptures in pipe work and sealed joints, absence of any earth wire on one of the three MIC tanks and poor adjustment of certain devises where excessive pressure could lead to water entering the circuits. At the same time, the report expressed concern at the inadequately trained staff, unsatisfactory instruction methods and sloppy maintenance reports. In October 1982, MIC escaped from a broken valve, seriously affecting four workers and causing eye irritation and breathlessness among people in the nearby communities. This incident was a clear indication of the potential risk to public life. In
...ections 376 (rape) and 302 (murder) under the Indian Penal Code and was awarded death sentence. The Court had passed this verdict based on numerous hard-hitting evidences. The Court also blamed the inaction and partiality of the Delhi Police in coming to the aid of Mattoo when she had filed a complaint against Singh as his father; J.P. Singh was the then senior IPS officer Director General of Delhi Police. However, on 6th October 2010, the death sentence was reduced to life sentence after Santosh Singh filed a plea in the Supreme Court. In spite, of this, the turn of events in this case shows that although justice was delayed for Priyadarshini Mattoo, justice was not denied. This only proves the efficiency, power and social responsibility of media in a democracy. This is why the case is considered as a landmark reversal of judgments in the history Indian judiciary.
Steve Condie’s 2004 docudrama, One Night in Bhopal is about the Indian gas tragedy which occurred in 1984. Like many other documentaries, Condie presents his particular interpretation of the event and manipulates audiences to view the gas leak accident as an avoidable disaster, which could’ve been averted by the Union Carbide America. My own unique, however, was shaped by factors personal to me and my way of understanding the world. Amongst these were my belief in the appropriate role of money in society, my psychological tendency to emphasise with the sick and my persistent nature.
engines, axels and the like - sits not in Detroit, Tokyo or Stuttgart, but in the
The company’s sphere of influence results in millions of individual cases where the company is accountable for potential problems that negatively affect customers and noncustomers. In Erin Brockovich, Masry and Brockovich work relentlessly to make PG&E answer for its negligence by demanding just compensation for the affected residents of Hinkley. Certainly, mishandling of cooling water rich in hexavalent chromium at PG&E’s natural gas compression station led to the contamination of Hinkley’s groundwater supply. However, this natural gas compression station was only one of several compression stations in PG&E’s natural gas distribution system. “Eight gas
Critically analyse and compare the cases of Ex Parte Pieters 1993 3 SA 379 (D) and Ex Stoter 1996 4 SA 1299 (E)
Two main theories have been published on the cause of the industrial accident that occurred at the Union Carbide pesticide plant: employee sabotage and corporate negligence. Following the events that took place in Bhopal, there were two investigations conducted. The initial investigation was jointly conducted by the Indian Council of Scientific and Industrial Research and the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation. The Union Carbide Corporation also led an investigation headed by chairman, Warren Anderson, and consisted of medical and technical experts, including Jackson Browning. Union Carbide claims that their investigation was hindered by the Indian Government and they were not allowed to interview emp...
However the Bhe case illustrates that it is not only the executive or ‘legislature that does not conform to the doctrine of separation of powers. In this case, the judiciary declared the principle of primogeniture to be unconstitutional and therefore invalid. In terms of separation of powers, the judiciary should have left it up to the legislature to first try and develop that aspect of customary law to be more constitutional before declaring it invalid. This shows that it is not only the independence of the judiciary that is undermined but other branches of government as