UNILEVER

Inside a multinational
Unilever is the world’s biggest food processing company: most people use its products every day of their lives. Amanda Root asks whether this giant company can be trusted.

Union levers
Unions are attempting to build international solidarity between Unilever workers. Steve Percy and Harriet Lamb assess their achievements.

Engine of enterprise
David Orr, a recent Unilever Chairman, defends the Company’s record.

Global reach
A look at Unilever’s empire and the changes taking place in it.

Pumping up sales
Thousands of dollars have been spent on research and marketing for Unilever’s toothpaste pump. Julian Champkin appraises one of the most brilliant sales strategies to be invented since the wheel…

UNILEVER-THE FACTS

Contracting out
Contract workers are replacing permanent ones, as Anjum Rajabali reports.

Bird’s Eye view
Peter Stalker describes life as a middle manager selling Unilever’s frozen foods.

SIMPLY… Unilever’s history

Planting Poverty
Unilever has restarted buying plantations but this policy harms the local population, argues Barbara Dinham.

Worth Reading on... UNILEVER

Thanks to the Transnational Information Centre London and Paul Elshof of the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations Amsterdam for help in constructing this issue.

Nails are bitten at the NI offices as letters and sales statistics arrive from various parts of the world, indicating how well magazines are liked. Previously mild editors are transformed into mini media moguls as they study the sales figures, hoping (although it’s bad taste to admit it) that their magazines have done the best.

I’ve hit a jackpot with this magazine. It’s about Unilever, one of the world’s biggest multinational companies, and a recent readers’ survey showed that the majority of you wanted a magazine about such companies. I almost felt smug being asked to do it. Surely it’s bound to be popular and please readers, I thought. Just find a few statistics to illustrate multinationals’ records in the West and the Third World, then sit back and wait for fan mail to arrive.

But then a horrid thought wormed its way into my brain. I realized that magazines on Unilever are not easy things to do. They require endless patience and still more tenacity. The Company is not about to spill its own beans. To my polite enquiries about why certain figures - breakdowns of investments and profits in regional groups - were no longer appearing in Unilever’s Annual Reports, I was told that the Company only discloses what it is obliged by law to reveal. Unilever wasn’t born yesterday.

Alternative sources of information had to be found. I burrowed into dusty archives in old musty libraries searching for facts about Unilever and discovered why so few people get very far with their archive research - at least six people were needed to wrest the relevant documents from their lead-weighted coffin-like storage boxes. Then I tracked down stockbrokers - trying not to sound too impressed when talking to people who appear on TV as often as I have hot dinners. Finally I set up blind dates with various Unilever experts in Amsterdam basements and London cafés. It was these people who put me on the right track by pointing out discrepancies between what Unilever says is happening and what really is going on.

Gathering all the raw material was only half the problem, though. Shaping it into an appealing magazine felt like balancing on a tight-rope overhanging a pit full of up-ended broken glass. You’re probably thinking I’m exaggerating. Honest to goodness - I’m not.

You see, there’s a contradiction between striving to please and trying to show how those who possess power use it. One person’s entertainment is another’s boredom. The things about Unilever that make me passionately angry leave other people in this office colder than a Unilever frozen fish finger. I get heated when I see how the Company claims to be apolitical, but is clearly benefitting, for example, from Western right-wing political decisions to stabilize currencies in El Salvador. Others editors remained unmoved when I talked of this, asking what I expected - all multinationals are out to make money.

The best way to solve this problem, I believe, is to focus on the issues that those at the sharp end see as important. Lit up with the immediacy of their feelings, such issues should never be boring. This NI magazine allows some of those in Unilever’s firing line to speak their minds. In this way it is doing its bit to create a politics that responds to real needs.

This NI is also addressed to consumers - those usually left out of politics. If it shows readers how their daily experience - from the whiteness they expect in their laundry to how sexy they feel as they heat up a TV dinner - is monitored, shaped and harnessed by Unilever, it will have served its purpose. As a sixteenth-century wag once said, knowledge itself is power. Knowing about Unilever’s hold over us (a slippery hold built of ice-cream and soap) is the first step to breaking it. (I hope.)

Letters
Letter from Mawere
Update
Briefly
Endpiece: by Teresa Ramirez
Reviews: including an Anita Desai classic
Country profile: Ghana

COVER PHOTO: Mark Mason
ONLINE MAG MAINTAINED BY SIMON LOFFLER