Gulliver

Uber is a taxi and food delivery service that contracts with gig workers and their vehicles. Founded in 2009, it uses phone location data to match drivers and customers. The first scandal to surface at the company was the use of customer data to spy on them using a tool called "God View.” Later the company was exposed for using another tool called “Greyball” to evade police and government officials as well as unwanted customers.  Uber has been heavily criticized for stealing taxi driver jobs, as well as for paying workers less than minimum wage and refusing to offer benefits such as healthcare and paid leave. Several legal challenges have been brought against Uber as well as a ballot initiative in California over these rights. 

Union Carbide, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Dow Chemical, was founded in 1898 in Niagara Falls, New York, to produce ethylene and other chemicals. In 1930, the company began building the Hawks Nest Tunnel in West Virginia where workers, who were mostly African-American, were exposed to silica. Many of the workers were denied the use of respirators and over 700 were estimated to have died from the breathing in silica dust which is akin to breathing in shards of glass. In 1962, the company began mining asbestos in King City, California, which it shipped to factories in New Jersey and New York for use in industrial manufacturing. Many workers exposed to asbestos became ill with asbestosis, lung cancer and mesothelioma. Union Carbide, however, is most famous for one of the world’s biggest industrial disasters in Bhopal, India, in December 1984, in which an accidental leak of methyl isocyanate resulted in the deaths of at least 16,000 people and for over 40,000 to be permanently maimed or disabled. The company paid out compensation of $470 million in 1989, but the families of victims in India have continued to fight for a better deal>