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A Civil Action The movie A Civil Action brings up an interesting idea that
many people in the public don't see or hear about very often. The idea that the
big corporations often don't take into account the safety of the people that
work for them or the people that live around the factories. These big
corporations are run entirely by money and the idea of what things will cost and
how much money they can possibly make. Too many times money is more important
than the lives of human beings and the people that run these places only see in
dollars and cents. The moral issues that this dilemma brings up are immense.
This has been happening for centuries since the industrial revolution. Workers
were subjected too harsh conditions and unsafe factories so that more goods
could be produced. They had children as young as seven and eight years old
working 15 hour days.
In our modern times, toxic waste now plays a big part in
the safety of people. The waste that these companies produce and dump under our
noses don't seem to bother them in the least. The way microeconomics effects
this must be fully explored to realize the way the corporate world thinks and
acts. The goal of any corporation is to make the maximum profit that they can
providing a good or service to the community while doing it as inexpensively as
possible to them. Too many times producing these goods, toxic by-products are
also produced. Nuclear power plants create plutonium, factories let poisonous
gasses into the atmosphere, and chemicals are dumped into the drains and washed
into our water everyday while being unknown to the people around them. The issue
then becomes what to do with these poisons at the cheapest cost to retain the
most revenue. In A Civil Action the W.R. Grace company decided that the best
place to dump the T.C.E. was in the river behind the plant. It's too bad that
all the people who lived down stream were also effected by the carelessness of
this company. It got into the drinking water and gave kids cancer and seizures
among other health conditions. These companies try to cover up these kinds of
things as much as possible by buying people off.
They think that if they give
people money for their losses than everything will be alright. For huge
corporations dealing with billions of dollars these payoffs are only a drop in
the bucket for them. Even a million dollars to any family is an incredible
amount of money and often the money becomes more important than the real issues
behind the problem and can't be passed up by a family struggling to get by. The
benefits of paying of these people for their trouble is much cheaper then doing
things the right way in the beginning and protecting their safety. Money in our
society has become a sense of power and authority. People think to many times
that money is the key to happiness. Although money isn't a bad thing it effects
the way people act and causes them to not care about the things that they should
many times. Corporations have a structure that they follow in order to make them
run in an efficient manner.
In the movie John Travolta initially doesn't want to
take the case because he doesn't think that there will be any money in it for
him and his firm. Even though he goes and sees how much pain this company has
caused to the people in Wolburn, he still doesn't care because of the money. Not
until he realizes how big the companies are does he take the case. As the case
goes on he isn't able to achieve what he ultimately wanted to do because the
Grace Company has so much money that it will almost always win. Travolta's firm
goes eight million into debt trying to win this case but ultimately has to
settle because they can't go on. The firm doesn't even have to clean up the
polluted land that caused all the problems. It wasn't until the E.P.A. steps in
and with their power was able to achieve a proper sanction to this company. This
is not the only issue that the W.R. Grace company has tried to cover up. They
produced and insulation called zonolite which contained asbestos. They were
worried that a label on the insulation would hurt sales of the product so they
fought hard to keep the labels off so that they wouldn't be breaking the law.
They knew as far back as 1963 that the insulation was harmful to people yet
produced it until 1984. The Grace company is a 1.5 billion multinational
chemical and construction products company.
With money like that these companies
have so much power that it makes them seem like they are above the law
sometimes. Not only this company but other construction companies often look
past safety in order to save money. Thankfully organizations like O.S.H.A. have
been developed in order to protect the safety of the American worker from the
power of these companies. O.S.H.A. sets national standards for industry in order
to provide a safe and helpful work environment for workers. Microeconomics is a
powerful factor in the way that companies handle their business. Money runs
these companies from the ground up and often is more important than the people
that work there. These companies try to weigh out the costs and benefits of
these actions. For a billion dollar company to change the way they do things in
order to be safe will cost them too much money many times so they decide that it
is more cost efficient to pay off the injured parties with a nominal amount of
money. Unfortunately that is the way the corporate world works nowadays, but
with organizations such as O.S.H.A. and others these huge companies that have
held all the power for years are finally being set in their place. These
corporations need to value the lives of people more than the paper that money is
printed on.
Bibliography
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