By Kevin Smith
of London Mining Network
With just over a month to go, preparations are in full swing in London at the moment in the countdown to the Olympics. Details about the opening ceremony have just been announced, sports venues are being prepped and international media are zooming in to cover the biggest sporting fixture in the world. There’s one controversy that has dogged the organizers of these games right from the starting line – the choice of corporate sponsors.
Despite the fact that the games have been billed as ‘the greenest ever,’ the organizers seem to have jumped into bed with some of the most controversial corporate entities on the planet, including Rio Tinto, who are providing the metals for the Olympic metals. At London Mining Network, we’ve had our eyes on Rio Tinto for quite some time.
Metal for the medals will come from the company’s Kennecott Bingham Canyon mine in Utah, USA, and its Oyu Tolgoi mine in Mongolia. Groups in Utah are protesting about air pollution from Rio Tinto’s Bingham Canyon operations, which contributes to hundreds of premature deaths each year in the Salt Lake City area. Planned expansion would make the situation worse. The Oyu Tolgoi mine will use enormous quantities of water in a desert region, and campaigners there accuse the company of poor planning and failure to share information with the public. And of course, we’ve also been monitoring Rio Tinto’s appalling labour record, most recently the brutal shut out of steel workers in Quebec.
We thought it was pretty outrageous that a company like Rio Tinto should get any good publicity through being associated with the Olympics, so working with some other organisations, we set up the Greenwash Gold campaign – a website that presents info and three short animations on three of the worst corporate sponsors of the Olympics, and invites people to vote for who they think is the worst. Shortly before the games begin, we’ll be awarding the Greenwash Gold medal to the company that has the worst international reputation.
When we launched the campaign, we were honoured to have Guy Farrell from the USW in Quebec come and share with us the shoddy way that Rio Tinto had been treating workers, and the amazing resistance that had been going on. It felt pretty powerful at the Rio Tinto AGM to have workers standing side by side with representatives from Rio Tinto impacted communities from Utah, Mongolia and West Papua.
There’s still a month left to vote. We’d love it if you wanted to vote for Rio Tinto, but it wouldn’t be fair for me to not mention the other two nominees. BP for the devastation caused to coastal communities in the Gulf of Mexico and for its tar sands expansion in Canada at the expense of the lives and livelihood of the First Nations. And Dow Chemical for its refusal to face the responsibilities of Union Carbide, the company it merged with that caused the Bhopal chemical disaster in India.
It’s pretty stiff competition when Rio Tinto is up against such controversial companies. But we’re appealing to steel workers the world over to vote for Rio Tinto in solidarity with the labour struggle taking place in Quebec, and to ensure that at the Olympic games in London, people can see that so long as Rio Tinto is causing so much pollution and abusing its work force so badly, it doesn’t deserve the honour of being associated with the Olympic games.
Vote by clicking here.
