Following a campaign led by the American Friends Service Committee, the company announced that it sold its Israeli subsidiary and discontinued the production of Pillsbury products in an illegal settlement in the occupied Palestinian territory.
Updates
31 December 2021
2021 saw multiple economic activism victories, many of which went under the radar. From ice cream to ICE surveillance, the people's power is slowly but surely chipping away at corporate power.
10 November 2021
Our Investigate Research Project has identified more than 60 companies with significant involvement in the militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border and in the surveillance and criminalization of immigrant communities throughout the United States. Of these companies, 25 are shortlisted as the worst of the worst, the first-ever divestment list designed to promote immigrant justice.
16 June 2021
AFSC has a new investment policy statement, incorporating a groundbreaking invest/divest framework. As far as we know, we are the first institution with a comprehensive immigrant justice investment policy; with a decision to divest from the prison industrial complex as a whole, not just from private prison companies; and with a policy that addresses Israeli apartheid.
30 March 2020
14 February 2020
26 November 2019
The world we live in has been transformed by the internet, social media, big data, and artificial intelligence. These technologies have enriched our lives, but they can easily be used for mass surveillance and repression. We must demand from governments and high-tech companies to guard our basic freedoms.
12 August 2019
24 April 2019
The U.S. government's "Zero-Tolerance" policy on immigration created a surge in the number of children that are locked up in detention facilities. The largest migrant youth detention facility in the U.S. is the Homestead detention center in Florida. It holds at least 2,000 children and is the only for-profit migrant youth detention facility to date.
12 December 2018
UPDATE: On April 9, 2019 Airbnb announced that it "will not move forward with implementing the removal of listings in the West Bank," reversing the company's announcement from last November. The following text reflects the situation before the April 2019 announcement, but our analysis still holds, despite Airbnb's decision.
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8 October 2018
Since 2014, the Israeli military has been aerially spraying vegetation-killing herbicides in Gaza in order to clear out the area along the Gaza border. A freedom of information application, filed by Israeli human rights organization Gisha, revealed the chemicals used and the companies involved.
20 June 2018
After becoming a franchisee of Europcar, Europe’s leading car rental company, Israeli company Albar terminated its businesses in the occupied West Bank. Europcar thus joins other multinationals that have ended operations in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory in recent years.
30 December 2016
On December 30, 2016, the AFSC Economic Activism Program submitted its recommendations toward the implementation of United Nations Human Rights Council Resolution 31/36 of March 2016, which called on the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to produce a database of businesses that, directly or indirectly, enable, facilitate or profit from the construction and growth of the illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. This was in response to the 2013 Report by the U.N. independent international fact-finding mission to investigate the implications of the Israeli settlements on the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of the Palestinian people.
The following is a list of socially responsible mutual funds that have not reported holdings in any of the companies on our divestment list. This does not mean that these funds are actively screening for prison or occupation-related human rights violations. If you have investments and these issues are important to you, contact your money manager to let them know about your concerns and to urge them to adopt a socially responsible investment (SRI) policy that includes a human rights screen.
European regulations isolate the Israeli settlement economy: Europe makes corporate activity in the Israeli settlements, including sourcing from them or providing them with basic services, increasingly into a legal risk, a reputational risk and an investment risk.
U.S. Corporations Complicit in Operation Protective Edge
The following is a list of corporations complicit in the 2014 attack on Gaza called Operation Protective Edge. If you are interested in organizing economic activism campaigns in response to the attacks, these are companies to target.http://afsc.org/resource/us-corporations-complicit-current-attacks-gaza
In the coming months, shareholders of three U.S.-based companies will be asked to vote on the Holy Land Principles, a new set of principles focusing on corporate labor policies in Palestine/ Israel. As corporate complicity in human rights abuses in Palestine/ Israel becomes the focus of growing public concern, a new voluntary code for U.S. corporations doing business in that conflict zone is a necessary development.
A memo by the AFSC addressed to the General Synod of the United Church of Christ in June 2015, prior to the meeting, describes updates about corporate complicity in human rights violations as part of the Israeli occupation, and encourages the church to join in boycott and divestment from these companies.
In this webinar with AFSC Economic Activism Program Director Dalit Baum, we walk users through the basic instructions for using "Investigate," including how to navigate the tool site, how to upload documents to be scanned, and how to interpret the scanner's results, followed by a Question and Answer period to address frequently asked questions about the tool.
The United States prison industry is massive. As of 2016, there were an estimated 2.3 million people behind bars and 5 million people on probation or parole. The number of incarcerated people has increased by 700% since 1970. The estimated cost of the prison industry is $182 billion each year, with the cost of incarceration alone nearly $74 billion. In hopes of claiming a piece of the $182 billion, hundreds of companies have signed contracts with the U.S. government to privatize nearly every aspect of the prison industry, from facility management to phone calls.
This webinar presents our new research mapping the U.S. prison industry and shows how to use the Investigate tool to measure your "Prison Footprint." It also offers targets for consumer boycott campaigns and discusses criteria for prison divestment.
As part of our support for the creation of ethical investment criteria, we have sent this letter to Isaiah 58, the advocacy group within the Ecumenical Lutheran Church of America, in support of their efforts to have the Church endorse a human rights screen that takes into account corporate behaviour in Israel/ Palestine. In the letter we explain the Investigate methodology and respond to some of the common questions: what is divestment? how is it different from screening? what about Palestinian companies?