Subject: [cwj 59] Japanese company's tainted milk spotlights corporate issues
From: Corporate Watch in Japanese <cwj@corpwatch.org>
Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2000 20:32:10 -0700
Seq: 59
Sunday, July 16, 2000 Japanese company's tainted milk spotlights corporate issues by Sonni Efron Los Angeles Times TOKYO - Japan has been rocked in recent years by horror stories of corporate mismanagement, but the case of the Snow Brand Milk Products, whose alleged sanitation lapses are suspected of causing the country's worst food-poisoning outbreak since World War II, has stunned the nation. The company announced last week that it will shut down all 21 factories nationwide for weeklong inspections after one person died and more than 14,000 people in western Japan fell ill after consuming Snow products. A criminal negligence probe is under way, and reports of unsanitary practices appear almost daily in Japanese media. Analysts wonder whether the company, Japan's No. 1 dairy, can recover. Authorities say they suspect that 10 Snow factories recycled milk products that had been returned unsold from stores - including milk past its expiration date that may have been mixed with fresh milk, re-pasteurized and resold. The tainted milk case, coming less than a year after workers mixing uranium by hand in buckets set off a chain reaction at a nuclear fuel plant in northeastern Japan, has raised fresh questions about what has gone wrong with Japan's once-vaunted management. "It used to be that Japanese companies did everything meticulously," said Harumi Ichiki, managing director at the Sumitomo-Life Research Institute. "Even the lowest-level workers did things properly, by the book, even when no one was watching and there was no direct reward. This was the Japanese national ethos. Now it seems we're wobbling." Japan had a number of consumer crises in the 1970s and developed what were lauded as the world's best quality controls in the 1980s. But the 1990s recession has forced downsizing that has led some plants to cut corners, said attorney Michiko Kamiyama, who specializes in product safety. "The lessons of the 1970s have been lost in the crush for profits," Kamiyama said. Less than a month ago, Snow was supplying 19 percent of Japan's milk and 44 percent of its cheese, racking up $12.2 billion in sales last fiscal year. By Friday, Snow's stock had lost nearly half its value. Snow's woes began June 26, when four children who had drunk its low-fat milk started vomiting and developed diarrhea. The number of victims swelled, and on June 29, Snow's management announced a recall of its low-fat milk. But the scale of the contamination - and the damage to Snow's pristine image - kept growing. Authorities now say nine different Snow products may be tainted. At the Osaka plant that produced the products, authorities found equipment that had not been cleaned for three weeks and was filled with congealed milk and toxin-producing bacteria. Snow officials have come under fire. Japan's leading financial daily, the Nikkei newspaper, called the incident "Japan's worst example of poor corporate crisis management." Snow President Tetsuro Ishikawa, 66, has said he and three other executives will resign in September to take responsibility. Meanwhile, bombshells keep exploding. The Yomiuri newspaper quoted a former part-time truck driver as saying that drivers routinely collected unsold Snow products from stores - including packages that were expired, swollen or half-empty - and poured them into an unrefrigerated tank for reprocessing. The worker, whose name wasn't published, said he was told not to sample the drinks but did anyway - then dumped his leftovers into the tank. "Everybody did it, so I did not feel guilty," the worker said. "All the workers believed that even if the expired milk tasted strange, it would be all right since it would be sterilized." An anonymous letter sent to the Mainichi newspaper claimed that the Osaka factory's poor hygiene stemmed from an all-too-familiar Japanese complaint: endless overtime. "Workers became exhausted and began cutting corners, and that is why this sloppy hygiene occurred," the letter stated. FAIR USE NOTICE. This document contains copyrighted material whose use has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Corporate Watch in Japanese is making this article available in our efforts to advance understanding of ecological sustainability, human rights, economic democracy and social justice issues. We believe that this constitutes a 'fair use' of the copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. If you wish to use this copyrighted material for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner. ------------------------------------- Corporate Watch in Japanese Transnational Resource and Action Center (TRAC) P.O. Box 29344 San Francisco, CA 94129 USA Tel: 1-415-561-6472 Fax: 1-415-561-6493 Email: cwj@corpwatch.org URL: http://www.corpwatch-jp.org ------------------------------------- ______________________ The Corporate Watch in Japanese http://www.corpwatch.org/japan (CWJ) mailing list is a moderated email list in English designed to connect activists campaigning against Japanese corporations and investments around the world. * To unsubscribe from the CWJ mailing list, send an email to majordomo@jca.apc.org with text "unsubscribe cwj". To subscribe to the CWJ mailing list, send a message to majordomo@jca.apc.org with the text "subscribe cwj" * The CWJ mailing list is NOT intended for wide distribution. 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