For the third time the Network Social Responsibility (NeSoVe) awards the “Eyesore of the year” – price for socially irresponsible companies, organizations, institutions and individuals.
Six cases are shortlisted this year:
1. The Castella GmbH (henceforth Eterna GmbH) for reckless real estate speculation in the context of the eviction of the “Pizzeria Anarchia” on 28 July 2014 under a large contingency of 1,454 police officers in the Mühlfeldgasse 12 in Vienna Leopoldstadt.
2. Henry am Zug, the catering service in ÖBB trains, because of wage dumping. Many employees work also in Austria, but are paid by Hungarian conditions. This is just a third of the salary of their Austrian colleagues.
3. IKEA because of the contradiction between appearance and reality. While IKEA presents itself as a particularly sustainable company, the campany and its suppliers attract negative attention by violating workers’ rights; further IKEA is using Sustainability Seals, which are criticized as greenwashing and misleading the public; finally, IKEA is a textbook example of how taxes can be saved with all imaginable tricks.
4. Jean-Claude Juncker for effective tax avoidance policy. In Luxembourg the current President of the European Commission has pushed a special finance and tax policy as finance and prime minister. Due to this policy companies need to pay little or no taxes.
5. The Plachutta group because of disrespectful treatment of the employee Tatara. The managing director Mario Plachutta dismissed summarily the waiter Juraj Tatara, because he wanted to sweeten its strawberries with 50 grams of Plachutta‘s sugarInadmissibly due to a Labour Court decision.
6. Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., because of work accidents and health hazards particularly in the supply chain of Samsung. From 2007 August 2014, 289 cases of occupational diseases were found alone in the Korean IT industry, of which 232 are directly or indirectly attributable to Samsung.