7 Corporations You'll Want to Avoid

Do Visit Co-op America - They have very educational information on how to become a responsible shopper - and the information below is from their site.

1. Which major retailer saw its New Dehli factories raided in October 2007 by authorities acting on a tip from an undercover newspaper reporter who found children as young as 10 sewing garments for a children's apparel line?

GAP

2. Which fast food company (owner of KFC and Taco Bell) received the dismally low score of 1 out of 100 in the "Climate Counts Company Scorecard," a report that that judged companies on their commitment to reversing climate change?

YUM!

3. Which popular retailer of apparel and toys got busted for the ninth time by Students and Scholars against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM), which uncovered sweatshop abuses (unpaid wages, illegal working hours, unsafe working conditions) at a producer factor in China in 2007?

DISNEY

4. Which electronics company was revealed in November 2007 to be at least partly responsible for more than 100 current or former Superfund sites? (Superfund sites are locations designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as being so contaminated by toxic chemicals that they are dangerous to human health.)

GENERAL ELECTRIC

5. Which chocolate-maker, long under fire by social justice advocates concerned about rampant child labor in the cocoa industry, has also become a dominating force in the bottled water industry, generating tons of plastic-bottle waste, and drawing criticism for polluting groundwater near its bottling facilities?

NESTLE

6. Which popular catalog company was the subject of a 2006 National Labor Committee report documenting abuses at its Saidan factory in Jordan including: human trafficking of guest workers, confiscation of passports, 118-hour work weeks, wages below the legal minimum, no sick days, and unsanitary working conditions?

L.L. BEAN

7. Which chemical company was named the number one polluter in America by a May 2008 report from the Political Economy Research Institute called the “Toxic 100 index”? (The index is based on EPA Toxics Release Inventory data, and ranks the nation's largest companies based on the quantity of their emissions, relative toxicity of chemicals emitted, and proximity to population centers, among other criteria.)

DUPONT