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Matt Garcia is assistant professor of ethnic studies and history at the University of Oregon.

Bevat de namen: Matt García, Matt García

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Is it possible for an exploitative multinational corporation to be run in an ethical way? Today, the question might seem hopelessly naïve. But in 1968, when Eli Black sought to take control of the United Fruit Company, he did so thinking it possible to create a socially responsible international conglomerate. According to Matt García’s Eli and the Octopus, Black believed this so strongly that, when it became apparent that it was impossible, he ‘knocked a hole through the quarter-inch-thick glass of his office window in a midtown Manhattan skyscraper and jumped’. García’s rendering of Black’s early life, social ethics and business trajectory begins with this tragic ending, a human story that kept me engaged with the book even when details of mergers, sales, profits and losses threatened to dampen my curiosity.

Eli Black (born Eliasz Menasze Blachowicz) migrated to the US from Poland as a child, arriving in New York with his mother and two sisters. They joined Eli’s father, an Orthodox poultry slaughterer. Black studied at Yeshiva College, intending to become a rabbi. Yet as he was finishing his studies at Yeshiva he had already begun night classes at Columbia University Business School. In 1945, as the war ended, Black proposed to Shirley Lubell and resigned as rabbi, taking a position in sales at Lehman Brothers on Wall Street. As the Black family grew, he passed from one position and company to another, eventually becoming CEO of American Seal-Kap (AMK, a producer of milk bottle caps), where he streamlined production and took risks that recognised the changing consumption habits of American families. Black repeated this formula after acquiring the meatpacking firm John Morrell and Company.

Black’s confidence that he could simply replicate his previous successes (streamline, focus on efficiency, negotiate with unions, identify changes in consumption, repeat)led him, in 1970, to acquire United Fruit, its merger with AMK forming United Brands (the ‘octopus’ of the title). Various other companies (from lettuce growers to sunglass makers) were brought under the United Brands umbrella. Black promoted a socially conscious model, arguing that a corporation is responsible not only to its shareholders, but also to its workers and their communities. Black took over United Fruit just as its crops were hit by a hurricane in Honduras. Despite this setback he quickly negotiated with local unions, offering a better pay and benefits package than union leaders had expected. The losses United Brands suffered in bananas, Black hoped, would be made up for by improved sales of lettuce through its subsidiary Inter Harvest. But here, too, Black’s previously successful business tactics faltered. A poor choice of lettuce transportation led to rotten vegetables and a union dispute in California with the Cesar Chavez-led United Farm Workers.

Read the rest of the review at HistoryToday.com.

Courtney J. Campbell is the author of Region Out of Place: The Brazilian Northeast and the World
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HistoryToday | Nov 10, 2023 |

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