Facebook isn’t the only corporation being grilled about accountability right now
Mark Zuckerberg’s squirming in front of Congress this week spotlighted the growing power of corporations to avoid transparency. There’s the Trump Organization’s constant deception. There’s Amazon’s shadowy pursuit of a city for its second headquarters.
But that power isn’t growing everywhere.
A few weeks ago, a California judge ordered bus manufacturer New Flyer to pay $170,000 in attorney’s fees to Jobs to Move America, an organization that sued the multi-billion dollar Canadian-based corporation and won last October. That $170,000 figure might sound small, but it’s a big deal — I’ll come back to that.
But first, the backstory. In 2013, New Flyer signed a $500 million contract with Los Angeles’s metro agency to provide compressed natural gas buses. They won the bid partly because they committed to create 250 jobs, both locally and within the U.S., with good wages and benefits.
But in 2016, when LA Metro tried to publicly release information about those jobs, the corporation sued using something called a “reverse Public Records Act” request. New Flyer claimed the job information was a “trade secret” that if revealed would tip off their competition. LA Metro backed off, but a public interest organization, Jobs to Move America, intervened on the public’s behalf.
Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mary H. Strobel agreed with Jobs to Move America, and at the end of March forced New Flyer to pay the organization’s costs of having to intervene. Jobs to Move America’s intervention “conferred a significant benefit on the general public or a large class of persons,” she wrote in her ruling.
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For New Flyer, $170,000 is pennies compared to the $248 million they profited last year alone. North America’s largest bus manufacturer returned a 243 percent margin to its investors in the last two years. They provide billions of dollars worth of buses to the U.S.
But that New Flyer has to release information meant to be public in the first place, and that they had to pay a penalty for trying to hide it, reinforces the value of transparency in government contracts.
State and local governments together spend trillions of dollars a year on goods like buses, computers, and school supplies. Not only do we deserve to know how our money’s being spent, but we also should spend it intentionally. It should go towards building the sort of society most of us want to live in, where no one is left behind because of their skin color or forced to work two jobs to support their family. It should decrease inequality, not increase it.
To do that, we need corporations like New Flyer to honor the agreements they make, and we need transparency to hold them accountable.
Jeremy Mohler is a writer and communications strategist for In the Public Interest, a nonprofit that advocates for the democratic control of public goods and services. He’d love to hear from you: jmohler@inthepublicinterest.org
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