Last month, Firestone’s rubber plantation in Liberia made the news, because it stopped ebola in its tracks:
The case was detected on a Sunday. Garcia and a medical team from the company hospital spent Monday setting up an Ebola ward. Tuesday the woman was placed in isolation.
“None of us had any Ebola experience,” he says. They scoured the Internet for information about how to treat Ebola. They cleared out a building on the hospital grounds and set up an isolation ward. They grabbed a bunch of hazmat suits for dealing with chemical spills at the rubber factory and gave them to the hospital staff. The suits worked just as well for Ebola cases.
Firestone immediately quarantined the woman’s family. Like so many Ebola patients, she died soon after being admitted to the ward. But no one else at Firestone got infected: not her family and not the workers who transported, treated and cared for her.
The Firestone managers had the benefit of backing and resources of a major corporation — something the communities around them did not.
Notice how NPR emphasizes that Firestone managers had the benefit of backing and resources of a major corporation, when, really, Firestone had managers who simply instituted a quarantine and made it stick.
Now that same Firestone plantation is getting a different kind of media attention. The latest Frontline, Firestone and the Warlord, looks at Firestone’s actions during the Liberian civil war. As The Vice Guide to Liberia makes abundantly clear, Liberia is a messed up place today, but when the incompetent gunmen were running the show, it got really bad.
What is the right course of action for the ex-pat managers of an enormous, immobile asset, in a country embroiled in civil war? They were apparently wrong for leaving and wrong for coming back.
“What is the right course of action for the ex-pat managers of an enormous, immobile asset, in a country embroiled in civil war? They were apparently wrong for leaving and wrong for coming back.”
Isegoria is 100% right. I saw the so-called expose on Frontline about Firestone and the operation in Liberia. Charles Taylor was an extortionist, and everyone knew it, but what was Firestone supposed to do? If they had just said chuck it all, they would have been accused of abandoning their workers. And when they gave in to Taylor and re-opened the facility, they were accused of currying favor with the dictator. Damned if they do and damned if they don’t. That plantation also produces the best latex in the world, and Firestone tires were acknowledged as the best in the world.