Recent Work

Rochester for Corporate Accountability is a not-for-profit volunteer group, which has been working for the past six years on the issue of responsible and ethical use of taxpayer money in the city of Rochester.

Through our investigation of the 10,068 businesses, which appear in the city checkbook throughout the past six years, we have found that there various corporations with a serious track record of unethical behavior, with whom the city uses our taxpayer money to conduct business. The unethical actions of the businesses in question often include serious human rights violations and labor violations. This behavior affects people in Rochester as well as across the United States and the world at large.  We believe that as citizens who stand to be affected by the actions of such corporations, we should have a voice in whether or not our taxpayer dollars are spent in support of them.

For this reason, our group has been researching and garnering public support in order to convince the city of the importance of setting up a Corporate Accountability Board in Rochester. The Board would be comprised of volunteers who would look into the ethics of a corporation in order to advise the city on whether or not that corporation should be granted our business and taxpayer dollars. This would be based on a series of seven ethical screens developed by Rochester for Corporate Accountability:

• Human rights violations

• Environmental degradation

• Labor violations

• Unethical corporate governance

• Monopoly dominance

• Excessive tax evasion

• The undermining of human health, and health of all other inhabitants of our planet's biosphere

Our group has been doing public outreach since April of 2019 in the Rochester Area, including canvassing efforts to raise awareness and support of our cause through a petition. We currently have over 1,100 signatures of residents in the city of Rochester from various districts and neighborhoods in support of a Corporate Accountability Board.

This past year, as we have faced so much as a nation and a local community throughout the pandemic, we have continued to see unethical actions of a serious nature from corporations. The labor and human rights violations of companies like Amazon, Uber, Lyft, and Caterpillar, and the dangerous health violations committed by companies including Gerber and Beech Nut which were found to have toxic metals in the baby food they produce show the need for corporate accountability in no uncertain terms, and we are ready to bring this to Rochester.