Unilever are huge their products include foods, beverages, cleaning agents and personal care products. The company owns more than 400 brands, which are organised into four main categories – Foods, Refreshments, Home Care, and Personal Care. Unilever’s current largest-selling brands include: Axe/Lynx, Ben & Jerry’s, Dove, Flora/Becel, Heartbrand, Hellmann’s/Best Foods, Knorr, Lipton, Lux/Radox, Omo/Surf, Rexona/Sure, Sunsilk, TRESemmé, Magnum,Vaseline and VO5.
Unilever is threatening to withdraw its advertising from online platforms such as Facebook and Google if they fail to protect children, promote hate or create division in society.
In a speech, Keith Weed, the Unilever chief marketing officer, said that, as a brand-led business, Unilever “needs its consumers to have trust in our brands”.
He went on to say “Unilever will not invest in platforms or environments that do not protect our children or which create division in society, and promote anger or hate,” he plans to say. “We will prioritise investing only in responsible platforms that are committed to creating a positive impact in society.”
Sounds good of them until we consider who and what Unilever are and what they do.
Global firms behind popular brands such as Kit Kat, Colgate toothpaste and Dove (Unilever) cosmetics use palm oil produced by child workers in dangerous conditions, Amnesty International has claimed.
The human rights organisation traced a range of well-known products back to the palm oil company Wilmar, which it alleged employs children to do back-breaking physical labour on refineries in Indonesia.
Singapore-based Wilmar counts multinational companies including Kellogg’s, Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive, Reckitt Benckiser and Nestlé among its major clients, according to Amnesty.
In a 110-page report accompanied by a video, Amnesty alleged products sold by those companies were “tainted by appalling human rights abuses … with children as young as eight working in hazardous conditions”. So much for “not investing in platforms or environments that do not protect our children or which create division in society.”
The report called on the companies implicated to tell customers whether the palm oil in individual products such as Magnum ice-creams, Ariel detergent, Knorr soup, Pantene shampoo and Aero chocolate bars were made using child labour.
“These findings will shock any consumer who thinks they are making ethical choices in the supermarket when they buy products that claim to use sustainable palm oil,” said the senior Amnesty investigator Meghna Abraham.
“There is nothing sustainable about palm oil that is produced using child labour and forced labour. Something is wrong when nine companies turning over a combined revenue of £260bn in 2015 are unable to do anything about the atrocious treatment of palm oil workers earning a pittance.”
It is not the first time that Unilever has been criticized and exposed for abusing human right laws.
Unilever’s abuses and disregard for human life and human rights is disgraceful and not “creating a positive impact in society.” They also perform cruel tests and experiments on animals. Despite promoting themselves as “anti animal testing” Unilever have been caught using chemicals that have been tested on animals in insanely cruel experiments numerous times.
The hypocrisy that Unilever and Keith Weed are displaying here is shocking. For the record Facebook and Google DO NOT POST ANYTHING. Keith Weed and Unilever are not trying to censor corporate giants they are trying to censor PEOPLE that use Facebook and Google. BOYCOTT UNILEVER FOR GOOD.
