Corporations

"A humbler Microsoft" is "reinventing itself," writes Advertising Age. "It is enlisting young executives ... in a marketing-leadership program to help it overcome hurdles such as competition from free software; the challenge of competing against itself with new products; and getting consumers to trust the company once blames for security breaches." Microsoft's chief marketing officer, Mitch Mathews, was elevated so that he reports directly to CEO Steve Ballmer.

The global mining giant Rio Tinto is lobbying the Australian government to amend draft legislation to ensure individual common law agreements with its workers override collectively bargained labor awards and certified agreements.

With the passage of the California Safe Cosmetics Act of 2005, cosmetics companies will have to tell California state health officials about the ingredients in their products that might cause cancer. It would seem that the American Cancer Society would be a natural supporter of this kind of legislation, but grassroots cancer-prevention organizers found this not to be the case. "The bill’s proponents said that one of the new law’s biggest obstacles was the silence of the ACS, the most powerful cancer-research and cancer-lobbying organization in the world.

"Industrial salmon farming corporations have learned an important lesson ... about what to do with their tarnished images of ecological and social injustice," writes Rebecca Clausen. "Simply pour money into a public relations campaign and overwhelm dissent." She points to half-page ads that the industry group Salmon of the Americas (SOTA) ran last month in major U.S. newspapers.