Polaroid and Apartheid: First major protest by workers
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In 1970, a woman named Caroline Hunter—a newly hired young chemist at Polaroid—ran across a mockup of a South African passbook in one of the company’s labs. She quickly discovered that the repressive government was indeed shooting its ID photos on Polaroid film, even though Polaroid claimed not to be doing business in South Africa. Turned out that an independent distributor was selling equipment and film, either against Polaroid’s wishes or to allow plausible deniability back in Cambridge. (Given that she saw a passbook in the labs, it’s hard to believe that Polaroid was unaware, though the level at which information stopped and started within the corporation is unknowable.)
At the time, Polaroid was perceived as a pretty progressive outfit when it came to issues of race. Edwin Land had taken pains to increase black employment, and on the night of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968 had gone to one of Polaroid’s factory floors to offer an impromptu speech about unity (“we must do better”) to the staff that many say they won’t ever forget. Compared with some multinational companies of this era (Coca-Cola comes to mind), it had seemed to be an enlightened company.
Hunter and a fellow employee named Ken Williams formed a group called the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement, intended to shame their employer into straightening this out, and adopted an eye-opening slogan: “imprisons a black South African every 60 seconds.” They were on the right side of the issue, and at Polaroid itself, the South Africa news was handled hamfistedly at best. First came denials—”we don’t do business with South Africa”—until the opposite was confirmed. The Polaroid sent a delegation to Johannesburg to investigate, noting in its press releases that it was made up of two black employees and two whites. The group returned with the recommendation that Polaroid could potentially effect some good by continuing to do business there, leaning on its local affiliates to increase their hiring of black South Africans and upping their pay. Not a horrible idea—but one that smacked of self-justification. A big cash donation to some Boston civil-rights groups was also well-intentioned, and instead looked like a payoff. The whole affair made this ostensibly enlightened company look retrograde, and no better than any other. Hunter and Williams were eventually fired.
It took Polaroid seven years to bail out fully from South Africa, by which time similar movements had cropped up in many other corporate environments. Anyone who went to college in the 1980s probably remembers DIVEST NOW campus protests, aimed at the trustees and the universities’ endowment portfolios. (My own school’s activists built a mock shanty, akin to the ones occupied by poor South Africans, on the quad, where it was desultorily occupied until it was firebombed one night by three frat guys.) The movement that Hunter and Williams got going was a major start to the worldwide economic pressure on South Africa that helped break the back of apartheid. The two of them ended up getting married, too; Williams died in 1998, but Hunter is still around, and spent her life teaching and doing civil-rights work. She received the Rosa Parks Award from the NEA in 2012.
http://www.polaroidland.net/2013/04/06/polaroid-and-apartheid/