Dear reader, How has your day been so far? At least one item that you have used will have been made by a multinational company. Adding on, as you drove to work or school, you will have passed across one shop or building that was owned or used by a multinational company. What I am trying to highlight through this example is how big of a hand multinational corporations have in your daily life. Multinational companies have indeed made themselves essential to the economy and through the economy, to your life. Today, if multinational companies stopped trading, the global economy would not just decline but come to a crashing halt. Millions of people would lose their jobs, income, and way of life and there would be an immense shortage of basic goods in the markets

To make themselves essential to the economy, Multinational firms have employed a wide variety of tactics. For starters, Multinational firms have used their money and influence to provide essential products in poor countries for a dirt-cheap price. This has prevented competitors from gaining a strong market share in these markets giving them a monopoly and meaning that if the company had to leave the market, a massive shortage of an essential good would occur. Take Coca- Cola, which is drunk as a replacement to the expensive and minimally available water in many poor regions of Mexico. Coca-Cola pulling out of the Mexican market would spell thirst and dehydration for many Mexicans. This danger is one of the reasons why the Mexican government has not passed any health regulations on Soda companies, despite the proven health risks of drinking it.

The influence of Multinational Corporations has increased with the onset of globalization. Now, governments no longer have the largest influence over popular opinion, multinational corporations do. This has allowed Multinational Corporations to grow and influence public opinion, making the general public more likely to have a favorable opinion of a corporation. Multinational Corporations have also, of course, used lobbying with politicians as a tactic to grow. Now a majority of the tactics I’ve talked about involve the growth of companies, which is the way Multinational corporations become essential to the economy. The bigger the company, the more essential it is to the economy and the harder the economic damage if the company falls.

Now that we are done talking about how Multinational corporations have made themselves essential to the economy, I wanted to talk about the effects of MNCs being this essential to the global economy. What better way to do this than to use an example; during the 2008 recession, the United States government heavily financed General Motors, a major car manufacturing company, was making huge losses and had gone bankrupt, the effects on the US economy would be disastrous, so the US government had to bail them out. This is just one example of how companies get bailed out when they make losses, which gives them a sense of immunity and allows them to spend lavishly and recklessly because they know that National governments won’t allow them to go bankrupt, because that would mean a lot of jobs being lost and the economy tanking, causing many people to lose a lot of money.

Another major problem due to MNCs being so essential to the economy is the fact that they tend to abuse their workers and resort to shady tactics to grow. Most major MNCs pay their workers less than $4 per hour, especially in regions without a minimum wage. Adding on, many companies resort to using slavery in poor countries to get their products ready. Adding on, many companies use shady tactics to grow at an extremely profitable rate which negatively impacts every other stakeholder of the company.

In conclusion, I would like to point out that companies that pretend to do good things to appear good in public minds are the biggest hypocrites of them all. Companies posting on social media that they are aware of social issues and are trying to change them is just another tactic to help them grow and become more essential to the economy, and then to use your tax money to bail themselves out when the economic conditions are not good and then exploit laborers to make maximum profit when the economy is going good. The only people benefiting from this arrangement are the corporations themselves.