Which companies would you refuse to work for?

Richard Millington asks over at his blog, FeverBee, if there are any companies that you would refuse to work for (and the picture of Mr. Burns was so apt i used it for this post too):

"Which companies do you consider ‘too’ evil to ever associate yourself with?

Tobacco companies perhaps? They’re pretty evil aren’t they? Your job is to help people kill themselves. Maybe oil companies too? Your job is to pollute the planet and begin wars. How about McDonalds? Run fat boy run!

So who should you work for? Well the brands everyone loves. Google? Yup! Innocent Drinks? Of course! Who wouldn’t want to work for those fruit-lovin’ (premium charging) critters? Maybe a charity too, Cancer Research UK perhaps? When you do a good job you save lives. Hell yeah!

I think to a great extent this is backwards. Working for a beloved brand is lazy, and possibly quite foolish. Your job is to keep doing a great job. What can you really accomplish at Google or Innocent Drinks? There’s only so much people can love smoothies. As for Cancer Research UK, if you don’t do an absolutely brilliant job, and give 150% every day, people might die. Can you live with that? Perhaps, it might be better to work for an evil empire?"

Personally, I think working in Charity PR would be highly rewarding and you shouldn't worry about something as extreme as people dying as a result of your work - Yes, PR changes things, but not to that extreme. You might say that you shouldn't be a doctor in case you might kill a patient, though I'm sure any doctor would tell you that this is not a good reason not to be one.

As for companies I wouldn't work for...

Definitely not tobacco companies, given the nature of the charity I volunteer for. I wouldn't work for oil companies either, though BP is repositioning themselves as a renewable energy provider, meaning that in the future, if they really do see renewable energy through and reduce the world's dependency on oil, they may become one of the top companies that PROs want to work for - a Google or Innocent Drinks as Richard puts it.


Discussing the issue with a colleague, he says that he would refuse to work for British Airways. He thinks it would be a permanent battle with critics, protestors and angry customers. For example, there is a lot of criticism over Heathrow Terminal 5 that would need to be dealt with, illustrated most recently by yesterday's protests by Greenpeace, where a number of people climbed aboard a British Airways aircraft with a banner that read "Climate Emergency: No 3rd runway." Not a job on my most wanted list.

But how about taking another angle:

If you work for a PR agency and one of your clients is 'evil', how comfortable are you handling that account? Is it better than working in-house because your agency has a 'good' reputation although it works with 'evil' clients?

This would appear to be slightly more of a grey area - few account executives can pick and choose which clients they work with, evil or not. and just becuase you're defended by the buffer of the evil company being a client of the company you work for, it still infringes on your own personal ethics.

Luckily, my personal ethics aren't add odds with the clients that the agency I work for works with (not to the extent that I would refuse to work here anyway), but I'm sure that mny others have had to ask themselves that question and that one day that question will come up for me.