"Back when I was in a union, I was just a number," laughs a man in a Wal-Mart Stores training video. "If a union got in here," he adds, "every benefit we got could go on the negotiating table. ... And with all our benefits, we'd risk losing a lot." The video is part of a new Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, "Discounting Rights: Wal-Mart's Violation of US Workers' Right to Freedom of Association." The report details ways in which Wal-Mart, the largest private U.S. employer, discourages employees from unionizing. Legal tactics include showing new employees presentations like the videos, with "heavy 'spin' on purported drawbacks" to unions. Illegal tactics include having managers eavesdrop on employees, repositioning "surveillance cameras to monitor union supporters," disciplining "union supporters for policy violations that it has let slide for union opponents," and firing workers for union activity. From 2000 to 2005, the National Labor Relations Board found Wal-Mart guilty of 15 cases of illegal conduct; seven of the giant retailer's competitors collectively had four rulings against them over the same period. Yet, HRW warns, "penalties under US labor law are so minimal that they have little deterrent effect."

Prompted by a U.S. Senate Finance Committee investigation into drug company grants to patient groups, other nonprofit groups and educational institutions, Eli Lilly recently posted online its donations for the first quarter of 2007. The company's first-ever public list of donations totals $11.8 million, with the largest grantees being Massachusetts General Hospital's psychiatry department ($825,000) and the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill ($544,500). "The majority of grants are awarded in categories in which the company markets medicines," reports Avery Johnson, but Eli Lilly maintains "there is no connection." Lilly's Alan Breier said, "These grants are first and foremost designed to improve patient care." Eli Lilly intends to update the list each quarter. Other somewhat-transparent drug companies are GlaxoSmithKline, which now posts its grants to European patient groups (which totaled $12.2 million last year); AstraZeneca, which lists its partnerships with UK patient groups (but not its donations); and Pfizer, which recently launched "an online status report on follow-up studies the Food and Drug Administration has required for company drugs already on the market."