Researching Your Employer

With the advent of the Internet much of your research of your employer can be conducted online. These include search engines like Google (www.google.com) and Vivisimo (www.vivisimo.com); the employer’s own website; business websites such as Hoovers Online (www.hoovers.com) and Dunn and Bradstreet (www.dnb.com); government websites for publicly traded companies in the U.S. (www.sec.gov/edgar) and Canada (www.sedar.com); and Guidestar (www.guidestar.org) for tax-exempt/non profit organizations. Note that some websites will charge fees to access more detailed information. The links below (which open in a new window) are useful starting points:

Online Corporate Research Guide
Dirt Diggers Digest editor Phil Mattera, wearing his other hat as head of the
Corporate Research Project, has posted a new guide to doing corporate
research online. The 23-page document, which replaces a much shorter guide,
focuses on ways to gather intelligence on any corporation's key relationships
and on its social (ir)responsibility record.

Jobtracker

Working America, an AFL-CIO affiliate open to all workers, maintains a database of more than 60,000 companies. By searching by zip code, idenustry, or state you can find which companies in your area are exporting jobs, endangering workers' health or involved in cases of violations of workers' rights under the National Labor Relations Act.

Corporate Research: An Online Guide, Institute of Industrial Relations, University of California, Berkeley.

Company Information, Martin P. Catherwood Library, School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University.

Finding and Understanding Corporate Financial Statements by Jim Stanford, Just Labour, vol. 2 spring, 2003.

Strategic Research by Teresa Conrow and Andy Banks.

BRB's Free Resource Center offers a comprehensive and searchable list of free public record sites along with additional tools to locate sources for civil records, criminal records, driving records, real estate records, public record vendors, record retrievers, legislation and more.

 

Strategic Action Center is a consortium of researchers, strategists, and tacticians designed to assist progressive organizations with information gathering, strategy development, and tactical implementation. SAC is designed to assist progressive organizations with campaign needs. We will help gather facts, analyze power structures, and take action.

 

The Corporate Research Project is a non-profit center that assists community, environmental and labor organizations in researching and analyzing companies and industries. The Project is designed to be a resource to aid activism. Consequently, our focus is on strategic research, i.e., identifying the information activists can use as leverage to get business to behave in a socially responsible manner.

The Dirt Diggers Digest is an online newsletter for corporate researchers working for labor unions, environmental groups, public interest organizations and other progressive entities. Each issue of the Digest reports on new sources for information that may be of use to such researchers. Also covered are trends in corporate and government disclosure policies and practices. The Digest is published roughly ten times a year.