The Corporate Research Project, an affiliate of Good Jobs First, 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. Our research can cover subsidies as well as any other aspects of corporate behavior.

The services we provide to activist groups include:

• producing profiles of specific companies or industries. We have done analyses in areas ranging from agribusiness and mining to private prisons and insurance.
  
  
• helping groups identify and obtain access to more specialized sources of corporate information from government agencies, private organizations or commercial vendors. We subscribe to numerous databases and CD-ROMs that would be too expensive for the typical non-profit organization to afford. Based in Washington, DC, the Project has easy access to the Library of Congress and the libraries of all federal agencies.
  
  
• training staff members or activists in research techniques. Corporate research is not an esoteric activity that should be restricted to the initiated few. The Project can help spread business information-gathering skills to everyone in an activist group. This Project's website contains a guide to doing corporate research on the internet.
  
  
• helping to coordinate campaigns in different places involving the same company. Since the Project is working with groups around the country, we are in a unique position to see connections between campaigns whose activists may not know of each other's efforts. When we help a group research a company, we look for ways that information can also be useful to other groups with which we may work.
  
  
• publishing an online newsletter covering a variety of topics relating to corporate research. The Project's website includes an archive of back issues of the Corporate Research E-Letter.
  

Most of our work is used for internal planning purposes and is not published, but we also produce reports for public distribution. Among the latter are:

Chapter 1 of A Matter of Trust: How the Revolving Door Undermines Public Confidence in Government--and What to Do About It, which was done for the Revolving Door Working Group;

USDA Inc.: How Agribusiness has Hijacked Regulatory Policy at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which was done for the Agribusiness Accountability Initiative;

Your Tax Dollars at Work...Offshore: How Foreign Outsourcing Firms are Capturing State Government Contracts, which was done for WashTech (a local union of the Communications Workers of America); and

Corrections Corporation of America: A Critical Look at its First 20 Years, which was done (in collaboration with Stephen Nathan) for Grassroots Leadership.

Apart from those mentioned above, some of our other clients have included:

• Greenpeace USA
• National Family Farm Coalition
• Natural Resources Defense Council
• Oxfam America
• Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition

If your organization needs corporate research help, please contact us.

Philip Mattera
Director
Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First
(202) 232-1616 ext. 212
pmattera(at)goodjobsfirst.org