The Job Creator Myth

The Harper Government (c)(tm)(r) has spent months promoting the Liberal tax cuts it inherited as being job creators. Well reality of course is a smack in the face with a wet dishrag sometimes, and in the case of tax cuts to corporations=job creation well, that smack you hear is a hard dose of wet reality.

Canadian CEO's were surveyed by the Globe and Mail about how they will use the upcoming tax cuts they get from the Harpocrites and job creation was not a priority in fact doing the same old same old, that is by definition NOT adding productivity to their operations (something the Bank of Canada has complained about) but just pocketing the tax breaks.

While these CEO's in the same survey challenged the government to invest more in R&D, with their pending tax cut they put the same amount into R&D as they proposed to put into hiring, the very source of productivity. In other words 'please sir can I 'ave some more" say the real begging class; the government should invest in areas we are not willing too. Can you say corporate welfare. These are the so called job creators the Harpocrites are using to justify their Liberal tax cut.

What will you do differently as a result of the corporate tax cut?

No change: 31%

Re-invest in business: 26%
...
Don’t know: 11%

Other: 11%

Grow business: 10%

Research and development: 6%

Hire more people: 6%

Almost three in five executives said investing in education and training should have a high priority in the budget, while 52 per cent said investing in research and development is key. Transportation and infrastructure were a top priority for 42 per cent of those who responded, while attacking the deficit came in fourth place – a high priority for 39 per cent of executives.

The Rich Get Richer

While the rest of us are told we must suffer roll backs, wage freezes, and other austerity measures the result of the capitalist state bailing out Wall Street and Big Business......

Executive compensation

The $1,700,000,000 golden handshake

Inside the best deal Frank Stronach ever made.

Bank of Montreal CEO pay jumps 28 percent to C$9.5 million

Average annual pay of a top Canadian CEO: $7 million

The total average compensation for Canada’s 100 best-paid CEOs was $6.64 million in 2009, compared to the average Canadian income of $42,988 and the average minimum wage worker’s income of $19,877.

The biggest pay package went to Aaron Regent at Barrick Gold Corp., who made $24.2 million in 2009, according to Mackenzie’s calculations. In second place was Hunter Harrison at Canadian National Railway Co., at $17.3 million, followed by Gerald Schwartz at Onex Corp., at $16.7 million.

A Globe and Mail review of pay for CEOs at Canada’s 100 largest public companies in 2009 shows top executives across Canada received, The cash portion of pay packages – salary and cash bonuses – did show substantial growth, with a combined median increase of 7.6 per cent. (Medians reflect the experience of the middle-of-the-pack CEO, while averages can be skewed by CEOs with particularly large or small compensation amounts.)

A list of the Top 50 Canadian CEOs and their astronomical take-home pay increases

In the past 12 years, there’s been a 444 per cent salary increase for Canada’s top CEOs. The top 10 earners collected a total of $60.7 million in 1995—by 2007, that number had jumped to $330.3 million. For example, Paul Desmarais, CEO of Power Corp, made more than $5 million in 1995; in 2007, his take-home was more than $29 million.

Canada’s richest CEOs pocket the average Canadian wage of $40,237 by 9:04 a.m. January 2nd – before most Canadians have booted up their computer for another year of work,” says Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) Research Associate Hugh Mackenzie.

The CCPA released a report on January 2, 2009 showing that the 100 highest paid CEO's at publicly traded corporations in Canada earned an average of $10.4 million in total compensation in 2007, which was an average increase of 22%, from its $8.5 million average in 2006.

This compared with an average pay hike of only 3.2% to $40,237 for the average Canadian worker during 2007.
"Compared with ordinary Canadians, whose wages have been stagnant for 30 years, Canada's economic downturn promises to hit the masses far harder than the best paid 100 CEOs," Mackenzie said. "They have enjoyed a decade of record pay hikes and will land on a softer cushion if they stumble from their lofty heights in the New Year."

The wage gap between the average Canadian worker and CEOs has been growing steadily over the past decade. In 2007, Canada's top 50 CEOs earned 398 times more than the average worker, compared with 85 times in 1995.

MacKenzie said that between 1998 and 2007 the average compensation of top CEOs increased by 147%, adjusted for inflation. This compared with a 3% decline in inflation-adjusted weekly wages for average Canadians and a 6% rise for those on the minimum wage.

Outing BP

A scandal occurred this spring when the British CEO of BP, British Petroleum, the British petrol giant which branded itself as green; Beyond Petroleum 'its a start', Lord Browne was outed for being gay, and supposedly lying about it in court.

The reality is that his resignation had less to do with covering up his homosexuality then covering for BP. Which had not gone Beyond Petroleum as a result of Lord Browne's corporate decisions but had become a Bad Player in the oil business.

British Petroleum used the cover of a post-Hurricane Katrina refinery bill in Congress for a sneak attack on legal protections against supertankers in Puget Sound. Reps. Jay Inslee and Dave Reichert thwarted it.

You will remember that BP had faced a number of oil field scandals prior to the outing of Lord Browne by his Canadian lover and rent boy; Jeff Chevalier.

A long list of misfortunes has battered this venerable company, including an explosion at its Texas City, Texas, refinery that killed 15 workers and injured scores more, and protracted outages at other refineries. There was also an Alaskan oil spill resulting from a corroded pipeline, along with 2005 hurricane damage to its big Gulf of Mexico Thunder Horse production platform, which delayed that facility's production start-up.

As if that weren't enough, the company's longtime CEO Lord John Brown stepped down abruptly this spring amid allegations about his private life. And more recently, BP was pressured by Russian authorities to sell much of its stake in a big natural gas field to state-run gas company OAO Gazprom.

Lord Browne the ultimate company man was still that despite his lovers outing of him. The reality was that his corporate maneuvering of BP in the oil business had been less an economic success than a failure in protecting the environment and workers.


As they say here is the rest of the story.

Blackmail, Sex & Corporate Secrets

While much has been written in Britain about the seedier side of the scandal, the critical role that BP and its executives played in it has been largely overlooked. Company officials, for instance, reportedly encouraged the C.E.O. to out himself on one of the BBC’s most popular radio shows, a plan that fizzled when Browne lost his nerve in the studio. Before that, BP leaders were secretly enlisted to serve on the board of Chevalier’s company, which was underwritten by Browne. And in the end, the disclosure of corporate secrets was as much a concern to Browne as the revelation of his homosexuality. The threat that internal BP matters might be leaked led Browne to lie in a court statement, which in turn led to his humiliating resignation and public shaming. Among the secrets Browne wanted to protect: He was considering relocating BP overseas—a potential economic ­disaster that would have been a huge blow to Britain’s corporate psyche—and he placed a dollar value on the heads of his workers in the event that they were injured or killed in an accident. In one memo, company executives gamed out different disaster scenarios for BP, comparing them to the outcomes in The Three Little Pigs.

Now the company is trying to right ­itself under a new C.E.O., Tony Hayward, who has taken over amid a growing outcry over BP’s shoddy environmental and safety record, which Browne managed to keep as secret as his private life.
Throughout the 1990s, he made a series of acquisitions that won him enormous praise in Britain and heralded the consolidation of the major oil companies. It seemed novel then that British ­Petroleum grew not by increasing its oil exploration and development but by taking over American oil companies such as Standard Oil of Ohio and Amoco. The BP-Amoco merger was the largest of its kind and launched the company into the big leagues overnight. When Exxon bought Mobil the next year, Browne quickly retaliated by purchasing Atlantic Richfield for $32 billion.

Browne was also, like any great C.E.O., a P.R. genius. In 1997, to the horror of many of his oil-industry peers, Browne admitted in a speech that he ­believed global warming was real. He then hired a San Francisco firm to ­rebrand British Petroleum and come up with a new corporate slogan. The old BP logo was replaced with a green-and-yellow sunburst, and ads suggested that BP now stood for . . . Beyond Petroleum. It was a masterstroke: BP had only $100 million invested in solar power at the time of the renaming, compared with at least $10 billion invested in conventional energy. But thanks to BP’s green logo and green C.E.O., its reputation as a green company flourished.

Browne was not quite so popular in the U.S., where experience on the ground is more important than a taste for fine art. “They pounded their chests a lot, but they didn’t know how to run refineries,” a former Amoco employee says of the BP executives. Because refineries are among the most intricate and dangerous workplaces on the planet, the old-timers feared that the BP ­executives’ ignorance would compromise safety, especially as BP cut jobs and budgets to reduce redundancy and raise profits for shareholders. (Similar allegations would later take center stage in the Texas refinery explosion lawsuits.) Other executives were skeptical of the hierarchical management structure at BP; they particularly complained about the handpicked “turtles” (named after the mutant ninja variety), who served as interns to Browne and were supposedly fast-tracked to replace other executives. There was also something known internally as the promise: a written business plan that could be used against employees who didn’t meet their projected goals. “They would use it to cut your throat if you failed,” a former engineer explains. Gradually, the company’s culture became less about innovation than intimidation. Fearful of losing their jobs, few spoke up about deteriorating conditions at some of the refineries. Behind Browne’s back, employees nicknamed him the “elf,” an acronym for “evil little fucker.”

Browne had his critics outside the oil industry too. The company was accused of committing human rights violations while building a pipeline in Colombia, and concerns were expressed about North Sea pollution. Greenpeace selected Browne for its Best Impression of an Environmentalist award. Matt Simmons, whose Houston-based Simmons & Co. is one of the largest investment-banking businesses serving the energy sector, was deeply skeptical of Browne’s 1999 prediction that, because of a worldwide market glut, oil prices would never reach $40 a barrel. “There was a vision of unreality in John Browne’s business plan,” Simmons says. “That generally works until you slip up.”

No one would dispute that Texas City, Texas, is a very long way from St. James’s Square. It is a rough-and-tumble blue-collar town on the Gulf Coast, where people know all too well that refinery work is often life threatening but just as often the only work available. On March 23, 2005, something went very wrong at BP’s Texas City refinery, the third largest in the U.S. An aging tank used to separate gas and fluid overflowed, filling the air with flammable vapor. A driver unwittingly left his truck running, igniting a fireball that by the end of the day had killed 15 people and injured more than 200. Not surprisingly, the blast led to the launch of hundreds of multimillion-dollar lawsuits and several investigations, including one by a commission that former secretary of state James Baker headed. A probe by the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board specifically blamed BP’s closed culture for the explosion. In 2006, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined the company $21.3 million, the largest penalty of its kind ever issued.

That wasn’t all that would befall BP. The next several months brought a cascade of problems, almost all blamed on lax oversight and poor management. In March, 200,000 gallons of crude leaked out of a BP pipeline at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, forcing the company to partially shut down a major field. The pipe, it turned out, hadn’t been cleaned in years. In April, the U.S. Department of Labor fined BP for unsafe operations in an Ohio refinery. Also during this time, the company was unable to capitalize on its Thunder Horse offshore oil platform—the world’s largest—which was damaged during Hurricane Dennis in 2005. And in June, the government charged some of BP’s traders in Houston with trying to manipulate the price of propane in the Midwest and Northeast.

All these incidents inevitably prompted this question: How could a company that was supposed to be a model of corporate citizenship have gone so wrong? The answer that emerged was simple, and the weakness of Browne’s highly praised policy of acquiring big companies and instituting massive cost cuts was suddenly, fatally exposed. Instead of putting excess cash into maintenance and safety, the executives in London had ordered the company to “bank the savings.” But as plaintiffs’ attorneys have alleged, a rubber band can be stretched only so far before it breaks. BP led the industry in refinery deaths from 1995 to 2005. For 10 years, there was a fire a week at the Texas City plant, and many were afraid to work there, fearing that disaster was imminent. As an employee explained in a survey, “No one here in management cares. . . . We have been very lucky so far with this.” At the same time, the arrogance of BP executives was easily recognizable. One memo, prepared for a meeting held before the Texas City explosion, insisted on cost cuts, a familiar refrain at the plant: “Which bit of 25 percent don’t you understand??? We are going to be wasting our time on Monday unless you come prepared to commit to a 25 percent cut.”

In the end, Browne lied less to save his image than to save the image of his company. It’s notable, for instance, that there was no talk of resignation when word first emerged that the press had its hands on Chevalier’s story. Only after Browne learned that the corporate secrets could leak did he finally decide to step down.

Browne’s early departure will not prevent continued legal battles for BP, but it is perhaps as close to a sacrificial act of love as Browne is capable of, and it has allowed the company to start fresh. Though Browne also resigned from the board of Goldman Sachs, he still works for Apax Partners, a global private equity firm, and goes to his office when it suits him.

And as usual in the corporate world despite his fall from grace Lord Browne has landed on his feet.

FORMER BP boss Lord Browne has walked away with a pension worth just over £1million a year.The disgraced peer tops the list of 100 leading execs who look forward to pensions of £200,000 a year or more.

The former chief executive of BP PLC Lord Browne of Madingley has resigned as non-executive chairman of the advisory board of private equity firm Apax Partners to join energy and power private equity specialists Riverstone Holdings LLC.

His appointment at Riverstone Holdings, which specialises in the energy sector, comes almost four months after he quit oil giant BP when it emerged he lied to the High Court during a battle to block stories about his private life.

Lord Browne takes on the post of managing director and managing partner of Riverstone’s European business and will be based in London, where the group is soon to open an office.

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Beyond Petroleum, British Petroleum, oil, Jeff Chevalier,

Rich Getting Richer

This is rich....with the full ironic meaning behind the word.

Much Too Golden Years
Elizabeth MacDonald
A growing number of chief executives, like AT&T's Ed Whitacre, are getting rich, lifetime compensation deals.

Fat cat chief executives are almost always used as Exhibit A in the national debate about the rich getting richer.

Bolstering that case is a growing body of evidence showing that a burgeoning cohort of chief execs are getting lush compensation deals that last long after they've driven out of the corporate parking lot.

Whitacre's golden parachute has quite the platinum lining. His pension package includes $4.5 million in annual payments for life, plus an $18.8 million lump sum. He'll also get $25,000 in country club fees, $6,500 in annual home security costs and access to the corporate jet for 10 hours a month. AT&T will also cover up to $19,000 in taxes for these benefits, except for use of the aircraft. Whitacre and his family will also receive free health insurance for life. Plus, he'll get just over $1 million a year for three years to work as a consultant to AT&T during his retirement.

• Gilded Greetings
• Special Report: CEO Compensation
• Complete Coverage: Leadership

See:

CEO Cream Sour Milk for Workers

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Casino Capitalism

Betting in the marketplace....

Bank of Canada Governor David Dodge also repeated a concern over a sharp reduction in the pricing of risk in financial markets, singling out the carry trade as a possible source of trouble.

The carry trade is a popular strategy that involves borrowing money in low interest rate currencies like the yen and then reinvesting in riskier emerging markets.

"One-way bets are always dangerous things," he said in response to a question about such trades.

....like betting on natural gas....

Bank of Montreal, Canada's fourth-biggest lender, said last week it will post a pretax loss of as much as C$450 million ($406 million) from trading in natural gas contracts. The bank plans to fire trader David Lee and Bob Moore, an executive managing director, over the losses, the National Post newspaper said today. The men are staying with the bank until the firm can unwind its trading positions, the paper said, citing unidentified people.

BMO said the losses are primarily from natural gas trading, while Desjardins Securities analyst Michael Goldberg expects more losses in the future.

“The commodity trading losses were the result of decisions that did not adequately recognize the vulnerability of the portfolio to changes in market volatility,” Bill Downe, President and Chief Executive Officer of BMO Financial Group, said in a statement.

Mr. Goldberg interpreted this statement as “faulty trading algorithms were based on garbage in, and they generated garbage out,” he told clients in a note.

This is the same bank that laid off staff knowing full well it was losing money based on a bad bet.

BMO More ATM's Less People

Banks Profit From Job Cuts

Fool me once....fool me twice.....ah heck fool me thrice

U.S. hedge fund faces billions in losses on natural gas bet

Monday, September 18, 2006 | 7:08 PM ET

Amaranth Advisors, a big U.S. hedge fund, has told its investors to brace for huge losses as a result of its costly bet that natural gas prices — now at a two-year low — would rise.

Some reports said the fund's losses could amount to $4 billion US.

"We anticipate our year-to-date losses might be in excess of 35 per cent as we near completion of the disposition of our natural gas exposure," the hedge fund said in a letter to investors obtained by several media organizations.

Amaranth traders apparently placed hugely leveraged bets that natural gas prices would rise.

A Hedge Fund’s Loss Rattles Nerves - New York Times

Enormous losses at one of the nation’s largest hedge funds resurrected worries yesterday that major bets by these secretive, unregulated investment partnerships could create widespread financial disruptions.

Alan Zale for The New York Times

Amaranth Advisors’ trading floor in Greenwich, Conn. The hedge fund said that it had lost more than $3 billion in the downturn in natural gas.

The hedge fund, Amaranth Advisors, based in Greenwich, Conn., made an estimated $1 billion on rising energy prices last year. Yesterday, the fund told its investors that it had lost more than $3 billion in the recent downturn in natural gas and that it was working with its lenders and selling its holdings “to protect our investors.”

Amaranth’s investors include pension funds, endowments and large financial firms like banks, insurance companies and brokerage firms. The Institutional Fund of Hedge Funds at Morgan Stanley was an investor in Amaranth; as of June 30, it had a stake valued at $124 million. The turnabout in the fortunes of the $9.25 billion fund reflects the decline in energy prices recently; natural gas prices fell 12 percent just last week.

The scale of Amaranth’s losses — and how quickly they appear to have mounted — was the talk of Wall Street yesterday, as was speculation on how much the bet was leveraged, or made on borrowed money. Still, there were no signs of ripples on the financial markets as a result.

Amaranth’s woes are largely the result of a decline in natural gas prices that began in December, well before the spring months of March or April, when they typically fall off. Amaranth’s biggest stake was a combination bet on the spread between natural gas futures prices for March 2007 and those for April 2007. Amaranth had often bet that the spread on that so-called shoulder month — when natural gas inventories stop being drawn down and begin to rise — would increase.

But instead the spread collapsed. In the last six weeks, for example, the spread between the two futures contracts ranged from $2.50 at the end of July to around 75 cents yesterday.

Traders briefed on Amaranth’s problems, including one person who examined the fund’s books yesterday, said that the losses might be considerably larger than the firm estimated. Over the weekend, according to one person briefed on the situation, Goldman Sachs examined the fund’s positions.

Amaranth is not the first hedge fund to experience problems in energy markets. MotherRock Energy Fund, a $400 million portfolio, shut down last month after losing money on its bets that natural gas prices would fall. Summer heat sent prices soaring and the fund lost 24.6 percent in June and 25.5 percent in July, according to one investor.

The natural gas market is exceptionally volatile, making it an ideal playground for hedge funds that thrive on wide price movements in securities. Natural gas prices are subject to more severe swings than oil, in part because gas cannot be stored easily.

Amaranth Advisors LLC was an American multistrategy hedge fund managing US$9 billion in assets. In September 2006, it collapsed after losing roughly US$6 billion in a single week on natural gas futures. The failure was the largest hedge fund collapse in history.

Amaranth’s energy desk was run by a Canadian trader named Brian Hunter who placed "spread trades" in the natural gas market. Hunter had made enormous profits for the company by placing bullish bets on natural gas prices in 2005, the year Hurricane Katrina had severely impacted natural gas refining and production. Hoping for a repeat performance, Amaranth wagered with an 8:1 leverage that the difference between the March and April futures price of natural gas for 2007 and 2008 would widen.

Natural Gas: Amaranth Advisors & Centaurus Energy

And although the loser in this, Brian Hunter is doing much better than the Amaranth investors. He’s still has the couple hundred million he made before he nuked Amaranth and being quite cheeky, he’s actually shopping around a new fund!

Econbrowser: Amaranth hedge fund losses

Of course, if anybody ever audited Amaranth's holdings, they would have seen what was going on immediately, and indeed NYMEX apparently inferred from the volumes that something was wrong and warned Amaranth to reduce its positions. But the way the hedge fund game is often played, foolishly credulous investors never get to see the books and base their decision simply on the fund's track record and slick sales pitch. I have to join Big Picture and Motley Fool in blaming the folks who supplied Amaranth with capital, rather than the managers themselves. Anyone who tells himself that 35% annual returns with no risk are there to be obtained by some unseen hedge-fund magic is soon to be parted from his wealth.

When you hold a significant portion of the outstanding contracts, you have the potential to move markets in a big way when you liquidate, making your swan song all the more dramatic when it comes. This is what happened to Long Term Capital Management, and it seems likely that a significant part of the September volatility in the graphs above is directly due to Amaranth.

I have often argued that as long as speculators make a profit, their actions tend to be stabilizing, as they have helped direct resources to where they are most needed. But by that metric, we got $6 billion worth of destabilization out of Amaranth last month. And when I hear a story like this, my first instinct is that there could well be a lot more of this going on. Amaranth's staggering losses leave me more open to the claim that a significant part of the general commodity price increases we have seen in recent years might be the result of actions by speculators who are destined to earn spectacular losses.

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Criminal Capitalism Redux

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Not In The Dog House

Reports of animal illnesses and deaths were first reported to Menu Foods in February as this video of the Menu Foods Press conference shows. Coincidence? I think not.....

The chief financial officer of Menu Foods Income Fund sold nearly half his units in the pet food maker less than three weeks before it announced a massive product recall, according to insider trading reports.

The reports show that Mark Wiens sold 14,000 units for C$102,900 ($89,700) on February 26 and February 27. As of Monday's close of C$4.46, the units would be worth C$62,440.

After the sale, Wiens owned 17,193 units and had options to buy 101,812, the trading reports show.

On March 16, the Mississauga, Ontario, pet food maker recalled 60 million containers of "cuts and gravy" style pet food amid reports of pet deaths due to contamination.

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CN Strike No Hinderance To Honorary Degree

CN strike resumes Despite CN workers rejecting CN's earlier contract offer in an overwhelming vote, CN CEO E. Hunter Harrison will still receive his honorary degree from the University of Alberta for Leadership in Business. LOL.


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CEO Profits From Ford Failure

Once again a CEO makes off with filthy lucre while the company collapses. Though some speculate that he may have been rewarded for saving Bush.
Since he did nothing that saved jobs at Ford.

Ford CEO: $28M for 4 months work
Struggling Ford Motor Co., which posted a record $12.7 billion net loss in 2006, gave its new CEO Alan Mulally $28 million for four months on the job, according to the company's proxy statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission Thursday.The Ford (Charts) pay package for Mulally comes on top of the $7.4 million that aerospace company Boeing (Charts) had previously reported paying him for his eight months running that company's commercial aircraft unit before he made the move to Ford at the beginning of September. Mulally's pay package at Ford included a $7.5 million hiring bonus, as well as $11 million that Ford described as an offset for forfeited performance and stock option awards at Boeing. In addition he received $55,469 for relocation costs and temporary housing. The details of the compensation packages and costs come as Ford moves ahead with plans to close plants and cut more than 30,000 hourly positions from the company in an effort to stem losses.

The company had disclosed in a footnote buried on page 228 of an earlier filing with SEC that Mulally saw the value of his stock bonuses increase to $6 million from the originally agreed upon $5 million "after reviewing the company's 2006 performance results and Mr. Mulally's leadership role in progressing his key priorities."

Ford announced in March that all full-time staff would receive some form of modest bonus for 2006, as it attempted to improve morale in the middle of a downsizing. Most salaried workers and supervisors received between $300 to $800, depending on their location and rank in the company. Most union members received about $500. The company did not detail the overall cost of the bonus program, but the widespread bonuses cost the company at least $62 million, based on the 125,000 employees who were eligible for the payment.

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Criminal Capitalist Gets Honorary Degree

The U of A does it again. Celebrating criminal capitalism by giving an honorary degree to E. Hunter Harrison of CN. Heck he is the perfect model for a MBA think of all his successes; the accidents, environmental damage, job losses, and forcing workers to strike. If he is one of the top executives in his field then perhaps they should consider Conrad Black for an honorary degree next year.

Former deputy prime minister Anne McLellan and CN chief executive E. Hunter Harrison are among 10 people who will receive honorary degrees at the University of Alberta’s spring convocation ceremonies.

In making its choices, the university made sure to pick a diverse group of leaders from the fields of art, science, business, and community involvement, U of A chancellor Eric Newell said.

Among the selections, the choice of Harrison has the potential to cause some controversy since it was one of his company’s trains that derailed and spilled oil into Wabamun Lake in 2005.

CN was criticized for its handling of the incident in the early days following the spill.

But Newell said Harrison is a worthy choice to speak to business graduates because he is widely recognized as one of the top executives in his field, and CN’s operational headquarters are based in Edmonton.

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CN


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CN Whines

CN says striking conductors' wage demands too high

Oh really. I think not. Not after record profits and cost cutting that has reduced jobs and has resulted in numerous accidents that endanger their workers, the public and the environment.

UTU asked for wage increases of 4.5 percent in the first two years of a three-year contract and 4 percent in the third, CN said. "The UTU's final offer on lump sum bonus payments - C$1,000 ($840) per year over the three-year period - was three times greater than the other recent agreements," CN said.

Ah. cry me a river.

CN is demanding a flat wage rate. Where it has won those concessions in the U.S. the rail workers are now doing twelve hour shifts. Gone is the eight hour day.

Report on Business Top 1000 listed the productivity of CN workers,

RANK	COMPANY (Year-End)	EMPLOYEES	HEAD OFFICE	REVENUE/ EMPLOYEE	PROFIT/ EMPLOYEE

	34. Canadian National Railway (De05)	21,540	Montreal,QC	$336,676	$74,420

So each worker at CN produced a gross revenue of over three hundred thousand dollars for the company and made CN a profit of $74,000 each, thats after their wages, benefits, company taxes etc. had been paid out.

After all labour produces all wealth, all wealth belongs to labour.

Here is CN's ten year stock chart.

Not exactly boom and bust, just one long boom.

Paid for by CN workers and CN's disregard for public safety.
















And while CN whines about paying out $1000 signing bonus spread over three years, thats a big $333 a year, to their workers, here is what Hunter Harrison earned in 2005.

He is the second highest paid CEO in Canada.

	Canadian National Railway Co.	Harrison, Hunter	$56,219,496
Salary: $1,665,950 Bonus: $4,664,660 Subtotal: $6,330,610 2% chg Other: $1,710,324 Share Units: $20,931,213 Option Gains: $27,247,347 TOTAL: $56,219,496 New option grant: 250,000 ($2,136,051) Industry: Industrials

That means Hunter earns a cool $29,281 a day!!! While begrudging CN workers a measly 4% wage increase and a pitiful signing bonus over three years. Yet each worker produces a profit of $74,000 each, which goes to Hunter and his Shareholders.

Ain't capitalism grand.

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Time to Nationalize CN

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Nortel Slash & Burn

Since the nineties Nortel has been cutting its workforce and shipping jobs off shore, 56,000 workers cut, and it still has not gotten it out of its fiscal spiral downwards. Why should this be any different.

Nortel to slash 2900 jobs in latest cost-cutting

Nortel Networks Corp. will slash 2,900 jobs, or 8.5 percent of its workforce, over the next two years and shift another 1,000 employees to lower-cost locations like China, India and Mexico as North America's biggest maker of telephone equipment struggles to shore up its profits.Nortel, which currently employs about 34,000 workers, said on Wednesday This is the latest round of job cuts at Nortel, which once employed about 90,000 people. Last June, the company said it would cut 1,100 jobs and alter its pension plans in an attempt to contain costs.

The layoffs are the latest in a series of cost-cutting moves made by Chief Executive Officer Mike Zafirovski since he took over the beleaguered company in November of 2005. Since the collapse of the telecom and “dot com” markets in 2001-2,
Nortel has cut more than 60,000 jobs.

As usual let's look at how much the guy at the top makes while his company bottoms out and he slashes jobs.

	Nortel Networks Corp.(1)	Zafirovski, Mike	$37,429,297
Salary: $305,785 Bonus: $0 Subtotal: $305,785 % chg Other: $28,698,591 Share Units: $8,424,921 Option Gains: $0 TOTAL: $37,429,297 New option grant: 5,000,000 ($10,695,000) Industry: Information Technology Legend

And the reason for Nortel's collapse was not productivity nor the crash of the dot.com bubble but criminal capitalism.

Nortel CFO Leaves (Again)

Nortel chief financial officer Peter Currie is stepping down this spring to take on "new challenges."

The company announced Tuesday that Mr. Currie will be stepping down on April 30 of this year, although he will continue to provide advice to the company to ensure a smooth transition.

Currie took over the CFO chair one year ago to help Nortel recover from several years of financial scandals and mismanagement. Between February 1999 and April 2004, two of the three men who held the title of Nortel CFO were fired for cause.



See

NORTEL: REDUX

NORTEL: Canada's Enron

Criminal Capitalism

We Need a Living Wage

The Phoney Debate On Net Neutrality

CEO


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BMO More ATM's Less People

The Bank of Montreal (BMO) is laying off 1000 workers while making record profits.

At Bank of Montreal, the company earned a profit of nearly $2.67 billion for the fiscal year ended last Oct. 31, compared with $2.4 billion in 2005.

The reason given for these cuts; said with complete ablomp and full of the heartfelt concern;

"It's not staff who really deal with customers face to face," said Ralph Marranca.


Right you don't have staff who deal with customers, you cut them years ago and replaced them with ATM's.

ATM's are the Daleks of the Banking business.

You are forced to use them, contrary to certain bloggers assertions otherwise, because the banks have replaced staff with them.

And BMO has replaced branch expansion with online banking. Which the staff being cut are the IT backbone of.

A spokesman for the bank said the employees affected will include support staff including back office, administrative and technical support workers.

And the guy making the cuts is the outgoing President of the BMO; Tony Gomper who earned this year a cool $9,981,608

Salary: $1,000,000 Bonus: $1,700,000 Subtotal: $2,700,000 -10% chg Other: $560,454 Share Units: $2,700,000 Option Gains: $4,021,164 TOTAL: $9,981,608 New option grant: 158,200 ($2,700,000)

And who once said this about why you don't layoff staff;

Investment in people, like investment in education, is the single best investment that a Canadian company can make. I think it is very short-sighted to go into massive lay-offs as a strategy, because you’d be throwing away a stockpile of goodwill and future value for the shareholders. I believe that massive lay-offs of that sort point to a failure of management to anticipate the kind of economic environment in which we are going to be operating.

Repeat that out loud, Tony. You and your management are a failure. But you are laughing all the way out of the bank while leaving your staff with the crying towel.


A tip o' the blog to Far and Wide

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