Largest Abusive Company You Have Never Heard of. The beatings will continue until morale improves
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Giant corporate entities have become so far-flung and impersonal that "human relations" departments have been created within the soulless structures to cloak the fact that there's really nothing human about them.HR is mostly known for sending the corporate rank and file peppy motivational memos that boil down to: "The beatings will continue until morale improves."
The beatings of American workers (wage slashing, axed benefits, union busting, mass firings, offshored factories, and brutish abuse of worker rights) have been increasing in frequency, intensity, and scope—mostly ordered by CEOs in the posh, faraway headquarters of multi-tentacled global empires. These detached autocrats are wrecking the lives of hardworking people for no reasons but institutional greed, calculated self-interest ... and because our corporate-coddling government lets them get away with it. Let's meet one of the most powerful of these lords of rapacious global capitalism—Glencore.
Never heard of Glencore? Neither had I until February, when I visited some members of the United Steelworkers Union outside a Glencore-owned aluminum plant (Sherwin Alumina) on the Texas Gulf Coast. In 2014, after months of negotiating a new contract, Glencore suddenly tossed these workers a take-it-or-leave-it offer that would drastically cut wages, increase healthcare costs, and eliminate pensions for new hires. (Glencore's profit that year was $4.6 billion). Fed up, 98 percent of the union's members voted against the contract. Glencore's reaction was to lock them out and replace them with contract workers.
Photo Credit: Dmitry Kalinovsky
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