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Home > Meet the Abusive 'World's Largest Company You've Never Heard Of'
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Meet the Abusive 'World's Largest Company You've Never Heard Of'
By Jim Hightower [1] / AlterNet [2]
May 18, 2016
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.
Some 5,500 miles away from these proud, principled workers, you'll find
Glencore's sleek global headquarters (dubbed by Reuters as "the biggest
company you never heard of") in Baar, Switzerland.
Not merely big, it's colossal-the tenth largest corporation in the
world-with 160,000 employees in more than 50 countries on six continents. It
produces and trades coal, oil, gas, metals, minerals, foodstuffs, and other
commodities. Indeed, its nondescript name is an acronym for GLobal ENergy
COmmodity REsources, and it owns a huge chunk of the world market for many
internationally traded resources, including zinc, copper, nickel, aluminum,
grain, and oil. Uniquely, Glencore combines the production and shipping of
more than 90 different commodities with the entirely different, corporate
culture of high-speed computer trading of commodities.
Now, let's hail the chief, the uber-competitive and ravenous corporate
dealmaker, CEO Ivan Glasenberg, whose $2.3 billion in personal wealth ranked
him No. 301 last year on the Forbes list of the world's 500 richest people.
Since joining Glencore in 1984 as a base-level coal marketer, Glasenberg
moved swiftly up the executive ladder to become "the savviest trader on the
planet." He dines with prime ministers and hobnobs with oligarchs,
relentlessly pushing acquisitions, devising opaque partnerships, and gaining
government favors that have made the conglomerate a dominating behemoth. But
attaining, using, and holding such power in so many parts of the world can
be, well, "untidy:"
. Corruption of officials and severe human rights violations by
executives of Cerrejon, an open-pit coal mining operation partly owned by
Glencore. Charges include Cerrejon security forces expropriating entire
villages to expand mines and, with Columbian paramilitary units, driving a
Wayuu tribe off its land in what the native people called a "massacre."
. Cooking the books to evade taxes that its partially owned Mopani
Copper Mines owed the people of Zambia, and letting pollution flow
uncontrolled from the same mines, causing health problems for five million
neighboring people.
. Permanently shuttering Glencore's Columbia Falls aluminum plant in
Montana last year after 1,500 laid-off workers and local officials had, at
the urging of the corporation, produced a viable plan to reopen it. Then
refusing to reach a fair severance deal with USW members, some of whom had
been with the plant for three decades. Also, opposing EPA's designation of
the contaminated factory site for a Superfund cleanup, claiming that this
would devalue its property-even though a Superfund project would create jobs
and benefit the community. Brian Doyle, president of the local steelworkers
union in Columbia Falls, summed up the corporation's attitude: "To Glencore,
we're just a number. They don't know who we are, and they don't care."
. Exactly. Which is why the workers in Texas are fighting this David-
Goliath battle. To learn more, visit the United Steelworkers website at
www.usw.org [3].
Jim Hightower [4] is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker
and author of the book Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go
With the Flow [5] (Wiley, March 2008). He publishes the monthly Hightower
Lowdown [6], co-edited by Phillip Frazer.
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[3] http://www.usw.org/
[4] http://www.jimhightower.com/
[5] http://jimhightower.com/store/swim_against_the_current
[6] http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/
[7] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Meet the Abusive
'World's Largest Company You've Never Heard Of'
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Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
Home > Meet the Abusive 'World's Largest Company You've Never Heard Of'
Meet the Abusive 'World's Largest Company You've Never Heard Of'
By Jim Hightower [1] / AlterNet [2]
May 18, 2016
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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.
Some 5,500 miles away from these proud, principled workers, you'll find
Glencore's sleek global headquarters (dubbed by Reuters as "the biggest
company you never heard of") in Baar, Switzerland.
Not merely big, it's colossal-the tenth largest corporation in the
world-with 160,000 employees in more than 50 countries on six continents. It
produces and trades coal, oil, gas, metals, minerals, foodstuffs, and other
commodities. Indeed, its nondescript name is an acronym for GLobal ENergy
COmmodity REsources, and it owns a huge chunk of the world market for many
internationally traded resources, including zinc, copper, nickel, aluminum,
grain, and oil. Uniquely, Glencore combines the production and shipping of
more than 90 different commodities with the entirely different, corporate
culture of high-speed computer trading of commodities.
Now, let's hail the chief, the uber-competitive and ravenous corporate
dealmaker, CEO Ivan Glasenberg, whose $2.3 billion in personal wealth ranked
him No. 301 last year on the Forbes list of the world's 500 richest people.
Since joining Glencore in 1984 as a base-level coal marketer, Glasenberg
moved swiftly up the executive ladder to become "the savviest trader on the
planet." He dines with prime ministers and hobnobs with oligarchs,
relentlessly pushing acquisitions, devising opaque partnerships, and gaining
government favors that have made the conglomerate a dominating behemoth. But
attaining, using, and holding such power in so many parts of the world can
be, well, "untidy:"
. Corruption of officials and severe human rights violations by
executives of Cerrejon, an open-pit coal mining operation partly owned by
Glencore. Charges include Cerrejon security forces expropriating entire
villages to expand mines and, with Columbian paramilitary units, driving a
Wayuu tribe off its land in what the native people called a "massacre."
. Cooking the books to evade taxes that its partially owned Mopani
Copper Mines owed the people of Zambia, and letting pollution flow
uncontrolled from the same mines, causing health problems for five million
neighboring people.
. Permanently shuttering Glencore's Columbia Falls aluminum plant in
Montana last year after 1,500 laid-off workers and local officials had, at
the urging of the corporation, produced a viable plan to reopen it. Then
refusing to reach a fair severance deal with USW members, some of whom had
been with the plant for three decades. Also, opposing EPA's designation of
the contaminated factory site for a Superfund cleanup, claiming that this
would devalue its property-even though a Superfund project would create jobs
and benefit the community. Brian Doyle, president of the local steelworkers
union in Columbia Falls, summed up the corporation's attitude: "To Glencore,
we're just a number. They don't know who we are, and they don't care."
. Exactly. Which is why the workers in Texas are fighting this David-
Goliath battle. To learn more, visit the United Steelworkers website at
www.usw.org [3].
Jim Hightower [4] is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker
and author of the book Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go
With the Flow [5] (Wiley, March 2008). He publishes the monthly Hightower
Lowdown [6], co-edited by Phillip Frazer.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
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Report typos and corrections to 'corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx'. [7]
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Source URL:
http://www.alternet.org/economy/meet-abusive-worlds-largest-company-youve-ne
ver-heard
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/jim-hightower
[2] http://alternet.org
[3] http://www.usw.org/
[4] http://www.jimhightower.com/
[5] http://jimhightower.com/store/swim_against_the_current
[6] http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/
[7] mailto:corrections@xxxxxxxxxxxx?Subject=Typo on Meet the Abusive
'World's Largest Company You've Never Heard Of'
[8] http://www.alternet.org/
[9] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
