.What They Say…

Globalists have been fighting against the increase in bilateral trade deals since the failure of the Doha round of the WTO. They much prefer multilateral deals that lay the foundation for globalized business. Says Michael Treschow, chairman of Ericsson, “We make source components from dozens of countries. What good is a deal with India if India does not have the same kind of deal with China? It just cuts across the supply chain. It is not countries that do business with countries but companies that do business with companies.” Goodbye to commerce nationalism, for transnational capitalists it just gets in-the-way of business.

.Chinese mines and worker safety

The worst year was 2002 when 7,000 Chinese mine workers were killed in workplace accidents. Since 2000 over 40,000 deaths have occurred. Finally some improvement is occurring. This year death tolls are “down” to just over 3,000 and the government is shutting down thousands of small unsafe operations. In the coal heartland of Shanxi some 6,076 closures have taken place. The closing of these mines is also limiting widespread environmental destruction but additionally causing more unemployment. The government hopes to consolidate the mining industry favoring larger state-owned enterprises. As Governor Yu Youjun has stated, “We can no longer sustain growth with the current development model.”

.German workers defend the high road

Leif Ostling, CEO of the Swedish truckmaker Scania, is also worried. Currently in a take-over battle to fend-off MAN he accused the German company of having 5,000 too many workers and unnecessary factories. For Ostling protests over BenQ is When Siemens sold off its mobile phone unit to BenQ of Taiwan it soon went belly-up with the resulting loss of jobs in Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia. Siemens is a Germany firm on scale with General Electric. Its current head, Klaus Kleinfeld, is a poster boy for transnational capital and the only German CEOto make it onto Business Week’s top global manager survey. German capitalists have been struggling to restructure national business culture to fit globalization and shed co-management and the broad stakeholder approach deeply imbedded in post W.W. II German society.

Kleinfeld fired 5,400 workers, got others to increase work hours to 40 from 35 with no pay raise and toped-off this corporate efficiency by rewarding himself a 30% pay increase. When he abandoned the troubled phone unit the union accused Kleinfeld of putting shareholder value above social responsibility and kicked-off a firestorm of criticism. Aggressive German transnational capitalists have been expanding abroad. But the more Deutsche Bank, Allianz, Linde and VW walk away from Germany the more protest they face from workers and some politicians. The Financial Times worries that “no matter how international German groups become, they will always be hemmed in to some extent by the political and social constraints of their homeland.” That’s a “big worry” because union activity “in many ways is paralyzing companies from doing what they need to do.”

Meanwhile workers continue to protest at Siemen’s headquarters in Munich demanding greater compensation even though Siemen’s no longer owns the phone unit. Kleinfeld gave up his pay increase and set-up a $44 million solidarity fund for former workers but is still getting heat. Even conservative Prime Minister Ms. Merkel called on Siemens to “assume responsibility” for its ex-employees.