Bayer: For A Better Life (Unless You Happen To Work There)

[Modern School]

Bayer Pharmaceuticals AG is a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical company based in Germany. Their motto is: Science—For A Better Life.

Bayer is most famous for aspirin. However, they also once marketed heroin as a "safe, non-addictive" morphine substitute. Nowadays, their biggest profits come from more modern drugs, like Kogenate (to treat hemophilia), which brought in $1.45 billion in 2010, according to the Bay Citizen.

Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceutical in Berkeley is a subsidiary of Bayer AG in Germany. In August 2010, 29 union members were laid off, with an empty promise that they might be rehired when times got better. That offer seemed to materialize in May for ten of the workers, just in time to preserve their seniority rights. However, Bayer suddenly pulled out of the deal, saying that in fact there were only two jobs available. The others could get rehired in the future, but their seniority rights would be expired by then, likely forcing them to accept lower pay, benefits and job security.

The ILWU, which represents the workers, asked Bayer to extend the “recall rights” for another 90 days, but Bayer did not respond for several weeks. When they did reply to the offer, they said they would extend the rights, but only if the union fast tracked approval for the new contract by August 24th, 2011, and accepted Bayer’s right to contract out janitorial services to nonunion employees, thus eliminating many of the jobs in question.

The Bay Citizen quoted Bayer’s director of public policy and communications, Sreejit Mohan, saying, “We just want to be seen as fair to our employees.”

Of course these are crocodile tears. Bayer, like all companies, is most concerned about being seen as fair to their shareholders, with employee wellbeing being fairly low on their agenda. If they really wanted to be seen as fair to their employees they would make them all equal stakeholders in the company, with pay and decision-making responsibilities commensurate with the bosses. (Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel, “What Is To Be Done?” portrayed such an arrangement). Short of this, they could offer generous remuneration, job security and safe working conditions and perhaps then be seen as less evil than other bosses.

The struggle at Bayer does not affect only its workers. In order to keep the company in Berkeley, the city extended its enterprise zone to include the 43-acre Bayer facility, making the company eligible for $10 million in state tax breaks, essentially a gift from taxpayers that allows its executives to pad their paychecks. Yet at the same time, taxpayers must also foot the bill for the laid off workers’ unemployment benefits and potentially other services, as well, like health care if they end up in an emergency room without insurance.

Meanwhile, profits are up. The company has plenty of money not only to retain the employees, but to offer them generous raises. Of course that would mean less money for the bosses’ salaries, which have been growing so fast that they now average 325 times their average employees’ wages. Two years ago the gap was only 263 to one. (See “Rich Get Richer”). The proposed contract does include modest raises of 3.1% to 3.4% each year for the next four years (for those who still have jobs), but it also requires workers to pay a larger share of their health care costs, thus keeping take-home pay stagnant or causing it to decline.
Posted by Michael Dunn

Modern School
http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2011/09/bayer-for-better-life-unless-you-happen.html

[truedelphi]

1. Some two hundred and thirty five years ago,

people in the colonies were upset about items that the "Crown" saw as rather minor events but that the colonists saw as major infringements. (Much as how King Rahm Emanuel and His Highness Obama see our day to day struggling as just so many efforts exerted by "retards.")

Now we take these slaps to our pocket books, to our livelihoods, as just part of our every day life.

We are constantly feuding with the Upper One Percent. It is reminiscent of the types of pleadings and whispered demands that the colonists kept submitting to King George the Third before they went all revolutionary on his arse.

Yes, our lives have become one continual monotony of PLEADINGS:

Please let us keep our crapola jobs, even if you lay us off for a year or so and now want us back for less pay.

Please honor my health insurance policy. Although I didn't have all the paperwork that I was supposed to submit in quadruplicate, and although I didn't get all three specialists to sign off on the procedure to save my damn life.

Please don't have our farmers' seed tainted with GM crapola, because independent scientists are seeing indications that this stuff destroys the intestines, liver, kidneys, spleen and other organs of the lab rats that get fed this stuff in research trials.

Please don't keep giving the Biggest Financial Players Bailout monies. Every single individual in the USA had already contributed some 77,000 dollars of their own wealth to the perpetual Bailout of the Uber Elite. And now the only way Europe can economically survive is for them to eye the money market funds, worth seven trillion bucks, and owned by entities in this country.

Oh, and please be aware that every year of my life since I was nineteen, I have paid into the Social Security system, and I would really like it either given back to me, dollar for dollar with interest, or else to have the Social Security I was promised delivered to me and everyone else, as we paid into it and there is a 2.1+ Trillion dollar surplus.