Death in the supermarket

Mark Ames

.........What changed in the US workplace isn't a sudden influx of guns on the market, or an influx of psychos in the workplace, but rather the most obvious and powerful cultural force of all: Reaganomics.

But you can't bring that up. Reaganomics is accepted as a kind of law of physics, the ultimate example of America's cultural and moral superiority, at least according to our cultural propaganda.

Yet if you consider the possibility that these crimes have a socio-economic cause, just like inner-city violence does, then you find that much more is revealed by profiling the company where the massacre took place than by profiling the murderer.

Profile Safeway. Its current CEO, Steve Burd, is a classic post-Reagan corporate vampire whose every working hour has been dedicated to enriching a tiny layer of shareholders and executives - including himself - at the expense of tens of thousands of Safeway employees. Burd's policies of constantly slashing workers' pay, pensions, health care benefits and so on earned him hefty bonuses during Safeway's best years in the 90s.

Instead of distributing the earnings windfall back to workers, he went on a reckless (and some say corrupt) acquisition spree, which came under fire from some shareholders for obvious conflicts of interest in many of the companies acquired (which had ties to some Safeway directors).

When these acquisitions turned out to be bad buys, Burd did what all post-Reagan CEOs do: he made his employees pay it. So in 2003, he tried further freezing wages, raiding the employee pension funds and forcing workers and retirees to pay for health care benefit payments for the first time in Safeway's history. This led to a five-month workers' strike by some 70,000 California employees in 2003-4, the longest grocery worker strike in American history.

Burd's real-world villainy, and the utter futility of resisting it, was summed up in early 2004 by Rev. Jim Conn, a Methodist who led a several-hundred-mile pilgrimage up to Burd's home to plea for him to look into his heart: "We are praying for this man, Burd, who has been so recalcitrant, so cold to his workers. He needs to know about the lives he is affecting."

Prayer didn't melt the ogre's heart: eventually workers agreed to a new contract requiring them to pay for health care benefits, and they got no salary increase as they'd fought for. But perhaps God was listening to Burd's prayers, because last year he earned 42% more than in 2004: $3.25 million in salary and bonus, and 1.03 million share options.

In 2002, Burd boasted that he planned to raise Safeway's share price in part by "financing price reductions by lowering costs, including restructuring labor contracts..."

Like other post-Reagan corporate heroes such as "Neutron" Jack Welch - who fired 120,000 GE employees while making billions for the super-wealthy - and Al "Chainsaw" Dunlap, who took over Scott Paper in 1994, fired a third of the employees, and walked away with over $100 million in stock options 19 months later - Burd gets away with this plunder, his only threat being a salvo of Methodist poison-prayers, and he gets to be the hero too. Ask most Americans today, and they'll tell you - even the ones who stand to lose from it - that a company's highest priority is not its responsibility to its employees, but its responsibility to its tiny clique of obscenely rich major shareholders. And these people are considered sane! ...........

To read the full article click the link below:

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/mark_ames/2006/06/reaganomics_and_the_safeway_ra.html