| Number 36 | July 2, 1999 |
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This Week: |
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Greetings, This issue of the Notes is longer than usual. Sorry, but these three stories seem quite separate, and it takes a few words to link them together in a way that makes sense. No time to say more. I gotta go up to the lake, like a good Minnesotan. Next time, Nygaard |
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Last week I said that I had read the full 20-some page communiqué issued at the end of the recent economic summit of the "Group of Eight" (G-8) wealthy nations held recently in Cologne, Germany. I promised some "highlights for your reading pleasure." Did you doubt that I would also include some comments of my own? Doubt no more. The basic premise of the G-8 communiqué is that economic globalization is good for everyone. As they ("the Heads of State and Government of eight major democracies and the President of the European Commission,") declare in their very first statement: "Globalization, a complex process involving rapid and increasing flows of ideas, capital, technology, goods and services around the world, has already brought profound change to our societies. It has cast us together as never before. Greater openness and dynamism have contributed to the widespread improvement of living standards and a significant reduction in poverty." In fact, globalization has contributed to exactly the opposite. Here's some evidence:
We can see, then, that on both the global and the national level, economies are becoming more unequal, and poverty is increasing, as we pursue the policies of the G-8, World Bank, IMF, and so on. Keep this fact in mind as we look at some more quotes from the G-8 communiqué. Quote #1:
Quote #2 has to do with the World Trade Organization, which is the organization coordinating the nightmare known as globalization:
Quote #3, on biotechnology, in which agribusiness attempts to improve the profit potential of Mother Nature, with as-yet unknown environmental effects:
There are dozens more interesting quotes, but we have to move on to other subjects. If you want to see them, you'll have to go look at them yourself. You can find the full communiqué at http://www.state.gov/www/issues/economic/summit/99communique.html |
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There is a "health food" grocery store chain called Whole Foods Market that some of you may be familiar with. You should avoid it like the plague. Not only is the story of Whole Foods interesting as a case study of perception versus reality in the world of consumer choice, but it also shows us why we need a real alternative newspaper in the Twin Cities. Readers of the local "alternative" weekly, City Pages (which was recently bought by national publishing megacorporation Stern Publishing) might have seen an article in last week's issue called "Vegetarians at the Gate." The word "alternative" appears in quotation marks for reasons that should become clear in a few paragraphs. The Twin Cities already has one Whole Foods Market, over on Grand Avenue in St. Paul, and we're soon going to have another over in the ritzy Calhoun Beach neighborhood in Minneapolis. That's what the City Pages article talked about, and after giving some numbers about how big and profitable the natural foods business has become, the story focused on the potential impact of the chain's presence on the local food co-ops. The tone of the article is summed up with the following caption that appeared under a smiling picture of a local co-op manager: "The Wedge's Elizabeth Archerd says times are good for the local co-op, and a new chain-linked neighbor isn't worth worrying about." And why should the Wedge, or any other co-op, worry about Whole Foods? The natural foods market is growing so fast that there's plenty of room for everyone in this market. In fact, some in the co-op world seem to think that Whole Foods might even be a good neighbor to have, since the high visibility of Whole Foods might serve to increase sales at all the local stores that sell vegetarian, macrobiotic, pesticide-free chow. After all, their company motto is "Whole Foods. Whole People. Whole Planet. Among the general public, Whole Foods has carefully cultivated an image as a "friend of the earth," and not only because it sells organic foods. Whole Foods also prides itself on being a model of the modern workplace environment, offering its employees "Happiness and Excellence" by "striving to create a work environment where motivated Team Members can flourish and succeed to their highest potential." The Other Side of the Story Four years ago in St. Paul, Whole Foods Market, Inc. outbid family-owned R.C. Dicks supermarket for its lease and replaced the long-time employer's 50 unionized positions with Whole Foods' own lower paying, nonunion jobs. Such behavior led to weeks of picketing on the part of activists in the Twin Cities, under the leadership of the St. Paul local of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW). The St. Paul tactics were hardly surprising. Although you would never know it from the City Pages article, Whole Foods Market, which Time Magazine calls "a billion-dollar juggernaut," is infamous among activists around the country as an example of "new-age unionbusting." Here are a few quotes to illustrate some crucial points that City Pages deemed unfit to make: From the United Farm Workers Union, we learn that "Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has spouted anti-union rhetoric for years. "Here's the way I like to think of it. The union is like having herpes. It doesn't kill you, but it's unpleasant and inconvenient and it stops a lot of people from becoming your lover," said Mackey (Business and Society Review, 6/22/92)." The United Farm Workers Union has been conducting a campaign to improve wages and working conditions for strawberry workers in California. The campaign, supported by groups as diverse as the NAACP, the National Organization for Women and the Sierra Club, includes a campaign to ask supermarkets and consumers to sign a pledge of support for the farmworkers in their struggle. Whole Foods refuses to sign, and Don Moffitt, a Whole Foods regional president, puts it this way: "We're not signing a pledge that supports the union. If you say we don't support the farmworkers union because we don't support unions in general, I'd say that's true." An estimated 150,000 endangered turtles drown in shrimp nets each year, according to the Earth Island Institute, a San Francisco-based organization that led the campaign for dolphin-safe tuna. But, as the Bay Area newspaper Metro Santa Cruz points out, "when the group approached Whole Foods about carrying shrimp caught in nets certified to protect sea turtles, chief executive officer John Mackey once again sided with industry and blasted the activists. 'We will not be coerced by Earth Island Institute or anyone else to support advocacy programs against our will,' Mackey said. One would never know from reading City Pages (or, apparently, from talking to managers at local food co-ops) that Whole Foods presented any problem more significant than a competitive threat to local natural-foods sellers. What the heck kind of "alternative" newspaper is that? The report on Whole Foods in the Metro Santa Cruz was generally very good, but if you would like to know the difference between a radical analysis and a liberal one, the following paragraph illustrates one facet of the difference quite well, I think: "It strikes many employees as hypocritical for Whole Foods to sell itself on its higher standards and then complain when it is held to those standards. If Whole Foods means what it says about empowering workers, [its workers] say, it cannot be satisfied to profit so richly from the low-wage labor of its employees--and it cannot listen only to those workers who agree with it. The true test of any participatory workplace is how it treats its most vocal critics." In fact, the "true test" of any participatory anything is not "how it treats" anybody, but who gets to decide how everybody is treated. If people are "participating" in any sense beyond producing wealth for the company, then they must be participating in decisions about their own working conditions. Which leads me to Michael Bonsignore. |
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The Honeywell corporation has been based in Minneapolis for many decades and, not unlike Whole Foods, has had an image in the local media of a caring and involved home-grown corporation. Not all Minnesotans share the view, as Honeywell was a major producer of cluster bombs and other "anti-personnel" weapons for many years, but that's another story. Honeywell was recently sold to a New Jersey company called Allied Signal, so Honeywell headquarters is shutting down and CEO Michael Bonsignore is headed for New Jersey, where he will be the head honcho of the new company. Besides providing many good-paying jobs to residents of the Twin Cities, Honeywell has gotten a reputation as a "good corporate neighbor" from a long history of investment in the Phillips neighborhood, in which its corporate headquarters has been located. Phillips is one of the poorest, if not the poorest, neighborhoods in the Twin Cities, and Honeywell has put a bunch of money over the years into local housing, neighborhood improvement, and other civic-minded projects. Now they are moving and taking many of those high-paying jobs with them, and who knows what will happen to their local philanthropic efforts in the future. They assure us that they will keep being a "good neighbor." Maybe they will, maybe they won't. But that's not the point. The point is the same with Honeywell as it is with Whole Foods Market and the Group of Eight: The rich do what they want, and the poor have to live with the consequences. Nothing But the Truth The Star Tribune (Newspaper of the Twin Cities!) published an interview on June 23rd with Mr. Bonsignore, in which he addressed the sale of Honeywell and the accompanying layoffs in Minneapolis, as well as the related local fears of losing the corporation's largesse. "I've done everything short of standing on my head and wiggle my ears to convince everybody that Honeywell's commitment to the neighborhood is preserved," said the CEO. In the interview Bonsignore "confessed" to reporter Roger Yu that the most difficult part of the deal was the layoff of the corporate headquarters staff - "the people I work with every day and see every day and have lunch with." In the same paragraph Yu reported, perhaps ironically, that Bonsignore "did not shy from the compassionate CEO role." "I decided early on that the only way to deal with this personally was to make sure we were telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, no matter how painful it was," said the compassionate CEO. "We would be far better off and come right out and be open and candid as possible on what the impact was going to be, likely when it was going to be, likely that very few employees would be reassigned [that is, most would be laid off. Ed.] I didn't want to get hopes up that all 1,500 people will find a place somewhere else in Honeywell." Well! As far as being "candid" as to when the impact would be felt, all of the negotiations leading up to the sale, conducted personally by Bonsignore and the CEO of Allied Signal, were totally secret. The article states that "Later, Bonsignore's aides said Honeywell will probably eliminate only (sic) 800 to 1,000 jobs in the Twin Cities, instead of the 1,500 Bonsignore has repeatedly mentioned." That's not what I'd call "nothing but the truth," but it is a time-honored tradition in public relations to leak out bad news in exaggerated form early on so as to make the revised figures on that bad news seem not so bad after all. And it worked; now it's reported as "only" about 1,000 well-paid jobs being lost. But all of this evidence of hypocrisy is secondary. The real heart of the interview lies in the following quote from the compassionate CEO: "At the end of the day...my first responsibility is to Honeywell shareholders, to make sure that the outcome for the company's success is as predictable as possible." In this quote we have Bonsignore actually telling us the "truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." The first responsibility of any corporation, Honeywell included, is to it's shareholders. And who are those shareholders? Are they the low-income residents of the Phillips neighborhood, to which Honeywell is "committed?" Not likely, since 90 percent of all stock shares, bonds, trusts, and business equity in the United States is in the hands of the richest 10 percent of Americans. Let's be fair. Mr. Bonsignore really has no choice, even if he is compassionate. He and his company know what their "first responsibility" is, and they know that, in order to survive, the company must grow to huge proportions and make handsome profits. If they don't, they will be sold to some other company that will. They must, and they will, make whatever business decisions are necessary in order to make this happen. And the people of Phillips have nothing to say about it. They have no more to say about it than the rest of us in the bottom 90 percent of the population, we who are the American equivalent of the global poor. Here is where we see the connection between the Group of Eight, Honeywell, and Whole Foods Market. Whether it's in your local food store, in the Minnesota economy, or in the international realm, what's happening is that the real decisions that affect our lives are being made by an ever-smaller group of powerful people and institutions. And it's not just a bad idea; increasingly, it's the law. Our work as citizens is not simply to beg for the bosses to treat us better. Our job is to try to get a seat at the decision-making table. In the case of Whole Foods, we should support attempts to unionize the workers so they have a voice in how their company is run. In our state economy, the job is to support locally-owned and controlled businesses, and resist the privatization of public services. And on the worldwide level, our job is to resist globalization and it's potential to make all the rest of our organizing even more difficult, and possibly illegal. In this spirit, Nygaard Notes will be heading out to Seattle in November to participate in a protest at the next Ministerial Summit of the World Trade Organization. People all over the world will be converging on that fine city in an attempt to make our voices heard. You'll be hearing about this in future issues of Nygaard Notes. |
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