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Revelations about Stelco senior management's huge pensions is just part of the kind of corporate behaviour the United Steelworkers of America has criticized for years, says USWA Ontario/Atlantic director Wayne Fraser.
"The greed of Stelco's senior managers and board of directors, combined with Stelco's approach to labour relations, is right out of the nineteenth century," Fraser says. "Charles Dickens would have a field day writing about this place.
"They quietly protect senior bosses' pensions with a trust and guarantee that unnamed executives will get severance payments of up to three times their annual pay if Stelco gets bought out. Then they loudly announce that they need cuts in pay and benefits from workers.
"It is wrong, and it is just another reason that Stelco's credibility deficit with our members is bigger than its financial woes."
Fraser says Stelco is far from alone in this sort of corporate greed, "but Stelco stands out because of its insistence that the pay and pensions of our members are the problem. The real problem is Stelco management's bad decisions. It was Stelco that made the strategic and operational decisions that got it into trouble, not its employees, not the union, and not the retirees."
Stelco Incorporated of Hamilton filed for bankruptcy protection on January 29, 2004.
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