Bastille Day for Nortel's 'desperados' - Euros, not cake, on menu
Posted: Jul. 17, 2009
RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, N.C. – As Nortel’s current management team has driven the once proud telecommunications gear giant into bankruptcy court and dismemberment, one of its saddest moment came Thursday in France.
Instead of eating cake (remember Bastille Day, July 14, 1789 and the French Revolution?), Nortel strikers are going to be eating Euros.
Nortel’s leaders surrendered to demands by bomb-threatening, blackmailing, striking employees to: first, have a meeting; second, agree to let the employees keep working through Aug. 16 when the plant may be sold or closed as part of Nortel’s bankruptcy; and, three, agree to pay severance – or “redundancy pay.”
How are those laid-off workers in North America who received no severance, retirees facing cuts in pension benefits, and current employees including some 2,000 in RTP supposed to react to news that blackmail works? That’s exactly what happened this week when those 480 Nortel workers in Chateaufort threatened to blow up their place of employment.
Despite calling these Nortel strikers “desperados,” the French government led by Industry Minister Christian Estrosi agreed to coordinate the meeting, Bloomberg news reported. At least Nortel wouldn’t sit down to discuss what turned out to be surrender terms until the bomb canisters (empty, as it turned out) were removed.
A lawyer for the strikers said they not only want severance pay but also $141,000!
Will Nortel pay that as well?
Nortel management kowtowing to employees who threaten violence is unacceptable. “Bossnappings” have become popular in France. Now the new trend is bomb threats. They work. That’s a dangerous, dangerous precedent.
Unfortunately, conventional tactics by laid-off workers and retirees in the U.S. and Canada to receive fair treatment haven’t worked.
They have blogged; they have filed law suits and motions; they have rung the phones off the hook to governments looking for help to get severance and to protect pensions. Yet in bankruptcy courts in Canada and the U.S. they are treated as second-class debtors who will receive the cake crumbs left from any Nortel fire-sale selloff of assets at bargain prices.
Nortel’s leaders have not helped matters by remaining remote – and throwing salt in the wounds of the masses of current and former workers by paying $40 million in retention bonuses.
Mike Zafirovski, Nortel’s embattled chief executive officer, had to be ordered to appear before members of Canada’s Parliament to discuss what he was doing with the company. The next day, Nortel announced it would sell crown-jewel wireless assets to rival Nokia Siemens through an auction process.
If that hearing had taken place in Paris, Mike Z. could have been mobbed.
The 30,000 or so people who work at Nortel have every right to be angry, but at least the Americans and Canadians are following due process. Let’s pray that strategy leads to some economic justice for them.
Nortel’s remoteness in management helped fuel the boiling over of tempers in France by not meeting with the workers, the union has claimed. Former Nortel workers in the States and Canada haven’t given overwhelming endorsement to how Nortel has managed the layoffs and bankruptcy, either.
How sad it has been to follow this story as an outsider. Imagine how tortuous it must be for the Nortel veterans? At least only the most extreme have threatened violence.
Nortel’s final days apparently are at hand. And once the financial books are closed, just how a mighty company through years of leadership mismanagement (mistakes made long before Mike Z. took over what turned out to be the SS Nortel-titanic) managed to destroy itself should become a case study in business schools.
The headline in the course catalog:
“Avoiding Failure from Finances to Human Relations 101: Nortel, RIP 2009.”
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