Nick G.
US capital
has secured yet another Australian-owned company, chicken processor Ingham
Enterprises.
This ends 95
years of family ownership of the company.
It is not our
intention to weep for the capitalist Ingham family. They have engaged in the private
appropriation of surplus value created by generations of workers simply because
the ownership system of capitalism gives them that right.
But the
company has now been purchased by US investors and profits realised through the
sale of Ingham’s products will be directed to the hands of US billionaires. An
extra squeeze will be on the agenda for Ingham workers to force an increase in
those profits.
Corporate piranhas
In this case,
the foreign investor is one of the global capital’s most ruthless private
equity firms, Texas-based TPG Capital.
Its sole interest in an acquired company is to buy out current owners
and shareholders, strip it of non-core assets, redirect its operations only to
high return ventures and then sell the company at a huge profit through a
public share offering.
Sometimes it
will purchase the same company and start the whole process over again in what
the International Union of Food workers (IUF) calls a “Buy ‘em, bleed ‘em, buy ‘em
again cheap” strategy.
For example,
in 2000, TPG and Leonard Green & Partners invested $200 million to acquire
Petco, the US pet supplies retailer as
part of a $600 million buyout. Within two years they sold most of it in a
public offering that valued the company at $1 billion. Petco’s market value
more than doubled by the end of 2004 and the firms would ultimately realize a
gain of $1.2 billion. Then, in 2006, the private equity firms took Petco
private again for $1.68 billion.
Private equity
goes for workers’ jugular
In all of this buying and selling frenzy, workers’ rights
are the first to go.
At the time
of its acquisition by TPG in 2002, Swissair caterer Gate Gourmet employed
25,000 workers. TPG immediately launched an aggressive drive for steep reductions
in payrolls, wages and benefits involving closures and assaults on union
rights. According to a Reuters report, the company today employs
"about" 20,000 people.
In 2002,
along with Bain Capital and Goldman Sachs Capital Group, TPG took over Burger
King in a $2.3 billion leveraged buyout. In December 2007, Burger King, the world's
second largest restaurant chain (over 11,200 units in 65 countries), adamantly
opposed an agreement which would see Florida farm workers receive a tiny one
extra US cent for every pound of tomatoes purchased by the fast food giant.
Workers - not national bourgeoisie –
will take up the fight
Company owner
– now former owner - Bob Ingham exemplifies the weakness of the national
bourgeoisie. He has compliantly welcomed
TPG’s buyout of his enterprise and expressed his confidence that TPG would
“ensure that our customers will continue to receive the highest level of
service and our employees would be well looked after”.
TPG has
grabbed hold of Ingham at a time of expansion in the chicken processing
industry. Chicken meat production in
South Australia, where Baiada and Ingham both have major processing plants, has
doubled from $232m to $436m in the five years to 2011.
But it has
also taken over following some major fightbacks by workers in the industry,
particularly in rival Baiada owned plants.
The lessons
of those struggles are sure to be shared with and taken up by Ingham workers at
the first sign of intensified exploitation by their new foreign masters.
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