Sunday January 23rd 2011
LaContra's comments
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- Chinese foreign policy: Discord
- The Tucson shootings: The blame game
- Banyan: The indispensable incarnation
- Turkey and Armenia: Two vast and ugly blocks of stone
- The euro area: Time for Plan B
- East Jerusalem: The Shepherd's lost sheep
- Comparing US states with countries: US equivalents
- Silvio Berlusconi's antics: The return of Ruby
- Charlemagne: Mr China goes shopping
- German politics: Will the eagle crash-land?
Over the past five days
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- Wary detente between China and America: Another go at being friends
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Over the past seven days
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Some commentators probably need to tone down the nonsensical comments regarding corporate slavery or contemporary feudalism.
Tata Steel has 80 thousand employees, Jamshedpur has a population of 1.1 million. Even as other Tata subsidiaries have a presence in the city, so to have dozens of independent firms lured there by the quality infrastructure and life.
Jamshedpur is not a 'company town' in the strict sense as its 'non-Tata' population is several times larger than its employee population. While Tata provides infrastructure, utilities, and services for free or at a subsidised rate, it does not control the retail markets, service provision, or restrict market access to non-Tata businesses.
You can look at it this way:
In India, government provision of services and maintenance of infrastructure is patchy at best, non existent at worst....Tata Steel needs a constant and regular electricity supply to fire their furnaces and it was not available so a Tata subsidiary built a large power station. The station was much larger than needed but was built with the ongoing expansion of steel production in mind. Basically they sell off their excess power production at a subsidised rate to the population and provide a 100% rebate to staff.
There a close to 200 schools and colleges and Tata maintain 25 of them directly and provided endowments, grants, and scholarships to the rest.....This is basic philanthropy not centralised control.
Parks, zoos, cultural attractions, sports facilities...these are underwritten but seriously, what does a cost to maintain a garden or a park in India for chrissake?...This again is not much different than sponsoring a park or a stadium in the west....What would the naming rights for an American football stadium cost per year? BofA pay $7 million over 10 years to name sponsor the Carolina Panthers Stadium. I bet they run an entire sports academy in Jamshedpur for less!
Tata housing is confined to certain districts which have been constructed solely for Tata employees...This is no different to gated or managed communities in the US (think Celebration Florida, the Disney city....thought not as uptight and creepy).
Subsidised and managed transport services? Google offers an employee shuttle service to allow staff to avoid the commute in and around Silicon Valley. Leather seats, air con, WiFi, and even bike racks and dog transport compartments....again I'd hazard a guess that Tata can operate the entire Jamshedpur bus system for less than Google pays to run a 40 bus shuttle service covering 54 miles.
Tata Steel is the 7th largest steel producer in the world, a global player in a global market. The Tata Group ranks in the top 20 for corporate innovation, top 10 for Most Reputable, and was rated 1 for wealth creation in India.....
The associated costs of underwriting service provision to Jamshedpur is negligible to a company of this size. When it comes to CSR and employee service provision they are as innovative as Google but on a larger scale operating in a much less expensive environment.
22m Brits do volunteer work?
Going to the pub is volunteering perhaps.
Well as long as no one is leaving guns, knives, or poison at the Travelodge the 3 ex murderers working there should probably be able to avoid the temptation to start offing the guests
@Tinabcx
I'm sorry, I have to take issue with something you wrote....
"It seems like a lot of us don't understand what the big deal is with such a small, yet meaningful change."
This is only a 'meaningful change' in the eyes of re-branding wonks and marketing gurus who are selling their naff 'vision' to an executive board looking for anything that might allow 'a strategic realignment of of the company-consumer interaction' or some other such bollocks.
Look, they are already 'branded'.
Everyone knows the name...the name is the brand... and the logo is superfluous compared to the name. This fetish to be recognisable as a mere logo is a marketing gimmick...not perpetrated on the consumer but on the companies that hire these branding consultants like Lipman at Brandweek.
If Starbucks want to move into 'other' related markets like retail supermarket sales then what's wrong with simply dropping the word 'coffee' off the literature and leaving it as plain old STARBUCKS, logo or not.
@SharonMcCallister
No...Its not just you.
In 2010 NIKE spent $3.8 billion (that is NOT a typo)on celebrity endorsements, advertising, and team sponsorship.
Toyota's advertising budget for 2010 was £1 billion.
Citigroup did cancel their $50 million contract for a new corporate jet, but not to underwrite anything meaningful in the communities in which it operates, only because the US government forced them to do so.
I wonder what it costs Tata Steel to basically underwrite a city of 1.1 million people in the middle of India? ....And even if they spent $3.8 billion, its a better investment than giving money to filthy rich sportsman such as Tiger Woods, Ronaldinho, Roger Federer, or LeBron James.
There is probably a rough way for Tata Steel to calculate 'when to say no' to further spending on Jamshedpur.
Tata Steel is currently listed at 345 on the Forbes Global 2000 list.
Some close ranked companies are:
Colgate Palmolive 348
Toyota 360
CitiGroup 353
NIKE 333
Since the costs of running the city of Jamshedpur could be defined as mixture of CSR, Advertising&Promotion, Non-salaried remuneration (perks), and perhaps Human Resource Management....I propose that you could take the corresponding budget allocations, for these departments, in these closely ranked companies as a guide.
So in other words, add up how much NIKE or Toyota spend on Advertising, CSR, Employee Perks, and HR Promotion per annum and as long as the per annum operating deficit of running a small Indian city is similar.....I reckon they are ok.
Being an Aussie/Brit who has lived abroad for over 20 years I long ago gave up trying to reign in my cruel sarcasm and caustic comebacks. Neither do I try dilute them with self deprecation or mask them with polite trappings.
Mind you it results in most people just calling me 'that Aussie cunt' ..But what can you do? :)
...needs more salt
The western liberal perspective is anchored by the belief that Chinese leaders (and other market orientated authoritarians) secretly realise that they are on the wrong side of history, clinging to their centralised power by denying their people any meaningful democratic discourse.
This is where the western liberal mindset, which claims its legitimacy through its declared universality, departs from reality. The Chinese not only believe that liberal democracy is not inevitable, they view it as truly undesirable.
Westerners of course have an inherent belief in superiority of their system, unfortunately history has not progressed enough to validate that perspective. Philosophically, there is no reason to elevate one system above the other and comparatively the Chinese model, being sui generis, has not been in existence long enough to be judged.
The Soviet system collapsed because of the contradictions within a planned centralised communist economy and the economic pressures of the Cold War. The Cold War was fought by the US because the USSR offered a then plausible alternative to capitalism and aggressively exported their system. The Chinese are fellow capitalists but are canny enough not to threaten the west in the ideological stakes, they don't export their model thus their place in the capitalist system protects them from a cold war like engagement with the west.
Fukuyama is right on the money this time...America, of late, has wasted its moral, economic, and political capital thus its ability to cajole or influence China which is a shame because there is no inevitability of China morphing into a liberal democratic state over time nor do they stand athwart the path of history in resisting political liberalisation.
The argument is whether market capitalism or liberal democracy is the true engine of modernisation and development. Just because America considers that its democratic credentials created its economic development does not make it axiomatic and universal....So far the Chinese are proving that the opposite is equally true, that economic development extends a legitimacy to their political system
Not for the punters who crowdsourced 5K for a big pen it wasn't
Oh how droll...but then I'm not the one wearing a the purple smoking jacket and fleecing the punters in the name of art
Hey if Goldman Sachs can hire a few thousand thieves, fraudsters, and con-men, I don't see why Travelodge can't hire a couple of murderers.
Oh please don't get your feelings hurt luvvie!
But don't try to elevate this artistic non-event too much either.....
Venom-spewing?!...indeed!
The spewing of venom is a long way from the simple mirth and derision I have expressed regarding Mr Woodring, his big bic, and a fawning cognoscenti.
@bamf-joey
Emotional?
Not really, I just like to see a spade called a spade and a gimmick called a gimmick.
Giant ball of twine at roadside diner in Kansas?
Cringe-inducing plebeian kitsch....
Giant nib pen held by artist in swanky Seattle art academy?
Ooooh Ahhhh..its ART.
And it doesn't have to be my money for me to comment on the waste of it.
Well lets see...
There is the world's largest Ball of Twine in Cawker Kansas.
The world's biggest Sundial in Lloydminster Alberta.
The world largest Catsup Bottle in Collinsville Illinois
The world's largest Tin Solider in New Westminster British Columbia
The worlds largest Lamp in Donalda Alberta
Oh and the world's largest Golf Putter in Bow Island, Alberta...
(Who knew Canadians were so "artistic"!)
The world largest nib pen?
Coming soon to an otherwise wholly forgettable junction somewhere on Interstate 5.
Obviously the 40 euro fee is extortionate...No one should be surprised that is was RyanAir who tried it on first.
I was under the impression that unlike ones passport, which is required by customs and immigration authorities, the boarding pass is issued, required, and recognised solely by the airlines themselves...So why would I be paying the airlines for what is essentially their own choice of identification and organisational method?
Surely the 'boarding pass' can be anything an airline chooses it to be? But whatever the boarding pass is it is the responsibility of the airline to make sure that the boarding pass is available ubiquitously. This should exclude having to print out anything...Who carries a printer around in these times of electronic messaging? Electronic boarding passes that reproduce a bar-code for boarding require Smartphones which are not universal and thus unsuitable. With the comprehensive usage of the simple mobile phone surely an sms with a code number would suffice?...After all a Boarding pass is not an identification document but a way to facilitate the boarding process so that the procedure is accomplished in an orderly fashion.
To Doug P...
"First, how do you know McCain's motive is "to regain some of his squandered 'maverick' credentials," rather than a desire to be on the right side.?
It saddens my to say it but in the contemporary American political landscape, to be on the 'right' side increasingly equates with being a maverick
@bamp-joey
I can't define ART but at $5000 in crowdsourcing funds I can easily define a bunch of posturing ART sycophants.
Don't let my mother read this...I'll never hear the end of it
I try to defend the UN on most occasions as a flawed, imperfect yet vital international institution.
But for the UN to be departing too soon from a mission that has so far been a rare success is making my position more difficult to defend.