Editor:
Our newspapers this week have included full page apologies from Mr Gordon Nixon, the President and CEO of the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC).
This ‘apology’ was typical of the self-serving responses when corporate executives behave badly. Mr Nixon has the gall to try to misdirect the reader into thinking this was only about a few people in technology services being outsourced, although he does admit that “it’s about doing what Canadians expect of RBC”. This is exactly right; it’s about doing what’s right. He also writes that RBC will continue to “focus on Canadian jobs and prosperity”. If that is so, why are RBC’s bank tellers paid so poorly and forced to work less than 20 hours per week so that they are excluded from benefits?
Mr Nixon was right to claim that RBC was “Compliant with the regulations”. This is exactly how the corporatist state functions. Their well-paid lobbyists (including those employed at the ‘stink-tanks’) get their puppet politicians to set up the laws and regulations that work best for them, not their customers or employees. This is why Canada has open-door immigration and temporary foreign-worker programs. When corporations cannot outsource our jobs then they can flood our employment market with cheap labour to drive down payroll costs. This is the oldest trick in the capitalist game plan for maximizing profits, as payroll is often the largest cost for a company, especially ones in the service businesses, like banks.
These are the scams taught by economists at business schools to the ambitious young men, who are deficient in empathy but smart at mathematics, who are pursuing their careers via the iniquitous MBA. It would improve our modern world enormously if all people studying to be economists or seeking an MBA were forced, before they graduated, to work in a minimum wage job for six months after taking a mandatory course in ethics. But this is not what the owners of Canada want from their hired guns – it’s profits, profits, profits – exactly what Mr Nixon was rewarded for doing.
As Mr Nixon wrote: “delivering returns to shareholders” is really what his job performance is about, all the rest is just corporate public relations. It was the directors of RBC that recently rewarded Mr Nixon with a $11.1 million bonus (on top of his $1.5 million salary) along with $10 million plus rewards to two other senior RBC executives for delivering a 22 per cent return to the shareholders (that also includes Mr Nixon himself, whose bonus included $6.6M in stock). These executives are now at the ‘compensation’ levels they reached prior to the Great Financial Crash of 2008. These special people are being paid 500 times what tellers make per year; this is neither right nor fair, especially when RBC made $7.5 billion in profits.
Getting caught was the only ‘mistake’ in the eyes of RBC and the other supporters of the corporate world view, as illustrated by the recent drug money-laundering conviction of another ‘world-class bank’, HSBC. People have to realize that we do not need a privately-owned set of casinos hiding behind the label “banks”, when they earn most of their money through gambling, not banking. Credit unions do a much better job of banking.
In a few weeks, the voters of BC can demonstrate that they do not agree with this selfish view of the greedy one per cent. They will have a chance to terminally remove our own “wicked Witch of the West” and her corporate pals.
Herb Spencer, Surrey
