People for sale

Capitalism, raw in tooth and claw is alive and well and living in the world of mergers and acquisitions. Slavery now outdated also seems to retain a sort of half life through M&As.

Take the Cadbury bid by Kraft. The former is a company with a long and distinguished history of not merely profitability but socially responsible behaviour. Along comes a predator who decides that Cadbury’s time has come and it will gobble up the firm in the interest of yet more profits. 

The people who make up Cadbury, the employees, laughingly termed stakeholders in various descriptions of what constitutes a company, are not expected to have any say in whether Nestle takes over their company. These people are in effect “bought and sold” in an echo of harsher times when slavery meant something rather worse. 

Meanwhile well-meaning reports appear on the subject of engagement and how important it is for the performance of companies. Conferences abound on why engagement is so essential and countless articles appear on the benefits of engagement for the “bottom line.” How engaged will Cadbury’s employees feel if and when their company becomes part of a mega corporation based far from these shores? 

Will it matter that Kraft runs Cadbury or is this merely a book keeping entry a financial abstraction that the employees should not bother their little heads about? And does Nestle care that its takeover target may be full of resentful and disengaged people who feel their interests have been totally bi-passed in the acquisition process. Of course no one is saying that Kraft is a slave trader. 

It is not literally buying the employees in the full ownership sense of the word. Yet if your job depends on working in Cadbury and the company is sold along with it, the similarities with slavery are hard to ignore.