Re: Lenovo to employ 340 people at technical centre, Volume 12, Number 16, April 24 - April 30, 2006
For 55 years, IBM has been located here in Greenock in beautiful surroundings, and you simply throw all this away and destroy what many of us would call a family and all for mere profit! We here already work on a minimum-wage basis with long working hours, and still it's not enough for you, is it!
And do you think you can repay people's loyalty by giving them some redundancy money? Patronizing behaviour like yours sickens me to the utmost! The more we work our butts off to make a decent profit for the company the sooner you use the money we have earned for you to finance the company's move to a cheaper country or to satisfy your own needs at the expense of others. That's a rotten thing to do. We are not your slaves that you can shift about in the world like some goods or objects!
I'm writing all this to have all of my/our disgust & outrage exposed, and you all should be ashamed of yourselves as you are a disgrace to mankind. You provide jobs, but only to feed your own greed and complacency, not to provide your workers with a decent living! Best example: your move to Slovakia!
Must be a great feeling to be celebrated like a saint in all those "second-& third-world-countries" for offering jobs, when you are actually only exploiting the people there in the end anyway by paying ridiculous wages for outrageously long working hours and taking advantage of the fact that neither we nor those poorer countries have a chance to defend ourselves, so you keep ripping off the weak and indigent!
Now please don't tell me you have to do so as a result of globalisation. You simply want to, as one can never have enough money and power in the world! How else do you justify manufacturing in cheap countries while you from sell your products at high prices in developed countries, knowing perfectly well that the employees who make your products could never ever afford to buy them! You seem to have forgotten what a business is really there for. It's there for the people and not for the pure profit or the mere satisfaction of a shareholder! Who do you think will buy your goods and in turn keep filling your wallets when people hardly earn enough to pay their rent? This is what the future will bring for many countries in the world if you keep up this way of "making business"!
You probably think that I must be hopelessly naive, but I'm very well aware of what's going on globally, and so far you all have done a great job numbing-down people and holding them in their fatal passivity, but you won't always be on top of things and then I hope that you all will get a good taste of your own medicine, because not everybody will sit back silently and watch their lives being taken away from them and from others!
Nicole Barbyer,
Greenock
