Kellogg’s is closing its London plant after 90 years, blaming low cereal sales. More than 500 full-time workers, including one of our dearest friends, will be out of work. They made 27 cereals and the aroma around the factory has been a wonderful part of driving down Dundas St. East. It’s like driving through a cloud made of Froot Loops.Â
Some days I think this world is completely backwards. Â I think I’ve read one too many stories about employee layoffs recently.
Every day you read about a company or service having to make cutbacks and people are the first things to go. Oh, maybe they start copying on the blank sides of previously printed paper but “efficiencies” always mean tossing people out of jobs. Â It’s just upside down and wrong to serve shareholders over peoples’ lives. There are unrealistic expectations that share prices will just go up and up and up. Years ago, motivational speaker and leader Lance Secretan put it best when he was a guest on my CHML talk show: When things get tight in the family budget you don’t throw out a couple of kids!
It’s survival of the fittest out there, for sure, but incompetence has nothing to do with treating people as commodities. It’s kind of sickening when you think about what people have to go through when this happens to them.
The debacle with the US government’s recent shutdown comes down to a matter of pride. Families living on shoe-string budgets were strained during the 16 days nearly everything came to a halt and why? I’ve done a lot of research into it and the conclusion I’ve drawn is simply because the Republicans didn’t want Obamacare – the nickname for universal health care – to come into being. Â Their reasons were astounding. Basically they didn’t want it to happen because people like it and they like having health care and that would also mean that they like Obama more. That is how petty, greedy, selfish and disgusting politics has become. Â You couldn’t pay me enough to get involved in that mess. Â Speaking of which, the ad officially seeking mayoral candidates in London went online recently. It states that applicants need 10-plus years experience but under education it says, not applicable.
I joked to a peer the other day that I’d love to be appointed to the Senate. “Better hurry”, he quipped, “it’s not going to be around much longer.” If only that were true. A hearing to consider the role of the Senate is underway this week but I predict it will result in the status quo. I believe the Senate exists so the Prime Minister can appoint people to it as a reward for being his supporter over the years. Â It’s a perk, a job you don’t even have to do and you slide away with a golden pension packet on the backs of suckers like us who work for a living. Â No one who deserves it will ever get it. Even the suspended Senators, Duffy, Wallin and Brazeau, get their pay and everything else back in two years. (That’s under review right now but I suspect it won’t change.) The best bit of evidence to come out of the testimony before the Senate was when Mike Duffy admitted he didn’t have $90,000 to pay back improper expenses. Â Thank goodness. Â If that bloated windbag had a hundred grand in the bank I don’t think I could stand it.