1 Factory unrest batters India's reputation (Harsh Joshi in The Wall Street Journal) Maruti Suzuki will recover from last week's deadly factory riot, but the unrest strikes another blow to India's reputation. The factory is shut down while investigators troll the wreckage -- that's costing Maruti about $9 million a day. Lost production and the cost to repair damaged facilities are going to hurt in the short term. But Maruti, India's leading passenger car maker by sales, already has plans to raise production elsewhere.
For India though, labor unrest is a bigger concern. Since 2009, industrial action has stalled output at Honda Motor, Hyundai Motor and several auto parts makers. In aviation, Air India and Kingfisher Airlines have both grounded dozens of flights recently because of strike action. Jewelers closed their shops for 20 days earlier this year to protest higher taxes on gold imports. There has been significant, lengthy and costly industrial action in the past two years by coal miners, bank staff, and workers at plants owned by Bosch and drug maker Dr. Reddy's, for instance.
One factor may be India's difficult economic predicament that's squeezing ordinary workers. The economy's slowing down while inflation is stubbornly high -- consumer prices have been rising at more than 10% for the last two years, driven by shortages and inefficient supply chains for food and essential commodities, rather than by wage increases. Unsurprisingly, the gap between rich and poor is worsening. The difference between the wages of India's top 10% of earners and those in the bottom 10% has doubled in the last two decades, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says. There is a huge underclass that has not benefited from India's economic growth -- 42% of the population still earns less than $1.25 a day.
2 Steel giant Mittal scales back (The New York Times) Steel is a notoriously volatile industry. But four years ago, Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian-born tycoon, appeared to have mastered the business. He was still aglow from his 2006 victory in an epic takeover battle for his nearest rival, Arcelor of Luxembourg, which made the merged company, ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel maker by far. With a fast-growing world economy hungry for steel, ArcelorMittal reported operating income of nearly $12 billion for 2008.
Things are different now, with Europe in a deep economic funk and once-roaring construction markets like India and China also slowing. Last year, the company had operating income of $4.9 billion. And on Wednesday, it reported second-quarter operating income of $1.1 billion, on sales of $22.48 billion. While the sales were down 10% from a year earlier, income was down more than 50% as the cost of the industry’s raw material, iron ore, rose even as steel prices slumped. The company has already started curtailing production in Europe to match reduced demand.
3 Quest for six-packs in India (The New York Times) India has long defined national well-being by the stomachs of its people. Hunger was once such a national crisis that during the 1970s the Indian government set minimum standards for daily calorie intake that are still used to measure poverty. Bollywood, of course, is India’s dream factory, more interested in fantasy than reality. Beginning in the 1990s, actors like Sanjay Dutt and, most famously, Salman Khan began muscling up, mimicking their peers in Hollywood, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Men across India were soon mimicking the Indian stars. Fitness centers, once almost nonexistent in India, quickly spread.
Rachel Dwyer, a leading scholar of Indian cinema, said early male stars like Dilip Kumar and Dev Anand never took off their shirts or drew attention to their bodies. Now Indian actors are waxing their legs or chests and posing for suggestive photographs. A fit body, Ms. Dwyer said, has become a status symbol. "The muscular body is very much a class thing," she said. "The whole fitness cult in India is a marker of upward mobility."
4 Facebook stock at all-time low (San Francisco Chronicle) Facebook's stock got hammered in extended trading on Thursday after it reported second-quarter earnings. Facebook just barely beat consensus estimates for revenue from Wall Street, and was in-line on earnings. But the stock is cratering anyway, now floating at around $24.
5 Alcatel Lucent to shed 5,000 jobs (BBC) Telecoms equipment maker Alcatel Lucent has said it plans to slash 5,000 jobs in order to save costs as it reported a net loss in the second quarter.Cutting 6.4% of the workforce would allow the group to save 750m euros ($910m), the firm said. The French-US group posted a loss between April and June of 254m euros against a 43m-euro profit a year ago. Revenue fell 7.1% to 3.5bn euros. The company currently employs 78,000 staff worldwide. Rival Nokia-Siemens Networks recently said it would cut 17,000 jobs - 25% of its staff - in order to streamline its operations.
6 The age of civil society (Dawn) For all of the flaws of leftist politics in the Cold War era, those movements did produce a large number of people who sacrificed much in their personal lives, put their heart and soul into fighting the status quo, and tried to build the society that they had read about in their little red books. With the emergence of civil society, we are also witness to a new kind of ‘development worker’ distinct from the political worker of the past. This is not to shed doubt on the commitment of those who do involve themselves in collective causes, but only to point out how much of an anachronism the idea and practice of revolutionary social change have become.
It could be that progressives in Pakistan, like those who are consciously supporting externally sponsored regime change in the Middle East, truly do believe that pro-people social transformation is now only possible through the patronage offered by powerful liberal-democratic regimes in the Western world.
For India though, labor unrest is a bigger concern. Since 2009, industrial action has stalled output at Honda Motor, Hyundai Motor and several auto parts makers. In aviation, Air India and Kingfisher Airlines have both grounded dozens of flights recently because of strike action. Jewelers closed their shops for 20 days earlier this year to protest higher taxes on gold imports. There has been significant, lengthy and costly industrial action in the past two years by coal miners, bank staff, and workers at plants owned by Bosch and drug maker Dr. Reddy's, for instance.
One factor may be India's difficult economic predicament that's squeezing ordinary workers. The economy's slowing down while inflation is stubbornly high -- consumer prices have been rising at more than 10% for the last two years, driven by shortages and inefficient supply chains for food and essential commodities, rather than by wage increases. Unsurprisingly, the gap between rich and poor is worsening. The difference between the wages of India's top 10% of earners and those in the bottom 10% has doubled in the last two decades, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says. There is a huge underclass that has not benefited from India's economic growth -- 42% of the population still earns less than $1.25 a day.
2 Steel giant Mittal scales back (The New York Times) Steel is a notoriously volatile industry. But four years ago, Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian-born tycoon, appeared to have mastered the business. He was still aglow from his 2006 victory in an epic takeover battle for his nearest rival, Arcelor of Luxembourg, which made the merged company, ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel maker by far. With a fast-growing world economy hungry for steel, ArcelorMittal reported operating income of nearly $12 billion for 2008.
Things are different now, with Europe in a deep economic funk and once-roaring construction markets like India and China also slowing. Last year, the company had operating income of $4.9 billion. And on Wednesday, it reported second-quarter operating income of $1.1 billion, on sales of $22.48 billion. While the sales were down 10% from a year earlier, income was down more than 50% as the cost of the industry’s raw material, iron ore, rose even as steel prices slumped. The company has already started curtailing production in Europe to match reduced demand.
3 Quest for six-packs in India (The New York Times) India has long defined national well-being by the stomachs of its people. Hunger was once such a national crisis that during the 1970s the Indian government set minimum standards for daily calorie intake that are still used to measure poverty. Bollywood, of course, is India’s dream factory, more interested in fantasy than reality. Beginning in the 1990s, actors like Sanjay Dutt and, most famously, Salman Khan began muscling up, mimicking their peers in Hollywood, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Men across India were soon mimicking the Indian stars. Fitness centers, once almost nonexistent in India, quickly spread.
Rachel Dwyer, a leading scholar of Indian cinema, said early male stars like Dilip Kumar and Dev Anand never took off their shirts or drew attention to their bodies. Now Indian actors are waxing their legs or chests and posing for suggestive photographs. A fit body, Ms. Dwyer said, has become a status symbol. "The muscular body is very much a class thing," she said. "The whole fitness cult in India is a marker of upward mobility."
4 Facebook stock at all-time low (San Francisco Chronicle) Facebook's stock got hammered in extended trading on Thursday after it reported second-quarter earnings. Facebook just barely beat consensus estimates for revenue from Wall Street, and was in-line on earnings. But the stock is cratering anyway, now floating at around $24.
5 Alcatel Lucent to shed 5,000 jobs (BBC) Telecoms equipment maker Alcatel Lucent has said it plans to slash 5,000 jobs in order to save costs as it reported a net loss in the second quarter.Cutting 6.4% of the workforce would allow the group to save 750m euros ($910m), the firm said. The French-US group posted a loss between April and June of 254m euros against a 43m-euro profit a year ago. Revenue fell 7.1% to 3.5bn euros. The company currently employs 78,000 staff worldwide. Rival Nokia-Siemens Networks recently said it would cut 17,000 jobs - 25% of its staff - in order to streamline its operations.
6 The age of civil society (Dawn) For all of the flaws of leftist politics in the Cold War era, those movements did produce a large number of people who sacrificed much in their personal lives, put their heart and soul into fighting the status quo, and tried to build the society that they had read about in their little red books. With the emergence of civil society, we are also witness to a new kind of ‘development worker’ distinct from the political worker of the past. This is not to shed doubt on the commitment of those who do involve themselves in collective causes, but only to point out how much of an anachronism the idea and practice of revolutionary social change have become.
It could be that progressives in Pakistan, like those who are consciously supporting externally sponsored regime change in the Middle East, truly do believe that pro-people social transformation is now only possible through the patronage offered by powerful liberal-democratic regimes in the Western world.
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