Bayer: For A Better Life (Unless You Happen To Work There)

Bayer Pharmaceuticals AG is a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical company based in Germany. Their motto is: Science—For A Better Life.

 

Bayer is most famous for aspirin. However, they also once marketed heroin as a "safe, non-addictive" morphine substitute. Nowadays, their biggest profits come from more modern drugs, like Kogenate (to treat hemophilia), which brought in $1.45 billion in 2010, according to the Bay Citizen.

Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceutical in Berkeley is a subsidiary of Bayer AG in Germany. In August 2010, 29 union members were laid off, with an empty promise that they might be rehired when times got better. That offer seemed to materialize in May for ten of the workers, just in time to preserve their seniority rights. However, Bayer suddenly pulled out of the deal, saying that in fact there were only two jobs available. The others could get rehired in the future, but their seniority rights would be expired by then, likely forcing them to accept lower pay, benefits and job security.

The ILWU, which represents the workers, asked Bayer to extend the “recall rights” for another 90 days, but Bayer did not respond for several weeks. When they did reply to the offer, they said they would extend the rights, but only if the union fast tracked approval for the new contract by August 24^th, 2011, and accepted Bayer’s right to contract out janitorial services to nonunion employees, thus eliminating many of the jobs in question.

The Bay Citizen quoted Bayer’s director of public policy and communications, Sreejit Mohan, saying, “We just want to be seen as fair to our employees.”

Of course these are crocodile tears. Bayer, like all companies, is most concerned about being seen as fair to their shareholders, with employee wellbeing being fairly low on their agenda. If they really wanted to be seen as fair to their employees they would make them all equal stakeholders in the company, with pay and decision-making responsibilities commensurate with the bosses. (Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel, “What Is To Be Done?” portrayed such an arrangement). Short of this, they could offer generous remuneration, job security and safe working conditions and perhaps then be seen as less evil than other bosses.

The struggle at Bayer does not affect only its workers. In order to keep the company in Berkeley, the city extended its enterprise zone to include the 43-acre Bayer facility, making the company eligible for $10 million in state tax breaks, essentially a gift from taxpayers that allows its executives to pad their paychecks. Yet at the same time, taxpayers must also foot the bill for the laid off workers’ unemployment benefits and potentially other services, as well, like health care if they end up in an emergency room without insurance.

Meanwhile, profits are up. The company has plenty of money not only to retain the employees, but to offer them generous raises. Of course that would mean less money for the bosses’ salaries, which have been growing so fast that they now average 325 times their average employees’ wages. Two years ago the gap was only 263 to one. (See “Rich Get Richer”). The proposed contract does include modest raises of 3.1% to 3.4% each year for the next four years (for those who still have jobs), but it also requires workers to pay a larger share of their health care costs, thus keeping take-home pay stagnant or causing it to decline. 

Misplaced Drug Hysteria

Oxycontin to Be Snorted (Wikicommons)

The SF Chron ran an article Friday on UC Berkeley’s continuing problems with drug abuse at their co-ops. As a result of a series of overdoses and accusations of drug dealing, the University has implemented a Good Samaritan law that would allow students to call the authorities in the event of a drug overdose without risk of arrest (assuming they, too, were high or complicit). Many parents and neighbors are crying that this is insufficient, that the co-ops are out of control.

I attended UC Berkeley in the mid-1980s. The co-ops had a bad drug reputation then, like now. However, I lived in the dorms, where drug abuse was also a problem. During my first week, a young man overdosed twice, each time consuming a smorgasbord of hallucinogens, narcotics, sedatives and alcohol, ostensibly purchased from various sources living in the dorms, as well as the co-ops and People’s Park. Another person in my dorm became paralyzed after consuming a handful of valium and crashing his car. There was one young man known as Robo Rob, who had a pyramid of empty Robitussin bottles on his desk and another known as Pill Head Craig (for obvious reasons). And then there were the basketball players, two giants who routinely spent weekend mornings covering our communal bathroom floor with the remains of their evening’s celebrations.

Moms, Dads, Just Say No to Drugs

The point is that the co-ops are not to blame for drug abuse by young adults living away from their parents for the first time. It is not even the living away from the parents (the majority of students I knew did not even smoke pot, and many didn’t touch alcohol). In fact, young adults do not even make up a significant percentage of drug overdoses in the U.S. According to Mike Males, the greatest increase in drug overdoses over the past two decades has been Americans in their 40s and 50s, while teen and young adult drug use and overdose rates are at their lowest rates in 30 years.

While it is tragic to lose a child to drugs, our collective obsession with sheltering and securing children has blinded us to the true nature of America’s drug problem. According to Phillip Smith (StopTheDrugWar.org) drug death rates today are more than double what they were during the height of the crack cocaine epidemic in the early 1990s and 4-5 times the peak heroin mortality rate in 1975. But it is not teenagers or college students who are filling the hospital rooms. It is baby boomers killing themselves with prescription drugs like oxycontin. According to Males, the average age of a person dying from a drug overdose is now 43, up from 32, in 1985, and 22, in 1970. Males also notes that number of 35-54 year-old binge drinkers (those consuming 5 or more drink in an evening) is double the number of teen and college-age binge drinkers combined.

Drug education and Good Samaritan laws for college students are certainly prudent policies. However, by ignoring their parents, both those who abuse drugs themselves, and those who are in denial about their partners’ and children’s problems, we are overlooking a far more pervasive and deadly problem.