Exxon is aknown corporate miscreant , and nothing it does to preserve profits should come as a surprise anymore . And yet .
In the face of a incapacitating pandemic and job crisis , the company has decide to do what it does best : maximize shareowner economic value . AReuters undivided reporton Thursday said the company is hellbent on paying out dividend to shareowner , and as part of a schema to do so , it ’s reportedly view job and expenditure cut . The company denied it , though Reuters pointed to circumstantial grounds the oil monster has been laying the groundwork that could make it easier to raise people establish on carrying out metric late last yr as the pandemic worsened .
And really , would it be that surprising ? The only affair that matters to Exxon is making rich people more money . Itlied about clime variety for decadesand put theentire biosphere at wager . Laying off a few thousand workers in the middle of a pandemic so it can devote out stockholder as promised is like a picnic in the commons for the ship’s company . Nevertheless , it neatly instance a few primal point about this moment in time .
Exxon CEO Darren Woods (second from right) clapping at the New York Stock Exchange because money.Photo: Richard Drew (AP)
https://gizmodo.com/big-oil-3-police-1844522589
The first is thatBig Oil is struggling mightily . Since the coronavirus ripped around the world and has stubbornly clung in the U.S. thanks to wildly unequal to and malevolent leading , the economy has break apart . Unemployment is sky - high , the U.S. has seen its slowest economic growth charge per unit ever , and basically nobody has any money to do anything ( or they reverence they might die if they do ) . Amidst this , oil color companies have seendemand craterand profits vanish . It ’s not just Exxon ; other big firms likeBPandShellhave also gone through layoffs and slashed earnings expectations while smaller firm are going belly-up orjust foregoing paying loanword . Shell has said point - blank it is n’t sure its businesswill ever total back . The whole affair is a mess !
The second is their responses for dealing with the mess , which are telling , particularly Big Oil ’s plans to layoff workers . Whether its Exxon ’s reported hail wave of layoff to pay out dividend or BP ’s chief executive officer call in laying off 10,000 people in its pursuance of moving beyond petroleum ( vomit)the “ right matter ” to do , it ’s well-defined as day workers are disposable in the case of profit or shifts in the market place . It ’s not that fossil fuel companies have a monopoly on hating worker and having a hard - on for stockholder . That ’s a fixture of capitalism that ’s been reenforce by the broken political system in the U.S. that has spent decade gutting prole aegis and pull in it easier for the very rich to make even more money just by being rich .
The last affair to notice is that this is all now occur at warp upper and at a plate rarely seen in a single industry , let alone in the face of a pandemic and a climate crisis that both menace all of humanity . Thefossil fuel epoch is endingas we speak . The inquiry now is how fast it collapse . Rather than acknowledging that and taking caution of the people who built it , Big Oil is using the last dollars extracted out of the burnt straw of our planet to describe the pockets of the loaded among us .
If you ca n’t imagine what come next , then take a look at ember . Its collapse over the past decade - plus in the U.S. bring out what ’s coming for Big Oil . And we can see the wreckage left behind in the form of disinvestment in coal residential district , ember miner with black lung , and companies that decline to pay up into the fund to help them carry on with it while CEOs live in lavish star sign built with ill - begotten profits . The reported consideration by Exxon to slash its workforce to keep profits juiced is just a glance of what the next tenner could appear like for oil rig doer , grapevine builders , and others whose livelihoods are link up up in the fossil fuel industriousness .
Democrats like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio - Cortez and others force for ajust conversion for workersthrough a period of manage diminution while holding fogey fuel ship’s company to account for the damage they ’ve work have the right idea . It ’s just a question of if they can get a hard enough grip on power to actually enforce their plan before too many workers hang through the cracks .
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