ECO-CRISIS OF CAPITALI$M

Spread of Bird Flu Worsens, Hitting Egg-Laying Hens Especially Hard

ALL FLU IS BIRD FLU

Megan Durisin and Lisa Pham
Thu, February 9, 2023



(Bloomberg) -- The global bird flu outbreak is worsening, highlighting the challenge farmers and officials face in reining in the deadly virus.

Just over 100 million poultry died or were culled due to avian influenza between the start of October and Feb. 3, according to the World Organisation for Animal Health. That’s more than triple the number in the same period in the previous season, which ended with record losses from the disease.

Farms across Europe and North America have suffered severe outbreaks, and cases are also picking up in South America — including in Bolivia, which borders major chicken producer Brazil. Egg-laying hens have been among the hardest hit, boosting prices of the grocery staple and further squeezing consumers.

There have also recently been signs of the virus adapting to different animal species, including minks in Spain — sparking questions of whether the outbreak could spread to humans. The spillover needs to be “monitored closely,” although a spread to people is so far rare and not sustained, according to World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

“We need to just be vigilant to make sure that the spread in animals is contained because the more the virus circulates in animals, the higher is the risk for humans as well,” Sylvie Briand, the WHO’s director for epidemic and pandemic preparedness and prevention, said in a briefing with reporters on Wednesday.

TOXIC TRAIN CRASH

Air near Ohio derailment safe for residents to return home


Thu, February 9, 2023 



EAST PALESTINE, Ohio (AP) — Evacuated residents can return to the Ohio village where crews burned toxic chemicals after a train derailed five days ago near the Pennsylvania state line now that monitors show no dangerous levels in the air, authorities said Wednesday.

Around-the-clock testing inside and outside the evacuation zone around the village of East Palestine and a sliver of Pennsylvania showed the air had returned to normal levels that would have been seen before the derailment, said James Justice of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“Hundreds and hundreds of data points we’ve collected over the time show the air quality is safe," he said.

Residents were ordered to evacuate when authorities decided on Monday to release and burn five tankers filled with vinyl chloride, sending hydrogen chloride and the toxic gas phosgene into the air.

Monitors did detect toxins in the air during the controlled burn at the derailment site, but other samples outside that area did not, Justice said.

The village's mayor expressed relief that the evacuation had been lifted.

“We know everybody’s frustrated. Everybody wants to be in their homes. We did the best we can," said Mayor Trent Conaway. “The number one goal is public safety, and we accomplished that. Nobody was injured, nobody died.”

He credited the village’s part-time firefighters and their quick response to the derailment for saving the town.

Some residents have said they were worried about returning even if authorities say it's OK to go home despite reassurances from officials.

It’s unlikely though, Justice said, that there be would any dangerous levels of toxins inside any homes or businesses based on readings from air monitors around the community.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said some residents may want to wait until their homes are checked. Rail operator Norfolk Southern Railway said it would provide testing and continue to operate its family assistance center “for the foreseeable future.”

“It’s very understandable you may want that testing done before you go back in your house,” DeWine said.

The governor said the railroad will have to pay for the cleanup and make sure something like this doesn't happen again. “The burden is upon them is to assure the public that what they do everyday is safe,” DeWine said.

Testing on rivers, streams and drinking water wells will continue throughout the area and in the nearby Ohio River.

Kurt Kollar, a representative from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, said contaminants from the derailed tanker cars spilled into some waterways and were toxic to fish, but he added that data so far indicates the drinking water was protected.

The fire from the chemical release is no longer burning, and crews have started removing some of the wreckage.

About 50 cars, including 10 carrying hazardous materials, derailed in a fiery crash Friday night on the edge of East Palestine. Federal investigators say a mechanical issue with a rail car axle caused the derailment.

No injuries have been reported from the derailment or from the controlled release of the chemicals, but some people complained about smelling chlorine and smoke in the air and having headaches.

At least one lawsuit has been filed over the derailment. An East Palestine business owner and two other residents sued Norfolk Southern in federal court on Tuesday, alleging negligence by the company and exposure to toxic substances as a result. They’re seeking to make it a class-action case for residents and businesses in the evacuated area and people who were physically harmed because of spilled chemicals at the site.

Norfolk Southern declined to comment on the lawsuit.

The Associated Press

New Flyer, the Canadian Tesla of public transit, looks to turn bus around

The 90-plus-year-old Manitoba manufacturer  has a global reach and a dominant share of the predominantly unglamourous market for public transit buses in North America and the United Kingdom.

Joe O'Connor
Thu, February 9, 2023 

no0208new-flyer

It was Paul Soubry’s final day of vacation, and among the things he had learned after two weeks of sunshine and four rounds of golf in Palm Springs, Calif., was that he wasn’t much of a golfer after all.

“I am terrible,” the chief executive of NFI Group Inc., a.k.a. New Flyer, the Winnipeg-based public transit bus manufacturing giant, said in late January.

Soubry did everything he possibly could in his final outing to be less terrible, such as executing a couple of “foot wedges” — that is, nudging the ball with his foot into a more favourable position — and allowing himself at least one mulligan, golf-speak for an outright do-over.

Depending on the company one keeps and the seriousness of the individual player, a mulligan can spell the difference between a truly bad, lost-in-the-woods shot and a perfect swing that sends the ball soaring straight onto the green. Alas, all Soubry had to show for his foot wedges and do-overs was a scorecard with a 97 scratched on it.

“I am officially retiring,” he said.

Soubry, of course, is not retiring from his day job, although given NFI’s debt-battered balance sheet, inflation shocks, ongoing supply chain challenges and the gut-wrenching decisions the guy in charge has had to make in laying off 400 Manitoba-based employees since March 2020 — 30 of whom received their pink slips right before Christmas — it would be perfectly understandable if he announced his vacation was of the permanent kind.

But the 60-year-old is no quitter, nor is he seeking a few corporate mulligans. The 90-plus-year-old Manitoba manufacturer he runs has a global reach and a dominant share of the predominantly unglamourous market for public transit buses in North America and the United Kingdom.

Paul Soubry, chief executive of NFI Group Inc., which owns New Flyer.

Nevertheless, NFI finds itself at a crossroads, mostly because the pandemic’s fallout has caused supply chain traffic jams and a stalled share price that has investors wondering whether Soubry — a dedicated pick-up hockey player and diehard Winnipeg loyalist with a keen sense of place and burning local pride — can turn this bus around in time to make it profitable again.

On Soubry’s watch during the past 14 years, NFI has weathered a Great Recession, streamlined its production processes, consolidated the North American bus manufacturing industry and expanded into Europe.

The company got into electric buses early, positioning itself to be the Tesla Inc. of mass transit before net-zero pledges were even a thing among politicians, and before billions of dollars in new government funding had been made available to accelerate mass transit’s green transition.

The company’s share price soared to almost $60 for a spell in 2018, but a global emergency crashed the party, creating a situation where the busmaker struggled to get all the required parts to make its buses, a situation that continues to this day.

Things were getting so grim that NFI secured a pair of government loans in late 2022 — $50 million from Manitoba and $150 million from Export Development Canada — to preserve its liquidity and protect against further job cuts.

It is hard to see what NFI would have done differently

Cameron Doerksen

This wasn’t some sacred Canadian corporate cow grubbing for government money to prop it up by using the pandemic as a convenient excuse for all its financial woes. NFI had a track record of being in the black, and generated more than $725 million in revenue and $15 million in profits in the third quarter of fiscal 2019, a few months before the world fell apart.

Recent earnings calls have been decidedly less upbeat, as revenues slumped to $514 million in the third quarter of fiscal 2022, and what once were profits are now counted as losses to the tune of $48 million.

“The company has faced some fairly significant challenges in the past few years and, to be fair, a lot if not most of the challenges were from things out of their control,” Cameron Doerksen, a transportation sector analyst at National Bank Financial, said. “It is hard to see what NFI would have done differently.”

But it is what Soubry does next to prevent the challenges of the past few years from becoming an existential threat that drives NFI off an economic cliff that will count.

Fortunately, the boss isn’t one to get too fussed when day-to-day circumstances get bumpy. There is a painting of a car’s dashboard hanging above his desk. The painting is no masterpiece, having been bought for $59 from the “scratch and dent” section at Winners, but he bought it because of something his father used to say.

There is a painting of a car’s dashboard hanging above Soubry’s desk.

Paul Soubry Sr. was chief executive of Winnipeg-based agricultural equipment maker Versatile, and he inspired his son to become a “business guy.” Dad died in 2010, but he told his son that if you only run a business by “looking at the gauges,” you are going to lose sight of the big picture.

Put another way, things might be fine in the immediate term, but if you are not looking ahead to where you are going, and in the rear-view mirror from where you have come, then you never really know what direction you are headed in. That’s why, despite all the recent challenges, what Soubry sees ahead is a massive, unprecedented opportunity.

“We haven’t had any cancelled orders, we haven’t had anybody say, ‘Screw you, I’ll go buy from one of your competitors,’” he said. “They want our product.”

The pandemic messed things up in the short term, but the even bigger mess humanity has made of its environment has had some long-term benefits for NFI. Transit authorities in North America and Britain are flush with government cash to help them transition away from fossil-fuel-burning buses to low- and zero-emission vehicles.

But buying a bus isn’t like buying a car. Joe Consumer isn’t kicking the tires and paying the sticker price on a single vehicle; it is cities, with a little help from their wealthy friends, buying in bulk.

New Flyer is going to feed the beast

Dimitry Anastakis

The United States federal government has committed US$2.23 billion in new federal grant money for transit authorities looking to green their fleets, and it will cover 80 per cent of the purchase price of a US$ 1.1-million New Flyer electric bus. Canada has a $1.5-billion Zero Emission Bus Initiative, and the United Kingdom has a partially government-funded commitment to put 4,000 electric buses on the road by the end of 2024.

The demand and the guaranteed money behind it are reflected by the more than 8,000 buses NFI currently has on its order books.

“New Flyer is going to feed the beast,” Dimitry Anastakis, an automotive historian at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, said. “There have been a lot of big announcements about the shift to EVs among the Big Three automakers, but New Flyer has already been doing this for five years, and it’s kind of gone under the radar.”

Perhaps that’s because public transit isn’t as sexy as that slick new electric passenger car silently ghosting past you at an intersection. Zero-emission buses aren’t cool; they are utilitarian, and much more like a piece of vital urban infrastructure than a vehicle for personal expression.

What stands out about New Flyer, said Andy Biesterveld, chief engineer at the Central Ohio Transit Authority, is the company’s long track record of manufacturing reliable buses.

“We knew that we would not have any quality issues,” he said. “New Flyer is first and foremost a bus company. They know how to make buses.”

COTA has been buying exclusively from NFI since 2019, about 100 buses in total. If you take the bus in a major North American city, there is a decent chance it is a New Flyer. Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver, Calgary, New York, Miami, Los Angeles and San Francisco all have the company’s buses on their roads.

“New Flyer is a major player and it’s something most people, at least outside of Winnipeg, don’t recognize,” Anastakis said.

Soubry doesn’t exactly rate as a household name either. For the record, he doesn’t take the bus to work when he is home in Winnipeg, but often hops on public transit when in other cities on business, so he can pump the bus driver for information. No one offers better feedback on a bus, he said.

Here is something you probably don’t know: public transit buses are highly customized vehicles. No one bus fits all. Every transit authority that places an order with NFI has a list of specific wants. The door that works great for COTA might not work for Los Angeles. Seat design, layout, number of cameras, camera positioning, doors, window tints, panel colouring, air conditioning capabilities, defroster models and drivers’ seats are all particulars NFI has to deliver upon, no matter how different one order batch is from the next.

The orders arrive for tens, maybe hundreds, of buses, a scale that left NFI particularly vulnerable to the supply chain chaos caused by the pandemic’s onset, which shuttered factories and generally sent people home, where they started ordering every type of electronic gadget they could get their hands on.

This created an unprecedented demand for microchips, those tiny components that are key for everything from your smartphone and your smart television to your made-in-Winnipeg smart electric bus. As manufacturing ramped up, the race for those chips was on.

Since NFI does custom builds and small-batch orders, it couldn’t compete for the required parts, because suppliers were too busy filling bigger orders. By the time the parts did become available, inflation had driven up the price.

Public transit buses are highly customized vehicles.

“We don’t have a demand concern, we have a supply constraint that has been hell, but that is getting better,” Soubry said. “But we still have a number of buses that have been built and are literally in parking lots waiting for spare parts to finish.”

Much as he loves buses, it is little wonder that Soubry needs to blow off a little steam every now and again. That’s when he can rely on old friends, such as Tim Steadman, to help with the cause.

The two met as students at the University of Manitoba’s Asper School of Business. Steadman, now a financial adviser, became a sales representative for Xerox Holdings Corp. upon graduating, while Soubry quickly established himself as a 20-something-year-old rockstar executive at StandardAero Holding Corp., an aerospace company he eventually ran before he became a bus guy.

“Paul was extremely impressive from a young age,” Steadman said. “Honestly, he works incredibly hard, and I am not just saying this, but you knew he was someone who was going places.”

Where Soubry religiously goes Sunday mornings is Oak Bluff Arena for a 9:15 pick-up hockey game. Steadman is the game’s organizer, and has been for 30 years. The regulars are a mix of accountants, lawyers and business types.

Among this crowd Soubry is known simply as Soubs, and is identified not by his high-profile job, but by his ability to still go end to end with the puck, despite having packed on a few extra pounds since his mid-20s.

“Paul can pretty much play anything. He was on the University of Manitoba basketball team,” said Steadman, known as Steady, among his hockey mates.

Every transit authority that places an order with NFI has a list of specific wants.

In a perfect, not-too-insanely-busy for hockey week, Soubs plays as many four times. He is also a Winnipeg Jets board member, and takes particular delight in terrorizing NFI colleagues unfortunate enough to count themselves as Toronto Maple Leaf fans.

Of all the guys in the Oak Bluff skate, it is Soubs, the one with the most time-demanding job, who instantly responds to Steadman’s Monday morning group email checking on player availability for the following weekend.

“He responds within a minute,” Steadman said.

Soubry’s love of hockey extends to his love of place: Winnipeg is home, and he identifies with its scrappy, us-against-the-rest-of-Canada identity, and its big-city-but-small-town feel. He rolls his eyes at outsiders’ wisecracks about the weather and the bugs.

Within this milieu, he is acutely aware that NFI isn’t just another business, but an international conglomerate born, raised and headquartered in Winnipeg that employs about 2,500 people locally, and rates as the heavyweight busmaker in the fight for market share in North America and the U.K.

Soubry takes it personally when times are tough, supply chains are snarled, the company’s share price is spinning its wheels around the $10 mark, creditors are waiting to be paid and workers are getting laid off. These are people he knows. People with families who he runs into at the rinks and grocery store.

“It is awful,” he said.

Why Sophie Brochu's Hydro-Quebec exit may be more about philosophy than politics

But the way Soubry sees things, this is just the beginning, and all the employees who have lost their jobs are going to be hired back once the factory ramps up production “later” in the year.

There is genuine cause for optimism. The zero-emission revolution is raging in municipal transportation, backed by public dollars and underwritten by government pledges to achieve their climate-change goals.

“The demand is there,” Doerksen, the analyst, said.

The bus just needs to get rolling again, with the newly retired golfer behind the wheel.

“We think we have hit rock bottom,” Soubry said. “We are now ramping our volume back up, we are now getting supply chain, we are way smarter, we haven’t lost business and we have this huge order book to execute on.”

• Email: joconnor@nationalpost.com | Twitter: oconnorwrites

Southwest, pilot union differ over causes for holiday meltdown


: Travellers deal with weather cancellations at Chicago Midway International Airport

Thu, February 9, 2023 
By David Shepardson and Rajesh Kumar Singh

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Southwest Airlines and its pilot union will offer sharply contrasting reasons for the low-cost carrier's meltdown in December that disrupted travel plans for two million customers, ahead of a U.S. Senate committee hearing on Thursday.

While Southwest has cited weather impacts, the union will single out poor preparation and a failure to modernize technology, according to written testimonies for the hearing, seen by Reuters.

The meltdown canceled almost 17,000 flights and is estimated to have cost more than $1 billion. It has also prompted a lawsuit from shareholders and a U.S. Department of Transportation investigation.

The Dallas-based airline attributed the breakdown in service to a "historic" winter storm, both in size and scale, which caused frozen jet bridges and icy aircraft engines.

It has also defended its computer system, saying the technology "worked as designed," while adding the airline has tapped General Electric Co to improve crew rescheduling capability and hired consultant Oliver Wyman, a unit of Marsh McLennan, to recommend operational changes.

Southwest's Chief Operating Officer Andrew Watterson repeated that message in his testimony, saying the airline experienced a "historic event" with a combination of challenges it had not confronted before.

"What began as a weather event on December 21st turned into a crew scheduling event by December 24th," said Watterson.

But Southwest's pilot union, which is in contract negotiations with Southwest, blames the company and its leadership for a "failure" to modernize crew management processes and technology and to prepare for the storm.

Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association (SWAPA) said the union has been sounding the alarm about the carrier's crew scheduling technology and "outdated" operational processes for years.

"Unfortunately, those warnings were summarily ignored," he said.

The debacle has put Chief Executive Bob Jordan in the eye of a storm as he faces pressure to restore the airline's credibility and regain the trust of customers, just one year after he took the helm.

Jordan has apologized and taken responsibility for the troubles, vowing to prevent a repeat.

Murray said while Jordan inherited a "massive, complex operation held together by duct tape and baling wire," he must show through actions that the company is serious about change.

The committee had asked Jordan to testify but Southwest said the hearing conflicted with other commitments, including an employee rally in Baltimore on Wednesday.

(Reporting by Rajesh Kumar Singh and David Shepardson; Editing by Josie Kao)

Report urges windfall tax to recover CEWS funds from large corporations


Thu, February 9, 2023 at 3:00 a.m. MST

OTTAWA — A new report by the non-profit organization Canadians for Tax Fairness says Canada should institute a windfall tax on all large corporations to help recover some of the public funds awarded to businesses during the pandemic.

The report examines 37 publicly listed companies that received the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy (CEWS), a federal program designed to help employers retain employees during the pandemic.

It concludes that in 2020 and 2021, the 37 companies rewarded shareholders by spending a combined $81.3 billion on dividends and $41.1 billion on share buybacks.

Canadians for Tax Fairness says many of these companies also reported impressive profits in 2022 as pandemic restrictions lifted and the economy improved.

The group says a windfall profit tax on all large corporations would force corporations to give back some of the public funds they received and assist with the country's overall recovery.

The head of the Canadian Revenue Agency recently said it wouldn't be worth reviewing more than $15.5 billion in potentially ineligible pandemic wage benefits flagged by the Auditor-General.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 9, 2023.

The Canadian Press

CLIMATE CRISIS IS CRISIS OF CAPITALI$M

Battle rages against Chile forest fires one week in

Wed, 8 February 2023


Forecasts of persistent high temperatures and strong winds bode ill Wednesday for drought-stricken Chile as dozens of forest fires -- several of them deadly -- showed no signs of abating.

More than 5,600 local firefighters, with backup from personnel flown in from Mexico, Colombia and Spain, were actively battling 89 priority fires out of a total of 311 burning a week into the disaster, officials said.

"We are entering the most complex part of the week," Interior Minister Carolina Toha said Wednesday.

"We have an alert for high temperatures for today, tomorrow and the next day in several regions of the country, requiring the mobilisation of a very large effort... to prevent the fires from spreading," she told reporters.

Fires have razed more than 309,000 hectares (763,000 acres) in the Maule, Nuble, Biobio and La Araucania regions, officials say -- an area equivalent to one third of Puerto Rico.

The official death toll was adjusted downward Wednesday by two to 24, with the number of people injured by the fires reaching 2,180.

A total of 1,180 homes have been destroyed, leaving more than 5,500 people homeless.

"If the temperature rises and the wind increases, we may indeed have more problems, and we already have many fires," Lieutenant Colonel Carlos Javier Martin Traverso, head of a Spanish military contingent providing help in Chile, told AFP.

He expressed concern about the so-called "triple 30" factor -- humidity under 30 percent, temperatures over 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) and winds above 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) per hour -- which, if present, could make for a fire of "great magnitude, virulence and potency."

Chile is in the grips of a 13-year drought.

str-ps/pb/ll/mlr/mlm

One of Biden’s top COVID advisors believes vaccine critics ‘quietly’ got jabbed on the side

Eleanor Pringle
Wed, February 8, 2023 

David Kessler wasn't one of the people wheeled out in front of the press pack every day during the pandemic.

If he was on-screen, the White House's Chief Science Officer for the COVID-19 Response Team was often speaking to President Biden in a desperate bid to get the nation's response right "the first time".

When he got the call from the President's team in mid-2020 to help strategize a response to the strange and terrifying new disease, the former FDA commissioner believed he "wasn't good at it". Three years on he said he still feels that way, despite the fact that 269 million people have had at least one shot of a vaccine.

And even those who spread doubt about the jab rollout are likely to be among the 81% of the population who have had it, Kessler believes.- 

Speaking to Politico from his home in Maryland, the former head of Operation Warp Speed said: "The fact is, 226 million people got the primary series. Push comes to shove, many of those who are being critical of vaccines, I think quietly they’ve gotten the vaccine."

Having taken on Warp Speed after it was created under the Trump administration, Kessler also cautioned against those who confused a questioning mindset with undermining basic facts. Or, as he sees it: "Creating enough doubt so people go, well, maybe I don’t need to do this."

He added: "I’ve lived this before. In 1952, with the first data that smoking caused cancer. The mantra of the industry was, “not proven, not proven, not proven.” It created enough doubt that it gave people a crutch who didn’t want to quit. It gave them a reason to continue to smoke.

"These vaccines are not perfect. But certainly, if you’re over 50, if you have any risk factors, the benefit/risk [ratio] is just overwhelming. So yes, ask questions. But please make sure that people who need this, whose lives are really at risk, take advantage of a very important potentially lifesaving tool."

He added that disinformation would be the next frontier to battle, as the "virus is not done with us yet".

Kessler's Tucker Carlson regret

Although happy to have served out of the limelight, Kessler did reveal he had one regret: not sitting down with Fox News host Tucker Carlson to attempt to find some "common ground".

Carlson has long criticized the vaccine rollout, calling it "unethical" and "immoral" as well as peddling unfounded claims that vaccines are linked to cardiac arrest.

Kessler added opening communication between vaccine skeptics and the scientific community is core to America's "greatness", as it is a country built of people who "know how to solve problems together."
There's more work to do

That problem-solving may well need to be aimed at a next-generation vaccine, Kessler hinted. Time and again COVID has proved it can mutate –the latest strain, dubbed 'Kraken', is the most transmissible yet with a study warning it could spawn other immune-evasive mutations.

As well as needing to provide a level of protection against future strains Kessler added that they needed to be affordable.

President Biden announced at the end of January that the public health emergency would end in May, thus reducing some levels of government support. Among the measures will be the end of free at-home tests and hospitals not getting any extra cash for treating COVID patients.

The cost of getting vaccinated is also expected to rocket once the government stops forking out for them.

Pfizer said in October 2022 that it plans to sell the Covid vaccine it developed with BioNTech at $110 to $130 per dose for teens and adults once government funding runs out.

Kessler, who began serving the Oval Office under President George H.W. Bush at the FDA, announced his retirement at the start of this year.

He finished by saying there's a lot of work left to be done on COVID and that the road will be far from easy, but offered some optimism in that it was a "once-in-a-century" pandemic.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Is the Rolls-Royce share price heading back to pennies?

Christopher Ruane

MOTLEY FOOL UK
Thu, 9 February 2023 

So far, this has been a good year for the performance of shares in engineer Rolls-Royce (LSE: RR). The price has moved up 10 % since the beginning of January. But it has fallen by the same amount over the past year – and lost more than 60% in value across five years.

The stock market has not responded well to the chief executive’s blunt description of the company’s challenges since he took up the job last month. Could the firm be about to give up its January gains and go back to where it started the month – in pennies?

Back to the future

Although the company is trading at around £1.08 per share as I write, this on Thursday morning, it is no stranger to a share price in pennies. As well as beginning 2023 that way, the shares changed hands for pennies each at some point in each of the last three calendar years.

But for many long-term Rolls-Royce shareholders, that would likely have come as an unwelcome novelty. The last time the shares had traded below the pound level was back in 2009, as the financial crisis dented investor confidence in the outlook for the business.

So could the same thing happen now? After all, if even the company’s top manager has concerns about its future prospects, why should investors see things differently?

Risks ahead

As a stakeholder, the Rolls-Royce share price is of more than academic interest to me.

I do think the shares could drift back to trading in pennies. February often sees weak performance in many shares after an optimistic start to a new year by investors fades away. The new chief executive has raised concerns that Rolls-Royce requires significant changes, potentially hurting the potential profitability of the engineer.

For example, he seems to be paving the way for job cuts. That could help save costs. But it may also demotivate the workforce. It could also raise customer concerns. When it comes to aircraft engines, safety and reliability are paramount. Heavy cost-cutting by a manufacturer can damage customer perceptions of quality – and perhaps hurt sales.

So I see risks that any bad news from the company could push the shares down into selling for pennies each again.

Playing to its strengths

However, after some huge losses after tax in recent years and only a modest profit last year, a new broom might be what the company needs.

If the new CEO has a real plan to improve performance, that could help lift the Rolls-Royce share price over time. As a long-term investor, that is what I am looking at.

I continue to think the company has the foundations of a strong business. Demand for aircraft engine sales and servicing is likely to remain high for decades. Complex barriers to entry also limit the amount of competition and its installed base of engines gives the company sizeable recurring revenues.

Whatever happens to the Rolls-Royce share price in the short term, I plan to hold my shares.

The post Is the Rolls-Royce share price heading back to pennies? appeared first on The Motley Fool UK.


C Ruane has positions in Rolls-Royce Plc. The Motley Fool UK has no position in any of the shares mentioned. Views expressed on the companies mentioned in this article are those of the writer and therefore may differ from the official recommendations we make in our subscription services such as Share Advisor, Hidden Winners and Pro. Here at The Motley Fool we believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors.

Motley Fool UK 2023

 

You’ve probably been hearing a lot about pensions in the news lately. But here’s the truth. Danielle Smith and the UCP want to remove Alberta from the Canada Pension Plan. That’s devastating news—I spoke to the City News to unpack the risks and costs if it happens. The thing is, Eugene, we can fight back. Sign the petition and demand Alberta stay in the Canada Pension Plan. Premier Danielle Smith and the UCP will put your retirement savings in jeopardy if they get the chance. They’re playing political games with the retirement savings of literally millions of hard-working Albertans like yourself. We can’t let Danielle Smith gamble away our future income security. We have to show our leaders that we won’t take this and that Albertans deserve the stability the Canada Pension Plan provides. Sign the petition now. In solidarity, Gil McGowan President Alberta Federation of Labour SIGN

"We work like robots": Discrimination and Exploitation of Migrant Workers in FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 Hotels

Shikha Silliman Bhattacharjee

2022, "We work like robots": Discrimination and Exploitation of Migrant Workers in FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 Hotels

14 Views87 Pages

1 File ▾

Hospitality Management,

Labor Migration,

Qatar,

Labor Organizing and Worker's Rights,

FIFA World Cup

Show more ▾

Investigations conducted by Equidem and GLJ-ILRF between February 2020 and July 2022 documented significant labour and human rights violations at 13 out of 17 of FIFA partner hotel groups. In this report, women and men from Africa and Asia working at Qatar World Cup hotels describe - in their own words, the sexual harassment, nationality- and gender-based discrimination, wage theft, health and safety risks, sudden loss of employment, and illegal recruitment charges they faced in their work. The legal and governmental context fuels these rights violations. Workers are denied the fundamental right to associate, subjected to intensive surveillance and employer control, and fear retaliation-including employer-instigated deportation - for defending their rights and interests.

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