It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Tuesday, October 19, 2021
CLASS WAR
Walgreens cited shoplifting as rationale for closing 5 stores in San Francisco, but local officials, data, and experts cast doubt on that explanation
Morgan Keith
Customers walk by products locked in security cabinets at a Walgreens store that is set to be closed in the coming weeks on October 13, 2021 in San Francisco, California. Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Walgreens said it's closing some San Francisco stores because of an increase in retail theft.
Police data obtained by the Chronicle did not show high rates of shoplifting reports at the closing stores.
One expert said people moving out of the city during the pandemic could've hurt Walgreens' business.
Walgreens announced Tuesday it would be closing five of its San Francisco locations due to "organized retail crime," but police department data, local officials, and policy experts are casting doubt on that reasoning, according to a report published by the San Francisco Chronicle on Saturday.
While the report said the chain has experienced retail theft, other factors like the COVID-19 pandemic and oversaturation of stores were cited as potential factors behind the decision to close the stores.
Walgreens spokesperson Phil Caruso said retail theft across its San Francisco locations has increased in the past few months to five times the chain's average, SFGate reported.
However, San Francisco Police Department data obtained by the Chronicle contradicts Walgreens' claims, with one of the stores slated to close reporting only 23 shoplifting incidents since 2018. Some incidents of shoplifting likely go unreported, but the closing stores had on average less than two shoplifting reports per month since 2018.
"Organized retail crime continues to be a challenge facing retailers across San Francisco, and we are not immune to that," Caruso told SFGate. "During this time to help combat this issue, we increased our investments in security measures in stores across the city to 46 times our chain average in an effort to provide a safe environment."
San Francisco Mayor London Breed pushed back against Walgreens' stated reasoning for closing the stores.
"They are saying (shoplifting is) the primary reason, but I also think when a place is not generating revenue, and when they're saturated - SF has a lot of Walgreens locations all over the city - so I do think that there are other factors that come into play," she told reporters last week.
Dean Preston, supervisor of San Francisco's 5th district, which will be impacted by a store closure, said the pharmacy chain is "abandoning the community" and has "long planned to close stores," the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
"Odd that some are so offended that I would suggest that a massive corporate chain might be closing retail locations for the exact reason they told investors they would close locations, rather than the reasons stated in their external PR," Preston said in a tweet on Friday.
In a 2019 Security and Exchange Commission filing, Walgreens announced it would launch a "Transformational Cost Management Program" that would shutter 200 stores in the US in order to save $1.5 billion in annual expenses by 2022.
A May study published by Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom found 15% of residents left San Francisco during the pandemic and have not returned, which he told the Chronicle could explain Walgreens' waning customer base in the city.
Walgreens did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
EXXON UNION BUSTING Exxon tells Texas refinery workers lockout will end if contract approved or union removed
FILE PHOTO: Exxon Mobil Beaumont locks out refinery workers Erwin Seba Sun, October 17, 2021,
HOUSTON (Reuters) - Exxon Mobil Corp on Sunday told workers at its Beaumont, Texas, refinery their six-month lockout will end if they ratify the company's contract offer or remove the United Steelworkers union (USW) as their representative.
"As we have told the Union, the conditions which would end the lockout remain the same: the company will end the lockout when we have a signed, ratified agreement," Exxon said in a message posted on-line.
"This has not changed, and anything said to the contrary is untrue. Additionally, if employees were to decertify, the company would return employees to work."
Decertification is the process to remove a union from representing employees at a given location. The U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) is reviewing a petition signed by at least 30% of the locked-out workers that could lead to a vote to decertify USW Local 13-243 in Beaumont as their representative. No date for a vote has been set.
Workers at the 369,024 barrel-per-day (bpd) Beaumont refinery and adjoining lubricant oil plant, which makes Mobil 1 motor oil, are scheduled to vote on Tuesday on the company's contract offer.
Bryan Gross, USW international representative, said the company chose to begin the lockout on May 1.
"The company asked, 'What has the union done?' The union has helped with groceries, assisted with bills, and is now providing health insurance for all of the 'world-class employees' at a multi-billion dollar oil company put on the street instead of bargaining in good faith for a fair contract," Gross said on Sunday.
The USW has urged workers at the refinery to reject the contract offer in Tuesday's vote.
The union filled a complaint with the NLRB in June alleging the purpose of the lockout was to remove the union.
Exxon said it began the lockout to prevent the disruption of a possible strike.
(Reporting by Erwin Seba; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell)
'Hours of my life I'm never going to get back': As offices reopen, workers resist bringing back the commute
Charisse Jones, USA TODAY
When Wendy White, 57, quit her job in March, a key reason was her company's insistence employees return to the office in the midst of a pandemic.
White, the single mother of an 11-year-old son, had no child care options and was fearful of taking public transportation while COVID-19 was spreading. Now she is considering two job offers, one that would allow her to continue working remotely with occasional travel, and another in New York City, less than twenty-five miles from her Madison, New Jersey home.
"The commute plays so heavily into my decision,'' says White, adding she will probably take the remote position. "The job in New York would probably be easier, but I don’t want to have to commute four hours a day ... I've commuted in and out of Manhattan for the better part of 30 years, so I'm just kind of done.''
As many offices reopen after being shuttered during the COVID-19 health crisis, roughly 40% of workers say they want to continue working remotely according to a Harris Poll survey for USA TODAY. And for some, not having to commute on crowded trains, slow-moving buses, or in their cars, is one of the biggest perks of working from home.
In a survey of 2,100 remote workers taken between March and April, 84% said shedding their commute was the most significant benefit of working outside the office, while 58% said they would seek a new job if they couldn't continue doing their current job remotely, according to FlexJobs, a career service specializing in remote and flexible work.
"They see commuting as wasting their time and adding to their stress levels when they can do their jobs really well from home, avoid the stress caused by the daily grinding commute, and find more time for their families, all of which leads to improved mental health," Brie Reynolds, FlexJobs' career development manager, said in an email.
Commuting can be costly
Upwork, an online freelancing platform, says that working remotely during the pandemic saved many Americans not only time but money.
Between March and August of last year, employees who drove to their jobs before the pandemic and then began to work from home saved $758 million per day overall, for a total of $90 billion, according to an Upwork study.
The study's calculations were based on consumer survey data on commute times per day gathered from a range of sources, including AAA, the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the National Household Travel Survey. The total savings included estimates of personal savings on gas, broader savings due to reduced risk of accidents, and how individual households valued an hour of their time.
In 2018 the average commuter spent 54.2 minutes getting back and forth to work each day, or 4.6 hours a week, according to the Upwork report.
Survey respondents who were able to cut out their commute starting in mid-March and work from home saved nearly 50 minutes a day on average, or more than four days' worth of time over a roughly five-month period.
“The commute to work is extremely costly both to households and to society, and remote work has helped reduce that cost significantly,'' says Adam Ozimek, Upwork's chief economist.
But as businesses ramp up in the wake of the pandemic's widespread shutdowns, many employers want workers back on-site because they believe it will boost productivity and profits.
Now, employers are grappling with a historic labor shortage as they try to match skill sets with open positions, and workers hold out for jobs that offer better pay and stronger benefits, and more flexibility.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4.3 million people - or 2.9% of the nation's labor force - quit their jobs in August, the highest ever reported by the BLS Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey series.
Flexibility is the top reason workers are quitting, whether they want to work remotely or to have more relaxed start times, says Andy Challenger, senior vice president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an outplacement company.
Amtrak makes a station stop at Alexandria, Virginia, on Aug. 7, 2016.
“Companies that have tried to go back to 9 to 5, five days a week, really run into a resistant group of workers,'' says Challenger, adding that hesitation is strongest among working parents with young children who are dealing with unpredictable child care and school schedules. "There's definitely some pushback.''
While having a better work-life balance is the main goal for many workers who want less rigid work requirements, commuting is also a concern, Challenger says.
“I think certainly a huge swath of American workers got used to a life without a commute,'' Challenger says, "and a reversal of that feels really much more difficult than it did two years ago.''
'It's something I endure'
White lives just 23 miles from Manhattan. But when she commuted to work before the pandemic, it took at least one hour and 45 minutes, including the ten minutes spent wading through the crowds at Penn Station as she made her way to the street.
"I’ve been doing It for years and it’s taken hours of my life that I’m never going to get back,‘’ White says of her commute.
Evan Terwilliger, 31, a senior faculty support specialist at Harvard Business School, was looking for a new position last March. “Then the world turned upside down and like many folks, I sheltered-in-job,’’ he says.
Terwilliger was able to work remotely and leave behind his 30 to 45-minute rush-hour commute to Cambridge from his home in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.
Now, he’s back on campus three days a week, and as he resumes his job search, being able to work remotely full time is a priority.
Evan Terwilliger says that he would like to work remotely full time when he finds a new job.
“It’s something I endure,’’ he said of his current drive back and forth to the university. "I feel more productive when I don’t have that commute. That commute zaps energy …It’s like you’re doing (another) job.’’
Benefits on the other side of the commute
Given the current competition for workers, employers may want to accommodate employees who ask to keep working remotely, or at the very least, allow them to work from home part of the week if it won't negatively impact the business, says Theresa Adams, senior HR knowledge advisor for the Society for Human Resource Management
If commuting is a particular concern, some workers’ schedules can be coordinated around traffic patterns, she says. For instance, they might come in on Monday and Friday, if that’s when traffic tends to be lighter.
“There is a major war for talent now so retaining employees is a major goal for employers,’’ Adams says.
The consulting firm PwC recently announced that its 40,000 client services workers, the majority of its staff, can choose to work remotely for good.
In addition to meeting the needs of current employees, such flexibility can make the company more appealing to prospective hires in a tight labor market, says Yolanda Seals-Coffield, PwC's deputy people leader.
"We knew the future of work was going to look different,'' she says, "so as we thought about coming out of the pandemic, and looking at what was going on in the job market, it became clear that people wanted choice.”
Commuting, however, wasn't a particular concern voiced by PwC's employees, she says. And she added that many staffers are eager to return to the office.
"A lot of our people are anxious to get back ... and are looking forward to collaborating with colleagues in person, so we expect many of our client service staff will be back on site,'' she says. "But we're also aware some people will want or need to remain virtual ... We'll see in the coming months how the numbers actually play out.''
Adams of SHRM agreed that employers may want to remind their staff of the benefits of being in the office.
"Certainly there are silver linings in being in person ... that people have possibly forgotten after working from home for so long,'' Adams says. "You get to develop personal relationships at work. You have face-to-face contact... and office parties. And all those things can be a motivator to return to the office.''
Challenger says there also appears to be a generational divide between workers who want to work remotely and those who want to be back on site.
"I’ve talked to workers that are in the later stage of their career, and there’s a real nostalgia for coming into the office and a nostalgia for the commute,'' he says, adding that some enjoy having time in the car or on public transportation to listen to music or read a book.
Terwilliger says he knows some people see their commute as a welcome way to shift in or out of work mode.
"For some folks having that commute benefits them,'' he says, "but I think a majority of folks looking for remote work in the future say, 'Nah. I can ... keep a separation between home and work and I don’t need a drive to do that.’’
Tiffany Chen had always wanted to be a clothing designer. When she was an undergraduate studying fashion at New York City’s Parsons School of Design, she dreamed of having her own clothing line. “I was like, ‘Oh, it'd be nice to have my own line someday and sell out Barneys,’” she said on a recent Tuesday morning over coffee at Mah-Ze-Dahr bakery in Greenwich Village. “[But] now that we saw what happened with Barneys, maybe it was a good thing it didn't work out that way.”
The path seemed simple enough: She would work for someone and gain the necessary knowledge and experience. But over time, her passion diminished. “It’s a lot of work to [start a clothing line] all on your own, and it’s very hard to enter the industry on your own as well,” she said. She’s a first-generation Taiwanese American who was raised to believe that hard work and making your own way are “admirable.” Though her parents wholeheartedly backed her dreams, they expected her to be able to take care of herself financially. “They were very much of the mindset [that] once you’re an adult, we’re not going to support you anymore,” she told me. “You’re kind of on your own. I agree with them. I think that’s the way it should be.” “Less money does come with its own stresses, but I would rather deal with those than the stresses of the previous work environment.”
Chen, who is 30, worked in the fashion industry for two years, but the long hours and the questionable ethics of the work clashed with her personal ideals. Working for a company that created cheap attire and emphasized ever-changing style trends became unsustainable. “I care a lot about the current ongoing climate and environmental crisis, and I definitely believe fashion has [played] a huge part in that,” she told me. “For budget reasons and ease, we would choose the cheapest materials possible in order to produce the garments.” So she quit this past May. She now brings in between $30,000 to $40,000 a year as a freelance photographer, which she said is close to what she earned when she began her career in fashion. It’s not much, but it’s “survivable,” she told me. She still lives alone, in the same apartment, and is much more conscious of her spending now. She’s bought health insurance through the Affordable Care Act and cooks with friends instead of going out. “Less money does come with its own stresses, but I would rather deal with those than the stresses of the previous work environment,” she told me.
And she’s not the only person who feels this way. In a mass exit dubbed the “Great Resignation” by psychologist Anthony Klotz, nearly 4 million people left jobs this past June, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. Another 4 million left in July, the fourth consecutive month of such high departure rates. In August, 4.3 million people left their jobs, a record number, according to CNBC. Labor economist Julia Pollak, who works for ZipRecruiter, told me that in normal times, “there are typically 3.5 million people quitting a job any month … That’s a substantially higher number, and employers are really feeling it.” Karin Kimbrough, chief economist at LinkedIn, told me in a recent interview that the “social contract [of] work is being rewritten,” and the balance of power that exists between employer and employee “is shifting towards the worker.”
Her team has seen people leave one job in favor of something better — they’ve deemed this time of “unprecedented” change the “Great Reshuffle.” “We can see when people change from Job A to Job B, and what we're seeing is that these transition rates are well above the prepandemic levels,” she said. According to Kimbrough, there are several industries in flux because of worker shortages, including healthcare, transportation, and logistics, which can encompass “everything from truck drivers to warehouse inventory to the people managing supply chains, which we know are, by the way, a big deal because supply chains are bottled up.”
With so many American workers imagining a new relationship to their careers, I set out to talk to people who either had already quit or were planning to quit their jobs. Hundreds of responses to a BuzzFeed News callout flooded in. The common theme among respondents was that they had all reached a tipping point where the job that they had became much more emotionally and, sometimes, physically taxing. Some people I spoke to quit their jobs entirely while others opted for freelance work so they could exert more control over their lives.
Amber*, 30, lives in North Carolina, near the Outer Banks. In the last year, she has quit three restaurant jobs. (According to Department of Labor statistics, many of the employees who have quit their jobs recently worked in the food service and hospitality industries.) “I was always treated like I was disposable,” she told me during a phone call in early September. The first workplace she left was a brewery. She had worked there as a server for “about a year,” but quit because she had to wait tables outside where it was “really hot out and really miserable.” She left and later landed a new gig at a traditional dine-in restaurant, where she was under the assumption that she would be a server. But she was soon required to take on hosting and bussing duties instead, which meant making $10 an hour instead of $400 a night during the summer season. In a follow-up email, Amber told me that the establishment’s “reasoning was that they were just too short-staffed to accommodate that demand and that everyone had to pick up hosting [and] bussing duties.” So she left to work as a cashier at a juicery, where she “did a little bit of everything,” but the owner “didn’t want to pay taxes.” This put Amber in a bind because she wants to buy a house someday, which would require documents showing her current employment. “It makes it really difficult if I look like I'm on unemployment,” she said.
She feels like her labor isn’t valued and employers have sometimes explicitly said as much, she told me. “I'm constantly having the fact that I'm replaceable just being shoved in my face. If I felt like I mattered, I would care more. I would do a better job,” she said. Because of her difficulty in finding stable work, Amber said she has “lost a lot of respect” for many jobs. “I would love to work for a place I was loyal to, but I don't think that that exists anymore,” she said. For now, the future is uncertain. She’s back to waitressing again, this time at a new restaurant, and is “just taking it day by day,” she told me. “Some days I get almost scared, but for the most part I’m grateful for everything and I know it will all be fine.”
Taiece, a 27-year-old living in Pittsburgh who chose to be identified only by her first name, had been working as an assistant general manager at a craft brewery for two years. In a way, it was like a dozen different jobs in one. “I could realistically be doing anything from trying to catch a trapped bird in our warehouse to pulling weeds in preparation for a 150-person wedding,” she said. She also hired and fired people, trained new employees, orchestrated the weekly schedule, helped plan release dates and branding for new products, and managed the business’s social media. “I'm constantly having the fact that I'm replaceable just being shoved in my face.”
The role took its toll. Staff reductions during the height of the pandemic meant the company went from a 12-person management team to a trio. Taiece was “promoted out of sheer necessity,” and her role at the company “changed several times.” She discovered that there were significant pay disparities. The person who previously held her position, she told me, made $45,000 — $10,000 more than Taiece said she was making at the time, a frustrating yet common occurrence for working-class Black women. Then, while on medical leave for two weeks due to a condition that rendered her physically unable to perform her job, the brewery hired someone to fulfill her tasks. Taiece said the new hire didn’t have adequate experience and was also hired permanently, making the same amount of money as her even though the company purportedly had no money to give Taiece a raise. “That was one of the most sickening blows I could have ever imagined,” she said. “That was the moment that I decided I was not going back to that job.”
Taiece, who studied graphic design in college, has now become a freelance graphic designer. She’s making enough to live on but did receive unemployment insurance, about $350 a week, while she was underemployed. Talking about her current work, she said, “You sell a $500 website, and then you sell a $1,200 branding suite, and you’re like, ‘Whoa, that’s my rent for the month plus enough money to pay all my bills and have money left over.’”
With her freelance design and branding company “thriving,” her decision to stand on her own has been “reassuring,” she said. “I am so much happier and I feel so much freer,” she said. She described her relationship with her former workplace as toxic. “I’m not someone who cries. I'm not someone who raises my voice. I don't get angry. I don't really do the intense swinging pendulum of emotional responses to things, but I found myself being angry and lashing out at people that I care about or being so much more quick to cry or to feel vulnerable than I have ever experienced. And I realized it was because a lot of my life became centered around that place,” she said. “I needed to step away from that in order to be able to reevaluate my position in life. I expect so much less from myself, and that's OK.” “I am so much happier and I feel so much freer.”
Eric*, a 28-year-old self-proclaimed workaholic, recently quit his job as a program manager at a tech startup in San Francisco. (Eric declined to give his last name to protect his privacy.) He understands that it’s a privilege to quit a white-collar job and said he knows he can get another job in a few months because of his network. But he’s become disillusioned with the industry and wants to “recalibrate my priorities, my lifestyle, my health, and be more present for myself.” Though his job paid $100,000 annually, it was demanding. Each week, there were 16 hours of meetings at a minimum, and because he was still working from home, office hours often bled into personal time. Though he liked his colleagues, he realized he was no longer “growing or learning” in his profession, “and the demands became too great.” Setting himself a short-term budget of $4,000 a month to cover living expenses, the jaded tech worker plans to tap into creative pursuits — “take a pottery class, painting class, learn how to play the guitar, you know, go on dates” — while unemployed. “Now I can reclaim that time for myself,” he said.
When I spoke with Barbara, a 61-year-old former truck driver — “off and on since 1981” — who now lives in New Mexico, she told me about how her morning started. “I was at the Grand Canyon this morning watching the sun come up,” she said. “And now I’m getting ready to go through Las Vegas and go over Hoover Dam, and then I’m gonna drive through Yosemite.” A Californian for most of her life, Barbara told me she had never been to the famed national park, but since quitting her job in May, she has been taking in the country’s natural beauty. “My thing is, everyone should be paid a fair wage so that [they] would want to go back to work.”
She used to haul lumber from Eureka, California, to the Bay Area. Barbara told me she worked every day, usually 15 hours, traveling more than 550 miles each trip. When drivers started returning to the road after a pandemic lull — around November 2020, she recalled — the experience became much more stressful. “I literally almost got in an accident every single day because people were just crazy, and rude and obnoxious,” she said. As someone who used to wake up at 3 a.m. to start her days, she finally got fed up and decided to quit. The world of trucking was male-dominated, and she found it had become so politicized it was hard to have a conversation with anyone, she told me. “Everything became so divisive out here,” explained Barbara, who identifies as a liberal. “A lot of truck drivers are conservative, [and] I felt like I just couldn't be who I was. I couldn't say anything because I didn't want people not to like me anymore. The divide in the last four years just became worse and worse and worse, and that is another reason I decided to quit. I just felt like I couldn't be my authentic self,” she said. There were also growing concerns about supply chain issues. In a few short months, she noticed the price of lumber tick up, which would have meant fewer trips for Barbara. She ultimately decided to get out of the industry before the problem became worse.
Barbara rents out her home in Ukiah, California, which she said brings in $700 a month, and she sold her truck and trailer for an additional $80,000. She now lives in a one-bedroom casita on her brother’s land in Santa Fe for free in exchange for “a little bit of work trade” like helping him tend to the property they live on. “I ended up doing well. However, I quit everything. I quit my life,” she said. Inspired by the nomad movement after her husband died last year of pancreatic cancer, she often travels with her pets, a dog named Girl and a cat named Bella. She’s supportive of the Great Resignation. “I think it’s great,” she said. “I have a Republican brother and I have another friend that’s Republican, and they’re always complaining that the people on unemployment need to go back and work. My thing is, everyone should be paid a fair wage so that [they] would want to go back to work.”
Employers now face the challenge of figuring out how to retain talent. Some employers are attempting to lure employees back by giving them more money. For example, some warehouse employers, according to Pollak, the ZipRecruiter labor economist, have chosen to give signing bonuses. “If you're making $15 an hour, getting that signing bonus of $1,000 is equivalent to moving to a job that pays $22 an hour,” Pollak said. “[It’s] a substantial change in your compensation. This is a big deal. It's very attractive to workers, especially in these low-wage jobs.”
Kimbrough, the LinkedIn chief economist, said that white-collar and blue-collar workers are also demanding that employers meet their needs regarding flexibility. Office workers might want to choose which days to come into the office, while those whose work is physically demanding might want more control over the timing of shifts. “They want better pay, but they want work-life balance,” Kimbrough said. “That’s the number-one priority.”
Matt Sanford, 35, became a stay-at-home father in July when he decided not to return to his job as a stage supervisor at a performing arts theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a job he had held for a decade. Sanford was furloughed at the start of the pandemic. After being home with his 7-year-old daughter and 2-year-old son, he discovered what he had been missing. “When the pandemic hit and I was pulled away from these 55-, 60-hour workweeks and got to truly know and experience my children in a very direct way that I really hadn't up until that point, this massive feeling of young fatherly responsibility — love and joy and a lot of sadness and disappointment about having missed so much of that — just really subsumed me,” he said.
Sanford’s wife has a full-time job working with students at the New Mexico School for the Deaf, but they save where they can, often cooking meals at home instead of going out to eat. It hasn’t been easy, though. “We didn’t have a lot of savings at the beginning of the pandemic,” he told me. The mortgage for their home was put in forbearance, which helped a lot, as did the federal stimulus and some assistance from their families. “We were able to establish a consistent enough savings account where we were like, ‘We’re going to be OK for 18 months before either of us really have to start making some big decisions around significantly gainful employment,’” he said.
Millions of people are reevaluating what kind of life they want to have. From working-class individuals who refuse to continue letting a 9-to-5 burn them out to white-collar workers deciding it’s time to unplug for a while, people are on a journey to rediscover who they are outside of their skills as workers. As Chen, the photographer living in New York City, put it, “I think we're kind of remixing the American Dream.”
“As I've gotten older, work is definitely [still] really important, but I think I've started to see it less as my identity,” she said. “What's really important to me is to be able to carve out the time and the space to build important things for me outside of work.”
*Names have been changed to respect the privacy of the people who were interviewed. ●
Biggest U.S. Coal Miner Surges 17% as Global Energy Crisis Boosts Demand
SO WHY IS MANCHIN WHINING Will Wade Mon, October 18, 2021,
(Bloomberg) -- The global energy crisis that’s fueling demand for coal boosted third-quarter results for Peabody Energy Corp., pushing up shares 17%.
Sales exceeded $900 million, the highest in seven quarters, and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of $280 million to $290 million will be triple the year-ago figure, according to preliminary earnings released Monday by the biggest U.S. coal miner. The results bode well for U.S. miners, which are heading into earnings season buoyed by increasing consumption at domestic utilities, higher demand for international shipments and prices climbing around the world. The global economic recovery has increased electricity consumption, leading to a shortage of natural gas and strong demand for coal. While world leaders will converge in Glasgow in two weeks for a critical climate conference, the dirtiest fossil fuel will remain the world’s biggest source of power for years to come.
“We remain optimistic about the future, given strong coal pricing and global demand fundamentals,” Peabody Chief Executive Officer Jim Grech said in the statement.
Peabody surged as much as 17% in New York, the most intraday since July. The shares have surged more than sevenfold this year as demand for coal has climbed. The company will issue its full third-quarter results on Oct. 28.
Peabody is the first U.S. coal producer to provide results for the quarter. Rivals may also report solid gains as power producers around the world are calling for more coal to head off potential shortfalls. U.S. miners are shipping as much as they can dig up, though their ability to increase production is constrained by labor shortages and mining capacity that’s been in decline for years.
Elliott Investment Management, the company’s top shareholder, reduced its stake after exercising short call options, according to a filing Monday.
Marx @ 200: Debating Capitalism & Perspectives for the Future of Radical Theory
The special issue features a debate between David Harvey & Michael Hardt/Toni Negri on the relevance of Marx today, contributions by Silvia Federici on feminism and Marxism, Slavoj Žižek on the future of radical change, Erik Olin Wright on the necessity to transcend capitalism, Lara Monticelli on alternatives to capitalism and prefigurative social movements, Christian Fuchs on Marxian theory of communication and many other excellent contributions as well as the first English translation of a text by Rosa Luxemburg on Karl Marx and a review of Sven-Eric Liedman's new Marx-biography. All articles are freely downloadable, and you can also download a single PDF file containing all the contributions from the link above. With contributions by : David Harvey, Michael Hardt/Toni Negri, Christian Fuchs, Silvia Federici, Slavoj Žižek, Erik Olin Wright, Lara Monticelli, Friederike Beier, Wayne Hope, Todd Wolfson & Peter Funke, Joss Hands, Peter McLaren & Petar Jandrić, Ingo Schmidt, Bahar Kayıhan, Joff P.N. Bradley & Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Paul O'Connell, Chihab El Khachab, Franklin Dmitryev & Eugene Gogol, Bryant William Sculos, Leila Salim Leal, Paul Reynolds, Ben Whitham, Rosa Luxemburg
In spite of its clear and distinguished pedigree in European political philosophy and theology, the concept of alienation is now associated, almost exclusively, with Marxian critical theory and analysis. This special issue of New Proposals has three main objectives. The first is to collect recent scholarship primarily concerned with using, refining, or deploying the concept of alienation, showcasing the concept’s utility across a range of case studies and disciplines. Following this, the second objective is to highlight the philosophical methodology that underwrote Marx’s materialism, thus ensuring that it is not left off the agenda as the New Materialist turn unfolds. Third and finally, given the diverse expressions of alienation each paper in this collection of essays explores the historical, analytical, and practical underpinnings of the concept, its contemporary fate, and speculations on the trajectory of this idea. We hope the results will push readers to undertake a similar revisiting of the concept and using it in their own extensions of Marxian thought and analysis.
Toyota will build a US battery plant as part of a $3.4 billion investment
Igor Bonifacic ·Contributing Writer Mon, October 18, 2021
Toyota plans to spend approximately $3.4 billion to scale its battery production capabilities in the US, the automaker announced on Monday. As part of the investment, Toyota says it will establish a new company that will, with help from its Toyota Tsusho subsidiary, build a battery manufacturing plant somewhere in the US. The company expects to invest $1.29 billion into the facility by the end of 2031.
Toyota said it would share details on the project, including where it plans to build the plant, in the future. However, the facility will initially focus on making batteries for hybrid electric vehicles, with production expected to start sometime in 2025. Toyota expects to create about 1,750 jobs through the project.
If nothing else, the investment is an acknowledgment by Toyota that it needs to diversify its electrification strategy. More so than almost any other automaker, it has invested significantly into fuel cell technology, with not a lot to show for its efforts, at least not in the US. Outside of California, you can’t buy its Mirai fuel-cell sedan. But as part of its Beyond Zero push, Toyota hopes to change that, with it currently planning to offer 70 different electric models, including 15 battery electric vehicles, by 2025.
Our Next Energy closes $25M Series A for battery tech with backing from Bill Gates, BMW
Aria Alamalhodaei Mon, October 18, 2021
Michigan-based startup Our Next Energy (ONE) has closed a $25 million Series A for tech that it says can double the range of EVs, as more and more startups take aim at surpassing the pitfalls of conventional lithium-ion batteries. The 15-month-old company managed to attract major investors, including Bill Gates-founded Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which led the round. Assembly Ventures, BMW i Ventures (German automaker BMW’s venture fund), Singapore-based Flex and Volta Energy Technologies also participated.
ONE is developing a hybrid cell-to-pack system composed of two batteries: the Aries, a cobalt-free battery that the company says avoids fire risk from thermal runaway; and a battery range extender called the Gemini, which ONE estimates will be capable of a staggering 700-mile range on a single charge. The idea is that the Aries would be used for daily trips, while the Gemini could be used for the occasional longer trip. (ONE cites research on its website noting that 85% of vehicles are used at least once per year for a trip longer than 300 miles.)
It’s this hybrid approach that may allow ONE to succeed where others have failed. Key to the hybrid concept is in the chemistries: the Aries is a lithium-iron-phosphate (LFP) chemistry. This is significant because LFPs are an older, cheaper formula that’s conventionally viewed as less energy-dense than more powerful nickel-based battery chemistries. But ONE says its Aries battery pack has managed to increase range and reduce cost, all while avoiding the pitfalls of nickel-based batteries -- namely, the reliance on scarce raw materials like nickel and cobalt.
ONE’s first customer, the identity of which the startup is not disclosing, will use the Aries as a replacement for a nickel-based pack, a company spokesperson said. If LFP batteries could be used as a drop-in replacement for nickel batteries, without the associated trade-offs in range and cost, it could be a game changer for the industry.
ONE CEO Mujeeb Ijaz. Image Credits: Our Next Energy
LFP batteries also tend to have a lower fire risk than nickel and cobalt chemistries, because they are more stable and require a much higher temperature to reach thermal runaway -- a chain reaction that occurs when a battery cell is unable to discharge heat at the rate it's being generated.
ONE was founded by Mujeeb Ijaz, a battery tech veteran who previously led the team at Ford developing its first hybrid fuel cell powertrain, before being poached from battery manufacturer A123 Systems to work on Apple’s mysterious car project. He founded ONE just one month after leaving the consumer tech giant.
The Aries will go into production at the end of 2022. ONE plans to manufacture the batteries in Michigan with a contract manufacturing partner, and the funding will be used to accelerate product development, Ijaz said in a statement.
CRIMINAL CAPITALI$M PAYES Lehman Brothers May Still Cash In on Its Own Big Short From 2009
Lucca de Paoli and Jeremy Hill Mon, October 18, 2021
(Bloomberg) -- Derivatives Lehman Brothers purchased to guard against defaults on the subprime-mortgage bonds that fueled the 2008 crisis could deliver a big pay-out more than 10 years after the bank’s collapse.
Lehman Brothers International Europe, or LBIE, a London-based subsidiary of the defunct bank, is taking bond-insurance firm Assured Guaranty Ltd. to court over decade-old claims that a swath of credit-default swaps it had bought were incorrectly settled in 2009. A trial to resolve the matter started in New York state court on Monday, with Justice Melissa Crane presiding over a virtual hearing.
LBIE claims it’s owed more than $500 million because Assured failed to use market prices when it closed out a series of swaps, tallying them up instead through a method its lawyer said defied “the laws of financial physics” in court on Monday. Assured relied on stale data, flouted market norms and acted in bad faith when it settled the trades, Andrew J. Rossman of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan in New York said on behalf of LBIE.
For its part, Assured says it followed the contracts to the letter when settling them, and the results show that it was actually Lehman on the hook -- owing the bond insurer a $20.7 million termination fee after the bank folded. Rather than a head-spinning skirmish over obscure financial instruments, “at its core, it’s a simple contract dispute, and a simple case,” Lev Dassin of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton said on behalf of Assured. That such arguments still rage some 13 years after the fall of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. underscores the complexity of unraveling the value of credit-protection bets placed in the run-up to the global financial crisis. The 28 credit-default-swap contracts in question, tied to bundles of U.S. and U.K. residential mortgages as well as some corporate loans, had a face value $5.6 billion, but certain quirks of these particular swaps make establishing a settlement price harder.
“Any time the underlying instruments are unusual and illiquid, this kind of dispute can arise,” said John Williams, a partner at Milbank LLP who leads the firm’s derivatives practice. “There can be very big differences between what one person thinks the contract is worth versus another.” Murky Waters
In their simplest form, CDS allow parties to wager on whether large companies will meet their financial obligations, and the settlement process is standardized. The swaps at issue here occupy a murkier and often more bespoke corner of the market, potentially leaving their value more open to interpretation.
As the buyer of the insurance, Lehman says the swaps should have been settled on the basis of market data. But Assured, the seller, says that was hard to do because there was no market to base valuations on. In fact, it says it held an auction for Lehman’s positions and no bidders emerged. Instead, the insurance company estimated the future performance of securities underpinning the trades.
Unsurprisingly, the two methods provided drastically different valuations -- almost $600 million apart.
“Everybody knows that the market-quotations framework is great, except when it doesn’t work,” said Julia Lu, a partner at law firm Ashurst, which counts Assured as a client but not in this case. “When there is a major market dislocation, you may not be able to get a quote anywhere because nobody’s willing to look at your trades.”
Credit-default swaps are designed to insure the holders against a borrower’s failure to meet its debt payments. Much like an insurance contract, the buyer of the credit protection makes fixed payments in exchange for a payout from the seller should something go wrong.
In the context of the financial crisis, CDS are perhaps better known as a tool for speculation rather than insurance, as traders used the swaps to make bearish bets on shaky mortgage bonds. Purchasing insurance on securities before they were set to collapse and then selling them in the midst of the crisis reaped huge rewards for the prescient few that did so early.
Timely Bets
Lehman is the best-known casualty of the crisis that risky mortgage bonds helped to cause. The swaps at issue in this case covered defaults on U.K. mortgage-backed securities, corporate loans and, crucially, two indexes that tracked subprime U.S. residential-mortgage securities. They were insurance on a part of the market that was in serious trouble. “Nearly half of the subprime-mortgage loans underlying these indices were already more than 60 days delinquent, in bankruptcy, in foreclosure, or owned by a lender after a failed foreclosure auction,” Rossman, representing Lehman, said in a pre-trial memo. “Any reasonable party following industry practice to use market prices, or at least market data, would have valued the CDS trades at hundreds of millions of dollars in LBIE’s favor.”
Assured’s argument, however, is that the swaps at the heart of the case were particularly difficult to price because of their unorthodox structure. They had a so-called “pay-as-you-go” set-up and the insurance firm wasn’t required to post collateral if market prices moved against them.
That’s why Assured hired Henderson Global Investors to conduct an auction. It found 10 parties willing to take a look at replacing Lehman on the swaps, but none submitted bids. So, instead of pricing the swaps in reference to the market, it calculated them based on its own models of what the losses of the underlying securities would be.
“None of the bidders, which included many of the most sophisticated financial institutions in the world, were willing to pay any amount to enter into LBIE’s shoes in the transactions,” said Rishi Zutshi, a partner at Cleary Gottlieb in New York who is arguing on behalf of the insurance firm. “Assured acted reasonably in determining its loss.”
A spokesperson for Assured declined to comment.
Atlantic Connection
When the CDS were written Assured was one of a number of insurers known as monolines, meaning that it only wrote insurance on bonds. A number of the biggest monolines, like MBIA Inc. and Ambac Financial Group Inc., were rocked by the subprime crisis and saw their own credit ratings cut. Worries about the health of these insurance companies might have weighed on the valuation of these CDS contracts and made other parties less likely to buy them.
The difficulty of pricing correlation risk and high cost of hedging “made it unlikely that a counterparty would be willing to pay Assured to enter into replacement transactions,” Zutshi said in the pretrial memo.
The result of the trial will be keenly watched by hedge funds like King Street Capital Management and Farallon Capital Management as well as lenders such as Deutsche Bank AG and Barclays Plc. They’re awaiting a judgment from London’s Court of Appeal, where a ruling to decide on disputes between LBIE’s ultimate subordinated creditors could reap huge windfalls. Administrators at PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLP have been winding down Lehman’s European arm since 2008, attempting to recover cash for the bank’s creditors. Money won by LBIE would eventually flow through the capital structure to holders of Lehman’s subordinated debt, now mostly owned by distressed debt investors. That could drastically improve the payout on the holdings for the funds that own those notes.
“This represents one of the final milestones of the LBIE administration, Europe’s biggest-ever bankruptcy,” said Russell Downs, a partner at PwC and one of the joint administrators. “This litigation will settle a key issue around compensation we believe is owed to LBIE.”
