What Paper Firms’ Merger Means
On July 18, we read in The Times that the CEO of Scott Paper Co., Alfred J. Dunlap, will net nearly $100 million from the Kimberly-Clark purchase of the company [“CEO’s Profit Nothing to Sneeze At”]. For his $100 million and one year of effort, Mr. Dunlap implemented the company’s consolidation that raised profits and market value to the shareholders, including himself. He did his job for the company by “improving efficiency”--but in human terms, 10,500 people lost their jobs.
Do Mr. Dunlap or the other shareholders care about those employees, who have also done their jobs for the company, some for many years? Is the only “reason to be in business . . . to make money for your shareholders” (Mr. Dunlap’s words)? Does business not have an obligation also to provide a means of making a living for those who must maintain the buying power to keep the economy in motion?
The justification for this “profit uber alles” attitude, with its disregard for the welfare of those who have given their lives to the production of whatever profit there has been, is that if business does not consolidate and improve its efficiency, it will not be able to compete in the global economy. That statement is true only because our laborers must compete against exploited workers in other countries paid minuscule wages and no benefits. We need to find more creative ways to compete than by continuing to eliminate jobs.
As an academician, I challenge my colleagues who are economists to stop simply trying to predict the economy, which they do not do well, and instead put their creativity toward devising a variation in the ways of the world economy--one that carries the incentive of capitalism but that has enough soul and farsightedness to be uncomfortable blatantly defining the sole reason for business as making short-term profits for shareholders.
LARRY W. COHEN
Founding Faculty and
Professor of Biology
California State University,
San Marcos
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Your article [“2 Paper Firms to Increase Their Heft by Joining Forces,” July 18] on the Kimberly-Clark merger with Scott Paper was very comprehensive, but in the 52 years I have been using ScotTissue (now called Scott 1000), Scott towels and Scotties, I never once thought of these products as “value priced” or “lower-price alternatives” to top-of-the-line Kleenex. Scott and Kimberly-Clark always seemed to fill the same niche.
What worries me as a consumer is that while most other brands of toilet tissue are 280-sheet two-ply rolls, Scott 1000 is a 1,000 sheet one-ply roll. I hope Kimberly-Clark doesn’t change this.
RICK ROFMAN
Van Nuys
