Boycott Caterpillar!

In his speech at Davos last week Sweden's Finance Minister made a lot of unseemly and unwarranted comments about the situation in Greece.

But he also made a passing reference to "corporate responsibility", a concept that never took root in North America.

It is perhaps overly harsh to say it "never took root". Henry Ford was on the right track with his five dollar day.

Andrew Carnegie built a lot of libraries.

There is a long history of corporate capitalism in America in which a sense of responsibility to the community was at least a consideration in the decisions taken in corporate boardrooms.

Those days are long gone.

The attitude that prevails today is the one all too evident in Caterpillar's decision to close their Canadian locomotive works.

Fuck the workers.

Coming off the best year in its history, Caterpillar can hardly claim that worker concessions are necessary for the company's survival, and they aren't.

The move to shutter Electro-Motive is about nothing other than making an already profitable company even more profitable, and if that means sending 500 working class families to the food bank and onto the dole, so be it.

So you union guys who are climbing into Caterpillar equipment tomorrow, maybe you can give a thought to those 500 workers in London who are out of a job today.

Boycott Caterpillar!