Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Celebrating great entrepreneurs - Peter Pocklington

In May of 1979 I watched Wayne Gretzky in the penultimate game in the history of the WHA. Next game was in Winnipeg. Wayne's team lost, the Jets won the Avco cup. By September the WHA was no more, and both the Jets and the Oilers were in the NHL.

Peter Pocklington owned the Oilers. He owned a lot of stuff back in the day. You could hardly get through the business section of the paper without reading about Peter Pocklington. The slobbering sycophancy of the Canadian business press was so over the top it was embarrassing. High school drop-out makes good. One of the richest men in Canada... yadah yadah blah blah blah. Day after day, the greatness of Peter Puck.

(A quick p.s. to any investor types who may peruse this; said press is still on with the over the top stuff. A quick countervailing opinion: short RIM big time. There is no possible way they can compete with Google and Apple in the long run. However, they are a sturdy little company with a lot of patents etc, so you can bet that before they go through the floor somebody (I'm guessing Google) will scoop them up at a nice premium to share price, so hedge your bets with a pile of call options. You're welcome.)

As he was rocketing into the ranks of the entrepreneurial elite, at least in the minds of most Canadian business journalists, he picked up a mid-size meat-packer called Gainers, I suppose to complement his collection of sports franchises, trust companies, and car dealerships. I think it's called 360 degree integration.  Over-leveraged out the ying-yang in a time of rising interest rates, Pocklington decided to do what every self-respecting entrepreneur would do under such circumstances; fuck the workers.

Now, slaughterhouse work is a shit job no matter how you look at it. It's always cold. It's always wet. You're up to your knees in animal guts all day long. I frankly don't know how anybody can do it for ten minutes. But people did it. And over the years, the union that represented those people had won them wages that would at least enable a half-decent life. So you put in your daily eight hours in hell, but you could go home to a modest bungalow in the suburbs,  feed your family, pay your mortgage, and save for your children's education to make sure they never had to do what you did.

Pocklington had a vision. Bust the union! Why should a business genius like him pay union wages? After all, somewhere on this planet there's gotta be people willing to do the job for less. True entrepreneurial thinking. There followed one of the most violent and divisive strikes that Canada has seen in the last half century.

Long story short, Pocklington won. Slaughterhouse work in Canada today is marginally above minimum wage and done mostly by recent immigrants. There was a picture in the paper recently, eight Somali's living in a little company owned trailer outside one of the big meat plants. They're grinning like they won the lottery. And they did! Instead of starving to death in some African refugee camp, they're making more money than they ever dreamed of. Sure, they'll never own a bungalow in Edmonton, but what the hell, times change.

Don't know what happened to the original Gainers crew, but that's their problem I suppose. As for Peter Pocklington, he's gone bankrupt a couple of times. Wasn't ever one of the richest men in Canada after all. Just finished a six month spell of house arrest for bankruptcy fraud.

The Gainers workers arrested on the picket line while trying to save their livelihoods got far harsher sentences.

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