Word: mergerism
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...foam settled on the biggest drinks merger in history, workers at Anheuser-Busch have been a lot less keen than shareholders to toast the company's $52 billion takeover by the Belgium-based behemoth InBev. Unions in hard-hit St. Louis, Missouri, where Budweiser has been brewed since 1876, pledged to protect the jobs of Anheuser-Busch's's 30,000-strong workforce. They better roll up their sleeves, because InBev will bring to town a reputation as a ruthless cost-cutter that has prospered by slicing fat from its units, consolidating breweries and laying off staff in a relentless...
...InBev itself was only created in 2004, from the merger of Belgium's Interbrew with Brazil's AmBev. It is headquartered in the Flemish city of Leuven, where the company can trace its brewing roots back to 1366. Though the board includes former Belgian Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene, the firm's power brokers are Brazilian investment bankers who have placed an accounting technique known as zero-based budgeting at the heart of their global strategy. It compels divisions to justify all costs for each year, rather than simply adjusting the baseline spending from the previous year...
...true that Microsoft and Yahoo had, for the past three years, discussed a "friendly" merger. But that was only to negotiate the terms of surrender. Microsoft had already determined that it must stop Google at all costs, and that Yahoo was the key. Microsoft's operating system monopoly was once a mighty platform that made the company and its partners rich as kings. It made Bill Gates even richer. Then the platform shifted to the Web, owned by no one, but benefiting Google and its magic search engine above all others. Search, after all, is a key to advertising, which...
...have other motivations for its new acquisition - particularly on the Web and in digital broadcasts. While consumers have little reason to type nbc.com into their browsers, The Weather Channel's site attracts some 40 million unique monthly visitors, according to Nielsen Online. The merger could help drive new traffic to NBC's other digital content. What's more, The Weather Channel, which is currently owned by Landmark Communications, has a brand-new $60 million state-of-the-art, high-definition recording studio in Atlanta, from which it can produce digital broadcasts both for television and the Web. Viewers can also...
...unions - including the Steelworkers - have formed alliances with foreign counterparts. And there are already several world-spanning labor bodies, including the International Trade Union Confederation and the International Metalworkers' Federation. For that reason, Richard Hyman, a professor of industrial relations at the London School of Economics, is skeptical the merger will work or is necessary. While unions need to better coordinate efforts on a global scale, he says, they would be better off working through existing federations. MIT's Kochan, on the other hand, calls those groups "very weak ... perpetual debating societies" with no decision-making power." Hyman doesn...