Cucumbers: when will we learn to love them again?
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – “It’s the bean sprouts”, the source of the E. coli outbreak in Germany, Reinhard Burger, Germany’s head of infectious diseases programme, said Friday morning 10 June. The actual sprouts that are behind what the WHO labels the “the unusual enteroaggregative verocytotoxin-producing Escherichia coli (EAggEC VTEC) O104:H4 bacterium” have not yet been pinpointed.
Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment and Food Safety and the Robert Koch-Institute will publish a joint press release Friday.
The number of new infections has been falling in recent days, but E.coli itself has killed 6 people in Germany and the HUS complication has killed 26, with an additional death in Sweden, according to WHO worldwide figures for the outbreak. In total, 2,909 people have been infected.
The European Union said Tuesday it would set aside €210 million for farmers touched by the outbreak, but a European farmers organization, Colos, says the losses are reaching €400m a week. Spanish farmers, the largest fruit and vegetable producers in Europe, calculate they have lost €200m in business since the start of the outbreak at the end of April, and German farmers say they have lost €60m, according to news agency AFP/TSR (Fr).
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – The line for people applying for lifeguard jobs in Newport Beach, California in the US is about to get a lot longer, with news of how much some are paid revealed by a city budget report.
A group of 13 senior lifeguards receives in the area of $100,000 a year, with two being paid more than $200,000 each. But the lifeguards in question, who train some 200 seasonal guards a year, say their salaries are on a par with those of senior fire department managers, for similar work, reports AP in the Globe & Mail.
The salary information came out as the city looks for ways to reduce the cost of its pension plan.
Newport’s Orange County Register, which has been tracking the international interest in its pay scale, points out that it is not alone, and that Huntington Beach, down the road, pays just as much.
Rupert Murdoch is going to single-handedly save the dying print news media, which online news services are strangling, by making consumers cough up hard money, starting in June. One week before the pay-day deadline, his News International company has published the new web sites of two key papers in his save-the-papers drive, The Times and The Sunday Times. The two sites have a paywall which will be activated 1 June: visitors will be able to read the home page for free, but must pay for news beyond that point. The site might be free, but visitors wanting to read beyond page 1 today must register.
For now, the new sites at first look like a step into the past, showing a traditional newsprint page rather than a news service that relies on web-friendly tools: the typeface is the classic Times Roman of newspapers, the banner at the top is classic newspaper style and the page has six columns, normal for print but unusual for web pages today.
The company owns the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), where it says it has successfully created a for-pay online product, with owner Murdoch in 2009 pointing to a high number of iPhone downloads. But the WSJ is a specialized financial news service and the two Times in London are aimed at a general public. Industry observers are giving mixed prognoses for the venture. News International says, according to CNN, that it expects to lose 90 percent of its online readers, but that the other 10 percent it retains will be “more engaged”.
Links to other sites: CNN, The Times (new site), Sunday Times
Punitive damages may be highest ever employment discrimination verdict cost for a company in the US
New York, NY, USA (GenevaLunch) – Novartis, Basel-based pharmaceuticals company, has been ordered by a judge in Manhattan to pay $250 million in punitive damages to 5,600 women in an American division of the company. Earlier this week Novartis was told to pay $2.5 million in compensation to a much smaller group. The two payments follow a guilty verdict for the multinational on charges of gender discrimination,failling to promote women and paying them less. The award represents 2.6 percent of 2009 revenues for the division.
Links to other sites: Business Week/Bloomberg, Le Temps (Fre), Los Angeles Times
Basel, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Novartis has been told to pay $3.3 million to 12 women in compensatory damages in the US, for gender discrimination at Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corp, a US division of the Basel-based company. Punitive damages are to be announced later and will cover a larger group. The women, employees at the company, started a class-action lawsuit in 2004, saying they were victims of discrimination at work, paid less and promoted less often.
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - UBS’a annual report, published Monday 15 March, stoked the fire under a debate in the lower house of Swiss parliament over limiting executive pay packages. Thirteen top managers at the Swiss bank were paid CHF68.7 million in 2009, of which nearly CHF55 was in the form of bonuses, and the bank spent another CHF41.3 paying former managers a mix of compensation.
The figures were nearly 10 times those for 2008, when the bank turned to the government for a bailout package.
The bank two weeks earlier, 1 March, announced losses for a third quarter running, and the details about payouts come just as the lower house of the Swiss parliament has been debating putting a cap on executive pay.
British civil servants are striking for a second day, Tuesday 9 March, over cuts in redundancy pay, while Portugal’s government has announced austerity measures that could match those of Greece. In other world financial news, Aer Lingus announced losses for 2009 of €81 million that are four times the loss in 2008, just three days after cabin crrew rejected a negotiated €97 million plan to cut costs.
Link to other sites: Irish Times, RTE, Ireland, Deutsche-Welle
Reuters news video
US bank Wells Fargo paid its chief executive officer John Stumpf $21.3 million in 2009, a sharp increase over his pay package of $8.8m in 2008, putting him at the top of the pay scale for US bankers in 2009. The bank repaid the federal government $25m, to the Treasury’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (Tarp) in December 2009, freeing it from the programme’s restrictions on pay. It more than doubled the pay of its senior executives for the year, while technically lowering their salaries. (Ed. note: AP calculates, based on its analysis of executive pay as listed with federal regulators, that he earned $18.7m).
Links to other sites: Bloomberg, Business Week/AP, Los Angeles Times
To Facebook or not? That is the question in Payerne
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Job-seekers in Switzerland, in particular the international population of workers, often have few clues about what standard salaries are, since companies are not allowed to advertise specific job salaries, for privacy reasons. TSR/RSR have provided a useful service by posting a table of average salaries by industry. The low end of the scale is the hotel business, with an average of CHF4,000 per month and at the top is banking and finance, with an average monthly income of CHF8,500.
The table is based on Swiss federal statistics for 2008. It also shows percentage increases in salaries for 2010 that have been announced by six of the largest employers, the industries that pay the least and the change in salaries overall for the past 30 years.
Links to other sites: Travailler en Suisse (Fre), with general Swiss salary information, ch.ch on general work information
The Bank of America will pay the US government $45 billion, the money loaned to it under the Tarp bailout plan. The surprise announcement Wednesday 2 December provides some relief for the federal government, which has been criticized for using taxpayers’ money to keep banks alive, only to see them turn around and pay large bonuses as they return to profitability. Bank of America is looking for a new CEO, and observers say paying back the loan will allow it to offer a better pay package, with less government pressure, but it also makes the bank more vulnerable to risk.
British Airways has asked its employees to take unpaid leaves of absence or work without pay for up to a month to help it weather the financial storm that caused it to post a record loss of £400 million for 2008, reports CNN. The company has not confirmed the information, nor do the British media report it but BA and the Unite union have been bickering over pay proposals in recent days.
Subway trains in London, England are likely to come to a halt for two days, with drivers on strike from 19:00 Tuesday 9 June until late Thursday. Their union is calling for higher pay. PR-Inside
British Airways last week told staff that it is seeking 2,000 voluntary redundancies among the 14,000 flight crew members, raising fears of a strike by airline staff this summer, according to the Times. The company announced a £401 pre-tax loss 22 May, the worst in the company’s history, due to a mix of falling business travel, a high pound and high fuel costs. Guardian
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - The Swiss banks regulatory body, Finma, has begun consulting with the banking industry and other concerned parties on a system that would limit salaries and bonuses in order to avoid excessive risk in the future. The consultation runs from now to 14 August and the system is expected to go into effect in January 2010, with banks required to comply by 2011. UBS, however, must comply with the principles in 2009, as part of the agreement under which it is receiving government funding.
Two of the key features are greater transparency and performance compensation based on longer periods, but Finma also emphasized in publishing news of the consulting process 3 June that banks’ boards will be expected to play a stronger role in overseeing pay. The proposed policy, referred to as the Circular, would apply to all financial institutions, not just large banks, which is what international financial market supervisory bodies are currently recommending.
Geneva, Switzerland (Tribune de Genève, Fre) – the city of Geneva’s notoriously complicated salary and benefits packages is about to be streamlined, with standard pay rates and fewer exceptions, according to the Tribune, which obtained a copy of a political agreement reached after months of wrangling.
