Altogether Brascan "owns and operates more than 120 major production facilities and properties, located mainly in Canada, the United States and South America, employing over 50,000 people," boasts the company's 1999 annual report to shareholders.
  Starting with a few millions in the late 1960s, the Bronfman brothers hired a number of managers, many from the accounting firm of Touche Ross, to handle their financial affairs. Led by the likes of Jack Cockwell, David Kerr, Robert Harding, Michael Cornelissen, and Trevor Eyton, the Bronfman managers parleyed their bosses' millions into assets worth billions over the next three decades.
  Cockwell and his cronies became legendary figures among the Canadian corporate elite: swaggering workaholics renowned for their short tempers and the bully-boy tactics they employed to bulldoze anyone in their way.
  "They are always ready to do battle," a former company insider told the Globe and Mail in 1993. "They are very impetuous in the way they react to information."
  By the late 90's the Bronfmans were ready to cash out of their holding company, and they did so by selling the bulk of their holdings to Cockwell et al.
  The chief jewel in Brascan's corporate diadem was Noranda, which had in turn acquired a controlling interest in Canada's second largest nickel producer, Falconbridge, which had been based in Sudbury's Nickel Belt since 1928.
  Cockwell and company left nothing to chance when it came to calling the shots at "Falco," as it is known locally. The senior corporate officers at Brascan and Noranda took seats on the nickel producer's board, (see chart below), and with good reason: in the first half of 2000 Falco's record earnings were helping to generate nearly half of Noranda's cash operating margin.
  But the Brascan/Noranda/Falco crowd could not, it seems, stand prosperity. Indeed, their mano a mano approach to corporate life had produced disappointing results, as the Globe and Mail's Report on Business Magazine noted in a January, 2001 profile of Brascan.
  "Brascan and some of its investments, notably Noranda, have been mediocre stock-market performers. Both Noranda and Brascan have underperformed the TSE 300 Index in recent years.
  "Noranda shares have the dubious distinction of underperforming the index by a fair margin since the early 1980s, when Cockwell's team finally seized control of the company with a $40-a-share offer. [Noranda now trades for about one third of that.]
  "One Bay Street investor who has followed the Brascan group closely says: 'I'm not going to invest in guys who aren't good investors. What's going to make Cockwell, at age 60, suddenly become a good investor?'"
  Although the company seemed poised to set all-time single-year profit records for a Canadian nickel company and the firm was actually achieving goals for earnings on equity that had been set for the following year, Sudbury's Falconbridge management provoked a strike by the workforce there that began on August 1st, 2000.
  The familiar rhetoric of globalization was used to justify demands that Local 598 of the Mine Mill/CAW give up contract provisions that had been won over decades. "Times were changing. The company needed to become more globally competitive. The union was top-heavy with functionaries like safety and health advocates who failed to "add value" to the overall enterprise."
  At first, the contest seemed totally one-sided. The 1,250 members of Local 598 seemed no match for two-fisted Bay Streeters with deep pockets (Noranda had a war chest of $2 billion owing to an earlier asset sale), who tweaked the union's nose by hiring a private security firm, running scabs, and maintaining partial production despite the strike.
  Provincial laws passed by the Tory government of Mike Harris were all on the company's side. This was fully illustrated in late October, when a Sudbury judge slapped the union with a sweeping injunction and verbal tongue lashing. The strikers were forced to stand idly by and watch scab workers and materials pass through their picket lines, and by early November it appeared that resistance to the Borg-like forces of globalization really was futile.
  And then, almost imperceptibly at first, the momentum began to swing back to the strikers. The hardrock miners, mill, and smelterworkers of Sudbury staunchly resisted the siren song of company propagandists to return to work as individuals.
  They donned balaclavas in the bitter, pre-dawn, cold and fought low-level intensity guerilla street battles with company goons, damaging vehicles and disrupting the flow of personnel and material despite the court injunction.
  Some strikers voted with their feet, though not the way the company hoped: they applied for work at Falco's crosstown rival Inco, and dozens found it, representing a significant long-term subtraction of skills and training for the strikebound company.
  The Canadian Auto Workers' Union boosted strike pay and poured in additional resources to bolster morale and show support. The Sudbury community, long a union stronghold, rallied behind the strikers while isolating the company and its minions. Most of all, though, the 1,250 members of Local 598 showed resolute courage and determination to retain their union, and its collective bargaining agreement, at all costs.
  On Thursday, February 1st, the strike at Falconbridge will enter its sixth month. The company has now conceded publicly that it wants an end to the dispute, that it is losing money, and that it will have to schedule temporary layoffs for its refinery workers in Norway because of the strike.
  While the outcome of the dispute remains far from certain, it is already clear that a group of determined workers may, on occasion, be able to trump the forces of globalization, no matter how powerful. At the very least the Falconbridge strike show that resourceful workers can deal globalization's proponents a very painful, and quite public, bloody nose.

Interlocking boards: A road map of three powerful corporations

  The following lists directors of Falcobridge, Noranda and Edper Brascan. *** denotes directors who sit on the boards of all three companies, ** denotes directors who sit on two boards, * denotes directors who sit on only one.

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Posted, January 29, 2001