Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Disgruntled and soon to be unemployed workers at a Nortel factory in near Paris decided to threaten to blow up the factory if they weren't given proper severance pay. Almost 500 layoffs were planned this week due to Nortel's bankruptcy proceedings here in Canada.

This, to me anyways, is just as crazy at that time in March where French workers held the boss hostage to demand better severance pay.

It wasn't the first "boss-napping" but those have since stopped... now it's bombs around buildings, recently Peugeot, Renault and Citreon employees also threatened to blow up factories if the salary demands weren't met.

This stuff is just messed up, I mean deep inside of me as someone who hasn't always been on top of the food chain: I feel like cheering for the workers who have the guts to stand up to fat cats and demand what they feel is theirs.

On the other side, as a shareholder you know how much money you've lost in Nortel and from a business point of view laying off these workers makes sense: so let's do it.

The problem with both of those mentalities is what I like to call the "Me me me factor":
-The worker is thinking only of himself, not of the thousands and millions of investors that have lost their homes, their shirts, their lives because of the losses Nortel has taken over the years.
-The shareholders couldn't care less about the workers because they want dividends and profits.

All of the above, in some twisted and strange sort of way, makes SENSE it is the ESSENCE of capitalism... Is it perfect? no. But it's dog eat dog and every man for himself. So you can hate the shareholders or you can hate the workers, because in the end everyone is the same: Me. me. me.