Quote:
Originally Posted by VroomGrrl
Greedy UNION idjuts? Are you serious? The oil companies brought home record profits last year. Why SHOULDN'T the people who pulled the crap out of the ground and did the refinery work share in the profit? I think greedy corporate officers are the idjuts. Let them pay their employees who made their bounty possible - or as far as I'm concerned, they can just STFU and do the dirty work themselves. Serves em right.
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Wrong. Wrong wrong wrong wrong. You've been getting your information from 10 second snippets again.
Exxonmobil recorded a record profit for the year, but they also reported record SALES. Most of that profit was in oil exploration and production, not refining which is a different part of the company. XOM's profit margin for the year was right around 10%. Their 4th quarter profit was down 33%.
They earned just over $40 billion, but had sales of $464 billion. We're talking about a company that has a market cap of around $400 billion which is down about 20% for the year.
Lots of companies have much higher profit margins than that, lots and lots of them. Microsoft's net profit was 27.8% during that same period.
Exxonmobil is just so large that they have enormous sales numbers, which transfers into large profits even if the profit margin isn't huge.
When you said
"OIL COMPANIES" you used the
plural form. Please give me an example of an oil company that reported record profit for the year besides XOM. JUST ONE! I study this industry allot. I have for nearly three decades. Evidently you don't.
Valero, North America's largest refining company reported a net profit of
NEGATIVE .96% last quarter and is shutting down two refineries.
Tesoro, another independent oil refining company reported a new profit of
.46% last quarter and has shut down one of it's seven refineries.
BP reported a net profit of 7.62%, again most of that was from oil, not refining.
Shell's profit was down 28% for the quarter and it's refining operation lost money.
Flying J, an independent refiner, pipeline, and retailer filed bankruptcy last quarter.
Things are tough for the refining business right now and are going to get tougher. They are closing plants, laying off workers, and struggling to be stay afloat and you think they should hand over whatever profit they made LAST YEAR to workers who are already making extremely good money for what they do?
Good thing you don't run a corporation.
BTW, from what I've heard the offer on the table is 3 to 3 1/3% raises per year for the next three years, and the unions are saying no way. They want lots more.