The New York Times reports that the company that owns Stella D'Oro cookies has been ordered to reinstate the 134 Bronx-based workers who have been on strike since their contract expired last summer, and to pay the workers back wages plus interest.
As I wrote in a post on The Jew and the Carrot, Brynwood Partners bought Stella D'Oro in 2006 and, when the workers' contracts ran out last summer, demanded that workers accept pay cuts of up to 26% and begin contributing to their health insurance costs.
As far as I can tell, Jews are just about the only consumers of Stella D'Oro cookies, whose major advantage is that they're parve (dairy free) and therefore can be eaten after a meat meal. A few years ago, the company decided to begin using dairy chocolate in some of its cookies; the ensuing outrage from the kosher-keeping community forced a return to (more expensive) parve chocolate.
As I suggested in my earlier post, the Jewish community can use this economic power not only to hold onto parve chocolatey goodness, but to make sure that the workers who help satisfy our sweet tooths are paid decent wages.
While this victory is a huge step forward for the workers, the fight might not be over yet. The company still can appeal the decision to the National Labor Relations Board, which is notoriously slow in hearing cases. In the meantime, it's still worth it to shoot a note to Henrik Hartong, Jr., the senior partner of Brynwood at huppsy@brynwoodpartners.com to let him know how glad you are that the workers will be getting their jobs and their wages back. Can't hurt to tell him that you're now more likely to buy his cookies.
I consider myself a feminist. A proud and public one. Most who know me would emphatically agree. I also consider myself good at confrontation. It feels awkward to use the word “good,” but it’s the right one. While I don’t revel in them, typically, I manage difficult conversations very well.
So why oh why, is it so ridiculously hard for me to tell a creep on the subway that the way he is invading my space is inappropriate and unacceptable? Bloody hell, it’s next to impossible for me to turn to the person beside me and say, hey you, stopping touching me.
Is it just me? I know it’s not. I’ve had this conversation with friends and co-workers. And I know I’m not the first woman to make the brilliant observation that men often take up more than their fair share of space.
Last night, I’m on my way home. Riding on one of the new trains with the long blue seats. I’m sitting at the far right, next to the handrail. The train isn’t very crowded. After a few stops, a young, thin guy sits down next to me. For no legitimate reason, he could fit a soccer ball between his legs...
As JFSJ's gets more involved in the green jobs movement, equity and diversity are central priorities. The NRDC, which is a great organization doing important work, underscores (and perhaps exacerbates) the problem when it put up something like this.
Twelve examples of green jobs, only one held by a woman. Of the eleven men, ALL appear to be white guys.
The Hippocratic Oath is often rendered in modern parlance as “do no harm,” with little recognition that it also goes on to trash physician-assisted suicide and abortion. It also advocates celibacy. So it’s safe to say the Hippocratic Oath isn’t entirely sound, though the basic principle is a good one. That would be why medical schools continue to administer some form of the oath (often sans anti-abortion, pro-celibacy tidbits).
But aside from the obvious power wielded by medical professionals, why not have a similar oath for other professions? In the wake of Wall Street’s meltdown, shouldn’t MBA’s also have to recite an oath to do no harm — or at least be a little less greedy at the expense of lower-order workers?
That is the thinking behind the MBA Oath, published in May by a group of Harvard Business School students. I learned of this thanks to recent MBA graduate Elana Berkowitz, writing in the across-the-pond Guardian newspaper. The oath-takers pledge themselves to “act with utmost integrity and pursue [their] work in an ethical manner,” along with other good things. It starts out by emphasizing the purpose of business professionals is “to serve the greater good by bringing people and resources together to create value that no single individual can create alone.”
Fine language, I suppose, and it’s certainly a better graduation tradition than the old one — waving $20 bills about. Crassness has never been a bad business strategy in this country, apparently. But count me as a cynic, at least of the value of the oath in and of itself. The Hippocratic Oath is all good and dandy, but I wonder what it would accomplish in a world without malpractice lawsuits and the FDA. On the business side of medicine, health insurers have been allowed to do considerable harm in large part because of government-sanctioned insulation from the full force and effect of lawsuits.
Will MBA’s be any more motivated by this oath in the absence of a vigorous government regulatory structure? I doubt it. As a Jew, I’ve grown to appreciate the value of communal guilt. It’s the difference, they say, between us and Catholics. They guilt themselves individually. We guilt each other. Theirs may be more efficient, but ours is better at enforcing good behavior in the community. The same, I think, is true in the case of policing bad business behavior.
So let them take this oath. It’s a fine bit of PR and probably will help a few here and there to feel good about their chosen profession. But my guess is the largesse afforded MBA’s when the paychecks are cut is more a motivating factor. A counter-balance with as much force on the bottom-line seems necessary, and that’s a renewed appreciation for the necessity of regulation.
P.S. Elana Berkowitz, to her credit, made these points as well. I don’t want to make it sound like she was just cheerleading the MBA Oath. I’m a little wary, though, of her hope for a “cultural shift within the business community.” Wary, but hopeful, especially if the research she cited by MIT behavioural economist Dan Ariely holds water.
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It would seem a Republican activist in South Carolina has gotten himself into hot water. On Facebook (and let's put aside the conversation about how far we've come into the age of new media), Rusty DePass said that a gorilla that had escaped Riverbanks Zoo was "just one of Michelle's ancestors" in reference to the current First Lady, Michelle Obama.
DePass is a former chair of the state election commission, and he's admitted that he was referring to the First Lady. CNN is now carrying video on the story from its local affiliate, but let's get beyond the actual story. It was a clearly stupid comment that probably gets made by any number of white GOP (and non-GOP) activists in the south (and the north, east, west, etc.), but in this case it was made on a public website.
Bob Coble, mayor of Columbia, South Carolina, says in the video that DePass should apologize, and more important that it is a racist comment. Because, it obviously is a racist comment. Imagine, for a moment, this comment being made about a white First Lady. It wouldn't even make sense, outside of the racist bigotry that equates blacks with lower-order apes.
The video kind of glosses over that, and when it comes back to Coble, a rival of DePass', he talks about the long tradition of First Ladies and how none of them deserve that kind of comment. But none of them, up until Michelle Obama, would be on the receiving end of that kind of comment. For obvious reasons. None of them before Michelle Obama has been black.
So let's not frame this in terms of the stature of her office. Let's call this what it is in more explicit terms. A white, southern GOP blowhard called a black woman an ape in order to demean her. It's almost predictable to the point of not being news. Does it even matter that she's the current spouse of Oval Office occupant?
“The Holocaust is a uniquely Jewish event.” So sayeth Assemblyman Dov Hikind, representative of Brooklyn.
You might not be aware that Nazi Germany, in addition to murdering six million Jews, also managed to snuff out the lives of some five million other undesirable groups: gays, Roma (gypsies), and Jehovah’s Witnesses just to name a few. If you weren’t aware of that, it’s probably due in large part to the efforts of people like Dov Hikind.
The occasion for Hikind’s remarks is a plan that would honor gays and other non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution at Brooklyn’s Holocaust Memorial Park. You’ve probably seen a memorial like the one in Brooklyn. They exist all over the country, virtually anywhere a sizable population of Jews reside. It hardly matters that the Holocaust didn’t happen here. Hikind and others in the Jewish community have made it a communal mission for several decades now to commemorate the deaths of 6 million Jews at the hands of Hitler’s minions.
Good for them. I’m a fan of remembering the Holocaust. I think it’s a significant part of our history, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, and we have much to learn from it. As with all shameful moments in human history, it can be tempting to turn away from it, bury it, pretend it could never happen again. It is critically important that we not bury it, not forget it, if only because it certainly can happen again.
During World War II we marched Japanese-Americans into internment camps. After 9/11 we didn’t have to march Arab-Americans and other Muslim citizens into camps. But we did persecute them in a similar manner. In a moment of fear, we repeated our historic mistakes.
To avoid this, we study history. That is why it is there, recorded for posterity. That is how we learn.
When I heard about the tragic murder of Dr. George Tiller, the Wichita doctor fatally shot in his church by an opponent of reproductive choice, I thought immediately about a group of brave women I met in Florida a couple of weeks ago.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention, while lamenting that this ad didn't come out before Prop 8 passed, you can donate now and help get it on the air in California, if your pocket book is so inclined. Now, on with the original blog post...
Alex Koppelman at Salon.com's War Room blog has a perfectly devastating post on a new ad in support of gay marriage in California. His point, in short, where was this ad before Proposition 8 passed?
California's Supreme Court, by a vote of 6-1 has upheld the gay marriage ban, otherwise known as Proposition 8, that passed in a referendum last year. More strictly speaking, they held that the ban did restrict the designation of marriage "while not otherwise affecting the fundamental constitutional rights of same-sex couples." Thus it is constitutional, which is an eloquent sort of yak caca, but it was a predicted ruling.
The silver lining, if there is one, is that the court ruled not to invalidate the approximately 18,000 marriages performed in the state prior to Proposition 8's passage. This from the same court that did invalidate the marriages performed by San Francisco in 2004. Progress marches onward, or more accurately, it stumbles in an ignorant stupor towards the light of tomorrow's sobriety.
I bring all of this up, because while it is in so many ways a travesty against the civil liberties of the gay community, it does not sway me from my more hopeful post of last week. Therein, I argued that I was wrong to blast the gay community for overreaching in 2004 when it pushed gay marriage in the Bay Area and Massachusetts.
I think, despite this setback, that my general optimism remains correct. So much progress has been made, and while vast swaths of the population still vehemently oppose gay marriage, most of them aren't willing to openly oppose basic equal rights for gays. The time seems nearer than it ever has when gays and lesbians will be able to afford the same legal rights and protections of married heterosexual couples.
As for California, well... at least they're trying.
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