November 16, 2007 10:20
Why I won't blog on vacation
Work in Progress is going on holiday. I mean it.
On Sunday, I'm going to take my little one and travel 8,000 miles to my hometown in Japan. My mom has advanced cancer, and my pop is old, so my three siblings and I—none of whom live in the country anymore—take turns making the international house calls. For two weeks, I'll trade reporting and writing for the more glamourous duties of chauffering old people to hospitals, making my mom comfortable during her chemo, preparing dinner, scrubbing floors, hauling trash—all to her highly exacting specifications. Ah, vacation.
The thing is, every time I take a break from work, work reels me back in. The last time I was in Japan was in April, and a few days before I left to return home, I received the e-mail: "We might want to run your story this week. Can you wrap it up?" I'd spent the past couple of months reporting a piece about unemployed Iraq war vets, and so I scrambled to scratch it out over the next days. I parked my little one in front of bizarro Japanese kid shows on TV and broke only to make lunch and cut down a mimosa tree.
You might ask why I wouldn't just tell my editor, "You know what? I'm on holiday, and plus I'm really busy taking care of my really sick mom. Couldja cut me a break and let me write it in a few days, when I'm back at work?" Yes, I ask myself that too. The answer is that my workplace is so competitive that we writers jump at the chance for publication. And you know, I wouldn't have minded squandering that time to write the story for my magazine, honest—if it had run. Then. Or ever. (It wound up here, on TIME.com, where I should have pitched it in the first place. I still think it's a damn good story.)
But what am I whining about? You're all familiar. As Lisa Belkin writes in this Sunday's New York Times (bolds mine),
I don’t mean to give the impression that I never work on vacation. I almost always do, which makes me all too typical. According to a survey this year of more than 6,800 workers by CareerBuilder.com, 33 percent stay in touch with the office while they are away. My most memorable work-infected vacation was in an era before laptops, when a deadline on a magazine article collided with two prepaid weeks at a beach house. So I dragged the computer and the printer and the fax machine and the dial-up modem to the beach.
She reports that big insurers are beginning to offer policies that cover travelers who have to cancel vacations due to work:
AIG, which introduced its plan just a few weeks ago, charges $24 to add the “cancel for work reasons” option to a travel insurance plan, while Access America, which created the category just last year, charges $19.
It's one thing if I skip a cruise. But how do I quantify the loss of two days I could have spent conducting an annual reorganization of my mom's futon closet? How do I monetize hanging out on her bed and gossiping about her friends? What's the financial value of watching her delight at a special delivery of bamboo shoots and cooking them as per her precise instructions?
More and more these days, our work seeps into our non-work lives. I know I'll succumb to checking e-mail while I'm there. I have two stories in the hopper that may suddenly find themselves in contention for publication, meaning I might very well find myself in a reprise of last April. And I'll feel a great urge to blog.
But I won't. Much as I'll miss you, friends, I'll just have to trust you'll be back to check in after Dec. 3. In the meantime, I'll be baking a ham my mom has ordered me to sneak through customs and clearing out the tool shed. Happy Thanksgiving, folks.
November 16, 2007 9:00
Why don't journalists get residuals?
Albert Kim makes this argument better than I could in the Huffington Post yesterday:
As a writer who's worked both in Hollywood and journalism, it's clear to me that the arguments used to justify residuals in one field could certainly apply in the other. Newspaper and magazine reporters produce stories and the companies that employ them profit from those creative efforts. And just as in Hollywood, those media conglomerates are always on the lookout for ways to (pardon my corporate speak) repurpose their material. Journalism doesn't have as many natural recycling opportunities -- news stories don't really lend themselves to reruns -- but it does happen.
At Sports Illustrated, popular features are often anthologized in hardcover editions with names like SI's Great Baseball Writing. Writers for The New York Times frequently see their articles picked up by other papers around the country. When I was a writer for Entertainment Weekly, my pieces would routinely get republished by other magazines in the Time Inc. empire -- usually international editions like Who Weekly in Australia or Time Asia. And of course all of these outlets post stories from their print edition on the web, which as we've all been told is the shining new frontier when it comes to advertising bucks.None of that extra revenue trickles back to the writers. So why is it that a system that's considered part of the natural order in Hollywood is so utterly alien in journalism?
The issue, writes Kim, is the long-established pay structure for journalists.
Well for one thing, journalism companies have a legal basis for depriving their writers of residuals -- the "work for hire" principle. Unlike Hollywood writers who are essentially independent contractors, most journalists are salaried employees, with regular paychecks and health benefits and pension plans. As such, the fruits of their labor become the property of their employers. That's the trade-off. Just as an engineer for Intel waives any financial claim to breakthroughs in chip design he makes while on the corporate clock, newspaper and magazine writers forswear any ownership stake in their stories.
Sure, work-for-hire is legal. It's the system that employs much of working America. Still,
...work-for-hire doesn't explain why freelance journalists don't get residuals. Their situation is the one that's the most analogous to writers in Hollywood, yet when a freelancer's work is reused online, or reprinted in an international edition, or syndicated, he or she typically doesn't get a single extra cent.
Not one red cent. I work at the same company that employed Kim for many years, and I can attest to our haphazard policy on this matter, even (or especially?) for staffers. When I was a writer at Money, I would get a small fee—$200, if I recall—if my material was reprinted by the Custom Publishing division. But when a story I wrote also ran in Asiaweek, I saw no payment at all.
Should journalists get residuals?
November 15, 2007 12:57
Stephon Marbury and other stupid workplace tricks
We all do stupid things at work. Below, my nominations for the top 10 stupidest workplace mistakes by some boldface names, inspired by the recent antics of Knicks point guard Stephon Marbury.
1. Stupid workplace trick: Stephon Marbury leaves Phoenix before a game against the Suns on Nov. 13 after a reported altercation with boss Isiah Thomas and flies back to New York.
Consequence: Fined $180,000 for missing the game. The Knicks lost 113-102.
What now: He's got $42 million and two years left on his contract. He could always play in Italy.
2. Stupid workplace trick: Don Imus spouts racist and sexist epithets about the Rutgers women's basketball team on his radio show, Imus in the Morning, in early 2007.
Consequence: Fired. MSNBC dumps the TV simulcast.
What now: He returns to the airwaves on WABC-AM on Dec. 3. Nappy head and all.
3. Stupid workplace trick: Martha Stewart, a onetime stockbroker, skirts a loss of $45,673 by selling all her ImClone stock a day before it fell 16% in 2002. According to the SEC, she used insider information.
Consequence: Convicted of felony in 2004 and sentenced to five months in jail. Discovered love for ponchos.
What now: Her Apprentice spin-off tanked, but she's back as business magnate, author, editor and homemaker extraordinaire. She can't fire herself.
4. Stupid workplace trick: Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern, has an "inappropriate" relationship with her boss, President Bill Clinton, in 1996 and 1997.
Consequence: Removed from White House. (Clinton is impeached by the House of Representatives and ultimately acquitted by the Senate.)
What now: Lewinsky received a master's degree in social psychology from the London School of Economics in 2006. Her dating reality show didn't pan out.
5. Stupid workplace trick: Judith Regan, publisher of an imprint at HarperCollins, announces the publication of a hypothetical confessional by O.J. Simpson titled If I Did It in 2006.
Consequence: Fired.
What now: Regan filed a lawsuit in November that accuses HarperCollins of scapegoating her for the public uproar over the book, and of trying to hush up her affair with Giuliani protegé Bernard Kerik. There's a bestseller in here somewhere.
6. Stupid workplace trick: Isaiah Washington brawls with castmate Patrick Dempsey on hit show Grey's Anatomy, and in the process outs his castmate, T.R. Knight.
Consequence: Fired.
What now: Guest-starring in NBC's Bionic Woman. Hint: he's not the title character.
7. Stupid workplace trick: Senator Larry Craig is arrested for soliciting sex in a men's bathroom stall in Minneapolis airport in June 2007, and pleads guilty to misdemeanor.
Consequence: Announces resignation in September, then tries to withdraw it.
What now: Still in office. And still not gay.
8. Stupid workplace trick: Star Jones prematurely announces she was "fired" from The View during contract negotiations in 2006.
Consequence: Fired.
What now: Her CourtTV show debuted in August. It's panned. But at least she didn't do anything drastic to get thin.
9. Stupid workplace trick: Henry Blodget wins a coveted job as an analyst at Merrill Lynch after correctly predicting Amazon would hit $400 in 1998—then boasts about his bogus stock recommendations in e-mails.
Consequence: Settled charges by SEC on civil securities fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission; banned from the securities industry for life.
What now: Reincarnated as a writer for Slate and other publications; he published a book in January 2007 titled The Wall Street Self-Defense Manual: A Consumer's Guide to Intelligent Investing. Honest.
10. Stupid workplace trick: Knicks coach Isiah Thomas is sued by Anucha Browne Sanders, former executive at Madison Square Garden, for sexual harassment.
Consequence: Loses suit. MSG ordered to pay Browne Sanders $11.6 million.
What now: He's still got his job. Now he's got to decide what to do with Marbury's. A boss reaps what he sows.
November 15, 2007 10:45
Offensive interview questions
A new survey by Development Dimensions International (DDI) and Monster.com asked job seekers and hiring managers to share the most inappropriate questions they've been asked during a job interview. DDI divided them into three categories, as below:
Crossing the Line … Illegal and Inappropriate
• "Would you join a church to get a job?"• "Are you single? Why not?"
• "Why are you not yet married?"
Offensive and Outrageous
• "Would you be available from time to time to watch my children?"
• "Are you willing to further this interview over dinner and do you mind me bringing my daughter along?"
• "Would you be willing to stay overnight with a client if they request it?"
Being Thorough vs. Getting Too Personal: How Much is Too Much?
• "Do you intend to have children?"
• "Are you happy in your relationship?"
• "Is that your natural hair color?"
I gauged my reactions to each of these, and I can't say I agree with the categorizations. It's all about context, isn't it? If I was being interviewed by another working mom and we really hit it off, and it was late in the day and she had to get her kid but was so interested in me she wanted to keep talking, how is that offensive and outrageous? As for "staying overnight with a client," well, if I'm a home health aide, then that's not out of line. As for the question about my intentions to have children, as far as I know that's illegal. And if I wore my hair pink, I'd find it funny if an interviewer asked me if the color was natural.
So come on. Give me real oinkers, people. Surely you've been asked something truly crazy during an interview. Give us the context, too. I'll start. When I interviewed at a magazine, an editor peered at me and inquired, "What are you?" Now, context: I'm mixed race, so it's not insane that someone would wonder. But still. In a job interview? Again, illegal?
In any case, the real question is how the interviewee handles idiot queries. All the smart-ass ways I could respond flashed through my brain, but in the end I gave the guy a big smile and told him about my various ethnicities. That led to a friendly chat about Japan, where it turned out he'd visited several times. I got the job.
Do share.
November 14, 2007 9:40
Fired for being fat—and contagious
You all remember our discussion from a few days ago about people not being hired—or even being fired—for smoking. I'd posed the question:
What about the obese? Is banning the hiring of overweight people--who, like smokers, could theoretically control their conditions--next?
So I was flipping channels last night and happened upon Boston Legal. William Shatner was holding forth in a boardroom meeting with a former employee who was about to sue him. The employee was an attractive, rotund woman (by the standards of Hollywood, anyway). Captain Kirk had fired her for being fat. The dialogue went something like this:
Kirk: There's this study from Harvard—you've heard of Harvard, haven't you—that found that fat was contagious.
Fired employee's lawyer: But you didn't think she was too fat to hit on.
Kirk: Oh, I like chubby sex. I just don't want to catch it.
Fired employee: Ka-ching.
Kirk: What? I don't have anything against the Chinese. Just fat people.
Fired employee: Ka-ching, ka-ching.
Funny, right? Except it rang a bell. I went looking for that Harvard study, and found it reported on in this TIME.com article titled "Obesity Is Contagious, Study Finds," by Laura Blue (bolds mine):
Researchers from Harvard and the University of California, San Diego, reviewed a database of 12,067 densely interconnected people — that is, a group that included many families and friends — who had all participated in a major American heart study between 1971 and 2003. ...According to their analysis, when a study participant's friend became obese, that first participant had a 57% greater chance of becoming obese himself. In pairs of people in which each identified the other as a close friend, when one person became obese the other had a 171% greater chance of following suit. "You are what you eat isn't the end of the story," says study co-author James Fowler, a political scientist at UC San Diego. "You are what you and your friends eat."
Gah! Kirk isn't just loopy from all the bed-hopping he did on Star Trek; fat can be caught, like a cold!
Be that as it may, there's no way this stands up as a reason to fire a competent employee. Or so I'm inclined to believe. But when you consider the arguments for firing smokers, it begins to sound awfully similar. Could this Boston Legal episode be the harbinger of a scary new trend? Can fat people be fired because obesity might be catching?
Here's Shatner as fat-hater Denny Crane, with James Spader as his law partner Alan Shore. You know, Shatner ain't such a Slim Jim himself. / ABC
Lest we forget the various virtues of girth, read this report in Slate today:
A study says curvy women are smarter. Sample: 16,000 females. Result: Women with high ratios of hip to waist size "scored significantly higher on [cognitive] tests, as did their children." Theories: 1) Hip fat contains omega3 acids, which promote "growth of the brain during pregnancy" and "could improve the woman's own mental abilities," whereas waist fat has more omega6 acids, "which are less suited to brain growth." 2) Teen mothers produce dumber kids because they're thinner and deficient in omega3. 3) Men like curvy women due to "the double enticement of both an intelligent partner and an intelligent child." Skeptical reactions: 1) The omega3 theory is pure speculation. 2) Diet and class are more plausible explanations. 3) Men don't care that much about waist-to-hip ratio. Rosy feminist spin: "Research that proves you can be sexy and intelligent is really positive." Cynical feminist spin: Except when it implies that being unshapely makes you stupid. (Related: Slate's XX Factor on a similar new study.)
November 13, 2007 2:00
Does Starbucks discriminate against women?
Yes, according to a fascinating new study by economist Caitlin Knowles, as described in Slate.
She, with her students as research assistants, staked out eight coffee shops in the Boston area and watched how long it took men and women to be served. Her conclusion: Men get their coffee 20 seconds earlier than do women.
I know, I know: you're thinking a) this is B.S., b) who cares about 20 seconds?, and c) somebody funded a bunch of women to hang out in Starbucks and order tall soy decaf Americanos?
But it's interesting for what it says about market economics. First of all, why would women wait longer? Knowles debunks the assumption that women simply order more complicated drinks; when men order the same drinks, they waited less. And when the servers were all male, the wait time lengthened; when the servers were women, the lag disappeared.
It is not clear whether women were held up by male staff because the men viewed them with contempt or because the male staff members were flirting furiously. The "contempt" explanation seems more likely, as the extra time that women have to wait seems to increase when the coffee shop is busy. Who would take extra time out to flirt just when the lines are longer?
There's something else left unmentioned in the article. Women are far less likely to express anger or frustration aloud when kept waiting. I think servers might factor that in when facing a long line of irritated consumers and make decisions based on who won't throw a fit if they're served a few seconds later.
The thing that's intriguing is that coffee shops are a cut-throat business. With a Starbucks, Europa or bodega on every corner, a consumer could find her fix just about anywhere. And economists have long assumed (based on Gary Becker's theories) that market competition eradicates discrimination:
The reasoning is simple enough: A business that deliberately offers shoddy service or uncompetitive prices to some customers, or that turns down smart minority applicants in favor of less-qualified white male applicants, is throwing money away. If it is a government bureaucracy or a powerful monopolist, that's a loathsome but sustainable choice. But racist or sexist businesses with many competitors are likely to be shut down by the bankruptcy courts long before the human rights lawyers get to them.
Could it be that coffee retailers haven't caught up to market forces? Or that women simply don't notice? Or that we're loath to make a fuss? I don't want to get all paranoid, but now that I've read about this study, I think this is what happened to me yesterday at the parking garage. Though I arrived first, the attendant fetched the car belonging to the guy behind me. I cocked my head in puzzlement, but didn't say anything. In any case, my car appeared about three minutes later. All the attendants were male. What do you think?
November 13, 2007 10:17
The Office is closed
My colleague over at Tuned In is supposed to be on vacation. But he has apparently slapped together some timed posts to appear in his absence, making the rest of us bloggers who mean to slack off on upcoming holidays look very, very bad. So I hereby shall steal his thunder by blogging on his beat about the TV writers' strike.
If I lived in L.A., I would so go out and join the picket line on my lunch break. I'm not a TV writer, and I'm not a member of the Guild. But look at the celeb power! Consider the photo ops! Throngs of tourists and paparazzi should show up today between 12 and 2 outside Universal. According to UnitedHollywood.com, a blog by strike captains (not to be confused with Hollywood United, which is a football club), these are the stars walking the oval today:
Army Wives – Kim Delaney, Brian McNamara, Sally Pressman, Drew Fuller, Wendy Davis, Sterling K. Brown, Brigid Brannagh
The Big Bang Theory – Kaley Cuoco, Simon Helberg, Kunal Nayyar, Jim ParsonsBig Love – Bill Paxton, Jeanne Tripplehorn
Brotherhood – Ethan Embry, Fionnula Flanagan, Kevin Chapman
Corey in the House – Rondell Sheridan, Madison Pettis, Lisa Arch, Maira Walsh
Cold Case – Thom Barry, John Finn, Tracie Thoms, Meredith Stiehm, Danny Pino
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation – William Petersen, Marg Helgenberger, Archie Kao, Marc Vann, Wallace Langham, Liz Vassey, David Berman, John Wellner
Desperate Housewives – Doug Savant, Nicollette Sheridan, Dana Delany, Tuc Watkins
Dexter – Keith Carradine, James Remar, C.S. Lee
Dirt – Ian Hurt, Josh Stewart
Everybody Loves Raymond – Ray Romano
The Game – Tia Mowry, Pooch Hall
George Lopez Show – George Lopez, Constance Marie, Valente Rodriguez
Grey's Anatomy – Katherine Heigl, T.R. Knight, KaDee Stickland, Amy Brenneman, Justin Chambers
Jericho – Ashley Scott, Bob Stephenson
Kyle XY – Jamie Alexander, April Matson, Chris Olivero, Bruce Thomas
Las Vegas – Vanessa Marcil
Mad Men – January Jones, Vincent Kartheiser, Rich Sommer
My Boys – James Kaler
New Adventures of Old Christine – Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Clark Gregg, Hamish Linklater, Alex Kapp Horner, Tricia O'Kelley
Numb3rs – Dylan Bruno, Diane Farr
Private Practice – Kate Walsh
The Riches – Minnie Driver
Rules of Engagement – Patrick Warburton, Megyn Price, Oliver Hudson, Bianca Kajlich
'Til Death – Brad Garrett, Kat Foster
True Blood – Anna Paquin, Sam Trammell
Wildfire – Lori Loughlin
Without A Trace – Poppy Montgomery, Enrique Murciano
Women's Murder Club – Scott Gemmill, Paula Newsome, Laura Harris
Wow! And scrolling down the list, I find my blood chilling at the thought of a whole season without these shows. What will I do without my Army Wives? How will I live without Big Love?
I don't mean to make light of the situation. The TV writers' strike is making me think long and hard about how writers in other mediums are compensated. Methinks we journalists can learn a lot from their demands.
More and more, the content we produce appears on the web, which our employers are trying their darndest to monetize. They'll succeed; that's not in doubt. So how ought we, the content providers, position ourselves to get a fair slice of the pie?
Take freelance writers. A major magazine like TIME might pay up to $3 a word for an article to appear in print. So this blog post might have yielded me $2,268. Not bad, right? TIME.com, on the other hand, pays far less.
For the time being, this makes sense. Advertisers pay far more to appear in the glossy pages of our magazine than they do on our web site. Plus, readers pay to subscribe to our magazine and read it for free online. But our web readership is exploding. More advertisers are lured to its younger, more international readers. I presume marketers also like the creativity and interactivity the medium allows for their ads, and their ability to measure response. My money's on the web site catching up to the print magazine as a desirable place to advertise someday soon. That means ad rates can creep up.
Shouldn't content producers then be able to negotiate compensation differently? If my blog attracts, say, 30,000 readers per week, then that means 30,000 people view the ads along the top and sides of my page. Perhaps I could be paid a fraction of the ad rate. That would motivate me to create ever more exciting content to draw more eyeballs, which would draw more advertisers, which would boost site revenue. We all win. No?
Here's a clip featuring the writers and actors from The Office picketing outside what looks like a gated residential complex. Which is weird. But maybe there's a studio across the street. Anyway, the writers talk about how they were made to write some webisodes that have since been viewed millions of times on NBC.com and that even earned them a Daytime Emmy—and that they were not compensated for. Because, you know, it's on the web, where nobody makes any money.
November 12, 2007 10:14
I am so not getting rich off my options
I think of this as I read a front-page story in today's New York Times about Bonnie Brown, a staff masseuse at Google who is now a multimillionaire. It's the classic cubicle-to-riches story: worker is among the first to sign on at unknown Internet start-up. Internet start-up grows up and becomes massive, universe-changing brand. Worker retires to a 3,000-square-foot mansion in Nevada.
I think of this as I contemplate my own sad tale. Call it a cubicle-to-cubicle version of Brown's. I, of course, do not work for an Internet start-up. Far from it: I work for the world's largest and arguably most storied media giant. But back in the go-go late '90s, my company, too, boasted a stock that soared. We had recently been rooked, I mean, acquired by AOL, an Internet start-up that was already a massive, universe-changing brand. We knew no limits.
Money magazine, my employer at the time, had benefited spectacularly from the Internet and stock-market boom. Our monthly issues were as thick as phone books, yielding us writers eight-page features in the well and limitless travel budgets. So in 2000, management decided to take an entrepreneurial, Silicon Valley approach to compensation. They decided to offer their favorite writers bonuses in stock options.
We didn't object. Why would we? After all, we were the ones who gobbled up Henry Blodget's predictions of Amazon at $400. We bought the boom whole. When I portrayed the plight of a middle-class family in Japan to show the effects of a market crash and a lingering recession on a developed economy like ours, I received hate mail from livid readers. I remember one in particular: "How dare you suggest America will suffer a similar fate! Our market will never fail!"
In the winter of 2000, I received 1,000 options in Time Warner stock at a strike price around $50. Share prices hovered close to $60 then, and were sure to keep soaring before they vested in four years. That meant that if the stock hit, say, $100—not out of the question back then—then I could keep the $50 profit. A $50,000 bonus! Not bad for a writer, right?
But the stock didn't hit $100. Between January 2001 and January 2003, Time Warner dropped 78%, from $51.21 to $11.36. In that time, of course, AOL transformed from a massive, universe-changing brand into a pure clunker, unable to keep up with the dazzling changes of its medium and thus unable to hold onto paying subscribers. The market crash that my reader said would "never" happen in the U.S. did, and all of the conglomerate's business units suffered, including ours. Advertisers reined in their budgets, and our magazines no longer weighed down the postman.
Time Warner stock currently trades at $17 and change. And my "bonus"? Trash. The options are what they call "under water"; its stock trading well below the strike price, they're deemed worthless.
While it makes sense for executives to tie compensation to company stock, I argue that for most workers, it doesn't. Our contributions, while valuable, are too far removed from the complex machinations that move stock price to count. I'll never again accept options in lieue of tangible compensation. Sure, there's a chance I'd hit the lottery, like Bonnie Brown. But I shouldn't have to gamble on getting paid.
November 9, 2007 11:02
No smoking at work. Or at home.
Surely your company has gone smoke-free by now. If you're one of the nicotine-stained masses, you're braving the November chill to get your fix outside, like an animal. (Why is it that smokers always head out coat-less, no matter what the weather?) Only at home can you puff away to your blackening lungs' abandon.
Get ready to give up that right, too. If you live in Florida, your employer might already be demanding that you stop smoking at home. That's right: bosses are forbidding workers to smoke at all. According to this TV news report forwarded to me by my colleague Daniel Eisenberg,
Westgate Resorts, the largest private employer in Central Florida, has banned smoking and won't budge from a policy of not hiring smokers and firing employees who do smoke.
What brought that on?
"When I found out it was legal to discriminate against smokers, I put the policy in place," Westgate president and CEO David Seigel said.
Seigel told Local 6 that the policy was prompted by the death of his close friend -- a heavy smoker who died of cancer."If you are too stupid to understand that smoking is going to kill you, then we are going to tell you that if you want to work for our company, you will not smoke," Seigel said.
Employers have reasons to ban smokers beyond their personal biases.
Seigel said his policy is cost effective and said since it went into effect, health insurance claims have gone down significantly -- making insurance more affordable for employees.
Westgate, and Florida employers, are hardly the only ones zeroing in on smoking by employees. Scotts Miracle-Gro in Maryville, Ohio, was the subject of a February cover story by Businessweek titled "Get Healthy—or Else." It tells the tale of a lawn-care technician named Scott Rodrigues whose career at Scotts met a jarring end:
...on Sept. 1—which happened to be his 30th birthday—Rodrigues was fired. "Why?" he asked. "You failed your drug test," the boss replied. Rodrigues insisted it had to be a mistake. He didn't even keep beer in the fridge. Then his boss told him the drug was nicotine. "Five years ago, if you had told me, Hey, you better quit smoking or you might not get a job,' I would have laughed. Here I am five years later, and I can't get a job."
I'm not a smoker, and I've lost family members to the damaging habit. I get the part about not wanting smokers to drive up insurance premiums for the rest of us. But unless the smoking has direct bearing on the job at hand--say, I don't know, food preparation--is it fair to deny them employment? What about the obese? Is banning the hiring of overweight people--who, like smokers, could theoretically control their conditions--next? What do you all think?
POST SCRIPT: Whaddaya know—a second after I posted this entry, what do I find in my mailbox but a company e-mail urging employees to quit smoking. From the e-mail, which pushes the services of a smoking cessation service:
Faced with healthcare costs related to smoking escalating, and the decade-long decline in smoking rates coming to a halt, employers need to be proactive in helping their workers stop smoking. On November 15, The American Cancer Society will celebrate the 31st annual Great American Smokeout --- a great time for employers to encourage their smoking employees to give up smoking for 24 hours in the hope that this head start will help them kick the habit.
A recent survey of employers by the National Business Group on Health reports that a majority of employers ranked smoking as one of the greatest priority health issues facing their companies, second only to obesity, but only two percent offer the comprehensive benefit recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Employers that need more urging to help their workers quit smoking should consider these alarming statistics:
• Cigarette smoking has been identified as the most important source of preventable morbidity and premature mortality worldwide. Smoking-related diseases claim an estimated 438,000 American lives each year. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
• Smoking costs the United States over $167 billion each year in health-care costs including $92 billion in mortality-related productivity losses, $75 billion in direct medical expenditures or an average of $3,702 per adult smoker. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)
• In 2005, an estimated 45.1 million, or 21.0 percent of adults were current smokers. The annual prevalence of smoking has declined 40 percent between 1965 and 1990, but has been unchanged virtually thereafter. (National Health Interview Survey. Vital and Health Statistics. Series 10, No. 232, Oct. 4, 2006)
• Workplaces nationwide are going smoke-free to provide clean indoor air and protect employees from the life-threatening effects of secondhand smoke. Nearly 70 percent of the U.S. workforce worked under a smoke free policy in 1999, but the percentage of workers protected varies by state, ranging from a high of 83.9 percent in Utah and 81.2 percent in Maryland to 48.7% in Nevada. (Journal of Occupational & Environmental Medicine 2001; 43:680-686).
• In 2005, an estimated 46.1 million adults were former smokers. Of the current 45.1 million smokers, 42.5 percent of current smokers had stopped smoking at least 1 day in the preceding year because they were trying to quit smoking completely. (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report October 2005.)
November 8, 2007 3:21
Moms don't opt out; they're pushed out
News flash: working moms don't quit for no reason.
I write this in the spirit of an Onion headline Gerry just sent me:
Study Finds Working At Work Improves Productivity
According to new analysis by sociologist Pamela Stone appearing in the fall issue of Contexts magazine,
Professional women aren’t quitting their careers solely because of babies and family, but because too many workplaces are not fostering an environment that allows them to keep working once they become mothers.
Excuse my English. But no sh*t, Sherlock.
Stone studied 54 women in-depth from a variety of professions (e.g., law, medicine, business, publishing, management consulting, nonprofit administration) living in major metropolitan areas, roughly half in their 30s and half in their 40s. The women were highly educated, affluent, mostly white, married with children, who worked as professionals or managers and whose husbands could support their being at home. More than half had graduate degrees in business, law, medicine, or other professions; they also had thriving careers in which they had worked for about a decade and had strong incentives to continue with them.
Stone determined that workplace pushes were a significant reason women opted out, and ”all but seven women cited features of their jobs—the long hours, the travel—as motivation for quitting.” Those who tried to rearrange their work schedule “felt like they were being given special favors.”
What am I missing here? Did anyone think that working professionals, once they popped out a puppy, immediately laid down the briefcase just because? For most of the women I know, leaving their hard-won jobs is an agonizing decision they feel forced to make because they simply can't meet all of their employers' unbending demands and still raise a healthy, happy family.
And they don't toss that briefcase in the laundry chute (does anyone have laundry chutes anymore?). They trade in for a different, more flexible job that best utilizes their talents and skills while still allowing the flexibility to grow children.
I'm sure Sherlock, I mean Stone, thinks she's furthering the cause of working women by browbeating employers into offering kinder, gentler workplaces for parents. It ain't gonna happen, sister. I don't think any boss who demands new mothers take frequent business trips and work late hours is going to smack his forehead after reading this report and say, "Gosh dangit! So that's why all these women are leaving me!"
I admit I think about this all the time. When I confided recently in a colleague that I feel pressured to show up at the office nearly every day for meetings, he responded that it was up to me to change that. He's right. We have to alter the paradigm. No boss is going to stand up and say, Heck, ladies, just work from home, why dontcha. I don't need to see your face here at 10 p.m. Well, I take that back; according to the Wall Street Journal,
Sun Microsystems Inc. is particularly aggressive about flexible work styles; the computer maker estimated that about 55% of its employees work from home or a remote office as many as two days a week.
But I don't work at Sun Microsystems. I work for an old-world media organization. It's up to me to insist that the powers that be redefine worker productivity. Doing my job means doing my job, no matter from where or when. What's it to you if I do my reporting from home in my pajamas, so long as I turn in my story by deadline?
Here's my version of the Onion headline:
Study Finds Working At Home Improves Productivity
Now that would be a study, Sherlock.
November 8, 2007 9:03
What, transgendered workers don't count?
There's a glaring snag in the landmark civil rights bill that was passed in Congress yesterday. Though it purports to protect workers from discrimination based on sexual orientation, it doesn't cover the transgendered.
First, a little background. When the Employment Non-Discrimination Act was introduced in April, it did include gender identity. But the version put forth by the House Education and Labor Committee had wiped clean mention of gender identity.
According to the Washington Post, Representative Barney Frank, he of the gravelly voice and the gay street cred, added language to protect transgendered workers, who suffer some of the most serious discrimination at work. But when another influential congressman—Education and Labor Chairman George Miller, a Democrat of California—objected, Frank backed down in order to get the bill passed. He told the Post:
"In general, in the legislative context, if you can pass a bill that improves things for a large number of people, then take it," Frank said. "The notion that you don't protect most people if you don't protect them all -- that's never worked."
Gay and lesbian activists have been fighting hard for these rights for decades. Now they're faced with a devil's bargain: protection for some gay workers, but not others. Frank added that transgendered workers might bring up their rights in another bill. But come on. Think a bill specifically purporting to give transgendered workers has any chance of surviving in Congress? As much a chance as a ham sandwich in a den of lions.
But perhaps all this is moot. Says the San Francisco Chronicle:
The House vote was largely symbolic, however, because the legislation stands little chance of enactment in this Congress. It faces daunting odds in the Senate, where it has not even been introduced, and President Bush has promised a veto.
The New York Times was more optimistic:
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat and a longtime supporter of gay rights legislation, said he would move swiftly to introduce a similar measure in the Senate. Some Senate Republicans said that, if worded carefully, it would have a good chance of passing, perhaps early next year.
I don't know, but I'm weirdly hopeful. Maybe Bush, in his lame-duck costume, will see fit to extend basic civil rights to a large segment of the population. Who cares if Pat Robertson excoriates him; he's backing Giuliani, after all.
But maybe it's best if the bill fails this round. Its advocates are surely preparing a contingency bill for the next prez. And she's not likely to leave out the transgendered. I hope.
November 7, 2007 12:20
Stop friending me on Facebook
I'm not on Facebook. I may or may not have once started an account with the intention of putting up a page someday as research for this column. But I haven't visited since, seeing as I don't need to hear one more giant sucking noise in the soundtrack of my already jammed life.
Yet I keep getting friended. I keep getting messages in my personal e-mail inbox telling me someone I may or may not know has just declared me a friend.
This happens frequently on other networking sites where I may or may not have opened an account, again for the purposes of research (this is also how I explain the numerous sushi lunches that keep showing up on my expense report). It goes without saying that I am frequently asked, as a trusted person in your network, to connect on the professional networking site LinkedIn.
While LinkedIn requires my permission before we hook up, other sites aren't so decorous. I just got a note saying that a former colleague had added me as a business contact on the site Plaxo. At least I know him. There's another site called Lyro that I apparently have signed onto, and via which I often receive notices that I have been forever joined with complete strangers. At least that's what it feels like.
My colleague Joel Stein wrote recently about his own ambivalence to the social networking craze in an essay titled "You Are Not My Friend":
I'm sure social networks serve many important functions that improve our lives, like reconnecting us with old friends and finding out if people we used to date are still good-looking. And social networks all have messaging functions, which would be an excellent way to send information if no one had invented e-mail.
But really, these sites aren't about connecting and reconnecting. They're a platform for self-branding. Old people are always worrying that our blogging and personal websites and MySpace profiles are taking away our privacy, but they clearly don't understand the word privacy. We're not sharing things we don't want other people to know. We're showing you our best posed, retouched photos. We're listing the Pynchon books we want you to think we've read all the way through.
Still, part of what you get from Joel's essay is that he's so hip, so popular, so down with the kids that he has accounts on MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, and even Doostang. And that's just my problem with Facebook. I'm not hip. I'm not popular. I'm not down with the kids, unless you're talking about the kind who build Lego pony houses on the floor. And I couldn't give a rat's poo if you agree.
The idea of a web-based network is useful, if only to keep your contacts organized and readily accessible. What I don't want is to join a clique just 'cause everybody else is doing it.
Apparently, a lot of people my age are suffering social networking angst. Take Matthew Rose over at the Wall Street Journal:
Having reached the ripe age of 35, I didn't expect to confront the kind of delicate social dilemmas usually associated with emotional teenage girls. Who are my friends? Should I befriend people I don't know? Why does everyone have more friends than me?
But that's crazy. We're in our mid-30s, for the love of Pete. Why should I spend hours of my already sapped day wringing my already chapped hands about who is and isn't my friend? How possibly will this enrich my life? You tell me. But not by friending me on Facebook.
November 7, 2007 9:54
Starting a new job is hard enough
So I was walking down the hall the other week and noticed that one of the offices was occupied by a guy I'd never seen before. I didn't recognize the name on the placard outside his door, either. Baffled, I asked my colleague Josh, "Who the heck is that?"
Turns out the new dude had been here a few months already, and before that had worked for months out of our Washington bureau. I had no idea.
This has long been a pet office peeve of mine. New hires are sometimes announced with great fanfare, with gushing e-mail blasts to the staff about their prior accomplishments and, in the recent past, with what we here call "pours" (I know, so 1950s), which were Champagne toasts.
Other new hires aren't announced at all. Or they're lumped together in a group e-mail announcing a bunch of hires, sometimes up to a year after their start date.
It's the same thing for promotions. The current editor of TIME has bumped up many of my colleagues, and for a time was sending congratulatory notices about their new posts and why they deserved them. Then the notices kind of stopped. I learned only recently of a bunch of writer-level promotions from scouring the masthead.
Why the discrepancy, you might ask. I'm not really sure. Under past management, these announcements seemed fraught with politics. Some new hires were to be boasted of--for instance, those who were stolen away from our competition. Other hires were kept under the radar--for instance, those that took place after some lay-offs.
Take me. I was brought back from Tokyo after months of pleading, a move management here only grudgingly approved. It was common knowledge among us foreign correspondents that management strongly discouraged us from making the jump to New York. Never mind a pour; the office manager showed me my office, and then I was completely on my own. No one checked on me; no one introduced me around; I wasn't even shown the way to the loo. One colleague confronted me in the elevator bank months after my arrival with this query: "Who are you?"
Boo freaking hoo, right? I'm a big girl; I ought to be able to find the dang powder room on my own. But starting a new job is hard enough. Left entirely to my own resources, I lost time learning the deeply complicated mechanics, culture and workings of the place. I didn't know when or where the meetings took place, and it was a couple weeks before I found an editor who would give me assignments. And to me, that's not efficient management. You want a new hire to hit the ground running. Why wouldn't you help make sure she can?
I'm not bringing all this up to whinge. Well, maybe a little, because it does bug the snot out of me. But what I really want is to canvas you all for your experience and opinions. How do your workplaces announce and introduce new hires? What works, what doesn't? What's the most effective way to make a worker feel welcomed?
November 6, 2007 1:00
Hiding in the office closet is stressful
Imagine coming to work every day and having to pretend to be someone else. Imagine you're Joe Smith from Indianapolis, but you have to remember to be John Sales from Boston. You've got to do the accent, to have a whole back story, cover up the inevitable slips.
Stressful, right? That's what closeted gay workers say they experience every day, says a new study by Belle Rose Ragins and Romila Singh of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and John M. Cornwell of Rice University. The article, “Making the Invisible Visible: Fear and Disclosure of Sexual Orientation at Work,” was published in The Journal of Applied Psychology.
A questionnaire study of more than 500 gay, lesbian and bisexual employees across the U.S. has found that “fears about disclosing a gay identity at work had an overwhelmingly negative relationship with their career and workplace experiences and with their psychological well-being.”
The toll the deception takes on the workers is serious. The researchers say those who "feared more negative consequences to disclosure" reported more trouble in these areas than their counterparts who weren't afraid of being found out:
• job satisfaction
• organizational commitment
• satisfaction with opportunities for promotion
• career commitment
• organization-based self-esteem
• greater turnover intentions.
Among their concerns:
• more (job) role ambiguity
• more (job) role conflict
• less workplace participation.
Naturally,
Psychological strain was described as stress-related symptoms experienced on the job, work-related depression, and work-related irritation.
So the answer is just to come on out. Right? Lordy, no. The researchers concluded that deciding whether to come out is an "exceptionally difficult career challenge facing lesbian/gay employees that typically goes unnoticed by employers" (bolds mine):
However, the threats to employment security are real. There are no laws prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in 31 states, and such discrimination remains “widespread” in practice. For example, previous research indicated that between 25 and 66 percent of lesbian or gay workers had experienced discrimination. Of the participants in this study, 37 percent said they had faced discrimination because others suspected or assumed they were gay or lesbian. More than 10 percent said they had been physically harassed. More than 22 percent said they had been verbally harassed. Nearly 31 percent said they had resigned from a job, had been fired from a job or had left a job because of discrimination.
Jeepers. Gaining, holding and performing a job for which one is qualified seems to me a basic American right. Yet nearly a third of gay workers had to leave a job because of their sexual orientation. Come on, folks. Surely there's a petition we can sign or a legislator we can bug to assure gay Americans the right to work unharrassed.
UPDATE: Thanks to TIME news director Howard Chua-Eoan for point out this story:
...the House Rules Committee voted early in the evening on November 5 to advance the Employment Non-Discrimination Act to the floor for a vote, and to permit consideration of three amendments, including Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin's proposal to restore transgender protections to the bill. The Baldwin amendment will get ten minutes for debate. The floor vote had been been tentatively scheduled for Tuesday, but late morning that day, lead sponsor Barney Frank's office told Gay City News that it had been put off until Wednesday.
November 6, 2007 10:15
Teaching English in Japan via mugging
You might have read about the collapse of Japan's largest English-teaching school, Nova. From the Wall Street Journal:
...more than 4,000 foreign-language teachers working for Nova [were] slammed by the biggest scandal in Japan's foreign community in years. The company, renowned in Japan for the hip-shaking pink bunny in its commercials, had been on a hiring binge, setting up recruitment offices in the U.S. and the United Kingdom and prowling college campuses offering jobs.
This sucks for the thousands of Americans, Australians and Brits teaching there:
Now, the Nova teachers are jobless and those who have lived from paycheck to paycheck are stuck in Japan. Some have been threatened with eviction from their apartments because Nova, which had provided housing and deducted the rent from teachers' salaries, stopped paying rent months ago. In the past week, 300 Nova teachers have swarmed the usually orderly employment agency office in western Tokyo, called Hello Work, seeking jobs.
Surely you've heard teaching English in Japan is lucrative work that requires not much more than the ability to speak.
English-conversation schools are a big business in Japan. Millions of Japanese dream of speaking English. But the six years of language classes given in middle and high schools focus on grammar, not conversation, so few children learn to speak English well. The $3.5-billion-a-year foreign-language-education industry teems with more than 1,100 companies catering to about two million students, according to the Japan Association for the Promotion of Foreign Language Education.
Fear not, Japanese friends. Who needs Nova when we have muggers? This video is an excellent teaching tool for young Japanese ladies who wish to travel overseas but know they will be robbed by two white men wielding a butter knife. And why just learn another language when one can combine the tutorial with upper-body muscle toning? Just do as the automatons in the aerobics uniforms do, and soon you'll be warding off your attackers fluently and attractively! (Thanks to my colleague Sora Song, who apparently spends her office hours trolling YouTube for weird clips from Japan.)
November 5, 2007 3:00
I thought Homer was Bart's dad
Nope. Turns out a "homer" is something a worker makes, using company resources and on company time, for use at the home. This from Harvard Business School's Working Knowledge web report:
A factory worker uses company time and materials to fashion a lamp he will take home for personal use—an artifact called a "homer." The practice is probably illegal and clearly against written company policy. If discovered, the worker could be fired on the spot for his action.
But here's the twist. Turns out that research shows homers—or, rather, allowing them—helps worker morale, team cohesion, and, contrary to what you'd assume, productivity. Says Harvard Business School assistant professor Michel Anteby:
...the practice may help some organizations be more effective. Homer making keeps teams together and skills sharp during idle times in the highly cyclic aeronautics business, for example. Also, someone's well-crafted homer can be a source of pride when fellow workers take note. Says Anteby: "If employers are able to tap into these drivers, and remain within the legal boundary, then they might be in a better position to allow their employees to blossom."
Hmm. I don't work in a factory, and can make nothing of use with my bare hands (I can fashion a Play-Doh pony for my kid to enjoy smooshing, but, again, I said of use). But I'm sure I've used company resources and company time for personal needs.
Like when I was a writer at Money magazine, I used my skills and resources as a personal finance reporter to research estate planning implications for expat Americans. In fact, I did pitch and write a story on the subject—but only because I needed to apply the information to my father's situation. I bet you I'm not alone; plenty of reporters work on stories merely to satisfy a personal need to know how it turns out. And don't get me started on my friends at consumer magazines. The editor needs new curtains? A fall feature on draperies it is!
Fess up: what are your homers?
November 5, 2007 12:30
Maria Bartiromo: "The year of my career"
Something struck me in the article in today's New York Times about Maria Bartiromo. If you recall, 2007 started out kind of sucky for the Money Honey:
It was only in January that Ms. Bartiromo’s name was tied — through leaks from Citigroup — to the company’s decision to oust its chief of global investment, Todd S. Thomson. Unidentified executives at Citigroup, which is both a CNBC advertiser and a frequent subject of its coverage, told several publications that among the reasons Mr. Thomson was fired was his decision to invite Ms. Bartiromo to speak to a group of Citigroup clients in Asia and to fly her to that event in the company jet.
After weathering a hail storm of rude accusations by jealous rivals and bitchy articles by gossipy journalists, it appears Bartiromo picked up just where she left off--and then some. She's landed huge interviews (try Prez Bush, honey). She scored Angelo Mozillo, CEO of Countrywide Financial, just as that lending firm was in the midst of the nationwide mortgage meltdown. And she was picked to co-moderate the debate last month among Republican presidential candidates about economic issues.
She told the Times:
“I really feel like I have had the year of my career,” Ms. Bartiromo, who is 40, said, “the best year of my career.”
Huh. The best year of her career. I take away two things from that:
1. The best year of your career might follow a really crappy one.
2. You don't have to be a professional athlete to score a season for the record books.
I never really looked at my career like that: a bar graph, with some years reaching higher than others. In sales, I guess your career is all about the bar graph. In my line of work, which is sort of the same as Bartiromo's, even though that's the only thing we remotely have in common, it's pretty subjective: you tally up your stories and assess their quality and impact. You might throw in extracurriculars (12 TV appearances, book on best-seller list). Maybe a promotion. Or an award.
I'm reading my own list and thinking I definitely have not had a career year yet. Sure, some have been better than others, relatively speaking. And the calendar year is a rather arbitrary span of time, isn't it? Last year, I was rocking until I got sick in October.
Maybe I'm just looking for bits of firewood to feed my current career-related existential crisis. But what happens if I have a career year, and nobody notices? Is it still a career year? What if I never have a career year? Tell me: what would your career year look like?
Here's Bartiromo talking about her slightly unconventional career path and giving tips on careers in broadcast journalism (notice she recommends an internship at TIME magazine):
November 5, 2007 10:18
Survey: Two-thirds who call in sick aren't
This just in! From AccountingWeb:
While 34 percent of people who call in sick to work at the last minute do so because of illness, 66 percent are taking time for other reasons, according to the 2007 CCH Unscheduled Absence Survey.
No kidding! So what were we doing--hitting the salon for a mani-pedi? Hitting that Super Wednesday sale at Kohl's? Hitting the snooze button 1,234 times? Nah:
The reasons for the other-than-sick absences were: family issues (22 percent), personal needs (18 percent), entitlement mentality (13 percent), and stress (13 percent).
Let's parse these. So two-thirds of employees take sick days for reasons other than dire illness. Of those, 22% are handling dire family issues: taking a sick kid to the doctor, driving over to mom's to help her fix the furnace. Another 18% are taking care of personal issues: handling backed-up bills, getting the car fixed. Stress, I also get--that's another 13%. Entitlement mentality, 13%, is the only questionable reason of the bunch, even though I'd guess those workers just feel so overloaded they deserve that Tuesday on the couch.
This kind of news may have HR types and bosses gnashing their teeth, their darkest suspicions confirmed. But here's the point, made in the AccountingWeb article:
"Most people today are juggling the demands of busy personal and professional lives, and are trying to do their very best in both places," said Pamela Wolf, JD, an employment law analyst with Riverwoods, Ill.-based CCH, which provides businesses with human resources and employment law information. "Organizations need to stop the tug of war with people for their time, and become a partner to employees to help them, and the business overall, be more successful."
What they're saying is that employers need a new way to parcel out time off to workers. We're going to take the time off anyway; don't make us lie about it.
The set-up is inherently unfair. Say Company A allots 10 paid sick days a year. Mike rarely gets ill. Bob, however, has a chronic illness for which he really does need those 10 days. Mike may not get sick himself, but he does have an ailing dad whom he'd like to visit. But he's got to use up his vacation days to do that. So in effect, Bob gets double Mike's two-week vacation time. To achieve parity, Mike has to fake some complicated disease in order to fly out to care for his poor Pop.
And in the end, employers lose out, too. Consider:
"Traditional sick leave and inflexible time-off policies may put an employee in the position of having to conjure up a cold and take off an entire day when they really just needed two hours to take a parent to a pre-arranged medical appointment," said Wolf.
Some U.S. companies offer personal days that can be interchanged with sick days. That's a good solution. Another is giving employees more flexibility to work from home. For instance, last Thursday I worked from home to accommodate two doctors' appointments at both ends of the day. Together they took up a little over an hour. I spent the rest of the day reporting and writing from home.
No, I didn't sneak in a mani-pedi. I'd show you a photo as proof, but I have the world's ugliest feet and I wouldn't want to gross you out so early in the morn.
November 2, 2007 9:00
Won't meet at a brothel? You're fired
That's what Steve Biegel, a top American exec who worked for Japanese advertising giant Dentsu, alleges he was told. According to Ad Age:
The former creative director at Dentsu USA has filed suit against the holding company, claiming he was fired after he complained about being put in sexually-charged work situations that included side trips to a Czech brothel, a Tokyo bathhouse and a Maria Sharapova photo shoot.
Among the allegations made in the court papers against the company and CEO Toyo Shigeta:
• A 2004 trip to a Tokyo bathhouse during which the Dentsu chief told Mr. Biegel and others to dip naked into a bath with him.
• A trip to Brazilian beach where Mr. Shigeta took numerous photos emphasizing the crotches of sunbathing women, and not letting up until he was threatened by one of his subject's male companions.• A photo shoot in Florida that was the site of another alleged "crotch shot," this time of tennis star Maria Sharapova, who stars in Dentsu's "Make Every Shot a Power Shot" campaign for Canon. The snap was passed around and is now attached to the lawsuit as evidence.
• A separate Canon photo shoot that took Messrs. Biegel, Shigeta and others to the Czech Republic, where Mr. Biegel was duped into visiting a brothel. According to the AP, Mr. Biegel and the other executive declined to take part, leaving Mr. Shigeta angry and to label them "no fun."
Dentsu issued this statement in response:
"Steve Biegel is a former employee who was terminated almost a year ago. When Dentsu refused to yield to Mr. Biegel's unreasonable demands, he made outrageous allegations which the company has refuted. He has now filed a claim to obtain money to which he is not entitled, for incidents he alleges took place over three years ago and which he never complained about while an employee of Dentsu. The company intends to counterclaim that Mr. Biegel has libeled Dentsu and defrauded the company. We look forward to the opportunity to vindicate our company in court."
Now, I can't speak to Biegel's specific charges. But they'll sound awfully familiar to anyone who's worked in Japan or done business with Japanese clients. The first charge doesn't strike me as much; I don't much relish the thought of bathing with colleagues or superiors, either, but public baths are an important part of Japan