I rarely blog on Shabbat, but two events this weekend have left me ethically reeling. Judaism holds that Jews are commanded to help ‘repair the world’–the concept of tikkun olam. We’re not expected to ever be able to finish the job and achieve a perfectly just planet, but we’re still required to begin the task. Other religions may not lay out social responsibility that specifically, but the concept is a common one–be just, help each other, don’t be mean, don’t hurt the planet, etc.

Yesterday, I came across this WBEZ blog post from Justin Kaufman describing a recent protest movement to block an allegedly clean-energy coal plant from being constructed on a large, empty plot of land in the South Loop. As Kaufman discovered, the “protest movement” was a huge and elaborate set-up perpetuated on their own neighborhood by the South Loop’s own Columbia College. Apparently, Columbia wanted to teach its media students how to “engage” in real world problems while at the same time demonstrating how to (my word here, but it fits) manipulate the media into telling a story.

So what’s wrong here? Plenty. First of all, Columbia hired street-theater hoaxsters the Yes Men to plant fake construction announcements in the neighborhood for the phony coal-plant project. Then the college organized students into protest teams, stationed them on a South Loop street corner with fake protest signs, swore them to secrecy, and told them to engage with real South Loop pedestrians and motorists–and the news media–to enlist their support for the phony protest.

In other words, Columbia College set out to trick people into believing something really bad was about to happen in a residential Chicago neighborhood. Crying wolf to your neighbors–actually trying to make them angry, worried, upset–is entirely not cool. It is, however, a really good way to lose their support. (Not to mention the media’s support, or your local alderman’s support, too.)

Second, the above problems could have been avoided if Columbia College had chosen to organize its students around a real problem. How about housing discrimination on the north side, or an actual environmental justice problem on the south side? It isn’t as if Chicago suffers from a lack of socially unjust issues that negatively impact the lives of real people. Trying to scare people for no good reason is bad enough. Going to such elaborate lengths to invent a problem that doesn’t exist instead of actually trying to help people–allegedly in order to try and teach students to help people–is laughable, sad, and most of all, ethically bankrupt.

Columbia College, what in the world were you thinking? Whatever it was, think better next time.

__________

Today, as the second-half of Shabbat got underway, I learned that an acquaintance’s employer and one of said employer’s biggest clients is committing systemic racial discrimination. Exactly the highly federally, state-wise, and locally (i.e. universally) illegal discrimination that term entails. In fact, a very 1950s type of “no baboon Blacks” and “no ghetto Hispanics” racial discrimination that makes your blood boil to learn about.

Said acquaintance is being victimized, themselves, because if they speak up they may lose their job. Which, itself, would be illegal–and, of course, they could turn around and report their employer to the appropriate authorities if it came to that. Out of fear (as near as I can figure out), my acquaintance has decided to just keep their head down until a better job comes along.

What would you do in a situation like that? I’m not sure what I would do. But I know that in 12 days I’m being welcomed into a people many of whom have given their lives to fight discrimination like that. Would I risk giving up my job? Would you?

I already know I’d give up my job if I were required to work on the Sabbath. I have that kind of observance in me. Other Jews have given their lives to observe Shabbat. Giving up my job is the least I could do to defend the boundaries of my faith. But the ethical commandments can be so much easier to hide from. It’s a lot easier to criticize others for not acting ethically then to point the finger at yourself.

I took that easier tack when I learned about all this earlier today. So I sit here in a coffee shop most of the way through Shabbat feeling as disappointed in Columbia College as my acquaintance feels disappointed in me.

Friends have heard me talk about how a central tenet of Judaism is that you’re supposed to struggle with it. With faith, with God, with mitzvot, with ethics. You’re meant to make an informed decision about your relationship with God and justice. It’s not supposed to be easy.

This Shabbat, I’m struggling.

I love it when I get to write about rogue companies. Not for the mischief they cause their workers (or riders, for that matter–just see my CTA category.) But for the Scooby Doo ear-raising “Hruh?” moment I sometimes get when I learn just how out-of-touch some of them can be. Mostly for thinking they can hide their actions. My Express Scripts blogging of late comes by way of a national labor client for whom I’m doing Internet outreach on the matter. I can’t label the company what I would like to in my national discussions, but as always, here on my blog, I’m happy to say what I think about companies like them for free.

I think they’re empty. I know you probably were expecting something a bit more opinionated and angry than that. After all, I’ve already labeled them needlessly, heartlessly greedy. But that greed has got to come from somewhere, you know? I often wonder when, exactly, it is that senior management at companies like this lose the ability to fill their hearts with human kindness and instead try filling the resulting spiritual hole with money. Of course, a hole in the soul is an infinite void that no amount of money could ever fill. So my best guess is spiritual bankruptcy is what leads Express Scripts and their ilk to lay off hundreds of workers at holiday time, penalize them further for being unhappy about it, and simultaneously celebrate how profitable a year they’ve had. There’s a pretty potent definition of shamelessness in all of that.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Express Scripts decided to suspended without pay three of the one-thousand workers at the Bensalem, Pennsylvania, plants that it plans to shutter before Christmas. The three workers had just returned from company locations in St. Louis and New York City where they were part of an effort to let shareholders, company executives, and customers know what was going on in Bensalem.

The suspensions, which you probably guessed already, are illegal. Federal labor law allows union workers to discuss working conditions publicly. (The Scooby “Hruh?” here is, of course, that companies like this do illegal things like that as if they can get away with them, because they often do get away without them.) A rally was held last week in Bensalem to call for the workers’ reinstatement. But as of now, they remain laid off and the Bensalem plants are still set to close in mid-December.

This blog post has as much of a resolution as the ongoing fight for fairness in Bensalem. I’m entering our most major of American holidays thankful for my friends and colleagues, for my community and for my place in it, which matters very much to me. But I’m also entering it aware of the pain and sadness and inequity that exists on this planet. And most of all, how so much of it happens because human beings just like you and me forget how to treat other human beings.

Just like you and me.

I agree that MSNBC’s suspension of Keith Olbermann was akin to a kindergarten teacher telling a five-year-old to go stand in the corner for putting gum underneath his seat. I happen to believe there’s no such thing as a person or a company–journalist, or media company, or anything or anyone else–who comes without an opinion. For a few days, Progressive bloggers across the country have been making hay of Olbermann’s wrist-slap, and not a few have complained that the whole silly affair has taken the news spotlight off the needs of un- and underemployed Americans.

So, nu? Doesn’t anyone else see the irony there?

I found perspective on that unfortunate potential to make things worse while trying to make things better in this blog post from White Courtesy Telephone on a similar tendency in the foundation world. The post sets out a list of 25 theses that seek to explain why, try as they might to work towards good, sometimes foundations leave their preferred causes in the same (or worse) shape as they found them. Change the word foundation to Progressive bloggers (as I have taken the liberty to do, with all emphases mine), and a few of these theses make the online bandwagoning around the Olbermann affair make unfortunate sense:

1. The progressive blogging world is filled with many people of good will who desire through their work to advance the common good. Many have in fact succeeded.

2. Taken together, however, the collective actions of progressive bloggers have failed to address, in any significant way, some of the most basic injustices in our society. After years of work, progressive bloggers have failed to alter the basic condition of the poor in the United States.

5. Progressive bloggers often lack a sense of urgency about the challenges facing marginalized communities.

12. Progressive bloggers generally do not know how to relate to the people and communities they aim to serve.  This relationship tends to range from command and control to benign neglect.

20. Progressive bloggers will forever knock our heads against some of our society’s most intractable problems and make little progress addressing them as long as we ignore their social justice dimensions. [I would add here, "on the ground."]

23. Progressive blogging is and should be primarily a moral rather than a technocratic tradition.

Progressive blogging isn’t (well, isn’t just) about writing snarky, data-laden blog posts about non-social-justice-supportive politicians. Why do so many of use blog as if high-level snark was the point? Progressivism is and has always been a moral stance, one based around the premise that common, everyday people deserve respect, a voice, uplift, inclusion. And most of all, to be heard and valued as the primary stakeholders in public discourse. Why do we so often forget that the point is about community at its most basic level? It is most certainly not about whether one of us gets shouted out on Politico.

There are a lot of important grassroots stories that got lost in the Olbermann whirlwind. Labor losses, healthcare battles, educational funding shortfalls all across America whose outcomes have the potential to improve or utterly destroy the lives of real people. Progressive bloggers who are really miffed about Olbermann’s unending media attention should make their next post about them.

Here’s one idea: cover the plight of the thousand workers in Bensalem, PA, who are getting laid off by the phenomenally profitable Express Scripts pharmacy benefit management company in the middle of a recession potentially so that (as is my opinion, anyway) Express Scripts can make their creditors happy enough to fund another big acquisition. The price of which, of course, will be destroying a fragile local economy and causing great pain to innocent families whose livelihoods are standing in the way of corporate greed.

That plug make be self-serving, but like I said, no one comes without an opinion. That’s mine. Feel free to elevate a grassroots cause in your personal backyard next time, or at least once in a while. It mind not be as sexy as slinging mud at major media. But if it helps, think how proud Keith would be?

The following appeared as a guest post this week on Howie Klein’s leading Progressive blog, Down With Tyranny, as part of my current professional activities to promote ethical labor standards in America…

This should be the story of a win-win situation. In the middle of the Great Recession, a nationally prominent mega-corporation manages to achieve phenomenal profitability and decides to share its good fortune with the wage workers who helped make that profit possible. All of that happens to be true about Express Scripts (Nasdaq: ESRX), the nation’s second-largest pharmacy benefits manager–all except for the decision about how to thank its workers. To show their gratitude, Express Scripts managers went in a different direction. First, they publicly lauded union workers at their most efficient processing plant. Then they told them they were losing their jobs. Sometimes corporate America’s capacity to stick it to the little guy is so astounding, you can’t help but feel impressed by the chutzpah.

The plant in question is an Express Scripts processing facility in Bensalem, Pennsylvania, employing 365 workers represented by SEIU Healthcare PA. In 2009, Express Scripts thanked those workers for setting a nationwide one-day efficiency record in processing prescriptions. This summer, however, as the expiration of the workers’ current union contract approached, Express Scripts unilaterally demanded wage and benefits cuts– not as the price of securing a new contract, but in order to keep the plant open at all. The company told its most efficient workers, essentially, work for less money and worse healthcare options, or we’re closing the plant and laying you off. Workers countered with their own give-back package and local officials promised to help the company secure public funds for plant improvements, but to no avail. On October 6, Express Scripts posted a WARN notice announcing the mid-December closure of the Bensalem plant, as well as a sister facility employing an additional approximately 650 workers.

Union bullying like that is nothing new, and certainly comes as a surprise to no one in a deadened economy like the one we’re still trying to climb out of. (Not that that makes such tactics fair.) The real surprise is Express Scripts’ justification for its demands. The company says without steep worker givebacks, it just can’t afford to keep the Bensalem plants open. Why might that be?

It isn’t because Express Scripts is hurting financially. According to figures supplied by SEIU Healthcare PA, the company is currently worth about $26.5 billion. In 2009 Express Scripts made a $1.7 billion profit that represented (astoundingly for the middle of the Great Recession) a 23 percent increase over 2008. In the first six months of this year, the company earned another $555 million, a 35 percent increase over 2009 figures, and expects that trend to continue into 2011. Management certainly was lauded for such great success. In 2009, Express Scripts’ top five executives earned a combined compensation in excess of $21 million, including $10.6 million in compensation for company CEO George Paz, alone. (For some perspective, that’s about 313 times the annual salary for the average American wage earner.)

It also isn’t because Express Scripts is wanting for clients. In addition to the $2.8 billion TRICARE contract to serve as the pharmacy benefits manager for all U.S. military families, the company holds multi-year contracts with numerous public, academic, and faith-based organizations in several states, among which the Ohio Public Employee Retirement System, the Ohio State Teachers Retirement System, Ohio State University, the Pennsylvania School Employees Retirement System, Farifax County (VA) Public Schools, the Evangelical Church of America, the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, the Board of Pennsylvania Presbyterian Church, and the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. (Or translated, millions of current and former wage earners and social-justice minded Americans who themselves would likely question Express Scripts’ actions if they knew about them.)

Maybe the answer’s in the rapid national growth Express Scripts has experienced in the past decade? Now we’re getting somewhere. Since 2002, the benefits-manager giant has acquired five other pharmacy fulfillment providers in five states and made a failed bit to acquire Caremark (that honor eventually going to CVS.) In the process, Express Scripts grew to become the nation’s second-largest pharmacy benefits manager, fulfilling the prescription needs of 25 million Americans.

But a more interesting figure is the $4.7 billion Express Scripts paid to make its most recent acquisition, the Indianapolis-based WellPoint. The deal, which closed last December, saw Express Scripts take on $2.5 billion in debt which, if you’re still paying attention, is an amount greater than the company’s entire 2009 profit. That debt was underwritten by major banks including Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, and J.P. Morgan Securities, who collectively probably thought it was a good idea when the deal first started to come together in 2008. Could it be that, given the recession, Express Scripts’ creditors now want a quick return on their investment?

It very well could. And what better way for Express Scripts to free up funds than by paring down its greatest area of expenditure– labor? Especially if the company wanted to keep investors happy enough to underwrite yet another major acquisition– say, for example the pharmacy benefits management division that Walgreens put up for sale this fall– a division which the New York Times just reported that Express Scripts has expressed an interest in acquiring?

If the company had a history of fair dealing, there might be more room for doubt about how these dots may all connect together. Yet in 2008, alone, Express Scripts settled an action brought by the attorneys general of 28 states alleging deceptive business practices that financially benefited the company at the expense of consumers, as well as a suit brought by New York State alleging inflated prescription drug costs (in collusion with CIGNA Corp.)

Express Scripts has also consistently lobbied for large government contracts but against federal oversight of its actions. In the early 2000s, board member Samuel K. Skinner pledged to contribute or raise $100,000 for George W. Bush’s re-election campaign at the very same time the Bush administration was selecting pharmacy benefit management firms to participate in the Medicare “discount card” program. Skinner’s previous claim to fame? Serving as Bush’s chief-of-staff and transportation secretary. Last year, the company joined drug-industry lobbyists in railing hard against President Obama’s healthcare reform plan, including a 2009 letter to employees from CEO George Paz warning that supporting healthcare reform would hurt the industry (read: slow our juggernaut, highly profitable growth?) and, as a result, consumers and employees.

The amazing thing about Express Scripts is that, despite the sheer lack of focus the company consistently affords to consumers, good business practices, and employees– and the staggering unfairness wrapped up in that– it still manages to turn a profit. That could be why instead of attempting to turn the community against the Bensalem workers by blaming them for the impending loss of local jobs (the much-ballyhooed divide-and-conquer strategy made famous by Caterpillar during its mid-90s union busting campaign in Peoria, Illinois), Express Scripts has opted for a more direct obey-or-else approach. After all, beyond a few million dollars in payouts to angry attorneys general, so far what has Express Scripts had to fear?

That could be changing. In early October, Bensalem workers and SEIU Healthcare PA officials went to Washington to meet with members of Congress and White House and Department of Defense officials to try and put a spotlight on Express Script’s activities. Since then, four members of Congress (Robert Andrews [D-New Jersey], Patrick Murphy [D-Pennsylvania], Joe Sestak [D-Pennsylvania], and Allyson Schwartz [D-Pennsylvania]) have called for a federal investigation into Express Scripts’ ability to meet its obligations to TRICARE families if the Bensalem plants close.

But since we’ve seen this all before, let’s assume that the protestations of four member of Congress aren’t enough to block a mega-corporation from closing a couple of plants. What then? Hardship for hundreds of families in a bad economy at a tender time of year? The deadening of an already precarious suburban Philadelphia local economy? Sadly, yes, but the story doesn’t end there. If Express Scripts is squeezing it’s one-thousand Bensalem workers to make good with creditors in order to set itself up for future major acquisitions, as they may very well be doing, the company’s 13,000 other employees have no reason not to expect the same treatment next.

Where are those 13,000 other workers? They’re working at Express Scripts facilities in no fewer than 13 states including Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Maine, New Mexico, New Jersey, and New York. So if Express Scripts has its way in Bensalem, the company’s war on wage workers could quickly become a national one. Worse, with little to stop Express Scripts or its corporate peers from continuing to put the needs of shareholders ahead of the needs of workers and consumers–and so far there’s still very little regulation to stop them from doing so– other large, multi-state employers may feel free to try and throw their unionized workers under the financial bus, too. There is scant doubt that what happens in the next few weeks in Bensalem won’t be taken to heart in board rooms across America.

In the end, it seems to me the real reason for Express Scripts sticking it to wage earners in a time of such economic uncertainty comes down to one horrifyingly simple thing. It’s a thing I’m sure sure George Paz’s parents warned him against in his formative years, much as I’m sure the children of Bensalem workers will be warned against it when all is said and done. That thing is greed. The age-old syndrome of I-want-more-and-I-don’t-care-what-happens-to-you. No pain, no WellPoint and, potentially, Walgreens gain. Except in this case, the price of my gain is your and your family’s pain.

As always, that’s a tough pill to swallow.

I laughed out loud for real when Todd Allen, author of the Drew Peterson-themed satirical graphic comic, Division and Rush, sent me the following link. It’s an April article from the New York Times questioning whether unpaid social-media internships are legal. I laughed because when I questioned the internships, myself, here on Carless back in February, more than a few Chicago media wonks warned me quietly not to rock the boat. So it’s always nice when none other than the U.S. Department of Labor makes you feel vindicated.

Written during my controversial exit from ChicagoNow, in my post, The Economic Damage of Social Media Internships, I pointedly questioned how a business relationship where workers were the ones imparting expertise to companies–and not the other way around–could be considered an internship. I wrote in part:

“Organizations are supposed to add value to interns, not the other way around. If social media interns–good ones–are bringing to the table critical skills and knowledge that will qualitatively improve the organizations that engage them, they should be paid fairly for their services. In this case, that means whatever the going local rate is for professional Internet marketing services in the private sector.”

I also lambasted the Chicago foundation scene for coaching cash-strapped nonprofits to offer social-media internships as a way to gain institutional knowledge about Internet community-building from young underpaid experts. To be frank, I was talking about the Chicago Community Trust–which did not go unnoticed by them, since I was already on their radar screen for having publicly questioned the worth of their consultant-managed 2009 Community News Matters grant awards. My continued criticism led my outgoing ChicagoNow editor to warn me that not marching in step with the Trust probably meant I’d “never work in nonprofit in this town again.” (Hurray, I thought at the time. Maybe I’ll finally have a job with health insurance.)

Turns out I was on to something. As told in the Times article, the U.S. Department of Labor has been scrutinizing unpaid internships all year. And as far as Uncle Sam is concerned, unpaid internships require that the benefits accrue to the intern, not the company offering the internship.

A June article from CNN/Money makes things clearer, specifically laying out the criteria the federal government uses when deciding whether an internship is really an internship. Among them:

• The working environment must be a learning environment for the intern;
• The experience should be for the benefit of the intern;
• Interns should not displace regular employees; and perhaps most important of all
• Companies should derive no immediate, bottom-line benefit from an intern’s activities.

If any of the above criteria are not satisfied, the federal government will automatically recognize the worker as a regular employee–requiring them to be paid market rate for what, as it turns out in actuality, are their professional services.

And I can’t think of any way that asking an Internet community-building expert (read: every college student in America) to work for your nonprofit or commercial business for free or very nearly in order to build or manage a highly added-value corporate social media presence can satisfy any of those criteria. Can you?

Or to paraphrase the CNN/Money article, a company can’t exploit you even if you agree to let them do it. Which, of course, is exactly what I said about unpaid social-media internships five months ago. Yes, that’s an “I told you so.”

I can live with it.

They must have been very surprised at what happened next. Which was…nothing. Well, not much anyway. Sure, buses became more crowded, and some major thoroughfares lost critical early morning and late-evening hours of service. But that sought-after groundswell of public anger never materialized.

There’s a good reason why. In 2010, thanks to CTA Bus Tracker and the widespread use of smart phones, anyone with a home or mobile Internet connection now has the easy ability to find out when the next bus is getting to the nearest stop. Or, really, to find out when any bus on any route is getting to any stop in Chicago–not to mention where on its route any bus is right now. Cue communal sigh of relief. And exit one of the most important public points of pressure labor unions have been able to count on up to now to force concessions from transit agencies.

Short of bus drivers going out on strike (which would be illegal and, judging by the experience of New York City’s striking transit workers in 2007, would likely break the union financially), short-term service disruptions no longer have the power to take riders by surprise, confuse their journeys, or force them to fear finding alternate routes. Instead, a few seconds of surfing on the CTA website, or clicking on popular transit tracker apps like iPhone’s (phenomenal) Buster or Android’s TreKing, is all it takes for riders to plan their bus trips in real time.

Meaning not only did the CTA’s bus union sorely misjudge the agency’s ability to afford to continue to pay 1,100 now laid-off workers without a giveback from labor, but the labor leaders who led those rank-and-file CTA workers over the bluff and into employment oblivion also weren’t paying attention to the widespread adoption of technology that would make it nearly impossible for the union to use public pressure to get the 1,100 jobs back.

The CTA is currently testing a similar real-time ‘L’ tracking system on the Brown Line. If I were a rapid-transit labor leader, I’d think about that the next time contract season rolls around. After all, transit workers deserve jobs just like anyone else. But they don’t deserve short-sighted labor leaders so out-of-touch with political and technological realities that they can’t tell the light at the end of the tunnel is nothing but an oncoming train. Hopefully, CTA labor leaders are paying attention now.

As a regular CTA rider, I’m annoyed at extra crowding on the 22 bus, and a lack of late-evening options on Division Street. But my outcry–more of a plea, really–is for Electropuf to port Buster to Android, not for the CTA to hire back the bus drivers. Thanks to bus tracker and unfortunately for the union, I just haven’t got time for the pain.

In Chicago, it’s always a shock when the clout runs out.

(Graphic: It’s been a quiet few weeks…not.)

As I dig myself out from my blogging hibernation of the past few weeks here on Chicago Carless, things have been a bit more steady over on my ChicagoNow blogosphere-watcher byline, Chicagosphere. If you know one thing about me from reading Carless, I’m not half shy about sharing my opinion.

Keeping that in mind, today on Chicagosphere I asked whether the Chicago Sun-Times union truly understands the endgame faced by their paper and journalism in general, calling out the Chicago Reader’s Michael Miner along the way for suggesting that columnists be forced to ditch commentary in favor of strict news analysis. (There’s nothing I find more tiresome than yet another reporter throwing the rest of the world under the bus for the failings of their own field.)

Of course you know, that’s not the only viewpoint I’ve shared recently. If you’re son inclined, I invite you to browse through my recent Chicagosphere columns (as usual, you probably should buckle-up, first):

Why the Sun-Times Deserves to Die
Last week, Chicago Newspaper Guild members working at the Sun-Times rejected the conditions of a last-ditch rescue effort for the tabloid. Does Chicago’s #2 paper have to go out of business for journalists to finally understand their profession has no bargaining power left? And just how many boring, finger-pointing columns does the news-reading public have to sift through before reporters finally take responsibility for their own livelihoods?

Columnists on Chris Kelly
Many local columnists covered the unexpected death of former Blagojevich croney Chris Kelly. Most rehashed their own words or the words of others. But a few really nailed the sad, simple nature of the situation.

Now on Sale: Social Media Management?
Frequently, nonprofits try to save money by eschewing PR strategy and handing over their all-important social media outreach efforts to neophyte college interns. You know what? You get what you pay for.

Chicago Online News: The Best of What’s Left
In the wake of the shutdown of the Chitown Daily News, I look at the the Windy City’s remaining sources of online news–and continue to caution local bloggers against relying on foundation money for long-term sustainability.

Analyzing Helen Shiller’s Response to the Uptown Riot Controversy
In late August, 46th Ward alderman Helen Shiller released an amazingly tardy, poorly worded response on the controversy generated by last month’s video of a riot in the Uptown community. I put on my PR strategist had and picked apart Shiller’s statement paragraph by paragraph looking–in vain–for evidence of responsible governance.

Why the Everyblock Sale Matters: Chicago Foundations Pass the Buck on Sustainability
Everyblock was lucky to be bought out my MSNBC.com. But the result might have been different if a savior hadn’t shown up after the Knight Foundation walked away at the end of its grant agreement.