Month: September 2018

Walmart and other major fresh food suppliers are taking a major step to alleviate a perennial crisis – contaminated food.  hey are implementing a blockchain network that tracks fruits and vegetables from farm to store. The software has reduced the time it takes to find the origin of injurious product from seven days to 2.2 seconds. Moreover, it cuts down on the wastage of food that has been the answer to contamination up to the present. If romaine lettuce caused illness, stores would remove all romaine from their shelves even though most of it was OK. Now, they will only trash that which has been identified as the source of illness. This will save time, injury and money. It will also make PR practitioners’ lives easier in managing communications for recalls. The new system is easier all the way around. Kudos to all the companies that have made this possible.

Bump stocks, devices that turn semi-automatic rifles into machine guns, gained a horrid name in the Las Vegas massacre a year ago. There is no excuse for them and they should have been federally banned. A year later, they are still being sold in 40 states and there doesn’t appear to be a movement to get rid of them. If nothing else, this shows the limits of publicity. The shooting in Las Vegas was international news and covered for days. The bump stock was featured prominently in the stories. Revulsion was universal. Calls for regulation blared once again. Nothing happened except in 10 states that saw fit to ban them. One can call Congress feckless but that would be too simple. There is no national will expressed in voting and activism. That takes hard work of building coalitions, grassroots organizing, petitions and lobbying. In the face of opposition from the National Rifle Association, this will never be easy and failure will be common, but if the public keeps at it, it will eventually succeed.

Amazon.com has been blistered in reporting and on social media for its pay scale for warehouse workers. It has just announced a raise for its employees. The increase of two to four percent was at best a small step and will hardly dent Amazon’s profits. Most certainly it will not stop criticism of its wages. Bezos has long been known as frugal when it comes to remuneration, and it might over time be a differentiation between a successful company and a struggling retailer. Should Amazon’s workers decide to unionize and strike, they can quickly shut the company down.  Poor pay is a prime reason for adverse action. Look for pay scales to continue as a weak point for the company in terms of reputation and credibility.

One painful crisis for a company is when an employee sabotages its product and services. That is why this instance hurts. The worker was clearly trying to get fired by spitting into food while being filmed, but that makes no difference to appalled customers and the company itself. What motivates a person to take such awful action. If he was unhappy, he should have quit without making a case of it. Business can’t protect itself from every erroneous action by employees. It has to trust they will carry out their tasks according to established procedures. If that trust is missing. a business is forced to shut down. It can’t guarantee customers they will get a product or service as promised. The ball park ex-employee is going to be prosecuted according to the law but that is small comfort to fans who are left to wonder what is in their food.

The UK’s Labour Party is proposing that as much as 10 percent of companies’ shares be set aside for employee ownership and as many as a third of board seats be reserved for employee directors. The British chambers of commerce predictably opposed the plan. The idea, however, is interesting. It has been widely discussed that workers have not seen the fruits of fat earnings from companies in this expansion. Wages have barely risen although stocks and dividends have. Companies are rewarding owners over labor, so why not make labor owners as well? It would serve to deflect much of the criticism that corporations are experiencing. Labour’s idea should be studied further.

If one is going to make a dumb spelling mistake, it is probably better to do it where all can see. That way, it can be laughed off. Still, it is an embarrassment for Cathay Pacific, and it raises questions about the day-to-day management of the airline. Someone should have seen the error before the plane took to the air and landed in Hong Kong. The company handled the incident as well as could be done. It publicly acknowledged the error and fixed the spelling on the aircraft right away. Meanwhile, the internet had a field day spinning jokes from the mistake.

The current Administration is trashing two of the most powerful symbols of America. Those, of course, are the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, which are beacons of hope for immigrants, the oppressed and refugees. Lady Liberty and Ellis communicated freedom, a chance to start again, an open invitation to make of oneself what one wanted to be. Trump is making a mockery of that by reducing the intake of foreigners just to one-third of its historical average. He has often stated he wants to keep people out of America. He wants a wall on the southern border. He sees outsiders as a threat to the United States and not added ingredients to a cultural stew. All this has come as a shock to those who want to emigrate here. It is a mordant surprise to Americans who believe this land is the terrain of immigrants. There is little to be done until the next Presidential election. Then,voters can decide whether to stand by Trump or toss him out.

Amazon has an internal crisis on its hands. It appears some of its employees have been selling confidential inside information to companies seeking to improve their sales and making offers to delete bad reviews of products. The company has launched an investigation and stated that what might be happening is strictly against its rules. If so, the errant employees have hurt credibility and fairness and deserve to be dismissed and/or prosecuted. Amazon is too big and important a retailer to have its trustworthiness impugned. If the issue is pay — employees acting out of bounds because their compensation is too small — part of the problem lies with Amazon itself. The company ought to be paying more to deter illegal freelancing. It is well known that it drives its warehouse employees hard and pays them relatively poorly. Amazon should mete out punishment, but it also should take a look at itself and its procedures.

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh is in a bind. A woman has come forward who claims in high school he had tried to rape her but was too drunk to do it. Kavanaugh has unequivocally denied that it happened and another man who was supposed to be with him has also said it isn’t true. Who to believe? It is a classic case of she said he said. In the #metoo environment, the woman is being given more credence than the man, and one prominent figure after another has disappeared from public life. Kavanaugh might be next. If so, it will be a blow to the Trump administration and perhaps, to the Court. Kavanaugh is widely recognized as an able scholar of the law, a gentleman with the numerous female clerks he has engaged and an all-around good person. If he did attempt to rape a woman while in high school, that should exclude him from the Supreme Court, but who is to say? It is two against one now — two men against one woman. How do you prove what happened?

This is one ironic measure of the importance of PR — a lawsuit against a PR executive for disparaging remarks. The essence of the tort is allegations from a former Uber executive that she vilified him to the media. If she did, perhaps she deserves to lose the case  If not, she is still going to spend money to defend herself. In any event, if media relations were not important, this suit would be without merit.