Reality TV Gives Corporate America a Big Wet Kiss
by Mark Brenner
February 1, 2010
Want to know what chutzpah means? Look no further than TV's newest reality show, “Undercover Boss.” Apparently the titans of industry aren't satisfied that they burned our economy to the ground and got nothing but a slap on the wrist from Washington. They want us to like them, too.
“Undercover Boss,” which debuted on CBS after Sunday’s Superbowl, is a corporate charm offensive. For one week the CEO of a major company goes "undercover," performing a variety of jobs at the bottom of the corporate ladder.
Over the course of an hour we discover that the CEO is really a nice guy. We see just how ready top brass is to reward hard-working employees and to clean up problems on the front lines.
It's a blast from the Reagan-era past: CEO-as-hero.
The first episode features Larry O'Donnell, president of Waste Management, the nation's largest trash and recycling company.
In fine superhero tradition, O'Donnell adopts an alter ego (that sounds strangely like a porn star)—Randy Lawrence—and spends a day each doing various jobs at Waste Management: sorting recycling; picking up trash at a landfill; cleaning port-a-potties in an amusement park; shadowing the manager of a landfill; and riding shotgun on a residential garbage truck route.
You can't help but enjoy O'Donnell's ineptitude doing blue-collar work. He struggles to snatch cardboard off a recycling conveyor belt in Syracuse while his supervisor chuckles that he's working on the slowest line in the building. Almost on cue, O'Donnell misses a big piece and completely jams the machine, forcing everyone on an early lunch break.
We get a good laugh but the joke’s on us, because Larry O'Donnell still goes home at the end of a year with a $3 million salary.
Viewers never see O’Donnell in his natural habitat, crowing about squeezing more work out of his “team.” On an investor conference call he held in March last year, he bragged that in 2008’s fourth quarter the company shed more than 800,000 “driver hours” compared to the same time the prior year.
What we also don’t see is any sign that workers at Waste Management have ever heard of unions. Although Teamsters represent thousands of workers at Waste Management, that piece of reality didn’t make it onto TV. No surprise, since the company has been aggressively trying to break the union for years.
During O’Donnell’s watch, the company has been forced to pay an $8 million legal settlement after locking out 500 Oakland garbage truck drivers in 2007.
Although failing to wring concessions out of drivers in Oakland, the company got its way in Los Angeles, where workers turned down a bad contract and struck for 12 days but were forced to take a sub-par health package or face permanent replacement.
The company also provoked a four-week strike in Milwaukee in 2008, forcing workers to dump their traditional pensions and swallow 401(k)s.
In that conference call with investors last year, Waste Management blandly reported that “labor and employee benefits costs improved by $59 million in the quarter … with most of that cost related to the withdrawal from the Teamsters’ underfunded Central States Pension Fund.”
Read the full article at:
http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2010/02/reality-tv-gives-corporate-america-big-wet-kiss