Trainman ( snipped-for-privacy@prodigy.net) wrote: : : This "modern" attitude of "ME first" and "Profit is all!" can sum up : almost every argument we've had here, whether it's UP's license fee, : Horizon's purchase of Athearn, Okiechoo's selling of TCA information, : Mark Mason, you name it. It all comes down to greed and ego!. : : People tell me I'm hopelessly mired in the past. That may well be true, : but there was a lot about the past that was much kinder, gentler and more : civilized, and the world is worse place for losing it. :
All CEOs should be like Aaron Feuerstein, instead of emulating Enron's Ken Lay:
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A CEO Who Lives by What's Right (washingtonpost.com)
"By Mary McGrory Thursday, December 20, 2001; Page A03
In this anxious hour of pink-slip dread, it is restoring to think of Aaron Feuerstein, a Massachusetts manufacturer who prizes his employees and risks profits on their behalf.
The CEO of Malden Mills, located in Lawrence, the 23rd poorest community in the country, stepped clear of the greedy stereotype of his kind in 1995 when, just before Christmas, his factory burned down. Rather than taking the insurance money and retiring or moving the plant to some Third World country, he promptly announced that he would rebuild. He gave bonuses to the help and paid them while they waited for the factory reopening.
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Where did Feuerstein get his extraordinary ideas about worker-management relations? "At my father's table. We all had to be there. No pizza in the kitchen. I was seven years old when I heard my father tell a story I never forgot."
Aaron's father had watched his father, who founded the factory, go around at the end of the day and give money to every one of his workers. Aaron's father explained to his father, a Hungarian immigrant, that this was not the American way. Aaron's grandfather screamed at Aaron's father that it was against the Torah to do it any other way.
Young Aaron consulted his rabbi, who happened to be his maternal grandfather. His other grandfather, he was told, was right. In Leviticus, it is written, "You are not permitted to oppress the working man because he is poor and needy." Aaron memorized the passage in Hebrew -- and lives by it.
Such a rabbi Kenneth Lay should have had."
--Jerry Leslie Note: snipped-for-privacy@jrlvax.houston.rr.com is invalid for email