[If you’re waiting for Part 2 of Anecdote 2, it is on its way. Anecdotes 2 and 3 are about business practices from 15 or more years ago; but as time goes on, and as I add entries to this blog, their relevance to current business practices will become clearer. Interestingly, I met someone very recently who had worked at a medical-advertising firm that had been a predecessor to a division of a current larger firm I am familiar with; and his seemingly wistful recollection of his old connection to the earlier firm suggests how, now more than usual, in this country there is a "troubled marriage" between the dual principles of (1) personal growth and being true to your own principles and (2) the evolution of business practices with respect to macroeconomic conditions. See editorial note at end.]
One important attitude to have when addressing the complex bear of the problems of the health-insurance industry is not to be naïve. A lot of workplace horror stories I have to tell involve medical-media firms (usually medical-advertising agencies). You say, Wouldn’t a firm that deals with medical matters be fair about an employee’s medical issues? I say, Any medical-media firm is a media firm first, and medical in any sense second. And being a media firm means sleazy management, more often than we would care to think. What are some examples? There are some broad types that become familiar after you’ve been in the industry a while, but let’s see a few unusual examples in this anecdote, and these don’t so much have to do with an employee’s medical issues as with a certain standard, state-administered benefit program.
Anecdote 3: Something I overheard at Montage Media in 1996
This was a matter that involved a third party, and I never knew who that person was. In 1996 I was working at Montage Media, which was relatively small (with maybe 30 employees) and located in Ramsey , N.J.
My gig with Montage comprised very sporadic dates within the latter half of 1996, and yet it was nice for my having respectable work. But of course it was insufficient in terms of needed income; and incidentally it is an example of temporary work at a place that you glimpsed enough of to know you wouldn’t want to work there full-time. It was run by a man who, in informal terms and from only-selective views I got of him, was something of a manic entrepreneur, as evidenced by (not the only examples): (1) one woman I worked with at Peoples Publishing in 2000 said she had been at Montage briefly and found she didn’t like the atmosphere (tense) because of how it was run; and (2) a man I worked with at Troll Communications in 1998 said he’d interviewed with that same owner of Montage and said he (the Troll coworker) had liked him because he’d (the owner) had tried to get a career going as a football player earlier in life. Why does this support my assessment of Montage’s owner?
Not only did I find this latter assessment (by the Troll coworker) bizarre (of a media-business owner!), or at least not one I could agree with on its face, but the Montage owner’s acting (as I witnessed in at least one instance) as if he was, with uncompromising manner, coaching a football team was exactly one of the things I thought was wrong with how he was running the company. Once I heard him all but bellowing at some young woman for something that had gone wrong, or such, and I thought he sounded for all the world as if he was a coach berating an oaf of a football player. In fact, she found herself able to say in a kind of appalled response, “Goddamn animals!”—as if she was summing up the place, and managed not quite to curse or otherwise indignantly respond to the man directly to his face.
Anyway, Anecdote 3 involves the company officer who was called the “controller”—this was that company’s alternative spelling (per magazine mastheads) for comptroller, but in this man’s case the spelling was rather apt—though he seemed tasked with being more of a Mafia enforcer at times. I overheard him call up the unemployment office and try to get someone removed from their rolls, someone who apparently had been an employee there and had been fired or laid off. The unemployment office, in the end, told him they couldn’t do that. Which of course it was its perfect right to do—and maybe its legal obligation.
Consequences of an employer’s monkeying around with unemployment
In general, when an employer ends up handling employees in such a way that a large number from that employer end up on the unemployment rolls—which in Montage’s case was quite a plausible and even a likely situation given the way this type of small publisher could operate—what is called the “experience rating” of a company in the eyes of the unemployment office changes. What this means in detail, or in more explicit general terms, I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure it reflects that the company may receive a red flag of sorts in the unemployment office’s eyes.
A more practical—and certainly a suitable—possible result is that the unemployment office may require the employer to pay out more money in unemployment contributions per time period, or the like, to cover the multitude of former employees the company is causing to enter its system. It would seem unfair to require employees to pay a larger percentage in unemployment tax out of their checks for this; thus it seems to make more sense that only some kind of employer contribution to the unemployment fund would go up. But I really don’t know how the specific practical consequences of an employer’s “change in experience rating” work, or even if a mechanism works at all as I just described.
Anyway, overhearing the Montage controller try to get someone knocked off the unemployment rolls said enough. With all I knew that was relevant, I found it a little appalling (and yet another new anecdote to add to my list of publisher rogue behaviors) that the company owner, as the likely one ultimately responsible, had his “controller” try to get a former employee—regardless of the merits of why the employee had been discharged—booted from the unemployment rolls.
This may seem a pretty minor story from a small (in more ways than one) business in another decade. But it may prove to be an interesting prelude to a later blog entry that touches on practices more typical of today, and at larger medical-media companies.
For now, the Montage Media anecdote has the advantage of being easy to understand, insofar as the company’s attempt at stiffing an employee in some sense was so crude and direct (and rather lacking in imagination). It turns out that the company thereby also did not comply with the law.###
[Editorial note, 4/28/12: Only on the day I prepared this entry for publication--and not in the weeks this entry was in draft form--did I find some online evidence of the apparent collapse of Montage Media, with a lawsuit suggesting tough problems for its main principal, Steven [sp?] Sweeney. This court-information-related Web site seems to say that his business was sued in 2010, by a printer (and others?), for lots of money owed; the plaintiffs (the number of 37 is noted!) filed for summary judgment and received it in 2011. This situation doesn't entirely surprise me, not to kick Mr. Sweeney when he's down.]
