A “gross pathologic report,” reflecting systemic problems, that doesn’t even address the worst tumor
I have supplied a number of rather detailed narratives/“arguments” about different phases of my experience at CommonHealth, which each can include a range of analyses that overall make for dense accounts. And from specific passages I quote below, the picture doesn’t sound too friendly. (But what can I do? I am trying to be fair to the facts, writing somewhat cumbersomely in not the most helpful circumstances.)
But a few themes should start shaping into a suggestive overall picture, which leads us to a more objective, less "slanted" set of conclusions (listed in section II below):
I. Some looks at specific sets of issues
1. Positives. From my first, “honeymoon” time with CommonHealth (my blog entry of July 5), the takeaway included (following are direct quotes, edited somewhat):
[A guiding principle to how we temps/freelancers seemed to be used and valued by CommonHealth was reflected in a situation] as if affinities and local-group loyalties were what kept groups of coworkers bonded together.
… The way Horizon used us editors, in ostensibly temporary work but with an eye to being judged for permanent positions, is a fairly typical placement-agency method, and an ambiguous one (and not always meshing with my aims—I generally tend not to expect or want this at any temp gig I’ve had). As I’ve said elsewhere (in my June 19 blog entry, “In editing, what is a freelancer?...”), as I’ve seen numerous times, this combined-agenda move can be handled sincerely on your behalf or not quite so. And as a more positive thing, if in employing you this way a company is checking you out to see if you fit them, you can certainly (and secretly) do the same with them. … [boldface added]
… The way CommonHealth looked at proficiency on a craft level versus how an editor fit into their company desires and culture is a very important theme that I can revisit with later anecdotes, which would say a lot more about the positives and negatives of this company….
2. Things appear darker. From my account of how work in 2003 was ended (in my July 16 blog entry):
A somewhat tough-sounding assessment, based on working for this company through many years:
[T]he “scalability” is in the company’s ability to move large amounts of money around—in pulling in large accounts, and (in essence) spreading money from healthy accounts and divisions to divisions that are doing less well, seasonally—all for the benefit of the longer-term (and often managerial) workers, while such “scalability” is not done to benefit the craft applied to (and necessary to) what it produces, such as is done by freelance editors and (perhaps) freelance production workers, much or at all. [boldface in original]
There was also detailed accounting of a 2002-03 situation, including use of e-mails, to support two themes:
…(1) [MBS/Vox] QC’er [i.e., editor] bitterness [seen among e-mails between us freelance editors who were the QC’ers at issue] [was] partly based on long, dense work [which means that our drawing conclusions about the company in an unusual anecdote wasn't simply invalidated by emotions spurred by how the work ended]; and
(2) [there was] the incendiary issue of CommonHealth’s occasional hiring value of female attractiveness[.] [boldface in original]
The most incendiary topic, which also is one of my most popular blog entries to judge from my per-entry statistics, concerned the breakdown of the placement agency “The Gary Laverne Group” (my first blog entry of July 9). The “takeaway” statement for this was:
For a time through early 2007, med-media firms wanted freelance editorial work done well and quickly by temps they hired from the placement firm GLG; but after a while, they opted not to pay for this work on time. This became a practice so widespread across firms and stretched out over so much time (varying among med-media firms) that it forced GLG into being in violation of state law regarding disbursing paychecks, in cases for many months, and caused it to go out of business. [boldface in original]
3. In 2004, another positive, amid more ambiguities. In my two sections on the period in which I worked for CommonHealth from 2004 through 2006, Part 1 (blog entry of August 23) included this very unusual way (by medical-media standards) I was valued by the editorial director of the flagship division of Ferguson:
[Editorial director] Karen’s valuing me for having worked at AB Bookman [an employer of mine in the early 1990s] was heartening and unusual: this evidently meant she saw me as able to do solid hands-on editing, and it was very rare in my overall experience that anyone in the medical-media realm actually reached out to me so consciously on the basis of my solidly traditional 1990s editorial work. [boldface in original]
We also found that Ferguson
[There were] the two general subtypes of CommonHealth trafficker: the “cheerleader” and the “horse.” [And along with this,] unlike the “bank of college kids” you saw at other agencies, at CommonHealth you could peg the traffickers in terms of where they stood on the spectrum of being a “cheerleader” or a “horse.” [boldface in original; by the way, the “horse” characterization does not mean “ugly,” but something about the type of performance the trafficker was expected to, or happened to, do]
In Part 2 of my 2004-06 material (my blog entry of August 1), we saw that I was welcomed back to MBS/Vox for the first time since 2003, but things would be different, in part as related to the breakdown of “Gary Laverne” as noted above:
…when we see that…MBS/Vox delayed paying for this quality-heavy work for several months, as became clear in 2007 after my work there was done, we have a different [situation in which] it isn’t hard to speculate…that, with the quality-dependent QC’ing done, MBS/Vox could sit on paying for this work while, first, it tried to bill its client for the work when the time came for that. [boldface in original; italics added]
##
*II. The more objective, less “slanted” set of conclusions*
What are some general trends we can start to appreciate from all this? Let us dial down the critical flavor of rhetoric and try to be fair.
(A) How you were embraced in good-faith and constructive ways—for your technical role, and your sense of being “part of the team”—varied over the years, to say the least.
(B) The roles that (some, not a small number of) women played, and the manner in which they played them, could be rather unusual, to put it very generally—ranging from the facilitative in a way that was based on female mannerisms, to what would be considered impertinent or even sexist-oriented behavior (e.g., when the company seemed to value women for their appearance) in other industries. (This is obviously a provocative topic, but it's a hard one to address by means of documenting facts and spelling out meanings as fully as is necessary, therefore it should be considered a minor aspect of the larger set of problems I am addressing.)
(C) Company ways of handling you as a freelancer (not just at CommonHealth) could phase into your being subjected to fraudulent (or highly questionable) situations regarding how or whether you were paid, before you knew it (and that possible fraud was specifically, directly at the hands of a placement agency). (At this point, in the examples we’ve seen, we can give CommonHealth the benefit of the doubt and say that, at least in some instances, perhaps it didn’t know it was straying into “fraud” or “dubious practice” territory, and was consciously engaging in expediencies that it didn’t know might backfire on it. I.e., it wasn’t consciously being fraudulent in delaying paying “The Gary Laverne Group.”)
##
A few additional blog entries will flesh out the picture here, before we really start to focus in any way on the extraordinary business of 2010. In some ways, they are amusing.
The one that is available now (“Geeks bearing grifts?...,” posted in the morning of September 4) deals with some unprofessional behavior of 2010 that was partly or entirely outside CommonHealth, and concerns a strange e-mail that I received in December 2010 (from an apparent placement agency) that presented a query to interest me in work. I AM NOT SURE IF THIS WAS TRIGGERED BY COMMONHEALTH, but whatever company triggered it, it seems very likely to have concerned medical-media work, and gives a fine illustration of the kind of high-handedness—that even gets into highly vague and questionable ways of communicating—that is typical of the medical-media industry.
Another time-period blog entry, on my experience at CommonHealth in 2007 and 2008, will provide vivid examples (from a range of sources) on the specific division culture that would seem to been the precondition for what happened in 2010 (as, one suspects, was also conditioned by the 2008-09 financial crisis and CommonHealth’s merger with Ogilvy’s medical-advertising division in 2010).
