Preliminaries for a Biopsy, 3 (or: Anecdotal Evidenz, Anecdote 4): What became of the placement agency “The Gary Laverne Group” (a pseudonym) in 2007? Some health-care-related dealings that were starkly unhealthy for a firm’s workers

One of a mini-series, on the peculiar medical-media use of an editor in order to bill the Big Pharma client (because, you know, editors wouldn’t be employed by med-media firms, along with the following possible financial mishaps, if the med-media firm couldn’t bill the Big Pharma client for that work)

[This adapts, and adds to, a mini-essay I posted on my personal Web site in 2011. Also, below I use the term “med-media firm” or “med-media” as a modifier; here, this refers primarily to medical advertising/promotional firms. See also “What is editing? Part 2 of 2: Is medical editing a blind alley? [BETA]” for an explanation of some of the logic to how med-media firms use freelance editors. Edit 5/30/14: For a follow-up to this entry, see here from May 2014.]

Takeaway: 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.

The variety of publishing I’m deeply familiar with is (or it certainly was before 2008) a highly changeable, if not unstable, industry, to say nothing of the passing political behaviors within given workdays and the more business-oriented (but in key ways questionable) machinations that can occur there. Many of the companies listed on my resume (especially those from the 1990s) have gone out of business (sometimes due to the supplanting factor of the Internet), or been bought up by (or merged with) another company, or moved a considerable distance away.

But the weirdest experience I ever had with a business’s fate in the media industry was when a placement agency, “The Gary Laverne Group” (a pseudonym; “GLG” hereafter), imploded. It was on a track to do this for a year or more, but once numerous of its paychecks to several employees started bouncing or were withheld by its management (and, later, GLG started being sued—apparently by an employee—for nonpayment), it fairly quickly collapsed.

This is also an example of how, as slow and tedious as the process can be, discovering the nature and cause of a business meltdown in a concrete, patient, and relatively respectful manner is better than high-handed incriminations, broad condemnations, sophomoric rhetoric and refusals to recognize complexity, and/or the like. For one small example, one or more GLG workers, frustrated in dealing with specific consequences of its meltdown, would dismiss it baldly as “sleazes,” but I instinctively held to the idea that steadily and firmly working with the company, to get square (though as a sort of stolid, persistent creditor), was a better policy.

It’s hard to say how much I would blame or criticize GLG in this matter today; in general, I have no real issue with GLG today. I have found in reviewing my clot of records on this mess that I was more patient with Gary of GLG than I might have been with a similar imposition in more recent years (2009-11), but I was, throughout, practical and resolved in some kind of proportion to the mysteriousness and vexatiousness of the situation. And I think Gary worked to mollify me a little more quickly during the meltdown than he did other workers because he, I believe, felt I understood his situation more than did the others.

Further, a longer-range objective of this account is to look critically at another, much larger firm that utilized GLG’s services for some years (and abused it just before GLG’s demise). With this larger firm, my emotions have been stirred and unsettled, partly because of its practices in 2010 (which had nothing to do with a placement agency) that seemed to echo practices it engaged in that were inferable in 2007, which latter had the consequence of helping to kill GLG in 2007.

I. GLG and its financial failure

Getting on board with GLG

GLG was owned and primarily run by two principals, “Gary” (age maybe 45 in 2007) and “Laverne” (age maybe 40 in 2007). It had been started in about 2000, after both Gary and Laverne had (to my knowledge) worked for another placement agency, Horizon Graphics (and had started it?), which had been located in Boonton, N.J., for many years. Gary, from what I’d understood and/or speculated, had worked previously (prior to maybe the early 1990s) in some capacity in television or radio; it seemed whatever he’d learned from those industries (in which I myself had never been terribly interested in working) led him later to set up talent agencies for those more print-media-oriented industries where revenue flowed fairly heavily, that is, those that GLG ended up serving, including medical advertising/promotional firms.

As for Laverne, coincidentally, I had first spoken with her in March 1994, after having submitted my resume to Horizon and gotten a form-card response in 1993. By March 1994, having left what would be my last full-time staff publishing job, I was itching to get into freelance work and no longer be an editorial staffer, if possible. Horizon Graphics used to advertise for editors a lot in New Jersey newspapers.

In 1994, Laverne wouldn’t interview me to include me in their roster of workers yet, because I didn’t meet the firm’s requirement of having three work references [this situation is briefly alluded to in the “Sequelae” subsection near the end of the blog entry “Anecdotal Evidenz: A health-insurance odyssey, amid my dealings with CPG (1993-94), Part 2 of 2,” of May 2]. She said, and this is a direct quote from old notes, Horizon could be “kind of held liable” if a worker didn’t pass muster with references. As it happened, I had to wait until early 2001—about seven years later—before I had, as Horizon required, the three publishing references who could be contacted and freely attest to my virtues as an editor (and, as it happened, these references came from, essentially, the educational and reference publishing subfields).

By then, Laverne was gone from Horizon; there were another few regular employees there I dealt with, and after Horizon took me on in 2001, they employed me—placing me at a range of companies, usually medical-advertising/promotional firms (“med-media firms,” hereafter)—until 2004, when they went dormant, partly (and presumably) because they suddenly lost an appreciable chunk of business with a certain large med-media firm in 2003. My densest and most valuable experience during my 2001-04 time with Horizon was with different divisions of the just-named large med-media firm, with which I put in so much time from fall 2002 through late summer 2003 that I was almost a full-time worker there, though at different divisions.

After Horizon went dormant, and wondering why I couldn’t try to work for the large med-media firm directly as a freelancer (the way a print publisher could employ you directly as a freelancer, and pay you so that, incidentally, you got 1099s instead of W-2s), I sent querying-for-work letters to Jen C., a supervisor of mine when I was there through Horizon [see toward the end of the blog entry “Getting bearings: Work flirting and the professional woman’s firewall,” from June 15]. She eventually tipped me off to GLG. Once GLG hired me, and it had no issues about references (I think I provided two, but it’s possible GLG didn’t even contact them), I started working at the large med-media firm again in April 2004. I would work through GLG at many med-media firms from 2004 through late 2006, and I believe I made more money in that period, year for year, than through Horizon.

By the way, Laverne was at GLG, but she wouldn’t have remembered me from 1994. Both she and Gary were generally fine to work with, when work arrangements were suitable enough. Regarding how GLG placed me at firms, there would occasionally be odd little issues; Horizon had been more erratic in terms of (obliviously) suggesting firms that would not be a good fit for me, such as regarding professional experience, but GLG’s awkwardness along similar lines wasn’t quite so bad. And the worst arrangement was GLG’s having me work at a Manhattan firm for five months in 2005, which entailed commuting time for me of about five hours a day (to and from). I felt in this case that, in part, GLG was using me as its try at making inroads into the Manhattan client scene and also using me as a mule to bring in money to it.

GLG’s collapse: why

The way GLG collapsed in 2007 can be attributed to a number of things. But it is ironic that GLG imploded so ignominiously about seven years after it started, and (ironic from my viewpoint) after Laverne (at Horizon) had held firm with me on three references about 13 years beforehand. But in part, this reflected changes in the overall med-media industry, which this blog entry is just one of several here, discussing.

Laverne left GLG in spring 2007, at (about) the same time (in April) as Gary announced to me that GLG was closing (indeed, its company phone line would eventually be disconnected, and its Web site would be removed; my last dealings with Gary would be through a cell phone and what was apparently the e-mail address of a relative of his. A fax number he would use with me in later 2007 did not belong to the GLG office I had faxed to for years.

I’m not sure what Laverne’s and Gary’s relationship with GLG was in terms of their having been invested in it—via deferred pay, stockholding, or whatever—but it was clear that Laverne vacated the scene in spring 2007 and I only dealt with Gary as he had the unenviable task of straining to get money from multiple clients, dealt with the increased demands of his funding company, and came to realize that legal threats were on the horizon, from different sources. He probably assumed all financial liability for the company as he allowed Laverne to cash in on her share and leave (this would be a reasonable assumption, though who really knows what happened as Laverne left). In effect, he retreated to a bunker to deal as responsibly as possible with the long, ambiguous denouement of GLG, while Laverne went on with her career.

What Gary is doing now is intriguing and I won’t describe it, while for an odd work-related reason I won’t go into, I contacted him in fall 2009 at the relative’s e-mail address and got a cooperative response from him.

Here is the basic problem GLG ran into—while in general and historically, it seemed to be one “agent” of choice for editorial talent for a fair number of north Jersey med-media firms. (There are numerous placement firms that fill this role, for different med-media companies; it seemed GLG was maybe the agency of choice for the med-media firms I worked at from 2004 through 2007. But other placement firms, still operating, run the gamut from The Creative Group, a subsidiary of the nationwide Robert Half International [which thus has seemed constitutionally unable to collapse as GLG did] to more local affairs like The BOSS Group and CGR7; the latter two a friend of mine has worked with, but I never have.) Placement agencies typically use the services of a funding company, which seems to be a sort of bank for businesses, to provide cash to back up payroll checks while the placement agencies experience what seems a fairly typical lag in receiving payment from their clients for the work a placed worker has already done. (The sites I checked out in 2007 are http://www.flexiblefund.com/, http://www.businessfunding.org/, and http://www.commercefunding.com/ [the company behind this last site may have somewhat different business aims today than the firm had in 2007].)

For example, a med-media firm needs an editor; the placement agency sends it an editor, who works there for three weeks, and the work is done. The placement agency is employing the editor as a staffer, with payroll checks made out for this staffer with taxes taken out; the placement agency is required by law to pay the staffer in a timely fashion, so it gives the employee the check per whatever its payroll schedule is. But the med-media firm that used the editor may hold off on paying the placement agency for the worker soon enough for the placement agency to have that money to back up the payroll check; therefore, the placement agency utilizes a funding company to provide cash to back up the checks. [See my blog entry “In editing, what is a freelancer? Versus a temp? And other considerations” from June 19.]

The funding company (I would expect) charges not-low interest for this service; when the placement agency gets paid by the client, the placement agency (on whatever kind of schedule) pays the funding company back the money, with interest. This all would seem to be standard business, to the extent I learned and inferred about it starting in 2007 when the GLG meltdown imposed on me grotesquely and I slowly but inevitably determined what was going on.

The point here is that several clients of GLG became so far behind (by their will, I would assume, at least in some cases) in paying GLG—and GLG ran out of money even from its funding company to such an extent—that GLG could not pay its paychecks on time. Paychecks bounced; it eventually withheld paychecks, up to several months—all in violation of state labor law. It tried to press, and/or wheedle, and otherwise get its clients to pay what they owed more quickly (but would not resort to suing the clients). The clients, to all appearances, felt no compunction on paying GLG later than usual; apparently their contracts with GLG didn’t forbid this. But their paying GLG late, pretty obviously, forced GLG to become in violation of state law regarding paychecks being disbursed in a timely fashion, and eventually GLG closed, with one of its two principals leaving relatively early in the 2007 breakdown, while a lawsuit hounded Gary, and while I myself started, then stopped, a laborious formal complaint with the state Department of Labor.

GLG’s breakdown in 2007 occasioned an unusual situation in which, when a division of the large med-media firm I mentioned earlier sought me for work in March 2007, because I was pursuing a relatively aggressive method of trying to get my payment from GLG before doing any further work through it, GLG allowed me to work directly with the med-media firm, which that firm allowed, seemingly in an ad hoc way. That coincided with the med-media firm’s having moved into a new office complex in which its various divisions were now spatially and, in some way, more practically consolidated, and it would start using outside, temporary (GLG-type) editors less; and an occasionally used freelance editor like myself would be hired directly, even if temporarily, and not through a placement agency.

As a general policy (which has been shared by other placement agencies), being hired directly by a med-media firm, shortly after your having worked there through a placement agency, used to be expressly forbidden by GLG without your paying a special large fee for this. Now, as an ad hoc decision, GLG was letting me start to work directly for this med-media firm. Of course, I had already been doing this sort of thing, working not through a placement agency (independently of any say GLG would have had, as the facts and legal circumstances allowed), with several other med-media firms in 2006. (Ironically, at one of these other firms, a coworker was there through Horizon Graphics, which apparently had resumed operation after going dormant in 2004. Also, when Gary or Laverne heard I was working at one of my independently obtained gigs in 2006, he or she asked me what the firm was, as if he or she wanted GLG to worm its way between me and the firm as a placement agency employing me.)

What my editorial work for the particular large med-media firm in question would lead to would pose some strikingly unusual problems of its own. But in 2007, as my star rose (in a small sense) as a direct employee of the large med-media firm, GLG’s star dropped as, seemingly, the type of small placement agency represented by it and Horizon, catering to certain types of large corporations, became more of a perilous proposition.

GLG’s collapse: early signs to interpret

GLG’s fall, it would become evident, started no later than 2005, when a check I received from it bounced, in November 2005. A check of almost $300 net pay incurred more than $100 in overdraft-related fees tied to my checking account, which, when I alerted GLG to the problem, it paid. (I would find that the bouncing of a paycheck happened with at least one other GLG worker in that same period of late 2005-early 2006.) I became nervous about being able to trust GLG for steady income, and, on working hard to bring in freelance work in which I was employed directly by med-media firms (some of them on the small side), 2006 became my most successful year ever in terms of number of firms worked for in a given year and in total amount of income. But GLG remained my main employer, and the biggest gig it found me was with a firm in Berkeley Heights, N.J., more than an hour’s drive from my home. This gig went on for a solid six or so months.

But later in 2006, checks from GLG started reaching me late by more than the usual amount of time. I think things got to where, instead of two given work weeks’ being put on the expected check, some of the time would be delayed, until I might get a check that contained an unusually large amount, catching me up to where I should have been if GLG followed its normal payroll schedule. I would comment on this situation to a workplace-derived friend [Sqodox, referred to in the long, indented section below] in October 2006 (when I gave him the news in an e-mail that I received a check that reversed a situation of my being anomalously “two weeks behind” in receiving a check, so that now I was back to being “just a few days behind [the date I should have received a given check,] where I would normally be in getting their checks”; italics added). But this way of GLG’s paying out checks—only when it had the money in its account to do it—would start to fall by the wayside.

By the end of 2006, I had another paycheck from GLG bounce, and then further checks were actually being withheld (they were printed by GLG’s checks-producing firm PayChex, but were being held by GLG because there was no money behind them). By early February 2007, I was owed four biweekly checks from GLG, some covering an appreciable period at the end of 2006 (meaning, in part, that while I dealt with my tax returns for 2006 pay, I had not received this pay, and this situation was going on for several weeks into 2007). The total gross amount for the four checks was over $5,000. I was still working for the firm in Berkeley Heights that accounted for most of my GLG work in 2006, but it was one of the firms responsible for delayed payment to GLG that caused GLG to delay sending out paychecks.

Long story short, I opted to do something I never had to do regarding an employer—certainly one that accounted for so much income—in my life: I refused to work for GLG until all the paychecks were in my hands. I made this clear to GLG in a painstakingly planned e-mail. “Going on strike” and facing down GLG this way—even while I was on such diplomatic terms with GLG that I could still discuss things with Gary in a businesslike way, while in February 2007 he seemed fatally out of touch with the monstrous situation he was in—all of this was such a stressful thing for me to do that I became horrifically sick in February, even entailing my getting emergency medical care. (I vomited so much, over several instances, that I needed an infusion of Ringers solution.)

[Here is a set of information I included in a document I first compiled on the GLG mess in 2007, and made available to a very limited number of people then. In 2011, I prepared a version of it suitable for access online via my Web site, but I don’t believe I made it publicly available then. The following is a small set of material from that document, on the experience of fellow temps employed by GLG, all pseudonymed: Liz, Nancy, Jane, Sqodox, Mitch, Belinda—freelance or temp editors all of whom I met and/or worked with at different times, and who had worked at medical-media forms as placed by GLG.

From November 2005 through February 2006, I was surprised to find that a number of these people had had experiences of paychecks being delayed, up to five weeks or more. There were at least three women this happened to; meanwhile, my checks weren’t being delayed. These people included Liz, a former staffer at a large ad agency (within the Interpublic conglomerate) and now a temp, who had to wait five weeks or longer, through early December 2005; Nancy, who had to wait several weeks—through January 2006—to get paid for work as a GLG temp (I believe at a division of the large medical-media firm I refer to in this larger Anecdote 4 document) in a period in November-December 2005; and Jane, who had worked many months at a pharmaceutical company as a GLG temp, whose checks recently were delayed till she complained to GLG.

With this news (in late 2005-early 2006) of so many editors’ having paychecks delayed while mine were still on time (though one did bounce), I did not feel smug, or “Better you than me.” I wondered if it was women who GLG was targeting for delaying checks, on the assumption that they weren’t main breadwinners in their households. To at least one of these people, I said she or they had a right to complain to the state Department of Labor.

I am not sure, but I think I heard (by earlier 2006) that someone else had a check bounce in that period of late fall 2005-early winter 2006.

Then in about spring 2006, I found that someone I knew for several years, Sqodox—who had been a fellow temp with me through Horizon Graphics in 2001-03 and whom I had recently encouraged to sign up with GLG—was having his first check delayed (for work at the pharmaceutical company that Jane had worked at)—by about four weeks after the pay period ended. Then GLG told Sqodox (I paraphrase), “Your checks should now come on time”—though the situation was more or less as follows: because the first check was delayed a few weeks, each subsequent one, even if it was two weeks after the previous one, was equally offset by a few weeks in relation to the pay period it was for.

The week of February 5, 2007, I encountered another person who had recently worked for GLG, Mitch, who was a former teacher. He said he had worked at MedThink (a pseudonym for a medical-promotions agency in Livingston, N.J.) through GLG recently and had not been paid for the work, for weeks. He also had had a GLG check bounce quite recently (in early 2007), and he had also had a GLG check bounce in the late 2005/early 2006 period.

Mitch also said that MedThink had gotten angry about GLG hounding them to pay its bills, because MedThink suspected GLG was trying to use their (MedThink’s) payments to back GLG checks for employees who were working for other clients that were behind in paying their bills. In fact, Mitch said that, in light of this, MedThink had considered hiring the GLG temps directly, away from GLG (as temps of MedThink, I believe).

Mitch told me a particularly ironic story about another GLG temp, Belinda, who had been a fellow temp when Sqodox, fellow temp Zdovox, and I had worked at MBS/Vox [see my July 5 blog entry, “Start of a Biopsy (this won’t hurt a bit)”]. Belinda had been a full-time staffer at MBS/Vox from about mid-2003 to about 2005, hired at the tail end of the temp phase she was in with Sqodox, Zdovox, and me. She was kept waiting for checks from GLG for so long that she almost lost her privately-paid-for health insurance as a result. Think about that: we were doing medical-editing work, not work on speculative ventures of trade books or limited-interest, leisure-pursuit consumer magazines; and the money-mishandling by medical-media firms could lead to one temp’s being at risk of losing her health insurance.]

I would not get the last of the four checks—which covered a pay period into early 2007—until June 2007. If this situation seems as if I was suckered, I think I was one of the numerous GLG employees who was paid earlier than some of the others (and in fact, the first two of the owed checks were sent to me fairly much in adherence to the schedule I outlined in my demanding February 2007 e-mail). And however much my being paid “earlier” was due to my diligent-or-strenuous, if not aggressive, holding GLG’s feet to the fire on the paychecks, I think no one among GLG’s other placement employees was as steady, thorough, and insistent about this (within externally imposed limits, because for a time GLG would be solidly out of touch with me). This is not bragging but reflects how this sort of situation was shockingly new to me (as well as legally highly questionable on GLG’s part), while I could only learn what the problem was and what to do and how to do it empirically, by bits, and meanwhile in a bit of a panic over not having my income come in.

I did not utilize a lawyer partly because I found that, as a payroll employee, my only recourse was to file a complaint with the state—as GLG was in direct violation of state law. As a matter of statutory guidelines or otherwise instituted rules, I had to pursue a complaint through the Department of Labor before opting to sue. Some other employee, however, initiated a lawsuit (I remember talking to a fellow GLG editor [Mitch, described in the long indented section above] who mentioned he was considering this route, but I don’t know if it was he who actually filed the suit I heard about). This fact of a pending lawsuit led Gary to pay me through bank cashier’s checks, since, as he explained to me in May 2007, his company account was “vulnerable” (i.e., one would assume, subject to garnishment or the like). Also, his funding company was requiring of him that payment by clients go directly to the funding company first, to satisfy what it was owed, then the remainder went to Gary, who then would pay the employee.

For the last two owed checks, he would send me the original paycheck’s stub—having been duly produced months before by the firm PayChex—along with a new cashier’s check. The time from my 2006 bounced check to final payment was roughly six and a half months, and the time from my February 2007 “going on strike” to final payment was four months.

This all reflects the practical headaches I went through. Why didn’t Gary declare bankruptcy? At one point he said he had no plans to do this. I don’t know the details of what a company’s bankruptcy would entail (under Chapter 11, say), and I didn’t know as much about bankruptcy in general then as I would later. But in general, with bankruptcy [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy, “United States” subhead, “Bankruptcy Exemptions” sub-subhead; and passim], the assets of a company become part of an “estate” that, in effect, the bankruptcy court is in charge of—almost as if it takes temporary ownership of the assets—and debts are paid to creditors in a basically evenly-dividing up way, to sum up very broadly. In GLG’s case, there were not many assets outside business equipment, which wouldn’t have satisfied such debts as the pay workers were owed; but what assets he did have, or could claim, mostly included money that was supposed to come in the future from the clients for which he had placed workers. And he couldn’t list this money as assets in a bankruptcy filing, because he probably didn’t know how much he would get and when. The dimensions of how a bankruptcy would not have worked for GLG—how the bankruptcy laws don’t square with such a fluid, uncertain-assets company like GLG—add to the outrageousness of the situation he was in and put his workers in. Again, I don’t know how much I would blame Gary alone for this.

II. The place of GLG among med-media firms through 2007, and what this means for today’s med-media business

“Follow the money.”  —clandestine advice from FBI associate director Mark Felt, a.k.a. “Deep Throat,” to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during their journalistic investigation into the Watergate conspiracy

As I said, an important feature of GLG’s failure is that its med-media clients were taking the liberty of paying GLG increasingly late. But this was for work that they typically wanted done at their own pace, and well. This while GLG seemed the premier placement agency (or at least one of them) to scout up temporary but good editors for the constellation of northern New Jersey med-media firms.

Thus, while GLG was looked to for trustworthy and capable workers, who were paid (what was in my view) high hourly rates, the med-media firms, seemingly increasingly in the latter half of the past decade, tried to delay paying GLG for longer periods, thus triggering GLG’s becoming delinquent in sending out its paychecks, making GLG in violation of state labor law. (When I told Gary in 2007 that I’d heard that the company in Berkeley Heights I’d been working at for him for months had two policy-outlined periods of delay for paying freelance workers, of four weeks and six weeks, Gary said he would be lucky to be even subject to the six-week delay with that company.)

Strangely to me, Gary declined to use an attorney to pressure or sue some or any of his clients. Laverne had said to me, earlier, that it was possible that they would use the services of an attorney with the delinquent clients, but Gary consistently held off from doing this later. Clearly he didn’t want to alienate the clients, which in general had been the sine qua non of his business. At a couple points, I believe, he commented to me that he would be paid by them eventually, as if this should console me, even while my paychecks were being held by him in violation of state law, and while I had financial need of them.

In February 2007, as I’ve suggested, I felt he was almost delusional in not recognizing what was happening with his company; he thought my issue in addressing the fact of not getting paychecks was simply my experiencing “stress.” (He would probably think differently a few months later when his company was closed, and he was only reachable by cell phone and at his wife’s e-mail address, and he was keeping money out of his business’s bank account.) In February 2007, he seemed to be running on wishful thinking, as if after the current situation of multiple clients’ being in arrears was cleared up, he could again freely get business from these clients, with GLG on better financial footing. (The Berkeley Heights client was especially gross, with its flagrantly paying late as a relatively long-term matter [and at least once, one of its accounting staff essentially stiff-arming Laverne when she phoned]—and yet it did this while still allowing me to come in to do its editorial work—which in my view was in the context of its being, not just in editorial work, an especially tawdry med-media “chop-shop.”)

[By the way, on the Berkeley Heights firm: I have somewhere in my files some kind of documentation to the following effect that I got off the Internet, but I don’t have it at hand (in general, I still have all the paperwork from the 2007 GLG mess, including correspondence with the state). But I found out in about 2009 or 2010 that the Berkeley Heights firm, which was not supported by a conglomerate and I think was privately owned or otherwise not supported by traded stock or the like, had to get some important recapitalization in 2007—apparently starting around the time I was putting the brakes on working there when taking GLG to task over its paychecks—that involving getting investment from equity firms or such, in order to “re-inflate” its revenue stream or such. This made a lot of sense given what it was doing with GLG temps, that it had such poor cash flow that it had to pointedly stiff GLG for months. But imagine being fully expected by this firm to come in to work when it had no intention of paying GLG’s bills for me right away, and was desperately scrounging up capital from new investors.]

When it comes to the question of whether fraud was going on here, there was a certain bitter irony for Gary. As I would think more incisively as time went on, GLG was being defrauded by his clients: they tapped Gary for workers, which he diligently provided; then he didn’t (or couldn’t) hold them to account strongly enough while they declined to pay him for the workers on time. But editorial workers he employed, who didn’t think through the whole situation, would look at Gary as if he was the only real sleaze here—as if he was engaging in fraud, they might say (I did hear one or more GLG editors talk about Gary and Laverne as if they were sleazy in their day-to-day excuses for why checks weren’t out). Certainly one of the workers started suing GLG (which as I’ve said the person technically wasn’t entitled to do).

More gallingly, I would assume that some of the clients involved, in defending their practices in this matter, would say it was entirely GLG’s fault that it was bouncing checks: it “should have had the money to cover the checks,” and they would have ignored the fact that their slow payment of GLG led to a situation where GLG had stretched its abilities to benefit from its funding company to the point that the funding company would eventually hold GLG’s feet to the fire as if GLG were a crassly delinquent debtor.

[The rest of the original form of this story is kept in reserve.]

Takeaway: 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.

Movie break: An “alternate personality” as a dam against despair, and a bridge to nowhere: The Beaver (2011)

A constellation of family and friends has issues about expressing themselves, whether via a transitional object, “forbidden art,” or learning to like oneself...

[This entry has been slightly edited; see also the July 13 follow-up.]

Jodie Foster is an actress, distinctly more so than Drew Barrymore, whose length of career belies how relatively young she is (though Ms. Foster is now almost 50, about a year younger than I). She also seems, in her career, like a Zelig-type character who has turned up in unlikely places. She modeled for Coppertone ads, from what I heard, in the late 1960s or so. She did TV work about then (see her Wikipedia article). She had a bit part as a street urchin in Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) and then got her first major notice, and award nominations, as the teenage streetwalker Iris in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). She was in the first version of the film Freaky Friday in 1977.

Later, she was Clarice Starling in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), opposite Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter. She was the protective mother in the thriller Panic Room (2002), accompanied by a 11-year-old Kristen Stewart as her boyishly-short-haired daughter. Stewart, about as bare-foot-plain in 2002 as Foster arguably was in about 1976, showed some early acting chops including in displaying insulin shock that her character entered when she was in her house’s “panic room,” spurring one of the housebreaking burglars to try to help her. [See my August 30 entry on Panic Room for some important notes on the issue of diabetes as handled in that movie.]

Foster’s career has continued without tabloid-ready drug-related meltdowns or dramatic marriage-and-divorce. She has seemed like an exemplary feminist without being conscious, self-conscious, or noisy about it. Even today, when she shows her years in acting as a sort of competent but careworn middle-aged mother, there still seems something refreshingly youthful about her—not in the sense of someone who won’t grow up, but in the sense of someone who maintains the wise optimism of youth while having lost youth’s callow snarkiness, immaturity, obliviousness to the different shades of life, and so on.

So there’s an important clue when her third directing effort, The Beaver, includes her remarking on one important influence on the film in her director’s during-the-film commentary (which is helpful to listen to for you to further appreciate the movie): she says this film, like her other directing efforts, is “the story of my life,” and in a way, “the hardest part of my life.” This and many other comments on the film DVD, not least her obvious and somewhat doctrinaire sensitivity to depression (one pointed focus of the film), suggest that she has suffered long-term depression, and finally wanted to make a film that addressed this phenomenon head-on. This alone, taking a view of her decades of accomplishments, makes us want to take notice of this film.

But as we watch The Beaver more than once, and get past some of the surface quirkiness of it, we find a film that, despite its flaws, deserves more recognition (critical and popular)—not just for its taking a stand on recognizing and treating depression, but for taking an atypical approach to it: seeing how a man, who is a paterfamilias and runs a business he inherited from his father, spontaneously starts to use a transitional object as a means to start coming to grips with his depression.

A transitional object—this term was founded in the 1950s, including with work by Donald Winnicott, and has one of its most well-known pop examples in the Peanuts character Linus’s “security blanket”—is an object, often a toy, that most healthily is used by children as a stage in becoming independent from their mother. [Wikipedia has an article; I can’t vouch at this time for everything in this article.] The psychological theory you can accept or not, but the sheer phenomenon seems so widespread and harmless that it would seem cheap-spirited to argue with the theory: it says that as a child (here we are dealing with “talking therapy” concepts, not psychopharmacological) goes through a separation/individuation phase—starts to replace its dependence on the mother, with her breast/infant-nurturing function, with something else—it then uses a toy as a replacement for the mother. This replacement can be a teddy bear (cf. the current film hit Ted for a bawdy/rowdy artistic exploitation of this phenomenon) or a doll. (By the way, has anyone other than me asked how weird the “American Girl” thing is? I.e., having a doll that looks like you? As if we don’t have enough problems in this society already with objectification of women.)

In the study of aspects of borderline personality disorder, it is noted that sufferers of BPD can make atypical (unhealthy) use of transitional objects (see, e.g., Jerold J. Kreisman, M.D., and Hal Straus, I Hate You—don’t leave me: Understanding the Borderline Personality [New York: Avon Books, 1989], pp. 52-3). BPD and depression aren’t exactly identical, but there is significant overlap. Of course, as an anecdotal thing, sufferers of BPD often report depression as their main complaint in consulting with helping professionals; and after they’ve been treated for BPD, they can end up being more discreet (than when in crisis) in talking about their condition, and say they have (merely) depression.

So whether or not Mel Gibson’s character Walter Black in The Beaver is a case of BPD or, more ostensibly noted in the film, depression, he starts to make a rather creative use of a transitional object, a beaver-like puppet, as a way to turn a corner in his depressive state: he finds a new way to express himself and function in a seemingly healthy way, including in his relations with family and at work. Whether or not you feel this is an outlandish, unlikely premise, I think it is plausible and worthwhile to consider along these lines: this may be an uncommon pass for a depressive person to come to, but not impossible; and depending how richly the story treats it, the story may still hold representative or edifying value for others.

More to the end of appreciating this film, Walter’s development shows that when long-term depression so badly challenges its sufferers—and challenges “collaterally damaged” family members—sudden new stratagems for “being a self-directing person” may emerge, which may be salutary in the short term. But in Walter Black’s case, this sort of thing ends up leading to tragic results—but in the process, he finds that it is up to him to come to the strongest terms with his depression.

Whether or not you find that this tale of depression seems a bit too lark-y, you have to admit that Mel Gibson’s acting as Walter with the puppet is a sight to behold. The film also raises some interesting points about how both Foster and Gibson make their work in this film relate to their own life. You remember my comment about Foster’s apparent experience with depression above. Also, Gibson is no stranger to something related to depression; his Wikipedia bio has a subsection on “Alcohol abuse and legal issues” that suggests he is bipolar (manic depressive)—this point referenced to a 2008 Australian interview. Thus The Beaver is interesting to see for Foster’s and Gibson’s own lives helping inform (1) the film’s comment on depression as a purely artistic and educational level and (2) its making use of, and indirectly referring to, their own different experiences with depression, in a way that ultimately, I think, makes this film a touching effort—not sentimental, but poignant and on the heroic side.

Preliminaries, 1: “Alternate personality”

Let’s get some things out of the way. The use by Gibson’s character Walter of a transitional object, through which he “ventriloquizes” with its voice, is not an instance of “split personality.” Those who think that such a way of playfully (and as a sort of defense mechanism, we might say) having an “alternative voice” is a matter of “split personality”—or, as people show their ignorance in confusing concepts, “schizophrenia”—need to be told: “Split personality,” or multiple personality disorder (the older term) or dissociative identity disorder (the newer, DSM term) is one thing, schizophrenia is another, and bipolar disorder is yet another. Schizophrenia involves extreme deterioration of the personality, including thought disorder such as delusions; bipolar disorder, or “manic depression” (the older term), is largely a mood disorder that may feature delusions but more definitively involves problems with mood and related self-image.

There are other psychological phenomena involving what could be called a lack of functional integrity: borderline personality disorder features this; any specific symptoms that involve what has been called “ego dystonia” (“that is not me”; “those thoughts aren’t mine”); and in a sense any disorder that cuts one off from one’s previously more usual identity-defining living, such as a fear of heights or of germs or of bugs that leads one to start drawing significantly hampering divisions in what one will get involved with, etc.

Something like using a transitional object and displaying personality through that is a different matter. I have exercised—as I’m sure many other people have—a version of this (which I should hope wasn’t pathological) when I used to play a game with my nephews when they were a lot younger, using dinosaur puppets to playfully interact with them. (They looked forward to this within a period of a few years.) Children, obviously, are delighted by this sort of thing, as is shown in how the young actor Riley Thomas Stewart lights up when Mel Gibson does his puppet routine with him. Children seem to like that because with it, an adult is being playful in a way a child doesn’t ordinarily see in an adult.

If some people were to say, “Well, I’m not a psychologist…”—fine. But believe it or not, even people who practice in the psychological fields get confused (more blameworthily) on these things. Some such professionals think schizophrenia is split personality (several years ago, I heard a doctor at Newton Memorial Hospital in Sussex County, N.J., saying some lower-level professionals there believed that)—and in my opinion, any psych professional who thinks this should not be practicing in his or her field, whatever it is (social work, psychologist, etc.). It’s like thinking the leg bone is connected to the wrist bone.

Mel Gibson as hot potato, yet essential to this story

One player in this film who might raise more hackles than anyone else is Mr. Gibson. I don’t follow his career extremely closely; I liked his film Braveheart, which I last saw in about 1995, when it was out in theaters. He was in the Mad Max movies, one of which I saw (he was an acting neophyte then). The Lethal Weapon films, or whatever of that ilk he was in, I never would have seen. More recently, and controversially, he has pursued his more spiritual concerns in The Passion of the Christ (2004), which I never would have seen. Though I didn’t see it (but closely read reviews of it), I personally felt it made both a misuse of Christ’s life and a misuse of cinema as an art form.

Another film he helped helm, which he produced and only appeared in in a cameo, was Paparazzi (2004), which was interesting but highly tendentious, with the controversial actor Tom Sizemore as a near-psychotic paparazzo.

Among Gibson’s more controversial behavior have been anti-Semitic rants when he has been arrested for drunk driving or the like. This, combined with the criticized depictions of Jewish townspeople in The Passion in line with the old canard of Jews as “Christ killers,” has led some to take a dim view of Gibson in recent times, as a sort of failed celebrity of a particularly vivid sort. Very recently there have been gossip-column reports of his unfortunate turn in having a restraining order sought by a relative amid some severe issues concerning another relative.

My purpose here is not to endorse Gibson as to his controversial views or the like, but to note that, to the extent his more aberrant recent behavior may reflect bipolar disorder (combined with unwillingness to take better care of himself), the choice of him for The Beaver is useful—Jodie Foster may have felt that Gibson’s “duality” as a talent and yet as a wounded soul, and his alternating between depression and occasional mania, make him ideal in terms of being able to convey this kind of personality “swingy-ness” and yet (if he could) have a humor and generosity about it, that some other actor might not be able to achieve. This plus the mere public-relations baggage Gibson carries might have raised audience expectations to see just how Gibson comes to terms with a depressive-yet-creative character in this movie.

In any event, I think his performance is the main one of interest and source of entertainment in this film, though clearly this is an ensemble piece, and importantly about family, not just about one colorful personality.

The story

Walter Black (Gibson) is the son of a man who founded a toy-producing company, Jerry Co., of which Walter is now president; his father has died, and as we find from a subtle reference at a dinner table, his father had committed suicide. This is one element of what Foster points out in commentary as a sort of clinical picture of a highly potentiated depression situation: if Walter’s dad had depression enough to commit suicide, Walter obviously has it, as is described in many particulars at the start of the film, in the Beaver’s blue-collar Australian manner in a voiceover. Moreover, Walter’s son Porter, played by the resourceful Anton Yelchin (age about 22), also is at risk of developing depression—to the extent that, in a sort of obsessive-compulsive way, he seems to have it already: he keeps a big set of Post-its on a wall in his room, each with a symptom of his father’s he sees in himself and wants to get rid of; he even has, we later find, a map of places he wants to get rid of these symptoms, bit by bit, across the country. He also has a more blunt way of dealing with stress/anger/whatever, not least triggered by his father (whom he consciously wishes not to be in the deepest, most thoroughgoing way possible): he bangs his head against a wall, now and then; eventually, an outside shingle falls off the side of the house and reveals a hole he has made.

Walter (and his wife Meredith, played by Foster) has another child, Henry, played by the cute towhead Riley Thomas Stewart. Henry’s experience of fallout from his dad’s depression seems to be his having become isolated at school and bullied/teased by others.

Meredith deals with all of this in a busy, conscientious, but nerves-frayed way; she is a professional engineer (she designs roller-coasters!)…and has enough means, it seems, that near the film’s beginning, she has led Walter to leave the house because, as happens in other homes in real life as a sad, virtually unavoidable development, his family (Meredith not least) can’t take his depression any longer.

So Walter, ending up in a hotel room with a meager set of belongings and a box full of booze bottles, and having saved a tatty beaver puppet from the garbage he removed from his car, fashions a noose and tries to hang himself in the bathroom. The shower rod breaks off the wall, and Walter ambles out to a balcony, noose and shower rod still attached to him. He is about to jump when the beaver puppet, oddly on his hand already, greets him with an Australian-accented “Oy!” Walter tumbles back and ends up on the floor. TV comes down on him, and he’s out cold for a while.

After an initial interesting confrontation between Walter and the newly christened The Beaver in his motel room, Walter heads back home with his puppet allowing him to show personality and industriousness again. But it’s all, Howdy-Doody style, through the puppet. At first he and Henry build a wooden contraption with tools and wood from the garage—Henry is delighted by The Beaver, as kids naturally would be. When Meredith comes home, taken aback, Walter offers a card containing a typed ostensible explanation by his psychiatrist, as if The Beaver is part of a new treatment program. Of course, this last detail is a ruse by Walter to cover up that The Beaver is something spontaneously emanating from him alone. (Walter has stopped seeing his psychiatrist for a longish period.)

Walter is taken back into family activity—dinner, etc.—much to Porter’s disgust when he comes home, and reminds his mother that she has taken years to get Walter out of the house only to let him back in with a “talking hamster.”

Thus begins a sort of roller-coaster ride of a plot—with Walter first being generally reconciled with his family, The Beaver doing almost all his talking, emoting, and spearheading activities for him. This preludes Walter/The Beaver’s coming up with a new toy idea for his company (after he has introduced his Beaver “persona” to his company staff, many of whom regard the two of them with understandable skepticism and semi-scorn), which actually becomes a hit (in the spring, not at Christmastime) with the toy-buying public. Walter eventually swings more toward the negative side of the manic when he becomes unable to distinguish between himself and The Beaver, while The Beaver seems to take over as more than a mere little sit-in.

What happens in the downward trajectory of the drama arc I defer comment on.

Family—and even a girlfriend—show a sort of inability to “fully be themselves”

Porter, the most complex young person in this complex story and ensemble feast, not only obsesses about not becoming like his father, but he also has a deviant side at school. Apparently smart enough to write papers like a studently Superman, he writes papers for fellow students at $200 a pop. Eventually, the apple of his eye, Nora, a cheerleader and the class valedictorian, who can do her own papers thank you, wants him to write her graduation speech, which is the one thing, after hundreds of pages of drafts, she can’t do.

Nora, Porter finds when they congregate together more, has a “secreted-away” side of her own. Ordinarily overachieving, she actually has done painting of a more Dionysian kind—graffiti-like drawing with spray paint or the like that has gotten her in trouble with the law (for vandalism, I guess). She says she likes to do it quickly…. It sounds a bit like a way of being manic of her own.

Nora is played by Jennifer Lawrence, who seems fine for a part that I think is the least well developed in the film (Foster comments that Nora’s role was rewritten to fit Lawrence better). The notion of a “perfect Apollonian female student who has a Dionysian potential” that isn’t normally allowed an outlet is an idea so trite, I think, that—I’ll tell you how trite. In 1977, when I wrote my first set of short stories, wanting to become a published writer some day, one of the most important stories, “Another Fallen Woman,” was about an excellent female student who degrades into a life of drugs, sex, etc.—which was a response, in part, to the teen rebel insanity I saw around me at the time, and was vaguely inspired by the film Looking for Mr. Goodbar. I think I knew my story idea was a rather hackneyed (if morally important) idea at the time.

In any event, I think the Nora character’s being a little crudely written and trite in general is not bad for the film—it is a sort of “repeating a key thematic figure” in the film: the individual who can’t express him or herself in a unified way, therefore has a deviant way of expressing a “forbidden” side.

Lawrence is good for this because, as can be seen in Winter’s Bone (see my May 15 blog entry), she has a beautiful, almost inert china-doll appearance that contrasts with a sort of somewhat laconic but well-turned power in her expressions, through voice and eyes. In this film, her tall, erect bearing—and even her rather long neck—which makes her seem like a cross between a beautiful woman and an elongated figure pained by El Greco—seems to be well suited to a character who is a straight-arrow cheerleader and 4.0 student. Yet Lawrence has a dramatic capability that I think can be described metaphorically this way: with her muted-expression looks, she can surprise with performance like Eric Clapton, who can seem almost boringly laconic and expressionless yet produce lyrical blues playing (which inevitably conveys rich expression), or like the lead guitarist in Paul McCartney’s Wings, Jimmy McCulloch, who when shoe-horned into small breaks by McCartney’s radio-friendly compositions could still play blues figures that showed more power for being compressed in time. So we can believe that straight-arrow Nora has the potential underneath to do her crazy graffiti-type painting…and of course, this intrigues Porter, who works to try to build a relationship with her even as she hires him to write her graduation speech.

Porter, though, being a depressive kid, fumbles when trying to “reach” her and crudely exposes (in a Brooklyn Navy Yard scene) her secret that helps explain a certain repressedness about her: she is grieving for her deceased brother, who had O.D.’d. Nora is strongly offended by Porter’s blunt inroads, and they part ways for a time.

Porter and Nora reconcile…and near the film’s end, she reads her graduation speech, written by him, which includes the idea that seems an emblem of the movie’s central theme, that it is a lie when people say “Everything is going to be OK.” This echoes an important line, in real life, in a friend’s e-mail to me in 2006, when her niece, in her twenties, and suffering from apparent borderline personality disorder, committed suicide. The friend represented to me something she clearly meant me to understand that she felt her sister, the niece’s mother, had tragically failed to understand: I paraphrase, “Everything can’t be all right when it’s not.”

People fail to see the emotional rot that a depressive sometimes is dealing with. The depressive him or herself, try as he or she might, has immense trouble with that emotional rot.

And this problem, whether you see it as existential, theological, medical, or otherwise, is a central problem of living that Foster tries earnestly to treat thematically in a film about, depressing as it is, clinical depression. The story involves family, echoed-among-others personality issues, humor and more serious episodes, and a general complexity that you appreciate on repeated viewings and hearing some things explained helpfully in commentary.

This film as a success—in various ways

Critic Roger Ebert, according to the film’s Wikipedia article, gave the film two and a half stars, and opined, “The Beaver is almost successful, despite the premise of its screenplay, which I was simply unable to accept.” If what he can’t swallow is how The Beaver is a temporary sort of miracle for Walter Black, that’s too bad, because I think the conceit works better than numerous people might think. Even if this seems a quirky device to use in a film about depression, I think the film raises enough ideas to consider about how we deal with the positives and negatives of life, and how a family may deal with the problem of mental illness within one member (and as a more genetic predisposition spread out among family members), that it is worthwhile as a semi-educational, semi-entertaining work to get us to talk and think about these things.

The photography is generally tasteful and the editing is good. The technical flaws lie more with the script that with the production. Foster as Meredith sometimes seems to try a little too hard with some line readings, but as generally being a vulnerable yet power-asserting character, she is usually good in the role. But her role is secondary to Walter’s and, in some sense, Porter’s. Lawrence as a sort of minor (but still important enough) character is good not just for the story but for marketing purposes; Yelchin and Lawrence obviously make good marketing sense to draw in the young fans. Gibson, of course, not only is the acting star for the most part, but how he is lit to emphasize a sort of careworn, timeworn appearance—slightly like Bette Davis in What Ever Became of Baby Jane?—is useful and, one might say, generous of him.

Cherry Jones is on hand as the V.P. at Walter’s company (and as the Jerry Co. employee who quite understandably might think regarding Walter, “If he wasn’t the son of the company’s founder, as lovable as he is, he should be escorted out the door, with delicacy in retrieving the electronic door key and Security on hand as he trundles out the door with cardboard box bearing ephemera from his desk—and be sure The Beaver goes with him, with his mouth taped shut”).

The Beaver was made on a budget of $20 million and made only $6.37 million at the box office—a shame. Its production team included Anonymous Content and Participant Media (I don’t know anything about them—though I think Participant helped produce Tom McCarthy’s film The Visitor). Production financing also came from a firm called Imagenation [sic] Abu Dhabi, a firm apparently located guess where; one of these latter producers (let's thank him) is named in narrow-type credits on the DVD case.

The film has an IMDB rating of 6.7/10, and its Rotten Tomatoes rating seems around 60%. I think it deserves better.

If we seek some reason this film was not a hit at all, a look at one aspect of its crafting can help.

The music—Foster notes she likes it for this film—is sometimes reminiscent of that for Ridley Scott’s Matchstick Men (2003)—both feature what sound like accordion in a sort of underscoring music that seems to hover between a kind of irony about the topics of the story (which topics can often be sad), yet which tries not to make too much light of these topics, but tries to create a kind of droll-attitude-yet-affectionate mood. In Matchstick Men, the mental illness theme—Roy (played by Nicholas Cage) is obsessive-compulsive and seems to suffer from Tourette’s syndrome (with his tics), yet becomes more normal when he is acting as a con man; his partner (played by Sam Rockwell) eventually cons him out of his wealth with use of a young woman pretending to be Roy’s long-lost 14-year-old daughter, introducing a family-warmth theme. Mental illness and family themes, in this film, seem secondary to a kind of lark comedy with a rather jaundiced point of view. In The Beaver, the humor—which can get to such a point where The Beaver, on Walter’s hand, is panting after Walter has had sex with Meredith—is secondary to the earnest themes related to mental illness and family that the film takes pains to detail in a host of ways.

Perhaps people were turned off by The Beaver because it wasn’t more go-for-broke with humor—and not so serious about depression. One aspect of planning that Foster explains is whether the beaver puppet should have had moving, CGI-generated eyes or not. I think she made the right choice, to have the beaver just be a goofy toy, with its being “plausible” as a character lying mainly in our imagination, similar to how Walter would have entertained this, and how his little son Henry would entertain this. If a fantasy touch of having moving eyes was introduced, God help us that we can’t even have a film this serious without fantasy chocolate smothering it.

Final notes

I won’t talk about what happens to Walter as things get darker, prior to a reconciliation further on in the story, ending with Porter and Nora on the one hand, and Walter, Meredith, and Henry (?) on the other, enjoying romps in an amusement park. If this movie took any strategic missteps, it might have been in trying to cover too much ground on the issue of depression interwoven with family interactions. But as to whether The Beaver as a means (1) for Walter to “wake up” for a time, and (2) for Gibson to engage in one of his most notable performances in years, seems too far-fetched, I say, Be more of a child with this one, and believe in The Beaver as a useful film conceit, and the rest of the story should better sit with you as an edifying look at the bear (not beaver) of depression and how a constellation of loved ones tries to cope with it. [See July 13 follow-up for further thoughts.]

Start of a Biopsy (this won’t hurt a bit): My first work at CommonHealth, 2001-03—some more than 10 years ago

[See my June 28 blog entry on my concerns about confidentiality. “Confidentiality criteria” (abbreviated “CC #__) referred to below are numbered per the criteria listed in that June 28 entry. Also, this entry may seem stylized and dense, probably because it is naturally elegiac about what seems a different age; future entries on the company at hand, if/when they become available, will be less dense and more “journalistic.”]

The first work I did within the CommonHealth conglomerate included several accounts in different divisions. My first stint of all, on May 14, 2001, through the placement agency Horizon Graphics, was at Noesis [CC #1]. This workday I barely remember, but my records show I worked on material for the product Elidel, a medication for eczema. I seem to recall—and my records confirm—that I had not enough work to keep me busy the entire time I was in the office. I was there over seven hours but had only enough real work to claim two and a quarter hours on my timesheet; but I’m not sure if I was paid for most of the time I was there.

(If I claimed on my Horizon Graphics timesheet about two and a quarter hours, or not much more than that, this generally would have followed the hours-reporting principles I would use—becoming increasingly regular with this—in virtually all my medical-media gigs in 2001-10, which I can further describe as to methods and reasons in another blog entry. For this day in May 2001, since I was new to this industry, and since Horizon may have guided me on what to do with hours for this day, I may have claimed all time I was at the Noesis office except for lunch, not just time worked plus a portion of my idle time.)

Later in 2001 I worked for a division called The Xchange Group, in Parsippany [CC #1]. There is not much to say about the brands I worked on there; I do recall that—to my surprise—the proofreading work was fairly easy and light (compared to many of the high-volume places I’d worked at in the past). I was especially struck by there being there a definite lack of ugly office politics or bitterness as you could so often see in low-paying, more traditional forms of publishing-related firms. I was rather amazed I’d “ascended” to such a species of (or environment for) media work, after a decade in, generally speaking, the tougher region of publishing I’d been in 1990-2000. (Of course, some firms in that period were distinctly nicer than others.)

In 2001, company optimism and serene sense of mission

There was also, among permanent staffers at large at Xchange, a general attitude of healthy optimism (not flaky optimism that was built on denial or obliviousness) that was tied to a sense of being “on the deck of the ship of good-faith American media-driven consciousness.” This was such as one might see among those working in top-level media firms in Manhattan, if the following isn’t a slippery caricature: it was one where a worker was privileged to gather information, and disseminate some version of it, that showed how you could (in good conscience) hail fine seas for all ahead, while enjoying an occasional droll minor-interest news story. This exaggerates the high-minded aspect a bit, but I am trying to describe a self-confidence tied to an attitude regarding not-quite-self-important, but important-and-competently-approached work that is not merely saying the opposite of where we often seem to be today (across white-collar America more broadly), post 9/11, post–financial crisis, swamped by scandals and paralysis, etc.

What I am sure of is this mood at CommonHealth changed, as a general tendency, over the subsequent years—definitely by 2007 [CC #3], though, pretty much, in mild stages. I defer comment here on what I witnessed in 2010 [CC #3, 4], while it is safe to say that changes in corporate mood and culture following the fall 2008 financial crisis would be, across numerous industries, to be expected and not all blameworthy.

One thing I remember about the 2001 phase is observing how, in the first few weeks post-9/11, people at the Xchange office, who had been so sanely, unruffledly self-confident up through about later August 2001, subtly but significantly registered what change of mood seemed to come over people in the wake of 9/11. This is very generally describing what it would take a novelist, and one dedicated to subtle details and a longish period of time, to do justice to. Interestingly, any broad change at CommonHealth, such as toward the more paranoid, bitter, snarky, or the like, very definitely did not happen through later summer 2003 [CC #3].

CommonHealth in its relaxed “golden period”: affinities and trust

One of the things I would say characterized my “golden period” at CommonHealth, which was from May 2001 through late summer 2003, is that the company was still a sort of confederation of formerly separate little companies spread out among multiple locations—Wayne Township (in Passaic County) and Parsippany and Morristown (in Morris County). Thus, when you were called in as a freelance editor, even if through a placement firm, and a given division liked you and had you back, one of the operating principles seemed to be that you and CommonHealth staffers “bonded” with each other based on trust and respect for your work, in an equitable division-by-division manner (actually, by May 2002 [CC #1], I worked at several divisions at different times—at least, Noesis, Xchange, and MBS/Vox).

It was as if affinities and local-group loyalties were what kept groups of coworkers bonded together. To me this was the best of what I saw at CommonHealth in 2001-03, and it represents, in my experience, the high-water mark of what company culture there could be fomented by its spread-out, locality-based “confederation” nature.

When CommonHealth started to locate all its divisions in one place, a big office building in Parsippany, in 2007 [CC #3], it was inevitable that a more unitary corporate nature started to supervene over all the originally disparate parts, and certainly for those corporate departments like Human Resources, top administration, and the like whose work aimed more toward a corporate-wide purview than to the prerogatives of local groups and craft-level work. For the central-office types, the possibilities of handling company business in a more standard big-corporate way were probably tempting and perhaps in some ways liberating (making their work easier). But in the process, I think, you could lose what creativity and good-faith relations would develop when loyalties developed in a more locality-based way; and here I defer comment on how negatively the more corporate qualities could become there [CC #3; 4 not quite yet].

My concentration at one division coincided with a family crisis

The first big account I worked on for MBS/Vox, which would be the one division of CommonHealth in which I did the most work overall (2001-03 and 2006), was for Listerine PocketPaks [CC #1]. The work done by me and a few other temps/freelancer editors (all there through a placement agency) was technical and editing-related—it was called quality-controlling, or “QCing”; it involved precision, wit, diligence through sometimes tedious work, and reference to your experience as an editor and writer (at least for me).

At the time in my personal life, I was dealing with the latter phase of my mother’s treatment for cancer; she had been diagnosed in September 2001, and amid a very demanding fall and early winter, I was heavily involved in transporting her many times to the hospital treating her, UMDNJ, an academic hospital that a doctor had made clear was best suited to her unusual tumor, a large soft-tissue sarcoma on her shoulder. There were two periods of chemotherapy treatments—in October 2001 and later in about February 2002; there were weeks of radiation treatment, mainly in November 2001; and her actual surgery, initial recovery, and transport to and inpatient treatment in a Kessler rehabilitation facility went on from mid-January into February.

This was a first-of-its-kind experience for me, heavily demanding (and coming amid wider post-9/11 business that was ongoing in New York City, about an hour away—even my being in Newark, where UMDNJ is, easily contributed to how 9/11 seemed to add to how things “vibrated” for me with hectic, worrying, but solidly competent activity). And this emergency family-related experience threaded in amid my spotty but increasingly steady work for MBS/Vox in December 2001 and the first two months of 2002.

My immediate contact there was Jen C., a sort of admin who designated what specific work we editors did, handled timesheets, told us our schedule for a given week or so, etc. She seemed as ready a person to bond with me, professionally, in such a situation as anyone I’ve dealt with in the past 10+ years. And for several years after that, when I sporadically crossed her path when I was at CommonHealth, she maintained a sort of sense of loyalty—extending mainly to Hellos in halls. This went on to as late as spring 2010 or so, and then appeared solidly to change [CC #3, not quite 4].

2002 work’s ending shows agendas

When the winter 2002 work suddenly ended for me (before February was over), I got an e-mail from Helene, my contact at Horizon Graphics, the placement agency handling several of us freelance editors, and she said [CC #3]:

“Sorry I didn’t send you a message yesterday. I did talk to [X manager, not Jen C.]. She said that you were very conscientious and thorough and she would definitely like to have you back as a temporary worker; however, the MBS/Vox team did not think that any of the Horizon temps were exactly right for a permanent spot. She said that the next project might be coming up in about three weeks, but she did not have any definite dates. I am not sure what this will mean in terms of you doing more work there. I know that they want to evaluate some more people who might be interested in permanent employment with them, but, at the moment, I have no new candidates to offer them. If the work comes in and there are no appropriate new applicants for them to try out, I am assuming that they will want to use temps who have already worked for them and who understand the job. …”

This forthcoming set of comments is very interesting, for several reasons:

(1) 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. I can later explain how, at times, it seemed that Horizon used temps in this framework of a “try-out”—meaning, in particular, how Horizon could benefit from a temp’s being hired away from it by a client corporation as a permanent employee.

(2) 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 [CC #3, 4].

(3) A situation in summer 2003, when a group of us temporary editors were back at MBS/Vox, and we were there for about eight months (with one or more of us starting slightly later than the others), illustrates quite a lot how an agency like Horizon related to CommonHealth—in this case, with the result that CommonHealth cut all ties with Horizon by September 2003. It is quite a story [CC #3, probably 4].

In February 2002, I probably wasn’t hoping for full-time work yet—for one thing, my mother was not out of the woods in terms of rehab and other requirements like returns for follow-up scans to see if she had a recurrence of cancer—the rehab alone would go into the spring or early summer, requiring my driving her at first, and later her driving herself when she was able. Periodic follow-up scans would go on for years, quarterly first, then every four months, etc. From winter 2002 on, I was always the one who drove her to UMDNJ, more than an hour from home one way. So obviously freelance work—with the possibility of flexible scheduling—was all I could do, and would appreciate, at the time.

But my response to Helene was frank, in a February 20 e-mail:

“My initial response is, yes, I would work again there, but it is subject to ongoing things at this end (schedule, certain priorities). I will give more info on this soon [probably related to my mother]. As far as permanent work, I started reaching the firm conclusion I wouldn’t want to work there permanently[,] in about my last week there. However, it seemed they weren’t clear on certain things they wanted from us in the work—all us temps had to make up some of our own rules, in effect. …” [CC #1, 3, possibly 4]

My tie to CommonHealth was rebuilt in late 2002 through much of 2003

As it turned out, I was not called back to MBS/Vox for many months. I got work through Horizon at other locations, not only within CommonHealth but with other medical-media agencies. Sqodox (a pseudonym), a fellow temporary editor with whom I would later routinely trade e-mails about various things (work-related and not) for years, was called back there (via Horizon) in the middle of 2002 sometime, and spent only a short time there; I wasn’t called back (via Horizon) until November 2002.

And then, though my time was renewed in stages like two months or a few weeks at a time, I spent about eight months there, the longest single stint I would ever have at a CommonHealth division. In fact, Sqodox and I were there basically contemporaneously the entire eight months; a fellow temp editor named Zdovox (a pseudonym) arrived shortly after we did, but we ended up as a de facto team steadily employed there as editors for several months through July 2003. (My time at MBS/Vox then, which wasn’t constant, was interspersed with brief time at other CommonHealth divisions, such as Xchange and Quantum. Xchange, generally speaking, produced promotional items related to direct-mail efforts and the like, while Quantum handled consumer advertising. [CC #3])

You could say this was the high point of my time with CommonHealth, the longest stint at a division for which I and other editors seemed favored, crowning an optimistic, mutually respectful period for me from 2001 to 2003.

But the way the “tenures” for myself, Sqodox, and Zdovox ended all at once in July 2003, and why, is very illustrative of the dimmer side [CC #3; at some point, 4] of my overall story, and this story has to wait (it has to do with point 3 of the Horizon-related considerations above).

The objective ahead: A call for “pragmatic dance” as a principle of working between different personalities…

…and specific claims of sexual harassment needing only to be handled confidentially, with common sense, and mutual respect; and my condemnation of confounding a sexual-harassment issue with editorial mishandling

[Edit done between asterisks on 12/18/12. Also note: the term "medical media" refers to medical advertising/promotions, not to genuine medical academic publishing.]

 

And that means whether you work in the holy-purpose [cough] type of business as a medical-advertising firm, or anywhere else.

’Nough said.

[This entry is actually meant to pull punches, and to show that I don't mean to spill a lot of info here, but to give a tip of the iceberg, an "abstract of the study," and to keep the rest in the freezer.]

Elaboration, you want? OK….

Evasion, sneakiness, and mismanagement are of keen interest in a tale of medical media that impacts consumer interests; but the full tale of intrigue is hard to publicize.

I have facts and concerns to share about certain business practices, of a type I’ve seen more than once but the very worst instance of which is a big beast to deal with in narrative form; and these practices seem quintessentially the province of one of the “camp follower” industries tied to the pharmaceutical industry: medical-advertising agencies.

The story I have to tell largely involves worker rights and technical issues that are within the peculiar domain of the media industry, which in some instances may seem like a lot of carrying on by a clique of silly women (and that includes some of the males). But in some respects, it involves more fundamental problems of wider relevance to many people in the country: the effect of private interest on the health-care industry, especially how it may pervert or undercut practices of honest dealing, fair play, and so on to its own workers, to say nothing of how it may disserve public health interests.

The story also involves what could be termed, as a Doonesbury cartoon of months ago phrased it in a censored way regarding a war issue, a “clusterfrig.” An assumption of my engaging in a sort of sexually harassing attitude toward a new coworker was held as reason to, in a remarkably manipulated way, have my work end early (though there was already a plan to have my term end more undramatically); this was bad enough. But this notion was broadcast widely in the division in which I worked, if not further; this was intolerable and, in my experience, unprecedented—it did not follow any acceptable professional standard for such an issue. Why was I brought in on the last day I worked there, with the risk of my finding out about this? Because I was to be used in an editorial way that was unacceptable, especially with regard to what it meant in ways outside the specific concerns of editing. So there are two big problems (tied together in a "clusterfrig"): the harassment issue, which to me almost entirely lacked merit and certainly became unacceptable with how unprofessionally it was handled; and the way in which I was exploited as an editor, which actually may have implications for public health interests. This situation left me so shaken and demoralized that it has taken almost two years to address it as I do here. (The delay, which I regret, has also involved accumulating considerable backup for my contentions on various levels.)

Only summaries or partial stories to be made public, for now

I will not reveal the whole story on this blog. I proceed with fashioning my story, and revealing what I choose to, working painstakingly to square with concerns regarding (1) confidentiality (see my June 28 blog entry) regarding the companies involved; (2) confidentiality regarding certain individuals involved; (3) my own interests regarding my liability to certain possible legal sanctions, as well as my interests in having justice (and my health interests) served for myself; and (4) deciding what is of public interest versus what may only be a novel story, or something of more interest as a sort of noir or strange story of intrigue and corporate bad faith. Much of the intrigue, and evidentiary basis, should remain in reserve for the foreseeable future; some of it is so evocative of a very peculiar industry that my sense of what to do, as I traverse a very familiar work-related domain, is to err on the side of keeping things under wraps for a while.

Thus my blog will be a sort of précis of what story I have to tell, or a teaser. The fuller, and evidence-anchored, story will remain unreleased, pending further decisions; but where appropriate, I can refer to “data on file” (or “DOF”; this term usually refers to information in the possession of the Big Pharma company; I make adapted use of the term here), a common phrase used within medical media’s conventions of referencing claims in ads and the like. And this “data on file” will usually be documents I have copies of, some drawn from the Internet, as it turns out.

In late August 2010, I was distrusted in a way that led me to be handled regarding a harassment issue as I was; but I was still trusted to handle FDA-required materials in a way that, on the management side, was unacceptable for this kind of material or in regard to any proofreading standards I have ever worked with. What is more amazing than this is how sneaky, paranoid, and aloof the company has been about dealing with this 2010 situation subsequently, as it certainly knows what I have revealed of my knowledge of the 2010 situation already. Its one attempt to communicate with me by mail in late March 2011 is yet one more emblematic story of this mess: in sum, it was a silly, weak move by the company, and in fact I refused the letter at the post office. But a deeper set of details, not to be revealed yet, shows how amazing and ironic a move by the company this was, and also offensive on a moral level. *[Note: This account may be adjusted in the future in line with a project category I'll announce, called Afterthoughts.]*

LinkedIn is, ironically, a big helper

Humorously, data from LinkedIn, which can be printed out, have become a very enlightening—and evidence-producing—set of “backup” for much of the factual foundation for what set of problems my fuller story constitutes. It is amusing to me that not only does LinkedIn and its possibilities provide windows onto seeing where former colleagues are working today, and not only does LinkedIn (on the other hand) NOT provide a practical way for me to pursue my career in normal ways (as it runs contrary to, or simply does not conform with, many of the methods I developed over many years for seeking leads and getting opportunities; it’s like an unrealistic geek’s idea of doing the footwork that I’ve found essential to my career). It also provides me a window on former colleagues’ “tracking” me and for me to see how these people seem associated with one another and with conglomerates or constellations of companies in which they (or their associates) work.

I proceed with this “project” with occasional heavy heart; with confused emotions yet ultimately with resolve; with anger, embarrassment, and indignation (this latter is such a common consequence, I find, of working in the media); and with regret, compassion for those of my coworkers I worked with to appreciable extent at the company involved, and an eye to being good-faith and socially responsible.

If you ask, Why don’t people in this industry mind their own business? I answer, That’s my question, too, and it’s been raised by multiple companies I’ve worked for. But in this one company’s case, it’s almost unbearably flabbergasting how this question has been posed.

What public implication is there?

If people were to think that medical-advertising/promotion agencies operate with a level of paranoia as if they were Los Alamos or the North Korean government, aside from the issue of their being afraid to lose a contract (that could be worth many hundreds of thousands of dollars), a main reason is the legal implications of their doing adequate work on their products. Medical advertising and promotions is tied to so much in potential sales, as well as (less directly) to so much in potential fines and penalties (criminal and civil) if a Big Pharma company is held to task for illegal marketing or other malfeasance, that the sense of important purpose, needing to hew to exacting standards, and paranoia about screwing up are understandable. I knew this about as much as anyone involved in this work; I’d been in it off and on for about nine years by summer 2010.

The reason for “high seriousness” regarding potential fines can be exemplified this way: Johnson & Johnson recently agreed to a settlement of $2.2 billion, including a criminal penalty of about $600 million, in the illegal marketing of Risperdal, an antipsychotic medication. Here is one story on this. On July 3, a story came out that GlaxoSmithKline agreed to plead guilty and pay $3 billion to settle allegations that it had illegally promoted some drugs and failed to report safety data on others, according to The Star-Ledger (July 3, 2012), p. 28. This amount included a criminal fine of $956.8 million, according to the Ledger. The drugs involved in illegal marketing were Paxil, an antidepressant, and Wellbutrin, another antidepressant that, to my belief, is less widely prescribed. The article also said the company had failed to report clinical safety data on Avandia, a treatment for diabetes. Other drugs were involved, too, according to the July 3 New York Times (article starts on p. A1). The investigation that led to this large fine/penalty started in 2004, with federal prosecutors initially investigating in Colorado, said the Star-Ledger. (This is not to say that promotional material for any of these products was necessarily worked on by the company at issue, CommonHealth. Much less would it imply that CommonHealth would be responsible for violation of federal law through promotional activity, as that is the responsibility of the Big Pharma company, not of the medical-advertising/promotions firm serving it as an outside contractor.)

Again, I am sorry that things have come to this, but I am not solely or even largely responsible for the mess that led to this.