Happy New Year, and welcome to what I hope will be a much more frequent and successful run of posting here at Cool Corporate dot COM. I wish my first post of the new year was a little more positive.
Let's say you're a Black employee, and you come into work one morning and find find a noose hanging in the work area accessible only to the white managers of your company. When questions, the best answer (most just shrug it off) was to hang two black employees.
This actually happened on December 7th of 2006, and of course legal action is being pursued against 180 Connect, a company that installs cable, telephone and Internet service to residential customers of Cablevision Systems Corporation (NYSE:CVC) in Nassau County, New York, along with many with Time Warner (NYSE:TWX) Cable. 180 Connect itself operates almost entirely in the United States, but the company has its corporate headquarters in Canada and trades on the Toronto stock exchange.
To say an act like this is stupid is a serious understatement. Its was also a shock to some of my younger co-workers, as I ways showing them in the newsroom as I picked up this story, that this sort of racism does exist.
Actions like this will obviously not be tolerated, but in the not to distant past, it might have been the norm. I am glad to be living in an age were there is much less of a hostile racial environment, but I know it would be Pollyana-ish to think this kind of thinking has been completely wiped out of the workplace. The topic of race is a tough one to deal with on its own. Race, and also gender, religion, and culture, can be one of the biggest 'forbidden zones' in sorting out office politics.
What do you think?
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