(Crossposted from CtW Connect)
Apparently even though they felt their financial situation was so dire they had to fire their 3,400 most productive workers to cut costs, management at Circuit City had enough money lying around to hire a consulting company to punch their name into Google and write down what came back...
(Find out more -- and who is watching you! -- after the jump)
Progressive blogger Jason Gooljar reports:
I happened to be checking my web stats when I saw that someone did a search on Google’s blog search site with the term "Circuit City". The IP address lead me to an organization called New Media Strategies... The post on my blog that someone from NMS viewed was a recent post about Circuit City.
So they’re watching eh? The post that I put up on my blog about Circuit City was basically referencing a post on the Change to Win labor federation’s blog. Yes, Circuit City is tanking. They laid off 3,400 employees and for what? I wonder, what is New Media Strategies going to do to counter this "attack"? I mean how do you counter failure? How do you spin the firing of that many employees and still have your client do poorly?
So, to summarize: paying productive employees who drive sales bad, paying consultants to do something you could do yourself for free good. I guess decisions like that are why Circuit City Chairman and CEO Philip J. Schoonover makes the big bucks.
I just checked our logs at CtW Connect and it looks like the folks at New Media Strategies have been by here a few times too. Interestingly though, Circuit City isn't the only reason they stopped by; the other search that brought them here is "coca cola colombia". I'm guessing this is the reason why we caught their attention on that subject:
The Colombian workers detailed the militarization of their society and the on-going paramilitary penetration of the government at all levels. They call it the "para-politics" scandal, and, they said, the Uribe government is up to its eyeballs in it. About 65 members of the Colombian Congress under investigation by the courts, and about half so far have been found guilty. This is the Congress that rubber stamped the Bush-Uribe trade deal.
The worker delegation made clear to us the opposition of legitimate trade unions to the Colombia FTA. The so-called "labor leaders" that the Uribe regime trots out to mouth support of the FTA are actually members of a sham union headed by a cousin of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar.
Genuine trade unions and collective bargaining have been systematically destroyed and dismantled. To eliminate unions, companies have been privatized and workers have been classified independent contractors...
The FTA is an agreement to benefit Colombian and U.S. corporations, not Colombian and U.S. workers. They mentioned in particular Chiquita, Brinks, Coca-Cola, the big banks, General Motors, and several other U.S. corporations that are in league with Uribe and what they called his illegitimate government.
We haven't focused too much specifically on Coca-Cola's business practices in Colombia, but it obviously concerns someone in the corporate-sphere enough to shell out money to New Media Strategies to keep tabs on us in case we ever do. I hate to see money get wasted, so I'll just refer you to a site with plenty more information on the subject. And for extra credit, here's an article from BusinessWeek about colleges banning Coke from campus in response to student protests about Coke's behavior in Colombia:
Several years of violence and killings of Coke workers intensified on Dec. 5, 1996, when a right-wing paramilitary squad showed up at the gate of the Coke bottling plant owned by Bebidas y Alimentos in Carepa, a small town in northwestern Colombia's banana-growing region. The paramilitaries shot and killed Isidro Segundo Gil, the gatekeeper and a member of the union's executive board. An hour later they kidnapped another union leader at his home and torched the union's offices.
The following day the paramilitaries returned to the plant, called workers together, and gave them until 4 p.m. to sign a statement resigning from the union on stationery the unionists claim bore the bottler's letterhead -- or else. Many union members resigned on the spot; 27 even quit their jobs and fled to other cities, fearing they would be killed if they stayed. Luis Hernán Manco, who was president of the union at the time, was summoned by the plant manager to a local tavern, where several paramilitaries warned him and other union leaders to leave town. "They said: 'If you want to live beyond today, get out of this area.' I knew they were serious," recalls Manco, now 59, who has been in hiding for nine years. For two more months, union leaders claim, the paramilitaries camped outside the front gate of the Carepa plant.
It's the fun new game that everyone is playing: if you're a progressive blogger, check your site stats and see what corporations are paying New Media Strategies to watch you!