November 14, 2007 9:40

Fired for being fat—and contagious

You all remember our discussion from a few days ago about people not being hired—or even being fired—for smoking. I'd posed the question:

What about the obese? Is banning the hiring of overweight people--who, like smokers, could theoretically control their conditions--next?

So I was flipping channels last night and happened upon Boston Legal. William Shatner was holding forth in a boardroom meeting with a former employee who was about to sue him. The employee was an attractive, rotund woman (by the standards of Hollywood, anyway). Captain Kirk had fired her for being fat. The dialogue went something like this:

Kirk: There's this study from Harvard—you've heard of Harvard, haven't you—that found that fat was contagious.

Fired employee's lawyer: But you didn't think she was too fat to hit on.

Kirk: Oh, I like chubby sex. I just don't want to catch it.

Fired employee: Ka-ching.

Kirk: What? I don't have anything against the Chinese. Just fat people.

Fired employee: Ka-ching, ka-ching.

Funny, right? Except it rang a bell. I went looking for that Harvard study, and found it reported on in this TIME.com article titled "Obesity Is Contagious, Study Finds," by Laura Blue (bolds mine):

Researchers from Harvard and the University of California, San Diego, reviewed a database of 12,067 densely interconnected people — that is, a group that included many families and friends — who had all participated in a major American heart study between 1971 and 2003. ...According to their analysis, when a study participant's friend became obese, that first participant had a 57% greater chance of becoming obese himself. In pairs of people in which each identified the other as a close friend, when one person became obese the other had a 171% greater chance of following suit. "You are what you eat isn't the end of the story," says study co-author James Fowler, a political scientist at UC San Diego. "You are what you and your friends eat."

Gah! Kirk isn't just loopy from all the bed-hopping he did on Star Trek; fat can be caught, like a cold!

Be that as it may, there's no way this stands up as a reason to fire a competent employee. Or so I'm inclined to believe. But when you consider the arguments for firing smokers, it begins to sound awfully similar. Could this Boston Legal episode be the harbinger of a scary new trend? Can fat people be fired because obesity might be catching?

Here's Shatner as fat-hater Denny Crane, with James Spader as his law partner Alan Shore. You know, Shatner ain't such a Slim Jim himself. / ABC

Lest we forget the various virtues of girth, read this report in Slate today:

A study says curvy women are smarter. Sample: 16,000 females. Result: Women with high ratios of hip to waist size "scored significantly higher on [cognitive] tests, as did their children." Theories: 1) Hip fat contains omega3 acids, which promote "growth of the brain during pregnancy" and "could improve the woman's own mental abilities," whereas waist fat has more omega6 acids, "which are less suited to brain growth." 2) Teen mothers produce dumber kids because they're thinner and deficient in omega3. 3) Men like curvy women due to "the double enticement of both an intelligent partner and an intelligent child." Skeptical reactions: 1) The omega3 theory is pure speculation. 2) Diet and class are more plausible explanations. 3) Men don't care that much about waist-to-hip ratio. Rosy feminist spin: "Research that proves you can be sexy and intelligent is really positive." Cynical feminist spin: Except when it implies that being unshapely makes you stupid. (Related: Slate's XX Factor on a similar new study.)

Sphere Related Blogs & Articles

|

November 13, 2007 2:00

Does Starbucks discriminate against women?

Yes, according to a fascinating new study by economist Caitlin Knowles, as described in Slate.

She, with her students as research assistants, staked out eight coffee shops in the Boston area and watched how long it took men and women to be served. Her conclusion: Men get their coffee 20 seconds earlier than do women.

I know, I know: you're thinking a) this is B.S., b) who cares about 20 seconds?, and c) somebody funded a bunch of women to hang out in Starbucks and order tall soy decaf Americanos?

But it's interesting for what it says about market economics. First of all, why would women wait longer? Knowles debunks the assumption that women simply order more complicated drinks; when men order the same drinks, they waited less. And when the servers were all male, the wait time lengthened; when the servers were women, the lag disappeared.

It is not clear whether women were held up by male staff because the men viewed them with contempt or because the male staff members were flirting furiously. The "contempt" explanation seems more likely, as the extra time that women have to wait seems to increase when the coffee shop is busy. Who would take extra time out to flirt just when the lines are longer?

There's something else left unmentioned in the article. Women are far less likely to express anger or frustration aloud when kept waiting. I think servers might factor that in when facing a long line of irritated consumers and make decisions based on who won't throw a fit if they're served a few seconds later.

The thing that's intriguing is that coffee shops are a cut-throat business. With a Starbucks, Europa or bodega on every corner, a consumer could find her fix just about anywhere. And economists have long assumed (based on Gary Becker's theories) that market competition eradicates discrimination:

The reasoning is simple enough: A business that deliberately offers shoddy service or uncompetitive prices to some customers, or that turns down smart minority applicants in favor of less-qualified white male applicants, is throwing money away. If it is a government bureaucracy or a powerful monopolist, that's a loathsome but sustainable choice. But racist or sexist businesses with many competitors are likely to be shut down by the bankruptcy courts long before the human rights lawyers get to them.

Could it be that coffee retailers haven't caught up to market forces? Or that women simply don't notice? Or that we're loath to make a fuss? I don't want to get all paranoid, but now that I've read about this study, I think this is what happened to me yesterday at the parking garage. Though I arrived first, the attendant fetched the car belonging to the guy behind me. I cocked my head in puzzlement, but didn't say anything. In any case, my car appeared about three minutes later. All the attendants were male. What do you think?

Sphere Related Blogs & Articles

|

November 13, 2007 10:17

The Office is closed

My colleague over at Tuned In is supposed to be on vacation. But he has apparently slapped together some timed posts to appear in his absence, making the rest of us bloggers who mean to slack off on upcoming holidays look very, very bad. So I hereby shall steal his thunder by blogging on his beat about the TV writers' strike.

If I lived in L.A., I would so go out and join the picket line on my lunch break. I'm not a TV writer, and I'm not a member of the Guild. But look at the celeb power! Consider the photo ops! Throngs of tourists and paparazzi should show up today between 12 and 2 outside Universal. According to UnitedHollywood.com, a blog by strike captains (not to be confused with Hollywood United, which is a football club), these are the stars walking the oval today:

Army Wives – Kim Delaney, Brian McNamara, Sally Pressman, Drew Fuller, Wendy Davis, Sterling K. Brown, Brigid Brannagh

The Big Bang Theory – Kaley Cuoco, Simon Helberg, Kunal Nayyar, Jim Parsons

Big Love – Bill Paxton, Jeanne Tripplehorn

Brotherhood – Ethan Embry, Fionnula Flanagan, Kevin Chapman

Corey in the House – Rondell Sheridan, Madison Pettis, Lisa Arch, Maira Walsh

Cold Case – Thom Barry, John Finn, Tracie Thoms, Meredith Stiehm, Danny Pino

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation – William Petersen, Marg Helgenberger, Archie Kao, Marc Vann, Wallace Langham, Liz Vassey, David Berman, John Wellner

Desperate Housewives – Doug Savant, Nicollette Sheridan, Dana Delany, Tuc Watkins

Dexter – Keith Carradine, James Remar, C.S. Lee

Dirt – Ian Hurt, Josh Stewart

Everybody Loves Raymond – Ray Romano

The Game – Tia Mowry, Pooch Hall

George Lopez Show – George Lopez, Constance Marie, Valente Rodriguez

Grey's Anatomy – Katherine Heigl, T.R. Knight, KaDee Stickland, Amy Brenneman, Justin Chambers

Jericho – Ashley Scott, Bob Stephenson

Kyle XY – Jamie Alexander, April Matson, Chris Olivero, Bruce Thomas

Las Vegas – Vanessa Marcil

Mad Men – January Jones, Vincent Kartheiser, Rich Sommer

My Boys – James Kaler

New Adventures of Old Christine – Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Clark Gregg, Hamish Linklater, Alex Kapp Horner, Tricia O'Kelley

Numb3rs – Dylan Bruno, Diane Farr

Private Practice – Kate Walsh

The Riches – Minnie Driver

Rules of Engagement – Patrick Warburton, Megyn Price, Oliver Hudson, Bianca Kajlich

'Til Death – Brad Garrett, Kat Foster

True Blood – Anna Paquin, Sam Trammell

Wildfire – Lori Loughlin

Without A Trace – Poppy Montgomery, Enrique Murciano

Women's Murder Club – Scott Gemmill, Paula Newsome, Laura Harris

Wow! And scrolling down the list, I find my blood chilling at the thought of a whole season without these shows. What will I do without my Army Wives? How will I live without Big Love?

I don't mean to make light of the situation. The TV writers' strike is making me think long and hard about how writers in other mediums are compensated. Methinks we journalists can learn a lot from their demands.

More and more, the content we produce appears on the web, which our employers are trying their darndest to monetize. They'll succeed; that's not in doubt. So how ought we, the content providers, position ourselves to get a fair slice of the pie?

Take freelance writers. A major magazine like TIME might pay up to $3 a word for an article to appear in print. So this blog post might have yielded me $2,268. Not bad, right? TIME.com, on the other hand, pays far less.

For the time being, this makes sense. Advertisers pay far more to appear in the glossy pages of our magazine than they do on our web site. Plus, readers pay to subscribe to our magazine and read it for free online. But our web readership is exploding. More advertisers are lured to its younger, more international readers. I presume marketers also like the creativity and interactivity the medium allows for their ads, and their ability to measure response. My money's on the web site catching up to the print magazine as a desirable place to advertise someday soon. That means ad rates can creep up.

Shouldn't content producers then be able to negotiate compensation differently? If my blog attracts, say, 30,000 readers per week, then that means 30,000 people view the ads along the top and sides of my page. Perhaps I could be paid a fraction of the ad rate. That would motivate me to create ever more exciting content to draw more eyeballs, which would draw more advertisers, which would boost site revenue. We all win. No?

Here's a clip featuring the writers and actors from The Office picketing outside what looks like a gated residential complex. Which is weird. But maybe there's a studio across the street. Anyway, the writers talk about how they were made to write some webisodes that have since been viewed millions of times on NBC.com and that even earned them a Daytime Emmy—and that they were not compensated for. Because, you know, it's on the web, where nobody makes any money.

Sphere Related Blogs & Articles

|

November 12, 2007 10:14

I am so not getting rich off my options

I think of this as I read a front-page story in today's New York Times about Bonnie Brown, a staff masseuse at Google who is now a multimillionaire. It's the classic cubicle-to-riches story: worker is among the first to sign on at unknown Internet start-up. Internet start-up grows up and becomes massive, universe-changing brand. Worker retires to a 3,000-square-foot mansion in Nevada.

I think of this as I contemplate my own sad tale. Call it a cubicle-to-cubicle version of Brown's. I, of course, do not work for an Internet start-up. Far from it: I work for the world's largest and arguably most storied media giant. But back in the go-go late '90s, my company, too, boasted a stock that soared. We had recently been rooked, I mean, acquired by AOL, an Internet start-up that was already a massive, universe-changing brand. We knew no limits.

Money magazine, my employer at the time, had benefited spectacularly from the Internet and stock-market boom. Our monthly issues were as thick as phone books, yielding us writers eight-page features in the well and limitless travel budgets. So in 2000, management decided to take an entrepreneurial, Silicon Valley approach to compensation. They decided to offer their favorite writers bonuses in stock options.

We didn't object. Why would we? After all, we were the ones who gobbled up Henry Blodget's predictions of Amazon at $400. We bought the boom whole. When I portrayed the plight of a middle-class family in Japan to show the effects of a market crash and a lingering recession on a developed economy like ours, I received hate mail from livid readers. I remember one in particular: "How dare you suggest America will suffer a similar fate! Our market will never fail!"

In the winter of 2000, I received 1,000 options in Time Warner stock at a strike price around $50. Share prices hovered close to $60 then, and were sure to keep soaring before they vested in four years. That meant that if the stock hit, say, $100—not out of the question back then—then I could keep the $50 profit. A $50,000 bonus! Not bad for a writer, right?

But the stock didn't hit $100. Between January 2001 and January 2003, Time Warner dropped 78%, from $51.21 to $11.36. In that time, of course, AOL transformed from a massive, universe-changing brand into a pure clunker, unable to keep up with the dazzling changes of its medium and thus unable to hold onto paying subscribers. The market crash that my reader said would "never" happen in the U.S. did, and all of the conglomerate's business units suffered, including ours. Advertisers reined in their budgets, and our magazines no longer weighed down the postman.

Time Warner stock currently trades at $17 and change. And my "bonus"? Trash. The options are what they call "under water"; its stock trading well below the strike price, they're deemed worthless.

While it makes sense for executives to tie compensation to company stock, I argue that for most workers, it doesn't. Our contributions, while valuable, are too far removed from the complex machinations that move stock price to count. I'll never again accept options in lieue of tangible compensation. Sure, there's a chance I'd hit the lottery, like Bonnie Brown. But I shouldn't have to gamble on getting paid.

Sphere Related Blogs & Articles

|

November 9, 2007 11:02

No smoking at work. Or at home.

Surely your company has gone smoke-free by now. If you're one of the nicotine-stained masses, you're braving the November chill to get your fix outside, like an animal. (Why is it that smokers always head out coat-less, no matter what the weather?) Only at home can you puff away to your blackening lungs' abandon.

Get ready to give up that right, too. If you live in Florida, your employer might already be demanding that you stop smoking at home. That's right: bosses are forbidding workers to smoke at all. According to this TV news report forwarded to me by my colleague Daniel Eisenberg,

Westgate Resorts, the largest private employer in Central Florida, has banned smoking and won't budge from a policy of not hiring smokers and firing employees who do smoke.

What brought that on?

"When I found out it was legal to discriminate against smokers, I put the policy in place," Westgate president and CEO David Seigel said.

Seigel told Local 6 that the policy was prompted by the death of his close friend -- a heavy smoker who died of cancer.

"If you are too stupid to understand that smoking is going to kill you, then we are going to tell you that if you want to work for our company, you will not smoke," Seigel said.

Employers have reasons to ban smokers beyond their personal biases.

Seigel said his policy is cost effective and said since it went into effect, health insurance claims have gone down significantly -- making insurance more affordable for employees.

Westgate, and Florida employers, are hardly the only ones zeroing in on smoking by employees. Scotts Miracle-Gro in Maryville, Ohio, was the subject of a February cover story by Businessweek titled "Get Healthy—or Else." It tells the tale of a lawn-care technician named Scott Rodrigues whose career at Scotts met a jarring end:

...on Sept. 1—which happened to be his 30th birthday—Rodrigues was fired. "Why?" he asked. "You failed your drug test," the boss replied. Rodrigues insisted it had to be a mistake. He didn't even keep beer in the fridge. Then his boss told him the drug was nicotine. "Five years ago, if you had told me, Hey, you better quit smoking or you might not get a job,' I would have laughed. Here I am five years later, and I can't get a job."

I'm not a smoker, and I've lost family members to the damaging habit. I get the part about not wanting smokers to drive up insurance premiums for the rest of us. But unless the smoking has direct bearing on the job at hand--say, I don't know, food preparation--is it fair to deny them employment? What about the obese? Is banning the hiring of overweight people--who, like smokers, could theoretically control their conditions--next? What do you all think?

POST SCRIPT: Whaddaya know—a second after I posted this entry, what do I find in my mailbox but a company e-mail urging employees to quit smoking. From the e-mail, which pushes the services of a smoking cessation service:

Faced with healthcare costs related to smoking escalating, and the decade-long decline in smoking rates coming to a halt, employers need to be proactive in helping their workers stop smoking. On November 15, The American Cancer Society will celebrate the 31st annual Great American Smokeout --- a great time for employers to encourage their smoking employees to give up smoking for 24 hours in the hope that this head start will help them kick the habit.

A recent survey of employers by the National Business Group on Health reports that a majority of employers ranked smoking as one of the greatest priority health issues facing their companies, second only to obesity, but only two percent offer the comprehensive benefit recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Employers that need more urging to help their workers quit smoking should consider these alarming statistics:

• Cigarette smoking has been identified as the most important source of preventable morbidity and premature mortality worldwide. Smoking-related diseases claim an estimated 438,000 American lives each year. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

• Smoking costs the United States over $167 billion each year in health-care costs including $92 billion in mortality-related productivity losses, $75 billion in direct medical expenditures or an average of $3,702 per adult smoker. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)

• In 2005, an estimated 45.1 million, or 21.0 percent of adults were current smokers. The annual prevalence of smoking has declined 40 percent between 1965 and 1990, but has been unchanged virtually thereafter. (National Health Interview Survey. Vital and Health Statistics. Series 10, No. 232, Oct. 4, 2006)

• Workplaces nationwide are going smoke-free to provide clean indoor air and protect employees from the life-threatening effects of secondhand smoke. Nearly 70 percent of the U.S. workforce worked under a smoke free policy in 1999, but the percentage of workers protected varies by state, ranging from a high of 83.9 percent in Utah and 81.2 percent in Maryland to 48.7% in Nevada. (Journal of Occupational & Environmental Medicine 2001; 43:680-686).

• In 2005, an estimated 46.1 million adults were former smokers. Of the current 45.1 million smokers, 42.5 percent of current smokers had stopped smoking at least 1 day in the preceding year because they were trying to quit smoking completely. (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report October 2005.)

Sphere Related Blogs & Articles

|