Commentary

When The 'Cause' Is Just

In a letter to ABC News President David Westin calling Elizabeth Vargas' voluntary upcoming maternity leave "a demotion," the National Organization for Women, Feminist Majority Foundation, and National Council of Women's Organizations piled it on by adding: "With this action and your parallel decision to terminate the series 'Commander In Chief,' in which Geena Davis portrayed America's first woman president, you have now managed to eliminate two of the country's most visible women role models and high achievers from your television lineup." Yet in an interview with MediaLife, Susan Scanlan, the chair of the NCWO, confesses: "This was obviously a ratings decision."

Old white guys are given years to make their mark in TV news, rants Scanlan, while Vargas was pulled NOT because she asked to go on maternity leave (which, in fact, she did), but because she hadn't had time to find her audience.

In this New Age of Equal Opportunity in which we live, I am certain the braintrust at ABC spent weeks, if not months, agonizing over how to pull the plug on their high-profile, non-male anchorperson, knowing full well that feminist groups would howl in protest--as indeed they have. Why not just go with the flow and avoid the pain? Because it might REALLY have been "a ratings decision" after all.

You know, sometimes businesses have to make personnel decisions based purely on performance. There is not always a racial or gender or sexual orientation or religious or ethnic heritage (am I leaving out any advocacy groups?) subtext. Yet for fear of lawsuits--or, at best, some very bad-sounding PR--most companies I know just shuffle underperforming employees who fall into one or more of those "subtext" categories from job to job, rather than giving them the heave-ho they justly deserve.

It is perfectly OK to fire a white guy for "cause," because with the exception of organizations with members who wear white hoods, Nazi armbands, hang out in basement armories in Big Sky country, or belong to expensive country clubs, nobody gets really upset, figuring white guys have had their foot on the neck of every other subtext group since 1776.

And so we have created a new double performance standard for the 21st century--one in which companies hesitate to dump workers solely on their inability to get their jobs done, but now heavily weigh whether the underperformer will have any grounds to make that ACLU call. Now, readers will argue that this is the way it should be, since some in the subtext groups have suffered various scholastic or economic "hardships," and should be given a little more latitude to screw up or "find their audience." But as General Motors President Alfred T. Sloan, Jr., said in 1923, "The business of business is business!"

Business is not a social safety net. It cannot correct or compensate for real or imagined slights that happen(ed) to subtext groups. Appearances to the contrary, I do not think we still live in a society where old white guys gather behind closed doors and plot against "the others." (Well, maybe in states where fried chicken and grits are considered part of a well-balanced diet.) There are far too many members of every imaginable subtext group who have proven their ability and value (and been rewarded accordingly, for grown-ups to keep whining that every difficult personnel move has a negative subtext. Sometimes the only subtext is "We can do better."

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