CBS TV's "Undercover Boss", a corporate charm offensive, opens with a union busting CEO

[Better Believe It]

Reality TV Gives Corporate America a Big Wet Kiss
by Mark Brenner
February 1, 2010

Want to know what chutzpah means? Look no further than TV's newest reality show, “Undercover Boss.” Apparently the titans of industry aren't satisfied that they burned our economy to the ground and got nothing but a slap on the wrist from Washington. They want us to like them, too.

“Undercover Boss,” which debuted on CBS after Sunday’s Superbowl, is a corporate charm offensive. For one week the CEO of a major company goes "undercover," performing a variety of jobs at the bottom of the corporate ladder.

Over the course of an hour we discover that the CEO is really a nice guy. We see just how ready top brass is to reward hard-working employees and to clean up problems on the front lines.

It's a blast from the Reagan-era past: CEO-as-hero.

The first episode features Larry O'Donnell, president of Waste Management, the nation's largest trash and recycling company.

In fine superhero tradition, O'Donnell adopts an alter ego (that sounds strangely like a porn star)—Randy Lawrence—and spends a day each doing various jobs at Waste Management: sorting recycling; picking up trash at a landfill; cleaning port-a-potties in an amusement park; shadowing the manager of a landfill; and riding shotgun on a residential garbage truck route.

You can't help but enjoy O'Donnell's ineptitude doing blue-collar work. He struggles to snatch cardboard off a recycling conveyor belt in Syracuse while his supervisor chuckles that he's working on the slowest line in the building. Almost on cue, O'Donnell misses a big piece and completely jams the machine, forcing everyone on an early lunch break.

We get a good laugh but the joke’s on us, because Larry O'Donnell still goes home at the end of a year with a $3 million salary.

Viewers never see O’Donnell in his natural habitat, crowing about squeezing more work out of his “team.” On an investor conference call he held in March last year, he bragged that in 2008’s fourth quarter the company shed more than 800,000 “driver hours” compared to the same time the prior year.

What we also don’t see is any sign that workers at Waste Management have ever heard of unions. Although Teamsters represent thousands of workers at Waste Management, that piece of reality didn’t make it onto TV. No surprise, since the company has been aggressively trying to break the union for years.

During O’Donnell’s watch, the company has been forced to pay an $8 million legal settlement after locking out 500 Oakland garbage truck drivers in 2007.

Although failing to wring concessions out of drivers in Oakland, the company got its way in Los Angeles, where workers turned down a bad contract and struck for 12 days but were forced to take a sub-par health package or face permanent replacement.

The company also provoked a four-week strike in Milwaukee in 2008, forcing workers to dump their traditional pensions and swallow 401(k)s.

In that conference call with investors last year, Waste Management blandly reported that “labor and employee benefits costs improved by $59 million in the quarter … with most of that cost related to the withdrawal from the Teamsters’ underfunded Central States Pension Fund.”

Read the full article at:

http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2010/02/reality-tv-gives-corporate-america-big-wet-kiss

[ddeclue]

1. Watched it after the Super Bowl the other night and thought it was incredibly transparent..

I mean really you aren't going to recognize your boss because he puts on some overalls? I wonder who got paid off to put that crap on the air?

[Motown_Johnny]

10. wouldn't you wonder why the film crew was following the guy who looks like your boss ?

[Better Believe It]

12. Great point! And when your on camera what are the chances you'd say anything negative about him?

You can easily be fired without any labor agreement protection.

[Initech]

2. My company does a lot of work for Waste Management.

And my boss has met that guy on more than one occasion. Some of this is fabricated but as someone who is a low-level employee where I work I can tell you there is some truth to it.

[Better Believe It]

3. Some workers like to be patted on the head by the CEO and supervisors

We generally called them "kiss asses" everywhere I worked.

Or they tend to grovel before their "betters".

And they are usually more conservative in their political views.

You find them on every job.

After such employees have been burned a few times by "good bosses", they frequently change their views and political consciousness as they become more militant and pro-union.

[Initech]

4. Well how is someone like me gonna get recognized?

Don't get me wrong - I hate suck-ups and I've seen them on many an occasion but if guys like me who are on the bottom end of the totem pole don't get a chance to plead our cases, why should anyone care?

[Better Believe It]

5. The same way millions of other people stood up and won recognition and justice on the job.

At some point you and tens of millions of other people who work for a living will have to stand up and fight for your rights. No one can do that for you. Few employers will just give you justice out of the goodness of their hearts, not if it interferes with their bottom line.

There is no other way out or solution.

I can't give you any good advice on how to proceed because I don't know the specifics of your work situation. Perhaps it's just not possible at this moment in time to organize effectively at your place of employment. I don't know.

I just hope the time and conditions for you and your co-workers to take effective winning action comes soon.

[brewens]

6. I worked with a guy that had lost his beer driver job when the

small distributor he worked for went out of business. He ended up running vacation routes at the distributor I worked for. He was trying to hang on and make it to retirement. He was a total Republican and kissed the bosses ass!
As soon as the boss he was in good with retired the new boss let him go. He ended up having a heart attack and had let his health insurance lapse being just two years from qualifying for medicare. He lost his house and ended up moving into a mobile home. A couple years later he got Alzheimer's and died another couple years later.
He was a prick and got exactly what the fuck he had coming to him!

[Better Believe It]

7. Sounds like he got his richly deserved just reward!

[dysfunctional press]

8. and yet, he may have died very happy....

knowing what a rich afterlife awaited him in heaven.

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: ...sucker.

or not? :shrug:

[Better Believe It]

9. With a cigar in his mouth. Fire on one end and fool on the other.

An old Malcolm X saying. One of my favorites.

[Greyhound]

11. Happy to give this it's 5th rec. n/t

[heli]

13. You see, corporate CEOs are just like you and me

except that they're exempt from every standard operating procedure and they get to make gazillions while driving the company into a ditch.

[Snotcicles]

14. I have seen the show twice and I noticed a pattern between them last night

Both shows showed there was a job the guy could not do well enough to be hired, both shows had a bad manager that got in trouble, both shows had a low level employee who was having hard personal times, was overwhelmed at work and got some sort of generous reward and or promotion, in both shows they had asked a few ground level workers to work with PR to improve their image or to improve morale. The whole thing was scripted and phony, right down to both CEOs staying in crappy motels. What a scam. I'd bet if someone did an expose from an unbiased view we would see a different show altogether. Maybe they should make one from the clippings on the edit room floor.

[Better Believe It]

15. For weekday folks