When In Doubt, Boycott!
Eastern Massachusetts has whipped itself into a fury after Hyatt hotels fired 98 housekeepers. First reported in The Boston Globe, the hospitality chain laid off the housekeepers from the Hyatt Regency Boston, Hyatt Regency Cambridge, and Hyatt Harborside at Logan International Airport on Aug. 31, but only after adding insult to injury and having the housekeepers unknowingly train their lower-paid replacements from a staffing firm in Georgia.
Their jobs were outsourced, and in a particularly sleazy way. And that led to series of dominoes falling on Beacon Hill.
Two weeks ago, Gov. Deval Patrick said he would encourage state employees to boycott all Hyatt hotels. Last week, three state Democrats introduced a resolution on Beacon Hill‘s Senate floor to officially boycott Hyatt.
The official boycott was defeated on the floor (wait… do Republicans suddenly have clout in the commonwealth?) and that led to Senate Minority Leader Richard Tisei firing off a press release lambasting his Democratic colleagues and the governor.
"This recession has impacted all businesses, and hundreds of companies have been forced to lay people off just to survive. Are we going to pass a resolution every time a company announces layoffs?"
Right. Tell us how you really feel, Sen. Tisei.
The Teller isn’t too sure about state-sponsored boycotts. But it does give the state’s GOP something to crow about, and something to finally bring Republicans and (some) Democrats together, too.
Clearly, Going Green.
Mutual Bank, which is headquartered in Whitman and has nine branches in southeastern Massachusetts and Cape Cod, has launched a new "green" initiative: installing water filtration systems in its offices and eliminating bottled water.
What’s so green about that, you may ask? Well for one, it eliminates the never-ending pile of plastic bottles. Sure, they’re recyclable. But take a minute to look around: these things are everywhere! In about two decades, bottled water has gone from a luxury good (remember Evian?) to an omnipresent trash pile.
Secondly, The Teller is sure this initiative saves Mutual Bank a few greenbacks as well. Bottled water is expensive. We’re sure the water filtration systems aren’t cheap, but the payback timeline can’t be too long.
The Teller has long believed that bottled water is the greatest scheme ever schemed. Companies are selling you something that, wait for it … falls from the sky! That’s simply brilliant. It’s as if someone found a way to artificially create sunshine, and then charged you money to lie in it for 20 minutes, just so you could get a tan. Crazy, right?
But surely bottled water is healthier than tap water, isn’t it? All horror stories of companies filling bottles from a garden hose aside, it really depends on the tap, and on the bottled water.
All we know is The Teller’s parents (The Nagger and The Yeller) drank tap water, and they turned out … well, really weird, actually. Is tap water what did it to them? Will this generation’s children have totally normal parents, thanks to our vicious bottled water habit? Only time will tell.
But in the meantime, Mutual Bank will save some money and reduce their pile of recyclable waste, all the while offering delicious filtered water. So that sounds like smart business, at least until things start to get weird again.
