None of Your Damned Business! Get Lost!

EDITORIAL

Getting any sort of accurate news from many wine companies is like trying to figure out who’s running the Kremlin by watching who is standing next to whom at the Mayday parade. But the old Kremlin apparatchiks have nothing on Jackson Family Wines.

The Santa Rosa Press-Democrat’s Kevin McCallum did the best he could when reporting on the massive layoffs at Jess Jackson’s empire last week. But at every turn, he came up against a dissembling, fact-impoverished stone wall from spokeswoman Caroline Shaw. She did an uncanny impersonation of Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler during Watergate.

Nixonian arrogance ran through her every statement that cried, “None of your damned business! Get lost! We’re PRIVATE, so go away.”

Yes, Jackson Family Wines is a private company. But when your private company is the largest winery in the county and one of the largest employers, your private business becomes public concern. This holds especially true when you sack 170 of your 800 workers.

The secrecy of huge private financial institutions, the lack of transparency at public ones and the government’s refusal to regulate them have plunged us into a worldwide recession. K-J and other private wine companies are way, way too puny to have a global impact, but their private power exerts enough public influence to ruin lives or make them better.

I’ve run corporations. I have had to lay off employees. If you have any humanity at all, it’s a gut-wrenching, heart-rending process. Like other economic segments, the wine industry will need to lay off even more people. Honest, straight-forward information will serve companies and employees far better than misleading the public.

— Lewis Perdue, Editor, Wine Industry Insight

NEWS UPDATE, Feb. 2, 2009, K-J Layoffs Forwarded to Labor Commission For Investigation