Today there is a story on Boston.com about laid off Hyatt workers who are struggling to find new work in the face of these tough economic times. This is a story that you can find in any paper, in any city, and it is a story we’ll continue to see for a long time. People are going to be out of work for good and bad reasons, but mostly bad, for a long long time.
The Hyatt blames these tough economic times for letting go of the hotel workers – there is also no question that the manner these employees were let go is unscrupulous, embarrassing, and altogether sad. There is something about this story, as it keeps bubbling up to the surface, that really irks me.
The Globe, as well as other media outlets, seem to be listless on stories like these. I don’t know if it is political pressure, I don’t know if it is editors that are afraid to say what they want to say, or if it is a situation where journalism has been driven to a point where they feel that their role is to simply take a story, skew it in a direction depending on which way their paper leans, and leave it up to the reader to decipher the real message.
The Globe clearly positions the Hotel workers as victims, which, I think is not an arguable point. The Hyatt, and those who wear the fancy clothes and sit in the cubicles like the one I sit in now, continue to make money. They look at tough economic times and say, “what can I cut in order to maintain my Country Club way of life?”, and immigrant slightly-above minimum wage jobs are their answer. Again, that’s stupid, morally wrong, and offensive.
But what the Globe refuses to do is really take it to the next step. They drive up controversy, rattle the cages of readers, get people excited, then leave us to our own devices. In this city, in this state, people are all too comfortable having a “feeling”. They want to say and feel the morally correct things, but are rarely asked to actually act on that feeling.
What is the action we should be taking? Well, if you really do care, you can actually go out and be vocally angry at the Hyatt. Picket, chant, write, call, whatever it may take. But in the end, you really need to do what you can to take business away from the Hyatt, that is the task. But we all know that’s not something most of us will take our time to do. We will read the Globe, complain about their situation, and if we want to stay downtown or are advising friends on a nice spot, we’d be likely to say, “The Hyatt has a good location.”
The Globe in this case is only partially reporting news. What they are really doing is a creating a mood or a feeling – but not asking us to do anything about that. Is it journalism’s role to make us activists? No, but if you get to the nuts and bolts, what is written here isn’t journalism, it’s purely heart-tugging melodrama, with no real ask of action and no responsibility to any solution.
You want to hurt the Hyatt in Boston? You want to actually follow through with your feelings that these women were wronged in the manner in which they were let go? Your tools are at hyatt.com. Boycott the hotel, their partners, write letters to them.
But, contrary to popular opinion and 2010 journalistic bylaws, reading an article and feeling upset about is not action.
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