Игроки всегда ценят удобный и стабильный доступ к играм. Для этого идеально подходит зеркало Вавады, которое позволяет обходить любые ограничения, обеспечивая доступ ко всем бонусам и слотам.

Travelers CEO Jay Fishman Speaks on the “American Opportunity”

Posted on by

A while back, I wrote a story on racial diversity — or, more accurately, the lack thereof — in the risk and insurance industry. There were several people I talked to whose words have stayed with me even almost four years later. Specifically, I remember a few days spent in Philadelphia at the annual conference of the National African-American Insurance Association (NAAIA).

It was an interesting place to be while I, a white guy, was writing about what it is like for nonwhites to work in an industry that even today remains racially homogeneous to a staggering degree. Of the few hundred attendees there, I was one of about five white people. The awkwardness that I felt by this (at times … everyone was overwhelmingly welcoming), especially while walking around with a reporter hat on essentially asking everyone “So … what’s it like to be black?,”  provided an excellent means to frame my understanding of how black people working in insurance must feel all the time. It is just strange to be unlike virtually everyone else around you from such a fundamental, identity-establishing perspective.

It was somewhat ironic, then, that the most enduring memory I have from those few days was provided by another person just like me: a white dude who stood out like a tourist. Jay Fishman, CEO and chairman of Travelers, gave a speech to discuss what his company was doing to try to promote better diversity at his company.

Here is how I wrote about it at the time.

[The September 2008] NAAIA conference in Philadelphia was particularly memorable as it marked both the association’s tenth anniversary as well as the first time the CEO of a major insurer gave a keynote address. Travelers chairman and CEO Jay Fishman spoke to around 200 people over lunch and was visibly emotional as he articulated his feelings on the industry’s legacy of exclusion and his company’s struggles to overcome the past.

“I’m outside my zone of comfort and to not acknowledge that, I’d be lying,” said Fishman. “I’m in awe of this group. My awkwardness is born out of sensitivity — not out of an unwillingness to tackle the subject.”

While Fishman admitted that Travelers may not have been focused on diversity for as long as some of the other carriers and brokers in the industry, he also expressed a personal commitment and discussed his company’s recent diversity program advancements. “There has been an awakening to the inequities of the past,” said Fishman. “We’re not where we want to be, but at best, we’re headed in the right direction. At best.”

When I wrote that he was visibly emotional, I mean that he might have actually been crying on stage. He was clearly choked up throughout his presentation and really seemed to be going through something while addressing an audience of black people and telling them that, essentially, his industry was still failing to include them just as much as it had been doing for the past century.

I’m not sure exactly what all this has to do with the video below. But the clip was made by Travelers and it shows Fishman talking about how he has “been a remarkable beneficiary of the American opportunity” while discussing how his grandmother immigrated to the United States from Russia when she was 13 years old to work a sewing machine.

So that just struck a chord and reminded me of a time when he seemed to also realize how unique his American story was — and how genuinely I once saw him expressing how much he wishes that others could benefit from that same opportunity just as much as he has.

Abuses in the Logistics Industry

Posted on by

Those running shoes you bought from Amazon or that alarm clock you picked up from Target got from where they were made to your neighborhood stores by way of logistics, a trillion-dollar industry in the U.S. Big retailers are able to save money and keep merchandise prices down by, among other things, using cheap labor for logistical purposes. However, a recent study has found that abuse is rampant within the logistics industry.

Jason Rowe of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, in partnership with New Labor, a workers rights group, surveyed 291 workers in New Jersey’s logistics industry and found serious problems in the way companies operate in towns off the heavily trafficked New Jersey turnpike. “New Jersey’s Supply Chain Pain: Warehouse & Logistics Work Under Walmart and Other Big Box Retailers” found the following:

  • More than one in five logistics workers surveyed have incomes falling below the Federal Poverty Level.
  • Less than 10% of those surveyed earn enough to meet the NJ Self- Sufficiency Standard, a measure of a living wage.
  • Almost nine in ten logistics workers are uninsured.
  • Agencies explicitly use gender as a hiring criterion for jobs in the logistics sector. They go so far as to advertise specific jobs for men and others for women.
  • Women seem to have limited access to higher-paying jobs, like forklift operation. Less than 5% of forklift operators in the survey were women.

The study also found that workers employed through agencies make up a sizable share of the sector’s permanent workforce. But these agency workers are paid less than direct-hire workers doing similar tasks, and face other issues because of their dual-employer situation. In addition, more than 13% of the workers surveyed reported being injured while working in a distribution facility, of which only one-fifth received some form of compensation for medical costs and lost income. A staggering 42% reported not always receiving the personal protective equipment necessary to perform their job safely. Suggestions proposed towards state lawmakers to address these problems include:

  • raise the minimum wage
  • better combat wage theft
  • force agencies to be more transparent with workers
  • close any loopholes regarding the unlawful nature of transportation deductions

The state of working conditions for agency workers within the logistics industry nationwide, is dangerous not only to the workers, but also to the big box retailers who use them — potentially affecting their reputation and costing them more money than they have ever saved using low-paid workers.

Electric Cars: The Silent Killer

Posted on by

Electric cars are great. They’re unbeatable with gas mileage, saving the owner time and money, and most people feel they’re better for the environment. But all the benefits pale in comparison to the one major drawback of electric cars — they can kill.

Battery-powered cars are quiet — too quiet some argue. Pedestrians cannot hear the cars approaching, something that the visually impaired rely on. The issue was serious enough for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to issue a report on the matter, which found that hybrid electric vehicles “have a higher incidence rate of pedestrian and bicyclist crashes than do ICE [internal combustion engine] vehicles in certain vehicle maneuvers.” A recent New York Times review of the electric Ford Focus calls it “Deep-space silent, the quietest of the many electric cars I’ve driven.” That’s a problem.

A silent car puts pedestrians, cyclists and the National Federation of the Blind in an uproar, as it should.
buy prednisone online https://galenapharm.com/pharmacy/prednisone.html no prescription

To help solve this issue, the Pedestrian Safety Act of 2010 was enacted, forcing the NHTSA to initiate a rule-making process for minimal vehicle noise. That’s fine going forward, but what about the fleet of quiet, electric cars already on the road? They could be considered to have a fatal flaw. And what if car companies are reluctant to manufacture cars with such a feature?

buy celexa online https://ozgurmd.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/jpg/celexa.html no prescription pharmacy

The response of the industry was clumsy. Many, including Honda and high-end manufacturer Tesla Motors, doggedly continued to manufacture hybrid and electric cars that ignored the issue. One motive for Tesla becomes apparent when you read their 2011 SEC filings: The safety feature “could negatively impact consumer interest in our vehicles.

buy champix online https://ozgurmd.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/jpg/champix.html no prescription pharmacy

” Nissan Leafs made a half-hearted effort by installing a grating boop-beep sound—but featured a mute button, something the new law wouldn’t allow. Toyota and Hyundai have been more proactive: This 2010 Japanese video shows Toyota tinkering with the Jetsons-style sound that is now standard on 2012 Priuses.

Car manufactures have no other option than to see this as a critical issue. If they don’t, it represents a serious failure of risk management. And those are never cheap.

Food Safety Reporting: The Best of a Bad Topic

Posted on by

Reporting on food safety issues is not the most glamorous topic and, truthfully, it’s sometimes disgusting. But it’s also something that’s important and necessary. Investigative reporting, no matter what the field, requires persistence, fearlessness and a little bit of trickery. Here are a few examples of the best investigative reporting on food safety:

  • “America’s Dangerous Food-Safety System” — Author Eve Conant writes about how the lack of inspectors and budget cuts is constantly putting Americans at risk of illness and death. The article is shocking in itself, but also includes some hard-to-believe facts taken from a Newsweek investigation into the matter.
  • “On the Menu, but Not On Your Plate” — Reporters with the Boston Globe found that certain fish being sold at area seafood restaurants were not the same variety as the menu claimed them to be. Many items on the menu were substituted with cheaper, less nutritional types of fish. Also known as “food fraud,” it has become somewhat of an epidemic and not only cheats consumers out of money, but exposes them to possible health risks. (We covered the topic in the April issue of Risk Management.)
  • “How Washington Went Soft on Childhood Obesity” — As the article, published on Reuters.com, explains, “In the political arena, one side is winning the war on childhood obesity — the side with the fattest wallets.” Indeed, as more and more food and beverage companies engage in aggressive lobbying, plans to reduce sugar, salt and fat in food marketed to children have been cut, with little to no explanation. Oh, and did I mention that in April Congress declared pizza a vegetable? Money talks as generation after generation of Americans become heavier and less healthier.

The complete list of the best reporting on food safety is available on ProPublica’s website.