Where to begin with a man whose success has enabled him to write a regular business magazine column — a man who thinks the best way to describe his company’s employee training program is that it has “the discipline of a boot camp and the cruelty of a Nazi concentration camp”?
Steve Day’s (戴勝益) Wowprime Corp runs 14 restaurant chains, with hundreds of outlets in Taiwan and China as well as licensed outlets in Thailand and Singapore, and it has plans to expand into Italian-themed eateries and into the US.
Boot camp and the stereotypical images of screaming drill sergeants, grueling exercise, physical and mental exhaustion and bad food are not enough to convey what Day’s restaurant executives have to go through to work for him, so he felt the need to add the imagery of savage physical abuse, quack scientific experimentation, starvation, gas chambers, crematoriums and genocide to the mix.
Day seems to feel that the “extreme measures” his executives are required to go through are a rite of passage to help “stimulate their potential.” It is hard to reconcile a management philosophy that espouses brutality and death-camp discipline with a company that likes to call itself a customer-based “happy enterprise.”
Should the authorities be asking what happens to those who fail the course?
It is interesting how often pan-blue politicians resort to playing the Hitler card — former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) faced such comparisons even before he became president, and then faced a deluge during the “red shirt” demonstrations of 2006, while in 2009 then-Kaohsiung City councilor May Zai-hsin (梅再興) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) said Uighur rights activist Rebiya Kadeer was like Osama bin Laden and Hitler. Is it because dictators closer to home, such as Chinese leader Mao Zedong (毛澤東) or Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), are too close to home?
However, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and others are not immune to such stupidity. The DPP used images of Hitler in a 2001 TV ad, along with former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), former US president John F. Kennedy and then-Cuban president Fidel Castro, as examples of leaders who dared “to speak up without fear of confrontation.”
It first tried to mitigate criticism as a cultural/linguistic confusion caused by foreigners’ lack of understanding of the “commercial’s context” because it was made for “local Mandarin-speaking viewers who would never object to it, as they have sufficient understanding of what we are trying to promote,” according to then-DPP spokesperson Phoenix Cheng (鄭運鵬).
The DPP was wrong then, but the question of “sufficient understanding” is apparently still unresolved, as the need for overkill to make a point has spread from the political world to the private sector in Taiwan.
Day is not the only business leader in hot water over his mixing of business and political/historical lessons. Hon Hai Technology Group chairman Terry Gou (郭台銘) gave a not-so-subtle endorsement of dictatorship a few weeks ago when he said “democracy makes no pottage,” and “democracy is not of much help when it comes to boosting the nation’s GDP.”
It is too bad that these men find brutality and dictatorship more appealing than ethical corporate social responsibility. However, it goes a long way toward explaining why Hon Hai’s name will be forever tied to such repressive working conditions that its infamous Foxconn plants in China have had to erect suicide-prevention nets after a wave of employee suicides.
Day and Gou may be chairmen of Taiwanese conglomerates, but they are in need of some remedial boot camp education in ethics, history and politics.
Both have become famous because of their abilities to create enterprises and make money for their shareholders, but the lack of respect for others that they have shown in their statements, especially the workers who have helped make both of them rich, is deserving of the utmost contempt.
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