Just a few more pledges from those who haven’t pledged yet!

(and we know who you are)

Subtle as a hammer.

Yup. The pump seal company herded everyone into the lunch room in the machine shop and showed us the film the United Way produced about their donation drive. The VP Marketing stuck his head in my cube, glared at me and said "you intend to give don't you?". The local drive in Kalamazoo always had a really big shot, a honcho at either Upjohn or Gilmore's (the two inbreed gazillionaire families in town) as figurehead, so the honchos at all the other companies wanted to suck up to the Gilmore or Upjohn honcho by extorting donations from 100% of their Proles.

A coworker of mine at Office Depot had previously worked at Michigan National Bank, which, of course, was always interested in cultivating it's public image. She was all too familiar with the extortion racket the "JCs" ran.

That was one of the things I really liked about working at Radio Shack, before their management got nasty in 89. Every fall, at the start of the annual United Way drive, corporate in Fort Worth would send out a letter, saying corporate makes a "substantial" donation to the Tarrant County United Way. What we in the stores do, is entirely up to us. I never received a pledge card from Corporate. My District Manager never said anything about United Way. It was nice to not be subjected to blatant extortion.

Steve