I blogged a few days ago about the recent Nandos pole-dancing ad which means that I won’t be eating their food. I’ve previously blogged on why Dolce and Gabbana and other businesses that use images of sexist and degrading attitudes to women in order to advertise their product won’t be getting my dollars.
Now a court case just decided in the US Supreme Court means that I won’t be buying GoodYear products either, as they discriminated against a female manager for years regarding pay relative to men of equal or lesser seniority performing the same work in the same position, as ruled by the EEOC.
That’s infuriating enough. The really outrageous aspect is that “strict-constructivist” Associate Justice Samuel Alito cast the deciding vote in dismissing her unarguable case of gender discrimination on a pure technicality: that she hadn’t filed a complaint against the initial pay discrimination event within 180 days. This is at the very least a tendentious reading of the statute:
As Ginsburg points out, this reading of the statute makes little sense; unlike a single discrete act such as a firing, an employee may not be aware of the discriminatory nature of their pay until much later, and moreover it is illogical to hold that only an initial decision to discriminate but not the discriminatory pay itself constitutes an unlawful practice. The effect of the case is to insulate employers from wage discrimination claims as long as they can hid the evidence from the employee being discriminated against for 180 days, a result contrary to the purpose of the statute that is in no way compelled by its language.
Scott Lemieux finds the outlook bleak:
this is a major way the Alito-fied Court will work to advance bad outcomes. Republicans don’t have to modify or repeal civil rights legislation, and the Court’s needn’t strike it down; the courts and/or the executive branch can just gut the legislation by making it difficult to enforce in ways that don’t attract public attention.
There’s more at Lawyers, Guns and Money, and as usual the comments are well worth reading as well.
There were a lot of people who used to claim that Alito was a moderate because his jurisprudence was principled and rigorously applied. This is just one example of how rigorously applying one’s principles does not lead to a moderate outcome, but an inarguably reactionary conservative outcome. He’s a youngish man who’s going to influence to Court for decades to come, and he is not (and never was) a moderate.
Crossposted at Hoyden About Town
Oh yeah, because Ginsburg obviously represents the middle in any debate. She does her best work when she’s asleep at the bench.
One of the guys at work mentioned how his wife found the Nandos ad disgusting. He asked why, and she said “I don’t know!”. Then we all went out for Nandos for the first time in six months. Yummy.
Boycotting Goodyear might be a bit tough. They make Dunlop, Kelly, Sava and Fulda tyres along with a bunch of industrial stuff.
The Nando ad is interesting - her indoors was utterly hostile toward it instantly. Unfortunately, since I’m pre-consciousness-raised, I innocently wondered where the Nando strip club was, not immediately associating the ad with Chicken. I thought “what a nice strip club that must be, that employs such articulate and fine lookin’ ladies” instead of the usual russian imports. I got no cup of tea that night.
If the Nando Pole Dancer were really concerned that her Nando’s patch was putting off the punters, she could have applied it to her mouth instead.
*/end sarc
Really?
LOL
Why not? There’s plenty of competition out there for just about every business you can name.
THe current hypersexualisation of everyday imagery is a disturbing trend which distorts society’s expectations of women andi s toxic to healthy sexual relationships. Why should I put dollars in the till of a company who adds to that by choosing to go with hypersexualised ads?
The idea that the ability to sue over a repeated number of the same “type of offence” by the same alleged perpetrator runs out after a fixed period has expired from the first offence is clearly ludicrous. This is easily seen by imagining a situation in which there is a statute of limitations on a serious offence like assault. further suppose that this statute of limitations is 180 days. Suppose that a husband brutally beats his wife for years. Eventually, one of these assaults is witnessed by a policeman. When questioned, both the husband and the wife agree that this behaviour has been going on for ytears. Does anyone think that it would be reasonable to throw the case out of court because the wife didn’t sue within 180 days of the first assault? Clearly, any judgement that asserts such a ludocrous position is going to hamper the law from providing incentives for appropriate behaviour to those partiers that need such incentives.
Please note that this is just a general comment. I do not know the details of the case in question. Nor do I know the details of the judgement. Finally, it should be noted that I am not a lawyer.
I assume tigtog doesn’t drink diet coke due to their advert a while ago which had a half naked male window washer and all the women rushing to watch.
just sayin’…..
Not that I drink the stuff anyway, but window-washing is a profession where any ogling is incidental. Pole-dancing is predicated on ogling of the lewdest sort- there is no other reason for the job to exist.
Not a symmetrical example.
I think i was talking about the sexualisation of everyday imagery which is a disturbing trend which distorts society’s expectations of men.
I complained to the Advertising Standards Bureau about that Nandos ad. Here’s the link if anyone else wants to do the same:
http://www.adstandards.com.au/pages/page38.asp
Thanks, Laura. I should have included that link in the post.
Damien, I agree on the obvious pitfalls in applying this sort of technicality test. It simply doesn’t pass the pragmatic purpose smell test of what could have been meant by the statute, but that doesn’t mean that Alito’s ruling won’t stand. The US SC is not tied to observing precedent in their rulings, but the Alito majoirty decision has now created a precedent for lower courts.
Georgeous G, you shame your avatar with the predictability of your “what about teh menz!11!!” whining. Make a bloody effort with the trolling, son.
If any one else wants to complain to the advertising standards peeps, it’s always worth mentioning which section of the code you think the advertisment is violating, in this case section 2.3:
Another add that is a bit strange.
It seems that drinking Pepsi Max while hitchhiking in the desert with your mate will lead to a threesome when a sexy women decides to pick both of you up only to have her car stall thus having to spend the night.
Oh the power sugary, carbonated beverages do possess!
Some years ago we boycotted …..brand of petrol [can’t remember exactly who it was] because they were doing something nasty to someone [I’m not deliberately trying to be so vague, it’s just age], then Exxon had to be avoided for obvious reasons, Shell were being ugly in Nigeria I think so they were given the flick and another mob got added cos of something that they were a party to somewhere in the 3rd world.
Leaving none of the regular retailers in our area categorised as acceptable.
Bloody oligopolies.
So we went back to buying the cheapest or most convenient.
I’m not trying to be flippant but to make the point that removing immoral companies from your shopping list often results with no one left in some categories.
Something to do with lack of free choice.
tigtog wrote:
Was one of his pecs higher than the other?
Now I’ll have to watch the Nando ad to see whether Mrs Nando, strong proponent of family values (the family is eating together at the end) is symmetrical or not.
I’ve only seen it between South Park and Drawn Together - not too many easily offended viewers there.
With respect, Tigtog, and while I’m entirely in agreement with you on Goodyear’s discrimination, I think your one-customer consumer boycotts are pretty futile. You can either boycott consistently on an ethical basis, expecting not to change others’ behaviour but to maintain a personal ethical principle, as vegetarians do when it comes to all meat, or pragmatically on a one-campaign-at-a-time basis, as the African-Americans of Montgomery AL did when it came to bus discrimination, which works best when extremely narrowly targeted, short-lived and well-publicised. Which kind of boycott are you using in the case of Goodyear?
I mean, you can be fairly confidently assured that Goodyear is not the only corporation which systematically discriminates at the junior manager level. If you were to consistently boycott products made by every one, I’m sure you’d find your lifestyle in this modern economy unreasonably restrained—as hannah pointed out in the case of petrol. Conversely, if you’re serious about changing Goodyear’s corporate policies, simply announcing that you’re not buying their tyres is hardly going to bring them to their knees.
Having a ‘list’ of companies from whom you won’t buy reeks of fashion more than politics. Worse, it rewards secretive companies with better PR rather than open ones with better corporate practice.
I was wondering when someone would bring this up.
Don’t know what Tigtog’s answer on this one will be, but my own experience has been that by the time one is about 35 one has realised that one-person crusades of any kind are indeed futile if you’re trying to bring about change. But, as Fiasco points out (more or less), you still need to be able to meet your own eyes in the mirror in the morning.
I don’t agree that it’s about fashion; it’s about the things that, for whatever reason, strike you as things you simply don’t want to collude in, engage with or be part of. For different and specific reasons, Spotlight, MacDonald’s, Macquarie Bank and cage eggs are among my own personal current boycottees of choice.
Well, that’s partly a fair summation of what I was trying to say.
Like you, PC, I buy free-range eggs when I have the choice, because I don’t want any part of batch farming chickens—though I don’t expect that my actions will end it.
I call it fashion because it’s a decision that neither satisfies a realistic expectation of change, nor any consistent ethical food-consumption practice: it’s solely due to my own consumer preference, which is really nothing more than socially learned patterns of taste. When I’m eating the egg, it’ll still be on a planet where chickens (and other animals) are factory-farmed, and it’ll still be complementing a nice fatty rasher of bacon. Hooray for me and my high principle!
Why Macquarie Bank, though, PC? I’ve missed that controversy. Are they cruel to their money?
Sorry tigtog my post was not meant to disparage your stand in any way, I support what you are doing and I’ll try to avoid Goodyear if I can.
Futile or not ‘a person has gotta do what a person has gotta do”.
My wife is a quilter [I’m male, my dog is named hannah] and she used to get stuff from Spotlight.
Still does sometimes but asks to speak to the manager each time and informs them that they have lost most of her custom and also that of several of her friends and rellies cos of Spotlight’s worker relations.
It’s just that there are a lot of immoral companies out there.
Pavlov’s Cat hits the nail on the head for me, Fiasco. I know that my boycott won’t change corporate behaviour on its own, although I have hopes that enough complaints to the advertising council might at least get that bloody ad yanked. It’s an ethical stance that allows me to look myself in the mirror, and yes, it’s based on fashions in some way as you say, because I’m not infinitely able to encompass all the wrongs in the world in my everyday pattern of boycotts and still be fed, sheltered and clothed, so I boycott what has my attention at the time to some extent.
If I was in the States I’d be writing to my legislators to add stronger language to the statute that Alito ran rings around, so that he couldn’t repeat that trick again for the next woman suing for reparation of pay discrimination based on gender. I’d also be looking into reviving some of the principles of the MacKinnon-Dworkin statue that would have enabled sex/p0rn workers to sue their former employers for unsafe work situations and the damages sustained, to help combat the glamorising tendencies of hypersexualised marketing.
Well, that’s the nasty point, isn’t it, hannah. Consumer boycotts assume that there is a possible morality or immorality behind capitalism, which is only one of many understandings of the beast. I tend to think that the notion of morality applied to economic systems is an historically contingent one for which we can thank the Webbs of the 19th century Fabian society, early Christian socialists like Chesterton and Belloc, and the Popes John XXIII and John Paul II. But what if it were less complicated than that?
Who benefits from an ongoing economic boycott of Spotlight? It isn’t their workers.
—SIGNAL—
FROM: ADM DAGAMA
TO: LPHQ
POSITION: SQUARE LEG
—TEXT—
COMMENT AUTOMODERATED
I AM JUST GOING OUT NOW
I MAY BE SOME TIME
QUE VENGA USTED MAÑANA
—SIGNAL ENDS—
That Nando ad also reminds me of nothing like it… Italian cereal food in long strands.Women shouldnt have to tolerate this type of depiction.F DeGama should surely use his head and replace it where it is needed in the advertisement in the womens suit and in the dance scene.Sexy fiasco!?
Nah, I’m still here, just quoting poorly and banally sarcastifying. Thank you, moderator.
Hannah, my response would be that union activism such as an immediate strike or a picket would be a far more powerful action than a consumer boycott—and it’s one of the more insidious parts of recent industrial ‘reforms’ that secondary strikes of this kind have been made unlawful for the forseeable future. Fuck you muchly, you chickenshit scab-enablers in the Federal Labor Party.
Tigtog, you’ve suggested some excellent, highly democratic, effective means of activism: complaints to powerful regulating bodies, citizens’ correspondence with legislators, the State regulation of working conditions by law, and the enforcement of employers’ responsibility for safe working conditions. I’m in favour of all of them—and I cheer your second paragraph in your last comment.
None of these means to power, you will all note, use the market as leverage or depend on highly subjective interpretations of morality and immorality. MacKinnon and Dworkin, for instance, would never have been naïve enough to argue that patriarchy would be affected by women or pro-feminist men refusing to buy Hustler or visit strip clubs: I argue that one of the reasons consumer boycotts are so rarely effective is that the marketplace does not have moral attributes.
To steal an aphorism from the cold dead hands of the NRA… markets don’t have morality, people do.
Philip, that’s incoherent, even for you. If you’re going to ad hominem, pal, try and keep up with your own metaphor.
Cereal?
Strippers?
Eh?
“union activism”
????
Blimey Fiasco that’s 2 dirty words in a row!
You’re right of course.
Particularly this bit: “I’m in favour of all of them”.
Including the union fella who Rudd just ’sacked’?
180 days is not an ungenerous limitation period.
Unfair dismissal (remember that?) allowed just 21 days.
Judicial review of an administrative (ie government) decision ordinarily must be lodged within just 28 days.
Mighell. First-class deadshit, in my not-really-very-humble opinion, and the ALP is very well rid of him. Furthermore, the sooner the Victorian branch of the ETU is forcibly unaffiliated from the Labor Party, the better.
But…
Since when do union officials have to apologise for getting good pay results for their members, or for having non-bourgeois language, or for hating the bosses? Sheesh.
(My apologies, Tigtog, for thread-splitting. When I get to work tomorrow I’ll be back strictly on-topic).
I’d just like to register a bewildered “Wtf” at the Nandos ad - seriously, were you all huffing paint?
If tigtog said it was, then I missed it. Try reading the post next time, Graeme. Unless you think that people should ask every one of their work mates what they earn so that they know if they’re getting paid the same, then the 180 days is meaningless, rather than ungenerous.
Furthermore, saying that every single pay cheque is part of the original decision to discriminate is as stupid as saying that you don’t have to keep paying someone every week, because you paid them the week they started.
Since when do union officials have to apologise for getting good pay results for their members, or for having non-bourgeois language, or for hating the bosses? Sheesh.
Because he gave a bloody marvellous free kick to the union bashers, Fiasco.
Also, you’re not describing what he said properly. He wasn’t just boasting about getting a higher wage out of the employers. He was saying he got something they weren’t entitled to. Way to undermine future union negotiations, dickhead (Mighell, not you F de G.)
I can’t take it! Must continue to derail thread!
The union bashers will I’m sure continue to union-bash as they please—though Mighell is as I said a deadshit with oakleaf and cluster, there’s nothing wrong with him talking like an electrician’s unionist. As Andrew E said on another thread, for every incident like this, cue Hugh Morgan to talk about the right to beat his serfs.
Back on topic re the Goodyear suit: the Dems have pledged to remove the time restriction from the statute regarding Pay Discrimination.
I don’t want to come across as defending the Nandos ad, but to my male eyes it seemed less offensive than many other adverts. Now I accept that in such things women’s judgement is far more relevant than men’s so I’m genuinely interested in why this ad gets you tig tog, and other posters, more riled than a lot of the other things we see.
The ads that strike me as the most sexist are the ones where the half naked women are either portrayed as stupid, or as irrelevant other than their beauty - I vaguely recall one where we never even got to see the woman’s face. She really was reduced to just a body.
Now the audience is obviously meant to be ogling the Nandos dancer, and that is clearly problematic, but it also portrays a pole-dancer as having another life - ie an autonomous human being who is more than just her body. What is more, I think people associate business suits with competence and intelligence, so arguably there is a suggestion there that strippers may well be intelligent people as well.
I’m all for boycotting companies that act badly. If enough people do it, even if there is no organised campaign, they may notice a drop in sales. Nestle, Exxon and Woolworths are top of my list, and I’ll be adding Goodyear (don’t know if I actually use their products now but will check). I’m open to adding Nandos as well, but I’d like to hear more about why.
Who watches ads? There is nothing more bizarre than cultural critics ranting on about bad or good or indifferent ads. Overdosed on the French school perhaps in wasted university years.
Here’s a novel thought. Don’t watch them. Why on earth woul or could you?
feral sparrowhawk wrote:
My thoughts exactly. She isn’t some McMansion stranded appendage waiting for EzyOffBam to save her life, or clean the toilet, or whatever other drudgery is advertised ad-nauseum. It turned the genre on it’s head (it looks like a headache advertisement at the start when she’s walking down the street). When was the last time you saw an advertisement for toilet cleaner aimed at men? Where’s the outrage over that?
Goodyear == bastards, no question. No excuse for that behaviour. I’m getting concerned that all the feminism we supported during the long march of the last four decades is morphing into another form of social conservatism. I’m also concerned that the progression made in the liberalisation of attitudes to sex and sexuality are not being undermined by advertising, but by the very people who were meant to be set free.
Tigtog - I think you need to direct your anger in a more productive direction. If the woman in the Nando advertisement was harmed like the Goodyear employee, I’d be outraged, but there’s no evidence she entered into the agreement to make the ad under duress. Where’s the harm?
The harm is in glamorising a dehumanising occupation.
Stripping and hooking is not good wholesome fun. The women who do it do not like the men who pay them to do it. The smiles are all fake, boys, every single one: strippers hate you. For most of the women, the only way they can keep doing the work at all is to be high as a kite for their shift.
Of course this means that nearly all that money from that “well paid job” (after the “manager” gets his cut) goes on feeding their drug habits. How many drug addicts do you know with happy, healthy families?
Are there students/housewives stripping/hooking who aren’t addicts and who are investing the hard-earned in lifestyle accountrements? Certainly there are. Do they constitute more than 1 or 2 % of sex workers as a whole? They do not.
Women resent the fantasy glamorisation of stripping as good wholesome fun. We’re also pretty crook on the general p0rnification pressure on women generally - now you’ve got to be gorgeous, have perfect children and be able to poledance as well? Fuck that.
But obviously burlesque is a hoot. And the difference is…?
Any stats? You ever actually been in a strip club? Met someone who does it for a living?
You honestly think that was what the ad was about? Seriously? I think perhaps people are trying a little too hard to be outraged.
The burlesque post wasn’t mine, but I believe the distinction is between erotic and pornographic. I have no problems with genuinely enthusiastic celebrations of human sexuality, which postmodern burlesque collectives tend to be. Stripping tends to unalloyed sexual exploitation by the club-owner though: apples and oranges.
As for sex workers’ themselves, I have never heard or read a sex worker defending stripping or hooking as good wholesome fun. Even the “happy hookers” who glamorise sex work don’t tend to portray it as just wholesome fun, neither do those who simply discuss how much easier it is to make a living wage in sex work than many other fields: they all discuss the need to avoid predatory pimps/madams and avoid drug addiction.
Sex worker activists refer to sex work as hard work, dangerous work, and work that needs much more in the way of labour protections for the workforce than they currently hold, largely because of the widespread exploitation of addiction and other abuses as a method of labour control, along with the financial imbalance between sex workers and pimps/madams in the division of profits.
Do I think the ad was “seriously” about anything other than some blokes having a good old joke about a fantasy of sex work? No, but just because someone is making a joke doesn’t mean that the joke isn’t chock full of stereotypes and subtexts about dominance and sexual objectification. But I wasn’t trying to be outraged, I just saw the ad and said WTF. I still say WTF weeks later.