It's not a town hall if there's no accountability: Washington Post chief announces job cuts – and refuses to answer questions
Matthew Williams
Seeking to transition from academia to social justice advocacy, I use my knowledge and skills to help fellow activists and students collaboratively analyze social ills and engage in creative, strategic movement-building.
This article from The Guardian discusses a "town hall" at The Washington Post in which the publisher Fred Ryan announced what potentially amounted to 250 job cuts--then angrily walked out, refusing to answer any questions. Even one of his staffers said, "This is embarrassing." How is this a town hall? Ryan won't even engage in the minimal level of public accountability of answering questions about this decisions which is going to have a huge impact on the lives of the people working for him. Historical town hall meetings in New England municipalities were hardly perfect--the wealthy often had more sway--but in principle, officials not only had to answer questions, but popular votes were held on important policy issues and the officials in charge had to get there through competitive elections. People in positions of power like Ryan often talk about accountability--but they usually mean accountability to them, without recognizing any need for them to be accountable to those people their decisions will affect. This is profoundly anti-democratic. If we say we want a democratic society, we need workplace democracy as well. To have real democracy, we need to be able to participate in making the big decisions that affect our lives--and most of us spend most of our waking hours at work. It's long past time to take a look at existing worker cooperatives and use them as models to fundamentally change the structure of our economy, so we have real economic accountability, not pseudo-town hall meetings where people don't even get to ask questions.