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Business Boo-Boo Band-Aid®?
2006-06-21 08:03:39 Eastern

When recently looking through the message boards at FreelanceSuccess.com, we came across news of craigslist post that ... well, put us into clinical shock. Yes, indeed: Johnson & Johnson, which topped $50 billion in sales in 2005, was looking for writers for a web site, yet couldn't afford to pay them. We figured that this had to be a prank or the case of a start-up doing under license. But when a couple of the ASJA Contracts Committee took to the web to get the scoop, stat, we found that, indeed, the site mentioned really is owned by Johnson & Johnson. Oh, my. Are things really that bad down in New Jersey, with a red ink hemorrhage? Couldn't the company find enough bandages in the warehouse to stem the flow? Is that why it placed the ad on Craigslist? Or, could it be - could it really be - that management, even with net earnings last year of over $10 billion, is so rapaciously greedy that it wants to start a new web site and have writers subsidize it? Could it be that the company is redefining the term bottom-feeder and looking for anyone desperate enough for credentials that might get roped into giving it away as an approach to its own fiscal health insurance? We'll point out that the company has a credo that says, among other things: "Our suppliers and distributors must have an opportunity to make a fair profit." Oh, well, those are just words, we guess, and a dime a dozen - or not even that.
   -- The Contracts Committee