Bloomberg LP Parental Leave Policy

What is the parental leave policy at Bloomberg L.P. ? After the EEOC maternity discrimination case was dismissed, has Bloomberg L.P. gone back to cave man times ?

Citizen Bloomberg

The Village Voice Exposé : Citizen Bloomberg : The Dirty, Rotten Business of Mayor Michael Bloomberg

''New Yorkers who have received city, campaign, or Bloomberg bucks in one form or another and who expect to do business again in the future agreed to speak anonymously with the Voice about the mayor's personality, the intersection of his political and private interests, and the goals he aims to achieve.''

Bloomberg Discrimination Update

City Workers’ Discrimination Lawsuits Rise under Bloombo Dicto's Thr33 T3rms, Reports NYT

From The New York Times :

"The number of discrimination cases filed by city employees in New York has risen even as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has adopted a far less adversarial tone than his predecessor did in dealing with the city’s vast work force.

"During Mr. Bloomberg’s first two terms in office, the number of lawsuits by employees accusing the city of discrimination was 12 percent higher than the number during Rudolph W. Giuliani’s two terms as mayor, according to government data furnished under Freedom of Information Law requests. ...

"Workplace discrimination has been an awkward issue for Mr. Bloomberg. The financial services firm he founded and led, Bloomberg L.P., has been battling a long-running lawsuit contending that Mr. Bloomberg and top managers created a hostile workplace for pregnant employees. Mr. Bloomberg testified for about eight hours over two days in 2009; the case is expected to go to trial next year," reported The Times.

Bloomberg Maternity Leave Discrimination Update

Mayor Bloomberg Bares His Fangs to Female Attorney During Testimony in a Major Federal Lawsuit Alleging the Mayor's Company Was Sexist and Discriminated Against Scores and Scores of Women, Who Took Maternity Leave.

In the summer before the 2009 mayoral election, Mayor Michael Bloomberg was deposed twice -- for a total of almost 8 hours -- in connection with a major federal, class-action lawsuit brought by 65 employees of the mayor's media empire. The employees have accused the mayor's company of systematically discriminating against pregnant women, who took maternity leave.

To no one's surprise, the details of the mayor's shocking deposition testimony were somehow suppressed before his embarrassingly little win in the November 2009 election.

During some of his testimony, the mayor gave a lot of nasty attitude to a female attorney, Kam S. Wong, who worked at the time for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and who questioned the mayor. It is not clear from an article about deposition excepts published by The New York Times if Ms. Wong questioned the mayor in both of the depositions.

The Times describes the mayor's attitude toward the female attorney as ''patronizing,'' ''unsympathetic,'' as well as ''sarcastic,'' and, at ''one point in his testimony,'' Mayor Bloomberg also ''mocked'' Ms. Wong.

The Times reported that excerpts of the mayor's deposition testimony showed numerous examples of ''moments of thrust and parry, irritability and self-assuredness bordering on cockiness,'' which ''are perhaps the most striking parts of Mr. Bloomberg’s deposition in a federal discrimination lawsuit against Bloomberg L.P., the giant financial services and media corporation that he founded.''

At one point, when Ms. Wong read a portion of Mayor Bloomberg's memoir into the record, which was about how the mayor held grudges against employees who took leave from his company, the mayor became patronising and belittling to Ms. Wong. Instead of addressing the subject of how the mayor's company treated employees, who took leave from his company, the mayor was sarcastic about how Ms. Wong actually read the portion of the book.

“Your reading is good,” the mayor retorted, according to The Times.

The federal, class action lawsuit covers a period of time in his company's office culture after Mr. Bloomberg had already become mayor. The Times reported that recent legal filings by the E.E.O.C. indicate what the commission ''asserts to be a pattern among company executives, not only of bias, but also of outright hostility toward women who took maternity leave, with some executives suggesting that they did not deserve to work for Bloomberg L.P.'' In his defense, the mayor said that he ''lost track'' of what was going on at Bloomberg L.P., after he became mayor, in spite of the fact that Mayor Bloomberg is an infamous control queen, who is obsessed with mayoral control over everything that he gets involved with, be it snow removal or the CityTime project.

In spite of his supposed defense, Bloomberg L.P. has a reputation for being a good old time ''boys’ club.'' In one example, The Times reported that Mayor Bloomberg was alleged to have compared women taking maternity leave with men wanting to take time off from work to play golf -- in other words, in the mayor's mind, maternity leave was a foolish expectation that pregnant women had, namely, to get paid for goofing off. In another example, whilst Mayor Bloomberg still controlled his company, Mr. Bloomberg was outright sued by an employee. The employee alleged that after she became pregnant, Mr. Bloomberg personally made a demand that she have an abortion. The Times reported that, at the time, Mr. Bloomberg told her to just, “Kill it!” Supposedly, Mr. Bloomberg adamantly denied any wrongdoing in the abortion case, and The Times reported that the abortion case was settled ''out of court for an undisclosed amount.''

Michael Bloomberg endorses Meg Whitman

Meg Whitman's business experience makes her just as equally unqualified to be governor of California as Mayor Michael Bloomberg's business experience makes him unqualified to be mayor of New York City.

On Friday, Mayor Bloomberg appeared at a campaign event with Ms. Whitman, where he said that Ms. Whitman's personal campaign spending -- $141.5 million -- allows her to enter office with no strings attached, reported the PolitiCal blog of The Los Angeles Times. "She's my kind of candidate," he said.

Good luck, California.

We've heard this same rationale expressed by Mayor Bloomberg about himself, but it was like a Three Cup Shuffle Scam : there's a slight of hand that we don't see coming.

Mayor Bloomberg's observations about Ms. Whitman were made a few days after The Gothamist website published a news report that the Bloomberg administration had run out of ideas on how to save taxpayer money, so it had begun a cyber suggestion box, where taxpayers could submit ideas on how New York City can save money. (Remember, this was the same Mayor Bloomberg, who in 2009 insinuated that his rationale for extending term limits was because he could rescue New York City's economy from the economic crisis.)

Let's see what he said about Ms. Whitman in their joint campaign appearance in California :

Just like his new cyber suggestion box suggests, just because you can spend over $100 million in a self-financed campaign for public office, it doesn't mean that a wealthy candidate actually has any good ideas about how to save the local government's budget. Spending money doesn't mean you know how to save money.

But there is more of the Mayor's math that doesn't add up. We'll explore that soon.

Running for the Exits

Quoted entirely from The New York Times.

Another Exit From Bloomberg’s Inner Circle

By MICHAEL BARBARO
(David W. Chen contributed reporting.)

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg so prizes stability and loyalty that he discouraged goodbye parties for employees of his media company, writing in his memoir that he could barely bring himself to wish departing workers good luck. “Why should I?” he asked.

Now he finds himself, however reluctantly, bidding farewell to his closest advisers at City Hall, who are leaving for lucrative jobs in the private sector.

In the process, they are forcing Mr. Bloomberg to remake an inner circle that has remained remarkably consistent, and free of drama, over the last eight years.

On Tuesday, Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler, who manages the city’s Police, Fire and Transportation Departments and the Office of Labor Relations, and who is arguably Mr. Bloomberg’s most powerful aide, said he would take a job at Citigroup in May.

Joining him in the exodus: Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey, the mayor’s political guru and chief of government relations, who will soon leave City Hall for a position at the mayor’s company, Bloomberg L.P., and James Anderson, Mr. Bloomberg’s communications director, who took a job with the mayor’s charitable foundation.

After Mr. Bloomberg’s improbable victory in the 2001 mayor’s race, both Mr. Skyler and Mr. Sheekey followed him from his company to City Hall. Since then, they have been a part of an enormously influential coterie of advisers.

They have advised him on everything, like his short-lived flirtation with a presidential run (spearheaded by Mr. Sheekey), the revamping of the city’s Buildings Department (a project run by Mr. Skyler) after several crane collapses and his decision to seek a third term as mayor (both advised him not to).

“They have been with the mayor the longest, and they are totally loyal to him,” said William T. Cunningham, who was communications director during the mayor’s first term.

But the changes inside Bloomberg Land do not end there. Since he decided to seek a third term last fall, Mr. Bloomberg has announced the departure of 15 high-level aides, most of them agency commissioners. It is a level of turnover without precedent during his time in office.

“He’s had a very stable crew,” said Andrew White, the director of the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School. “It was actually surprising to a number of people that there was so little change after the last election.”

Aides to the mayor said he was both fulfilling a campaign pledge to shake up his administration during his third term and allowing long-serving advisers to begin new careers outside of government, with his blessing.

That was the case with Mr. Skyler, who will become an executive vice president at Citigroup, overseeing the firm’s relationships with reporters, investors and government agencies.

Mr. Skyler, 36, is the city’s youngest deputy mayor, but he shoulders the greatest responsibilities, managing highly visible operations — like the efficiency of ambulance response times and trash pickups — by which most New Yorkers measure the effectiveness of their government.

A lanky former Ivy League fencer who grew up on the Upper East Side, he found himself at the center of grueling debates about how to identify human remains found at ground zero years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and how to handle the cleanup of the steam pipe explosion near Grand Central Terminal in 2007.

Mitchell L. Moss, an informal adviser to Mr. Bloomberg and a professor at New York University, called it “an exhausting job.”During a news conference in the Bronx on Tuesday, Mr. Bloomberg described Mr. Skyler as a “a phenomenally competent guy” who “did a masterful job for the city.” He added that he wished Mr. Skyler would remain at City Hall. “He’s got his life to lead, and he’s got to make his decisions, and he’s done that.”

Mr. Skyler is unlikely to move out of Mr. Bloomberg’s orbit entirely: the mayor’s companion, Diana L. Taylor, is a member of the Citigroup board of directors, which interacts regularly with the firm’s top managers.

Citigroup appeared intent on wooing an experienced New York figure for the job. Before Mr. Skyler began his job search, the bank had discussed the position with Mr. Sheekey; Howard Wolfson, the former communications director for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential campaign and Mr. Bloomberg’s re-election bid; and Gary Ginsberg, the former chief of investor relations and corporate communications for News Corporation, the owner of the Fox News Channel and The New York Post, according to people told of the discussions. A spokesman for Citigroup declined to comment on other candidates for the job.

Citigroup said government affairs would be part of Mr. Skyler’s portfolio. The bank’s primary lobbying efforts are aimed at the federal government, which gave the company billions of dollars in bailout money during the financial crisis. Mr. Skyler is prohibited from lobbying city government for the next year.

Mr. Bloomberg did not announce an immediate replacement for Mr. Skyler, but aides said a broad search would reach beyond City Hall. In an interview on Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Skyler said, “I think I was just ready to do something new, and I think that’s healthy.”

Misogynistic Mayor may cost Quinn her Leadership

The mayor doesn't like discussing the subject of the class action sexual harassment case against him and his company.

In addition to the pattern of sexual harassment and discrimination at Bloomberg L.P., look at how Mayor Michael Bloomberg has treated New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

Quinn's power base is now in question -- following her close association with Mayor Bloomberg> and his controversial push for third term extensions.

Bloomberg tricked Quinn into doing his dirty work on extending term limits, and then left her out to fend herself against voter anger. More evidence of his bias against women.

From The New York Times : Answers About Michael R. Bloomberg, Part 2 :

Q. Are the sexual harassment issues that are being brought against Bloomberg L.P. recent, or were they prior to his terms as mayor? If they are later than 2002 hasn’t he divested himself from any active role in the company and should it not be a relevant issue? If events occurred during his company stewardship, that is a different matter and should be brought to bear in the current campaign. Would you comment on this subject? — Posted by Ned Brody

A. A complicated subject. Mr. Bloomberg and his company faced three sexual harassment and discrimination lawsuits when he was still in charge of Bloomberg L.P. One suit, by a woman who charged Mr. Bloomberg with snapping “Kill it!” when she told him she was pregnant, claimed that he and other company executives subjected women to “repeated and unwelcome” sexual comments and overtures. That suit was settled the year before Mr. Bloomberg became a mayoral candidate. He did not admit guilt, and the plaintiff accepted an undisclosed sum and agreed to remain forever silent. A second harassment suit was dropped because of legal blunders by the woman’s lawyer, and a third was withdrawn after the plaintiff’s husband, another Bloomberg employee, pleaded guilty to stealing from the company.

We need to liberate the women who work around Mayor Bloomberg.