Some articles just make your mouth drop to the floor as you're reading them. That is exactly what happened as I read "Abuses Dog Paths of Young Magazine 'Crews.'" The article was about teenagers, most right out of high school, who sell magazine subscriptions door to door for major companies such as Rolling Stone, Reader's Digest, Redbook etc. Seems like a pretty normal job, right? Wrong.
Jonathan Pope left his home two days after graduating from high school to become a part of a traveling magazine crew. Pope had plans to see the country, party and meet new people. Little did he know that he'd be working 10 to 14 hours a day, six days a week, sleeping three to a room in cheap motel rooms, and some only had $10 for food, while their earnings were supposedly kept on the books.
Like many other teenagers, Pope had seen several friends severely beaten by managers, were regularly smoking meth, and had prostitutes sleeping down the hall from them.
It gets even better.
Pope stated that he finally persuaded his manager to let him leave. He was dropped off, without a ticket, $17 in his pocket and was more than 1,000 miles from home.
The ethics in this article are screaming. The story made front page of the New York Times. Obviously it is an uncovered matter; readers are lead to believe something must be done about something this awful. However, despite these heavily publicized fatal and violent crimes, the industry remains almost completely unregulated. This fact is shocking.
It is highly unethical for these managers to treat these young sales crews as they do. The government needs to take a step in and prevent this from happening. Almost all of the stories are similar when dealing with such cases, yet, more and more of these sales representatives are finding themselves in unhealthy shoes.
The ethical question of why there is no regulation surprisingly has an answer. The companies that sell these subscriptions are small and frequently change their names. The crews leave a specific state before the police get tracking on them.
In the society we live in today, it is highly unethical that these sales crews are working these long hours and some (the ones that do survive) only see about 20 percent of what they should actually have made.
Ethics needs to play a bigger role in this issue. The law enforcement needs to find more ways to put an end to this tragedy. The general public could possibly take on the role of alerting authorities if a magazine sales rep does show up at their front door. Hopefully, this problem will soon be resolved and something as simple as selling magazines doesn't need to turn into something as brutal as beatings and death.
*Related Articles/Readings:
http://www.travelingsalescrews.info/magazine%20sales%20crew%20abuse.html
http://www.parentwatch.org/insideedition.htm
http://theslot.blogspot.com/2007/02/wait-whos-abusing-dog-paths.html
http://video.on.nytimes.com/ifr_main.jsp?nsid=b55602544:1118416aa07:-3de1&fr_story=cc441f37425c1403e086b3f96ab5c21bf296dc36&st=1174745490894&mp=WMP&cpf=true&fvn=9&fr=032407_100957_55602544x1118416aa07xw3de0&rdm=470377.4516545299(Video about Crew Members)
Article by: IAN URBINA
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