This paper consists of five pages and considers how Texaco's chairman responded to the racial sensitivity incident in 1996. Two sources are cited in the bibliography.
Name of Research Paper File: RT13_SA043Tex.rtf
Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
happed in the autumn of 1996 was nothing more than the acceptance of a story by an overzealous reporter who would not leave a hot issue alone. That is how
Texaco got a bad reputation. Of course, that is not to say that some Texaco employees were not bigoted nor does that mean that the company was never guilty of
racial discrimination. However, a story that made headlines made things significantly troubling for this giant company. On November 4, 1996, a front-page story in The New York Times relayed
the fact that senior executives of Texaco had "bantered comfortably among themselves" (Kelly, 1996, p.6) during a meeting that occurred more than two years earlier in "planning the destruction of
documents demanded in a Federal discrimination lawsuit and belittling the companys minority employees with racial epithets " (1996, p.6). The scandal was huge. Having made the front page of the
New York Times gives one an idea of how significant this incident was. Also, in a touchy climate where racial issues are often accentuated, this story becomes all the more
important. How did the newspaper find out about the incident? The paper based its information on a tape recording of a meeting that had occurred two years previously and had
been made by one of its participants (Kelly, 1996). To an extent, such information might appear questionable as an attendee might have had a particular agenda. Further, if the tape
had been around for two years, why did the informant wait so long? Richard A. Lundwall in fact did come forward with a tape that had on it a
recording of Robert Ulrich, then Texacos treasurer, calling black employees "black jelly beans (1996, p.6). Also, the "N "word had been used (1996). The story also revealed that the