Anne Landman's Daily Document: Employee Morale at Philip Morris
Daily Doc: Employee Morale at Philip Morris
Employee Morale at Philip MorrisPM, April 11, 1984
Bates No. 2025880665
February 5, 2000
Here is a point that we don't think about too often, but of which we should take note, since it is important.
Stories in the media that expose the truth about tobacco company behavior affect the morale of employees at those tobacco companies. Apparently this is what happened during the Cippolone trial, when the media started exposing Philip Morris' internal documents to the public. Employee morale suffered and that gave rise to this "buck up" memo idea from PM's public relations company, Burson Marstellar. (Apparently tobacco companies' PR firms to do "internal PR" as well as "external PR."). After all, the fact that your employer has "hundreds of thousands" of internal documents being exposed publicly that could possibly be interpreted as showing the company has low integrity and unethical decision-making has got to hurt.
This is another reason why it is important for us to get information about the documents out to the media.
CITATION
Title: Employee Morale at Philip Morris
Type of Document: Memo
From: Jim Lindheim, Vic Han
To: Tom Ricke
Corporate Author: Burson-Marstellar
Date: 19880411
Site: Tobacco Documents Suptersite http://my.tobaccodocuments.org/
Company: Philip Morris
Page Count: 1
Bates: 2025880665
URL(s): http://www.pmdocs.com/getallimg.asp?DOCID=2025880665
QUOTES
(the following was suggested by Burson-Marstellar as text to be sent out in a memo to PM employees)
As many of you are aware, there is currently a spate of publicity about historical documents from the files of Philip Morris and other tobacco companies. These materials are being irresponsibly promoted in the media in the middle of the Cipollone trial which is underway in Newark, New Jersey involving Philip Morris, Lorillard and Liggett as defendants.
Because this trial is underway -- indeed, our defense side has just started its arguments -- we are limited in our ability to respond in detail to the distorted charges being made by anti-tobacco activists. These charges are misinterpretations of fragments of hundreds of thousands of pages of documents and do not in any way reflect the responsible and ethical decision-making process of our past management. We are confident that when the jury hears the full story, they will understand that our company has acted honestly and in good faith over the many years of the tobacco health controversy.
This publicity is not easy for any of us, since we see the integrity of our company being questioned. I can only assure you that we have reviewed all these files top to bottom and know that we have nothing to fear from our history. Once that history is fairly and fully revealed in the Newark trial, the jury and the public will realize that our company has always been responsible and honest.
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Anne Landman, Regional Program Coordinator
American Lung Association of Colorado, West Region Office
Grand Junction, CO
(970) 245-2120
afoxland@gj.net
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