Page 12 - BusinessWest October 26, 2020
P. 12

 Editorial
YA Vital Cog in Springfield’s Engine
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 ou can look in any direction you choose during this pan- and hoping for things to return to the way they once were.
demic and find developments that are disappointing, sad, The team is symbolic of the pandemic’s impact on the business and, in some cases, heartbreaking. It’s hard to single out community in another respect — a team that did a great job build-
specific stories from all the others. ing itself up, literally from scratch, will now have to rebuild. It won’t
But in the case of the Springfield Thunderbirds, the American Hockey League franchise that plays in the MassMutual Center, we find a story that is particularly poignant and frustrating — one that shows just how much this crisis has taken from us.
Indeed, this team had become one of the great symbols of Springfield’s renaissance, one of the very bright lights in a city that was once quite dark, figuratively if not literally, one of the reasons why people working downtown had to pay attention to their arrival or departure time because, if they didn’t, they might get caught in a traffic jam — a somewhat annoying, but, for those rooting for Springfield, almost joyous traffic jam.
Yes, the Thunderbirds were a feel-good story, a team that was selling out the MassMutual Center on a regular basis, bringing luminaries like David Ortiz, Pedro Martinez, and even Ric Flair to the city, and setting the bar ever higher when it came to strategies for attracting fans, creating visibility, and involving the franchise in the community.
This is a management team and ownership group that even took home BusinessWest’s Top Entrepreneur prize in 2018.
And now? This is a team in limbo, a franchise that doesn’t know if, when, or under what circumstances it can again play games. So much is up in the air, and almost everything is out of the control of a management team led by President Nate Costa (see story, page 6).
In a way, the T-Birds have become a metaphor for this pandemic. In many ways, we’re all in a holding pattern of some sort, waiting
Opinion
have to start from scratch, but it won’t be able to just turn the clock back to pre-pandemic days, either.
It will have to work hard to get fans back, build up its presence, and, hopefully, regain everything that’s been lost over the past eight months — and counting.
In many respects, most every business in this region will have to do the same thing. Eventually, although no one knows when, the pandemic will ease, and life will start to return to normal. Compa- nies will have to rebuild what they had and regain the customers and business lost.
And as they do that, they can look to the Thunderbirds for inspi- ration, a team that built itself up the right way, and will no doubt rebuild itself in similar fashion — using imagination, best practices, and a passion for continuous improvement to set and reach new goals.
What’s happened to the T-Birds is unfortunate on many levels. This team did seemingly everything right; it did everything a for- ward-thinking company is supposed to do to thrive in the moment and prepare for the future. But in a moment, it lost control of its for- tunes and its fate — at least for the short term.
We have little doubt this team will bounce back, eventually, and be part of Springfield’s efforts to rebuild from this crisis. In five short years, it has become a symbol of excellence and perseverance. And moving forward, we hope it becomes a model for how to survive the pandemic and become even better and stronger for it. u
  Women Are Losing Ground in Workforce
The numbers are stark no matter how they’re viewed. When 617,000 women leave the U.S. workforce
in one month — about eight women for every man who dropped out — it’s rea- son for short-term worry.
But the long-term impact may be more concerning.
Viewed through the narrow lens of
the present, it’s not hard to understand what happened (see story on page 30). Unlike most recessions, the one wrought by COVID-19 battered some of the most female-dominant economic sectors in the country, including restaurants, retail, hos- pitality, healthcare, and childcare. Unfortu- nately for many women who would rather be working than laid off, some of those jobs will be slow to come back — and some never will.
But the other factor in September’s mass exodus from the workforce is evident from the month itself — the month, specifi- cally, when kids go back to school. Only, most schools never physically opened, leaving kids to grapple with remote learn- ing at home. For most high-schoolers and even many middle-schoolers, that’s fine;
it’s not the same as in-person instruction surrounded by their friends, but they can make it work without any supervision.
That’s not true for most elementary- school kids, who tend to need the presence and support, if not the actual help, of a par- ent to make it through six hours of navigat- ing technology and absorbing information from a screen. And many of those parents have jobs.
Now, fewer of them do, because some- one has to stay home with the kids. And that someone, the vast majority of time, is the woman, who more often than not makes less income than her male partner.
There’s been plenty of handwringing about the gender pay gap in America. It’s not all based in discrimination — women do tend to work in lower-paying fields than men, on average, and they do often choose to pause their careers to raise families. Why more men don’t choose to stay home so their partners are able to continue working is a discussion for another day, but the fact is, the pay gap, for myriad reasons, is real.
And hundreds of thousands of women leaving their careers at once, even tem- porarily, will absolutely increase that gap,
because any pause in employment, espe- cially one that leads to a company change or even career change, tends to have ripple effects on one’s earnings down the road and over a lifetime. With about half the women who stopped working last month in the prime working age of 35 to 44, the long-term ripples could be staggering.
What’s the answer? On the issue of the pay gap in general, many solutions have been proposed, from raising minimum wage (women make up a disproportionate share of low-wage workers) to promoting schedule flexibility and work-from-home options for mothers; from state- and fed- eral-level actions to improve family-leave laws and invest in childcare to a commit- ment by employers to ensure their own pay practices are fair.
COVID-19 has laid bare some of those gaps in stark terms, as well as exposing not only how women are being impacted by this economy, but how women of color are being hit even harder. A reopening of schools at some point will no doubt ease these disparities. But it certainly won’t make them go away. u
 12 OCTOBER 26, 2020
OPINION
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