Dear Editor,
I should appreciate your printing this letter as a commentary on the destruction by fire of the Wisynco warehouse in Lakes Pen, which was featured in your newspaper last Friday, May 27, 2016.
It’s not often that negative occurrences of such magnitude elicit so readily a positive response. The chief executive officer of the Wisynco Group, Andrew Mahfood, has unwittingly sent every Jamaican a lesson which, if learned and lived, could see Jamaica moving forward. The common good must always figure into our decision.
Faced with such a disaster, the ordinary reaction by most CEOs of businesses would be to lay off his/her workers, for it is evident that the loss incurred would not allow for “business as usual”. But not so for Andrew Mahfood.
Having known his family — the calibre of his grandmother, Evelyn Mahfood of happy memory is well known — it was not a complete surprise that the welfare of his employees trumped profit. It is the same source, whence came the inspiration to found the now legendary Food for the Poor organisation, conceived and executed by Ferdinand Mahfood. Evidently, the Catholic Christian social teaching of their church was not lost on these two men. This is practical Christianity in action!
Can you imagine the possibilities of the moral/spiritual revolution that could result in this land of ours if our Christian principles were similarly applied in all our corporations and institutions, vis-Ã -vis their employees, when hard luck strikes and CEOs magnanimously take a reduction in their high-ended salaries in order to keep their employees on the job?
Might sound utopian to some, but Christian to others!
Most Rev Donald J Reece, OJ
Archbishop Emeritus of Kgn
don.j.reece@gmail.com
I should appreciate your printing this letter as a commentary on the destruction by fire of the Wisynco warehouse in Lakes Pen, which was featured in your newspaper last Friday, May 27, 2016.
It’s not often that negative occurrences of such magnitude elicit so readily a positive response. The chief executive officer of the Wisynco Group, Andrew Mahfood, has unwittingly sent every Jamaican a lesson which, if learned and lived, could see Jamaica moving forward. The common good must always figure into our decision.
Faced with such a disaster, the ordinary reaction by most CEOs of businesses would be to lay off his/her workers, for it is evident that the loss incurred would not allow for “business as usual”. But not so for Andrew Mahfood.
Having known his family — the calibre of his grandmother, Evelyn Mahfood of happy memory is well known — it was not a complete surprise that the welfare of his employees trumped profit. It is the same source, whence came the inspiration to found the now legendary Food for the Poor organisation, conceived and executed by Ferdinand Mahfood. Evidently, the Catholic Christian social teaching of their church was not lost on these two men. This is practical Christianity in action!
Can you imagine the possibilities of the moral/spiritual revolution that could result in this land of ours if our Christian principles were similarly applied in all our corporations and institutions, vis-Ã -vis their employees, when hard luck strikes and CEOs magnanimously take a reduction in their high-ended salaries in order to keep their employees on the job?
Might sound utopian to some, but Christian to others!
Most Rev Donald J Reece, OJ
Archbishop Emeritus of Kgn
don.j.reece@gmail.com