If someone from my loved one's (and family's sole breadwinner's) job called me 24 hours after they were killed in a horrific terrorist attack to talk about passwords because the company was in a crisis I think I would be relieved that someone was working to make sure I could continue to feed my kids while I figured out what to do next.
And if you see how Cantor Fitzgerald treated its employees and their families in the wake of that crisis, you'd see that helping them was the right thing.
The banking industry may have metastasized from a service industry to a giant vampire squid, but that doesn't mean every company turned into slimy blood-sucking leeches.
(And maybe C-F were heartless leeches before the attack and reformed due to their literal near-death experience -- I really paid little attention to them until that day. But they are famous for how they responded and rebuilt the business).
I'm a little confused how them getting their passwords help feed your kids after the employee is gone. I think what they did afterwards was definitely great, but that doesn't change my opinion that if that happened to me some passwords would be the last thing I would want to talk about.
Money, finance, jobs, passwords, it all seems so pointless when I think of it against that loss.
CF had most of their people based in the WTC. The majority of them were sole earners in the family -- they had kids in school, spouses (typically wives) who didn't work, etc. By all rights the company should have evaporated that day. Instead they rebuilt it. OK great, it's just some company and it survived.
What made the story famous was the fact that the company went out of its way to support the families of its dead staff even when the company itself was in the middle of an existential crisis. And it has continued to be somewhat of a "good guy" (as much as you can say that about someone in that business). I am sure there's a lot of PR spin, of course, but I watched this happen in the news when they appeared to be struggling pretty hard and were not managing their PR at all. They tried cutting off the survivors but got hammered (and probably needed that password help!). Most companies just let their insurance deal with the dead employees' families.
(Hmm, by doing a quick search of "cantor fitzgerald 9/11" I see that they were indeed utter assholes before the event.)
Of course they've had a chance to burnish their image since then.
While that is quite generous of them, I feel I should point out that if they really felt that way about their employees' families, they could have accomplished the same goal without tying it to the continued survival of the company by buying good life insurance for all of their employees. They'd have to have made sure to get a policy without a terrorism exemption, but given that their offices were in a building that had already been attacked once that doesn't seem like a stretch.
It may have turned out well here, but you really don't want to tie together things like "the company survives" and "grieving widows continue to eat". And not just because it may involve things like calling up relatives of the deceased to ply them for passwords while the bodies are still warm.
They gave $180 million to the families of the deceased in the 5 years after the attacks. If they went out of business due to September 11, none of that money would have been there.
They also provided health care to the families for 10 years. Again, if they went out of business, none of that would have been there.
Losing someone who is earning a salary often drives families into a downward spiral. Having to sell your house and move because you suddenly are choosing between mortgage payments and food for your kids is not easy. The survival of the company prevented this from being a sudden financial adjustment for many of these families.
And if you see how Cantor Fitzgerald treated its employees and their families in the wake of that crisis, you'd see that helping them was the right thing.
The banking industry may have metastasized from a service industry to a giant vampire squid, but that doesn't mean every company turned into slimy blood-sucking leeches.
(And maybe C-F were heartless leeches before the attack and reformed due to their literal near-death experience -- I really paid little attention to them until that day. But they are famous for how they responded and rebuilt the business).