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EDITORIAL
Op-Ed; Absentee ownership hits local charities
THOMAS M. KEANE

11/29/2002
Boston Herald
All Editions
037
(Copyright 2002)

For years, board members of the Women's Lunch Place met every third Tuesday of the month on the seventh floor of the New England Financial building on Boylston Street.

No more. In September they were disinvited, told they would no longer be welcome.

Now the Women's Lunch Place is hardly some crazy group, with members prone to run amok through the halls. Instead it operates a small day shelter out of the basement of the Church of the Covenant on Newbury Street. Seven days a week the shelter provides meals and services to more than 130 women and children. Yesterday it provided turkey dinners to all who showed up.

So what did the shelter do wrong? Nothing. It's just another unintended victim of a sad phenomenon - the disengagement by major corporations and businesses from the civic life of Boston.

New England Financial, once known simply as The New England, was for 165 years a mainstay of Boston. In the 1990s, it ran into trouble. The real estate market had collapsed, the company's balance sheet looked bad and it needed help. The white knight was MetLife, the giant New York life insurance company, which bought The New England in 1996.

The deal sounded good. MetLife made all the right noises about respecting The New England's independence. It promised that for at least a decade The New England would remain largely autonomous, an institution upon which Bostonians could rely.

That didn't last long. Buying The New England turned out to be a good financial deal for MetLife, especially since the almost immediate turnaround of the real estate market meant that much of what appeared troubled on the company's books turned out not to be so bad after all. The promises made were slowly and quietly broken. The company's name changed. Headquarters increasingly dictated operations. The company's 2,200 work force was reduced to just over 1,100. MetLife transferred hundreds of jobs out of Boston; other positions it simply eliminated. And this fall MetLife dismantled New England Financial's community relations department. In the future, all civic activities would be directed out of New York.

Unfortunately, this is not a solitary story. MetLife's retreat is part of a decades-long saga that has seen the city's most prominent businesses sold or merged. Where once they played a critical part in the life of Boston, now they operate at the periphery.

The heyday of business activism in Boston occurred during the 1960s and 1970s. The city's political leadership before then had proven stunningly inept; although celebrated in song and story, mayors such as James Michael Curley had turned Boston into a virtual backwater. Into the breach stepped the city's business community. A group that called itself the Boston Coordinating Committee - nicknamed the "Vault" for the safe near where it met at the Boston Safe & Deposit Company - successfully worked with mayors like John Collins and Kevin White to rebuild the city.

The need for the Vault's brand of day-to-day guidance largely disappeared during the 1980s (it officially disbanded in 1997). Even so, Boston-based businesses - particularly their CEOs and other senior management - remained deeply involved in the community.

That has now changed. Historian James O'Connell, in a forthcoming book to be published by the Kennedy School's Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, writes that, "Increasingly, Boston has become a `branch plant town' that exercises less control over its economic fortunes. One of the results is weakened civic leadership." The companies that dominated the Vault - like Shawmut Bank or Jordan Marsh - are now gone. O'Connell's list of prominent Boston companies now owned by outsiders is depressingly lengthy: New York's Keyspan now owns Boston Gas, English grocery chain Sainsbury now owns Star and Shaw's, St. Louis-based May's Department Stores now owns Filene's, and so on.

All of these companies still do business in Boston, of course. But their hearts are elsewhere.

MetLife, for one, takes great offense at that charge. Spokesman John Calagna rapidly faxes a six-page list of local donations - proof, he says, of the company's on-going "commitment to Boston."

To be sure, such checkbook philanthropy is needed and welcome. But, as a former staffer of New England Financial's community relations department says, "It's about more than money. It takes human beings." Human beings provide leadership, in-kind assistance, rolled-up sleeves activism, and an understanding of the unique needs of a city; those are the pieces now missing from MetLife.

The Women's Lunch Place is lucky; a nearby law firm, Holland & Knight, offered its offices. In truth, MetLife doesn't wish the homeless shelter ill. But from its perch in New York, running a multibillion dollar multinational corporation, a small operation like the Women's Lunch Place is easy to ignore. As the shelter has discovered, out of town means out of mind.

Tom Keane can be reached at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.