Yes, good apologies are rare. No, that isn’t a good apology. They still don’t even understand what they did wrong or how many ways it was wrong. It was more than just failing to cite the basic “pay a living wage” part of the argument. It makes no sense for a major feminist website, that is barely 101-level to begin with, to center employers and assume good intentions on the part of employers, except that they are showing where they see themselves in that system. They could have been offering twenty tips for WORKERS on how to make the most of hidden resources they can access (though trust me, when we’re hungry, we find those resources.) Twenty tips for employers were not remotely necessary — it’s not just forgetting about pay, a living wage would eliminate the entire issue and make the article a moot point. The tips offered are insulting to the employees, involve getting into their personal business, being patronizing, offering unasked for advice to employees, and shaming them while claiming not to. (Pro-tip: hungry people do not need their boss to tell them where the nearest food bank is.) The article is set on a premise that food insecurity isn’t something the employers are actually completely responsible for and instead posits them as Good People Who Just Want To Help. It doesn’t grasp that employers are the actual problem and keeping Tupperware in the office doesn’t even try to dismantle the problem. It was cozying up to exploitative employers rather than actually caring about hungry employees. The apology doesn’t touch on any of the layers of wrong of the article, nor on the layers of wrong that went into it being written, edited, vetted, posted, critiqued online for DAYS before it was re-edited, and then pulled. The transparency they claim is nowhere in evidence. The author is basically thrown under the bus because we all know their name, but no one is explaining how it got past that stage and how many people gave it a thumbs up for publication. And you can’t claim to be learning from the “mistake” if you can’t even articulate what exactly you did wrong.
