Remembering Jeno

introduction by Fred Rotondaro, Chairman of the Board, CACG

Humanitarian and businessman Jeno Paulucci died on Thanksgiving Day, four days after his wife of 64 years, Lois. Like the great Italian poet Dante, Jeno was preceded into Paradise by his Beatrice. We at CACG mourn them both greatly.

Jeno wrote an opinion piece for CACG this year on businessmen and jobs. We thought this was an appropriate time to reprint it. Jeno argued that a businessman needed to cooperate and work with his employees and their unions. He didn't think it was smart to put the unions out of business or pay employees a starvation wage just because he could. He thought if the workers prospered, then he would prosper. They did and he did. He started with a $2500 loan and ended his career as a billionaire.

Jeno received many national and international awards but one that Jeno most cherished was “Employer of the Year” from the state of Minnesota. He was the son of Italian immigrants, receiving an award from a state run by Swedish immigrants, for employing ex-prisoners and mentally handicapped persons to make frozen pizza. Only in America! This is the kind of American exceptionalism that makes us all proud.

Together with the late Msgr. Geno Baroni and Rep. Frank Annunzio, Jeno founded the National Italian American Foundation. His love of his heritage combined with his love of his country to build an organization that continues to celebrate the diversity of the American nation by highlighting the unique contributions of those who came from the land of his forbears. The organization is both exclusively Italian in one sense and inclusively American in another, like the countless stories of other Americans who ancestors came from other lands. 
  
Don't get the idea that Jeno was a sweet and gentle guy. He wasn't. He was tough as steel. He used to cut contracts with Jimmy Hoffa and he had a rubberstamp made for the many people who wrote to him, challenging his frank opinions. The stamp, he told me, saved him time. It said: “Screw yourself, Jeno.” Jeno did not suffer fools gently.

Jeno was born and worked when business and labor were both part of a social contract. They fought, of course, but in working out their differences, they worked together for the good of America. They weren't engaged in a winner-take-all battle. That's a lesson a lot of American businessmen and politicians need to re-learn today. Whether we are in management or in a union, the common good makes a claim on all of us. None of our individual interests can trump our collective duties to one another as citizens. Jeno lived his commitment to the common good as he lived his commitment to his beloved Lois, with integrity and faith. They will both be missed.

Here, we reprint Jeno’s article.

Reprinted from The Common Good Forum, December 1, 2010

Let it be said that those in business have an obligation to their area, their state, their nation and also to the people who they employ to make this a better life for everyone.

There is much dialogue concerning the rich person and the middle class.  I want to sort of speak out and tell you how I see it.

The so-called rich person used to be someone back in the depression days with $100,000.  This person would have been considered comfortably rich.  Then it became $1,000,000.

Today, the way the dollar is going and the cost of living is going up, you damn near have to have $10,000,000 to be considered comfortably rich -- soon it will be $100,000,000.

In fact I would not be opposed to a surtax on an individual's annual earned income of $2,000,000 or more.

I also, however, don't condemn those who have some money and who use that money to help the middle class person by growing their business. Remember that the middle class person is normally helped with a job and the income and the security and the family stability that come with having a steady job, created by the entrepreneur or the corporations.

Let me speak for myself.  During my 92 years - I started employing people in the 1940's, so now have some 65 years creating jobs -  I worked with all types of unions worldwide, never having one day of strike or a lock out in those 65 years by being fair with my employees, creating jobs or taking over companies that were failing and saving those jobs.  As a result, I made a little money, especially now with my Michelina's Frozen Entrees.

Should I be condemned for that?  No, because you want to remember that about half of those people that I helped get jobs were mentally impaired or physically impaired. I received a national award for employing the handicapped when 51% of our people in Minnesota, in 1972 I believe it was, were handicapped.  And, they were all unionized.

We have to help the middle class and we have to help the people who employ others who create jobs.  Without those people creating jobs, there is no middle class -- it's all the poorer class.  Think about it.

And one more point, over these 92 years I have either created or saved from ailing companies over 10,000 jobs worldwide and most of those 10,000 exist today. Of those jobs, most were unionized.  That's what an entrepreneur can do if makes a little money once in a while; i.e., they can employ people with jobs -- the most valuable commodity on earth.