by WorldTribune Staff, July 1, 2024 Contract With Our Readers
Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum (WEF) boasts that its mission is to improve the state of the world, and many prominent world leaders have been groomed through WEF’s Young Global Leaders Forum. [See below.]
Is Schwab using his own organization as a template and an example for globalist leadership?
The WEF has faced numerous accusations from its employees of sexual harassment and discrimination against women and black people, the Wall Street Journal reported on June 29.
“One episode still making the rounds among staffers is the time in 2017 he tapped a young woman to lead an initiative for startups. She had discovered she was pregnant, and during her first few days on the job went into Schwab’s office in Geneva to tell him,” the report notes. “Schwab grew upset that she wouldn’t be able to continue working at the same pace, people familiar with the incident said, and told her she wasn’t suited for her new leadership role. She was pushed out after what the Forum said was a brief trial period.”
The Journal interviewed more than 80 current and former employees ranging in tenure from as far back as the 1980s through the present day.
Some of those interviewed said that women were routinely sexualized and objectified, a tone they said was set at the very top of the organization. Since the WEF’s earliest years, staffers say women received warnings about Schwab: If you find yourself alone with him, he may make uncomfortable comments about your appearance. They describe his behavior as more awkward than menacing, but inappropriate for a leader.”
Schwab, 86, has been married to his wife Hilde, his former assistant, since 1971.
Barbara Erskine, a former Forum communications executive, said that Schwab told a board member to tell her that she needed to lose weight. Schwab told other executives that she had no charm, said Erskine, who spent a decade at the WEF and left in 2000.
Three women who worked in Geneva closely with Schwab—a receptionist, a personal assistant, and a European staffer—told the Journal that Schwab over several decades made suggestive comments to them that made them uncomfortable. Several other co-workers said they were aware of Schwab’s behavior with each of the women.
The receptionist who worked for Schwab said he asked her to private dinners and excursions. She said she had to be really clear with him more than once “what kind of relationship I wanted: professional and nothing sexual.”
Myriam Boussina, who worked at the WEF in the 1990s as Schwab’s personal assistant and in a role handling partner companies, said Schwab complimented her attire, haircut and body in a way that was inappropriate for a workplace and made her uncomfortable.
“I knew he liked me and I knew he found me pretty,” Boussina said. “Every man with a lot of power, they think that they can get any woman and they are not ashamed.”
She said there was no real human-resources department at the time she could notify. “You could not go and complain, it was impossible,” she said.
Internal complaints, email exchanges, and interviews with current and former employees reveal that, under Schwab’s decades-long oversight, the organization has allowed to fester an atmosphere hostile to women and black people.
“At least six female staffers were pushed out or otherwise saw their careers suffer when they were pregnant or returning from maternity leave,” the report said. “Another half dozen described sexual harassment they experienced at the hands of senior managers, some of whom remain at the Forum. Two said they were sexually harassed years ago by VIPs at Forum gatherings, including at Davos, where female staff were expected to be at the delegates’ beck and call.”
More recently, employees registered internal complaints after white WEF managers used the N-word around black employees. Black employees also raised formal complaints to WEF leaders about being passed over for promotions or left out of Davos.
“The Forum’s workplace culture is particularly distressing to many employees because of the organization’s public stances promoting gender equality. It publishes an annual ‘Global Gender Gap Report’ that details various countries’ progress toward gender parity. Some of the allegations of mistreatment came from former members of the very team that put it together,” the report said.
Cheryl Martin, a former U.S. Energy Department official who served as a top WEF executive, told the Journal: “That was the most disappointing thing, to see the distance between what the Forum aspires to and what happens behind the scenes.”
“It was distressing to witness colleagues visibly withdraw from themselves with the onslaught of harassment at the hands of high-level staff, going from social and cheerful to self-isolating, avoiding eye contact, sharing nightmares for years after,” said Farid Ben Amor, a former U.S. media executive who worked at the WEF for more than a year before resigning in 2019. “It’s particularly distressing when contrasted with the eagerness and earnestness with which many of us joined the Forum.”
Following is a partial list of former participants in WEF’s Young Global Leaders program according to Wikipedia:
Emmanuel Macron – President of France
Mark Zuckerberg – CEO and Founder of Facebook
Elon Musk – CEO of Tesla
Justin Trudeau – Prime Minister
Jimmy Wales – Co-founder of Wikipedia
Pete Buttigieg – Politician and US Secretary of Transportation
Sheryl Sandberg – Former Facebook executive
Jerry Yang – Co-Founder of Yahoo!
Sergey Brin – Co-founder of Google
Anderson Cooper – Journalist
Samantha Power – Former Ambassador to the United Nations
Ashton Kutcher – Actor
Nikki Haley – Former Ambassador to the United Nations
Chelsea Clinton – American writer and daughter of former US President Bill Clinton
Jared Polis – Governor of Colorado
Sam Altman – American entrepreneur
David Cameron – Former Prime Minister
Amal Clooney – Barrister and wife of George Clooney
While the WEF did not make Schwab available for an interview, WEF spokesman Yann Zopf said in a statement that the Journal’s article would “mischaracterize our organization, culture and colleagues, including our founder.”
Schwab’s WEF hit with charges of sexual harassment, discrimination against blacks added by Editor Two on
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