This week@work Time Magazine announced their Person of the Year for 2017 and Pantone launched the annual color for 2018. The unemployment rate remained at 4.1% and Colin Kaepernick received Sports Illustrated’s Muhammad Ali Legacy Award.

On Wednesday morning Time Magazine announced the 2017 Person of the Year: ‘The Silence Breakers’. Chosen from a group of ten finalists, the magazine recognized a group of people who came forward to unmask workplace harassment.

“This reckoning appears to have sprung up overnight. But it has actually been simmering for years, decades, centuries. Women have had it with bosses and co-workers who not only cross boundaries but don’t even seem to know that boundaries exist. They’ve had it with the fear of retaliation, of being blackballed, of being fired from a job they can’t afford to lose. They’ve had it with the code of going along to get along. They’ve had it with men who use their power to take what they want from women. These silence breakers have started a revolution of refusal, gathering strength by the day, and in the past two months alone, their collective anger has spurred immediate and shocking results: nearly every day, CEOs have been fired, moguls toppled, icons disgraced. In some cases, criminal charges have been brought.”

“The women and men who have broken their silence span all races, all income classes, all occupations and virtually all corners of the globe. They might labor in California fields, or behind the front desk at New York City’s regal Plaza Hotel, or in the European Parliament. They’re part of a movement that has no formal name. But now they have a voice.”

In the workplace, everyone loses  when women are devalued. Sallie Krawcheck tallied the cost in one of the most widely read articles last week.

“What we are only beginning to recognize is that demeaning and devaluing women is an insidious, expensive problem. It’s not just the eye-popping settlements in some cases, like the $32 million paid by Bill O’Reilly to settle a harassment claim. Nor is it just the high salaries network stars have been making while allegedly assaulting subordinates, like the $20 million, or more, for Matt Lauer. It only starts there.

The bigger cost derives from how women’s ideas are discounted and their talent ignored. I have seen it up close in the two worlds I know best: Wall Street, where I was chief executive of Smith Barney and of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, and in Silicon Valley, where I’ve raised money to run my start-up, Ellevest. These places are perhaps the purest microcosms of capitalism, and their lessons are instructive for all of us.”

While we’re on the topic, Katie Rogers explored the bias ‘When Our Trusted Storytellers Are Also the Abusers’.

“For decades, the journalists Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Bill O’Reilly and Mark Halperin appeared in front of cameras and tried to help Americans understand the country and one another. Now that they’ve lost their jobs after multiple accusations of sexual abuse, we are left wondering what they taught us.

How much did the abuse of women — often younger, subordinate or not famous — by powerful male journalists factor into the stories they told us? What did we learn about power, politics, accountability, elections — or even about Hillary Clinton, the first female presidential candidate from a major party?”

On a lighter, more regal note, Pantone has announced its color choice for 2018, moving away from 2017’s ‘Greenery’ to ‘Ultra Violet’, just in time for holiday shopping.

Camila Domonoske reported on the shift. “Each color of the year encompasses something about fashion, decorating and design trends while also reflecting “what’s needed in our world today,” the Pantone Color Institute’s vice president, Laurie Pressman asserted in a statement.

So. What does purple have to say about our planet in 2018?

It’s “a dramatically provocative and thoughtful purple shade,” Pantone says, one that “communicates originality, ingenuity, and visionary thinking that points us towards the future.”

Purple is often associated with royalty, nobility, luxury, power, and ambition. Which now may be attainable with a simple wardrobe update. Or, hard work; which more of us are doing as the Labor Department released the new unemployment report showing an unexpected addition of 228,000 jobs in November. “Economists expect that in time, wages will post a sustained pickup, which has remained elusive in this expansion even though labor-market slack is steadily disappearing.”

One of the finalists for Time’s Person of the Year, former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, Colin Kaepernick, received the Muhammad Ali Legacy Award from Sports Illustrated on Tuesday night.

“Kaepernick began kneeling during the national anthem last season to protest racial inequality and police brutality. The demonstration sparked a wave of protests by NFL players during the anthem that repeatedly have been denounced by President Donald Trump.

He spoke Tuesday about continuing Ali’s legacy of fighting social injustice, saying the boxing great “mentored me without ever meeting me.”

Kaepernick has not had a contract since leaving the 49ers in March and recently filed a grievance vs. the NFL. Ken Belson provided an update, ‘Explaining the Grievance Case That Kaepernick Filed Against the NFL’.

“You may not have heard much about it lately because it is transpiring behind closed doors. And it is unlike any legal proceeding you might have seen before, not really a trial but with elements of one.

The rules on how the investigation is conducted and by whom — and all the quirks of what evidence is allowed — are detailed in the byzantine labor agreement between the league and players.

It was designed with due process in mind, but as often happens with cases involving the N.F.L., the decisions are appealed and end up in federal court.”

If he is successful, “Kaepernick would receive twice what he might have earned if he was playing. However, “The league cannot force a team to assess or sign Kaepernick.”

To all the ‘silence breakers’, this was your week@work.