Work

Via Robin Vargese at the excellent 3 Quarks Daily, the Graduate Students Organizing Committee at NYU have set up a hardship fund , which will help defray “indispensable expenses such as health care, utilities, and rent for those who have lost their pay.” Need I say that this is an important cause, not only for the grad students at NYU, but at other universities too?

Cosma Shalizi says it loud and clear

Surveying the treatment of our graduate student employees from the lofty perch of half a year on the faculty, it seems to me that CMU, at least in the statistics department, treats them pretty well, and much better than we had it at Madison when I was a TA there, and a member of AFT local #3220. But still, if they wanted to unionize, I’d be completely behind them, and I think it’s idiotic and reprehensible for universities to refuse to even recognize and negotiate with graduate student unions. Unions can ask for stupid and/or selfish things, of course — which distinguishes them from any other organization how, exactly? — but the merits of particular proposals isn’t the issue here; punishing people who attempt to organize to exert their rights is.

As Chris notes in comments, left academics who’ve come out in favour of the NYU administration have ducked this point, preferring to concentrate on whether or not the grad student union has somehow or another been a pain in the ass. Get over it – unions are professional pains in the ass for administrators – and in any event it’s quite irrelevant to the broader issue. The make-or-break question is quite simple. Do you, or do you not, support what the university is threatening to do to striking grad students? To quote the title of one of my favourite books, which side are you on?

Judith Butler, Fredric Jameson and a bunch of other prominent lit-crit types have organized a group letter to John Sexton, president of NYU, protesting at NYU’s appalling behaviour towards graduate students on strike. So far they’ve gotten over 5,000 signatures. Go give them some more.

Update: I hadn’t realised until I read Michael Bérubé that Alan Sokal too has written to Sexton in protest. Nice to see old antagonists uniting in a good cause.

I was at a talk that Barack Obama gave last week at the National Women’s Law Center, and came away very impressed indeed. The speech began with standard politicians’ folderol, but kept on getting better. In particular, it focused on some of the political issues that Kimberly Morgan wrote about here earlier this year, but that Democratic politicians seem to have done a fine job in ignoring. Not only that, but it linked these issues directly to economic inequality.

And so women still earn 76% of what men do. They receive less in health benefits, less in pensions, less in Social Security. They receive little help for the rising cost of child care. They make up 71% of all Medicaid beneficiaries, and a full two-thirds of all the Americans who lost their health care this year. When women go on maternity leave, America is the only country in the industrialized world to let them go unpaid. When their children become sick and are sent home from school, many mothers are forced to choose between caring for their child and keeping their job.

… In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it – Social Darwinism, every man and woman for him or herself. It allows us to say to those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford – tough luck. It allows us to say to the women who lose their jobs when they have to care for a sick child – life isn’t fair. It let’s us say to the child born into poverty – pull yourself up by your bootstraps

Between this and John Edwards’ work on poverty, I’m actually feeling hopeful about the US Democratic party. Centrists in the party actually seem to be getting interested in inequality again, and to be finding a language that can link it to moral values. It’s the kind of hope that knows it’s going to be disappointed, if not dashed completely, by experience – but still, that’s more than I’ve had for years.

Confused by the internecine warfare in the US labour movement? Jim McNeill’s new article for Dissent is the best account that I’ve seen, giving a fair shake to both sides of the dispute.

I see via one of John H’s other incarnations that Mark Bauerlein is under the charming misconception that it’s a bad idea for aspiring sociologists to work on “the debilitating effects of the European welfare state” if they want to get their dissertations accepted. It’s always a good idea to, like, familiarize yourself with debates among prominent sociologists and other social scientists before making these grand pronouncements. But at least Bauerlein’s error gives me an excuse to link to this work in progress by Margarita Estevez-Abe and Glyn Morgan, which argues against the European welfare state because of its institutional inflexibilities. Morgan and Estevez-Abe say, correctly, that certain European welfare states have some very dubious features, perpetuating gender inequality among other things. They argue instead for a normative standard based on a capacity for a wide-ranging individuality, which in turn requires a strong degree of institutional flexibility. That is, institutions should be able to accommodate a wide variety of lifestyle and career choices, rather than assuming, say, that women should confine themselves to the home and motherhood. [click to continue…]

Alan Wolfe and Tyler Cowen are discussing Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Bait and Switch on Slate this week. The book is a kind of white-collar counterpart to Nickel and Dimed, where Ehrenreich tries to get a job (using an invented identity) in the media/public relations sector. Neither Wolfe nor Cowen is much impressed by the result, so I wonder whether they’ll be able to keep agreeing with each other about this for the next few days.

Today, Tyler opens his comments by saying, “We still need a good book on why white-collar workers are having a harder time finding jobs.” I suggest Vicki Smith’s Crossing the Great Divide: Worker Risk and Opportunity in the New Economy, which does what Ehrenreich is trying to do, only—if Tyler’s characterization of Bait and Switch is accurate—with more nuance and better methods. Smith is a sociologist at U.C. Davis. Her book looks at the efforts of non-union, white-collar workers to build careers for themselves at three companies (including a photocopy service firm and a computer outfit) and a job-search club. It’s a clear and nuanced piece of work, and it might be what Tyler is looking to read. (The next few paragraphs draw on an unpublished discussion of mine about the book.)

[click to continue…]

Maria writes below about American mythologies; Barbara Ehrenreich has a new book (review by Scott McLemee) coming out which speaks to one particular version of this by examining the genteel poverty of the middle aged woman with middling qualifications seeking a white-collar job. She catalogues the chancers, coaches and con artists who purport to be able to help desperate job-seekers to reinvent themselves and to make themselves employable. This New York Times essay gives a taste of her main theme – how job coaches, business best-sellers and the like reproduce a kind of mythology of the market which systematically masks the forces that actually drive it. Her take on Who Moved My Cheese?, which seems to have spent umpteen fucking years at the top of the NYT non-fiction bestseller list:

The Mice Come Out Ahead. Although the plot of ‘’Who Moved My Cheese?’’ centers on two tiny, maze-dwelling, cheese-dependent people named Hem and Haw, there are also two subsidiary characters, both mice. When the cheese is moved, the tiny people waste time ranting and raving ‘’at the injustice of it all,’’ as the book’s title suggests. But the mice just scurry off to locate an alternative cheese source. They prevail, we learn, because they ‘’kept life simple. They didn’t overanalyze or overcomplicate things.’’ In the mysteriously titled ‘’QBQ! The Question Behind the Question,’’ we are told that questions beginning with ‘’who’’ or ‘’why’’ are symptoms of ‘’victim thinking.’’ Happily, rodents are less prone to it than humans. That may be why we never learn the identity of the Cheese Mover; the who-question reveals a dangerous human tendency to ‘’overanalyze,’’ which could lead you to look upward, resentfully, toward the C-suites where the true Masters of the Universe dwell.

William Browning Spencer’s wonderful Resume With Monsters, a grim comedy of dead-end jobs, in which Ehrenreich’s Masters of the Universe have escaped from the Cthulhu Mythos, gets the underlying message of these books exactly right.

It was a payday at work, and the motivational pamphlet that came with the check was entitled “You Matter!” and Philip effectively resisted reading it at work, but when he returned home and was emptying out his pockets, he saw it and read it while standing up, and it was every bit as bad as he suspected. It began “Successful people are people who always give one hundred percent, who understand that a company’s success depends on an individual’s determination to excel. You may say to yourself, ‘I am an insignificant person in this big company. I could be laid off tomorrow along with five hundred of my fellow workers, and no one would care.’ The truth is, what you do is important to people who are important. While you may, indeed be one of many, your labor can benefit someone who is, in fact, genuinely important. You can …” Philip put the motivational pamphlet down. The writer had gone too far this time, Philip thought.

Listening to Bob Harris Country last Thursday, I was really captivated by Tom Russell talking about Charles Bukowski. I didn’t know anything about Bukowski, except having a vague idea that he might be something to do with the beat poets. Anyway, I was intruiged enough to go out and buy Post Office , Bukowski’s grittily written account of working for the US post office as a relief postman and then as a clerk whilst being almost permanently drunk, gambling and womanizing.

It began as a mistake.

A great opening line to hook you in, reminiscent of Hammett or Chandler, except this isn’t a crime story. Brilliant muscular writing about snagging with petty authority figures, trudging around delivering letters to lunatics in the pouring rain, mean and manipulative men and women, making money at the track, routine, boredom, cheating the system.

One of the best things I’ve read in a while, I don’t mind saying. Completely non-boring. I’ve now gone out and bought Ham on Rye , which I’m really looking forward to, as well as a book of poems: You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense . Comments to further remedy my Bukowski-related ignorance (or my Tom Russell-related ignorance for that matter) would be most welcome.

Nathan Newman is spearheading a new initiative, Agenda for Justice, which deserves attention and support. The core idea is to create and implement a progressive agenda at the local and regional levels that would be worthwhile in itself, and that might eventually serve as a platform for national level reform. It covers some of the same territory as David Sirota’s Progressive Legislative Action Network, but seems to me to have a more specific set of aims, with a focus on work, trade union rights and family support.

A minor victory for San Francisco hotel workers, who are fighting a divisive battle over contracts with their employers. The American Political Science Association has announced that it is moving its 2006 meeting to Philadelphia, “[d]ue to the lack of progress in the protracted labor-management dispute in San Francisco.” This is the result of a deliberate strategy by the hotel workers’ union, which has been working on persuading academic organizations not to host conferences at the hotels in question, while they continue to try to hold out. Union officials figure that it’s time for academic lefties to put their money where their mouth is, and they’re damn right. I’m delighted that the American Political Science Association has done this.

Update: I should make it clear that my understanding isn’t that the APSA is taking a political stance on the underlying merits of the issues here. Instead, I read the press release to say that given the likelihood of disruption (which would stem from leftwing political scientists boycotting, or organizing pickets, alternative meetings etc in solidarity with the hotel workers), the APSA has decided to move to a less controversial location.

Jonathan Cohn asks whether there’s any good reason to believe that nice guys do indeed finish first in the business world.

I’d love nothing more to believe that treating employees well is actually better business than treating them shabbily. But at the moment, anyway, count me as skeptical.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, Gary Miller has used economic theory to make exactly this argument, in a series of publications over the last fifteen years (this piece co-written with Dino Falaschetti, gives a good flavour of his work). Miller uses social choice theory and game theory to argue that managers, if they are to get workers to deliver their full effort, need to be able to make credible commitments to them that their efforts will be rewarded over the longer term. It’s thus a good idea to keep a strict separation between management and owners. Efforts to make the interests of stockholders and managers coincide with each other are going to weaken management’s ability to credibly commit to workers that they will continue to be employed, as managers become more interested in chasing short term stock market gains than in ensuring the long term health of the company. Long term success, for Miller, is produced through “gift exchange” in which managers credibly commit to insulate workers from the pressure for short term profits, and workers reciprocate by giving additional effort. One of Miller’s examples of a firm that used to do this very well is rather timely. From Miller’s 1992 book, Managerial Dilemmas :

Another condition for the achievement of cooperative equilibria in a repeated game is the mutual expectation that the relationship will go on long enough to justify the investment in cooperation. This was achieved at Hewlett-Packard by an early decision by the two founders not to be a “hire and fire company,” but one in which employees would have the security of employment commitment. In the 1980 recession, this policy was tested severely, but everyone in the organization took a 10 percent cut in pay and worked 10% fewer hours so that no one would be fired (Peters and Waterman 1982: 44). This confirmed everyone’s subjective belief that the relationship was long-lasting and that employee efforts were not going to be exploited for short-term gain by Hewlett-Packard.

How things have changed.

Jordan Barab writes about a quite appalling story at Nathan Newman’s blog today.

Last week federal immigration officials took into custody dozens of undocumented workers from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Ukraine at the Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina. How did they lure them into the trap? None of your business, says the federal Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). “We’re not going to discuss how we do our business,” Sue Brown, an immigration and customs spokeswoman in Atlanta, said last Thursday.

However, Allen McNeely, head of the state Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health division, said the workers were lured into the arrest by a flier announcing a mandatory Occupational Safety and Health Administration meeting.

McNeely said one of the contractors who employed the immigrants faxed him a copy of the flier. It is printed in English and Spanish. It tells all contract workers to attend an OSHA briefing at the base theater and promises free coffee and doughnuts. … “Federal immigration officials say they have the right to round up illegal immigrants in any manner they see fit—even if it means impersonating Occupational Safety and Health Administration officials.”

Jennifer Gordon wrote an article a few months ago which explains exactly how badly undocumented workers are screwed under the existing system of workplace safety regulation. They rarely know their rights, are reluctant to complain about abuses for fear of deportation, and as a result are killed or maimed far more frequently in workplace accidents than they should be. This utterly, utterly shameful operation will make undocumented workers even less likely to contact OSHA about workplace safety than in the past – and as a result will lead to more cripplings and deaths.

Update: See also this NYT story

Another interesting feature of last night’s was a strong turnout of trade unionists, handing out balloons and footy-shaped brochures about the dangers for working life arising from the Howard government’s proposed industrial relations reforms. Having finally gained control of the Senate a day or two, the government is pushing hard to shift the balance of power in favour of employers and managers, and against workers and unions. The unions are fighting back and seem to be winning the battle of public opinion, thought the immediate practical effect is likely to be limited.
[click to continue…]