by Henry Farrell on April 18, 2005
Three links relating to unions and the academy:
A very nice article in Dissent, which I’ve been meaning to link to for a while, setting out the reasons why non-tenure track faculty should unionize.
Teaching assistants at Columbia and Yale plan strike action; the university administration responds with the usual chestnut: “The university’s relationship with graduate students is educational and collaborative. It is not an employer-employee relationship.”
Nathan Newman writes about a new book by Charles Morris, a labour law scholar, arguing that unions have a right to “engage in collective bargaining through a minority union on a members-only basis.” By Newman’s account, Morris “documents that the clear legislative intent of the National Labor Relations Act was to require collective bargaining by companies with minority “members only” unions.” If this original intent can be made to stick (which would be a hard-fought battle, given the current ideological slant of the NLRB), it could transform the US labour relations system.
by Kieran Healy on December 11, 2004
Picking up on an “old item”:http://merlin.blogs.com/43folders/2004/09/osx_inventories.html over at “43 Folders”:http://www.43folders.com/ (this post has been marinading for a while), here’s a discussion of the applications and tools I use to get work done. I do get work done, sometimes. Honestly.
I’ll give you two lists. The first contains examples of software I find really useful, but which doesn’t directly contribute to the work I’m supposed to be doing. (Some of it actively detracts from it, alas.) The second list is comprised of the applications I use to do what I’m paid for, and it might possibly interest graduate students in departments like “mine”:http://fp.arizona.edu/soc/. If you just care about the latter list, then a discussion about “choosing workflow applications”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/workflow-apps.pdf [pdf] might also be of interest. (That note overlaps with this post: it doesn’t contain the first list, but adds some examples to the second.) If you don’t care about any of this, well, just move along quietly.
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by Chris Bertram on August 9, 2004
Further to “my last post on idling”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002293.html , I see “via Limited, Inc.”:http://limitedinc.blogspot.com/2004_08_08_limitedinc_archive.html#109202801859090687 that the French electricity company EDF are disciplining an employee (an economist who also happens to be a Lacanian psychoanalyst … only in France!) who has written a book — “Bonjour Paresse”:http://www.amazon.fr/exec/obidos/ASIN/2841862313/qid%3D1092057870/171-4684613-8604262 — on how to skive at work. The Belfast Telegraph “offers some top tips”:http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/features/story.jsp?story=548650 :
bq. Skiving off is such an ugly expression. Much more preferable are terms such as ‘zero-tasking’ or ‘enabling real-time back-end utilisation’. For those interested in how to zero-task successfully, here are five hot tips:
bq. 1. Never walk down a corridor without a a document in your hands. People with documents in their hands look like hard-working employees heading for an important meeting.
bq. 2. Make sure you carry home lots of documents at night. This gives the impression you work much harder than you do.
bq. 3. Use your computer to look busy. Try “www.IShouldBeWorking.com”:http://www.ishouldbeworking.com/ or “www.BoredAtWork.com”:http://www.boredatwork.com/ for entertainment. The I Should Be Working site has a neat panic button that instantly transfers you to a more business-like page with one click.
bq. 4. Build huge piles of documents around your workspace as only top management can get away with a clean desk. Last year’s work looks just like this year’s – volume counts.
bq. 5. If you have voicemail on your phone, don’t answer it. Let the callers leave a message. Try to return the calls when you know the callers aren’t there. In the end they’ll try to find a solution that doesn’t involve you.
Yeah, the guys over here probably think they’re pretty hot stuff, right?
After all, it’s definitely a very cool thing to be able to print off your own specially configurable buzzword card from the web, take it to the next buttock-shrivelling meeting you have to attend, patiently tick off the matches against your boss’s (or boss’s boss’s boss’s) tedious meanderings, and finally get yourself fired by standing up during his/her peroration and shouting ‘Bingo!’
I can’t be the only one, can I?
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