Surviving the Workday

In Great Britain, a database listing employees with identifying information including photos, and their grounds for dismissal will be available for future employers to check on potential hires. The database, called the National Staff Dismissal Register (NSDR) raises a number of concerns for employees. First, and foremost, these grounds for dismissal don’t have to be reported for police. Employers seem to be able to literally enter any information without fear of penalty. Second, there is no method for addressing any inaccuracies in the database:

James Welch, the legal director of human rights group Liberty, also says that he is concerned that the register does not offer sufficient redress to the falsely accused.

“This scheme appears to bypass existing laws which protect employees by limiting the circumstances when information about possible criminal activity can be shared with potential employers.”

Aee. I’m all for sharing information, but as you can see in the comments, there seems to be a lot of room for abuse, and once on the list, what will you do for work?

Oooh! Look at this home office! It’s really a glorified shed, but so cute, bright, and tucked away in the shade in the yard. And, of course, if you put some wheels on the bottom, you might be able to get away building it without a permit. Not that I would ever suggest doing that. Never mind me forwarding this to someone I know who likes building sheds…..

Via Treehugger

Even though literally a quarter of my living relatives live in your lovely city of Toronto, I know nothing of your culture, especially this word, Timbit. And even finding out the meaning (donut hole), I fear you have picked up some management practices from your neighbors down south: fire first, ask questions later. You really can’t buy PR this bad. And, as always with a story from Consumerist, the comments are quite funny, including some folks waiting for the first person to blame the victim, a popular Consumerist commenter practice.

If you were to send your mother flowers rather than clipping them from your garden, you might give try California Organic Flowers. I sent ranunculus to my mom for her birthday, and due to my own zip code error, there were issues with them arriving on time, but California Organic Flowers sent another batch for free after I developed a relationship with Marc trying to track down the flowers, which became world travelers. Again, that was due to my error, not theirs. 

You can also see Marc below, which is funny only that my husband stumbled across this video when looking for information on organic cover crops, and not organic flowers.

And why would you even care if the flowers you send are organic? About 70% of the cut flowers in the U.S. are imported, and often from countries that use pesticides and fumigants that are banned in North America. Furthermore, there are some serious labor issues with who cuts the flowers:

Meanwhile, two-thirds of Columbian and Ecuadorian workers suffer from problems associated with pesticide exposure, including nausea, conjunctivitis, neurological disease, reproductive problems, and birth defects. Plus, the International Labor Organization estimates that 20 percent of flower workers in Ecuador are children, who are even more vulnerable to hazards these chemicals pose.

After yesterday’s post, I remembered a survey in the United Kingdom of bosses and managers and how they felt weighed hiring people who might become pregnant (a pretty big group, mind you):

More than 75% of bosses would not take on a woman recruit if they knew she would become pregnant within six months of starting a job.
During the selection process, 52% of those surveyed will weigh up the chances of a candidate getting pregnant, taking into account age and whether they have just got married.
68% would like more rights to quiz candidates about their plans for a family.
Only 5% of bosses have employed someone knowing the candidate is pregnant.

I find the second and fourth point most disturbing. It’s interesting that in a place with paid maternity leave, there is what appears to be discrimination in hiring so as not to have to offer that paid leave and other parental leave and flexible work options.

In Alabama, father bikes to work and picks his daughter up from school. Apparently this is unusual as only 1,656 out of 1,611,160 residents bike to work.

I wasn’t going to post this link, but I’ve seen it three or four workplace blogs, and it seems now that I’m deliberately not posting it, which really wasn’t my intention. Basically, an attorney was laid off promptly after having a miscarriage, and rather than signing an agreement not to talk about it in exchange for three months salary, she refused, and sent her email to everyone under the sun to expose the callousness of her employer.

A number of points aren’t clear in the email, but it does raise issues about how we deal with the tragedies in the lives of coworkers.  If a coworker tells you she has a miscarriage, you need to express sympathy. Many people compare a miscarriage to the death of a child, including in support group structure, and while I won’t do that, it is just that big for many of us.

From Eight Violent Truths About Freelancing:

3. Freelancers Work For More Jerks Than Anyone Else.

Wait, What? I thought freelancers got to be their own bosses! How does that work?

It’s easy. It works like this:

1. Client provides project specs.
2. Freelancer completes and submits project.
3. Client changes specs.
4. Freelancer revises and resubmits project.
5. Client drops the order altogether, posts both sets of submissions anyways.
6. Freelancer finds new client.
7. Repeat.

Maybe #5 becomes “client doesn’t pay the invoice for 6 months” or “client offers half the original bid amount“, but you get the idea.

And that explains my jerk expertise. Feel free to ask any jerk-related questions. We’re talking about coworkers and colleagues of course. I don’t think Ms. Theologian has received any queries in a long time.

Honestly, if you are going to make certain arguments, it might be good to spell-check your sign first.

I’ll abstain from Gawker posts for the rest of the week as penance for two today.

Sometimes I enjoy reading Gawker a little bit too much. For example, one story I’ve been following is about a professor at Dartmouth who threatened her students via email with a lawsuit possibly regarding simply not liking her, and then the university got involved (also via email), and it’s all very interesting for those of us who are interested in forwarded internal emails exemplifying a lack of The Golden Rule via Gawker:

Now it’s official: everyone involved in any capacity with the Priya Venkatesan affiar annoys the hell out of us. To recap, Ms. Venkatesan was a Dartmouth lecturer who decided to sue her students for harassment or something because they heckled her. She is clearly a pompous tool. Her students are also probably pompous tools. Now a pompous tool who writes for the Wall Steet Journal editorial page weighs in with an indictment against academia. Joseph Rago attended Dartmouth, you see, though he totally didn’t like it very much and didn’t even try very hard in his classes. Because of post-modernism.

I’m really not sure it’s possible to follow this story coming in cold, but I am greatly amused with blaming post-modernism for anything.

I do wonder what happens with many of us in adulthood to make us so stingy with praise, so reluctant to compliment others, and so content to fault-find. I know part of my work history explains it: editing is all about fault-finding. But it’s not just a problem for editors.

Thanks for a Whole Lot of Nothing is an article that explores praise in marriage, Christian marriage, in particular, though applicable to all in the sense that it is important to become aware of the small gestures others make that make every day livable.

I’ve been reading No Free Refills about packaging issues in fast food, and wondering about my own pet gift basket issues. Most people who took our survey thought that dog shampoo was a critical component of a Welcome Home gift basket, purchased on the adoption of a new dog. And, in my personal experience with Mia, the absolute first thing we did when taking her home from the shelter was give her a bath as she was coated in urine. And there are arguments using dog shampoos with essential oils to repel fleas and ticks and  rather than human shampoo or dish washing liquid. So I’m sold on dog soap.

Dog shampoos come in solid bars with little wrapping except a slip of paper and in plastic bottles in liquid form. The bar is much harder to use, especially to work up a lather, and might be especially hard with a dog unused to baths. But the liquid soap comes in a bottle, which may or may not be recyclable, depending on where you live. So we have usability issues that bring us to liquid soap, but packaging issues that bring us to bar soap.

Any helpful thoughts?

Miss Conduct weighed in on Writers, blogs, e-mail, and civil discourse, at least partially involving the airing of literary dirty laundry post that I wrote. She manages to find the larger issue that had escaped me, which is to say, what to make of taking private correspondence (or internal communications at an organization) and making it public? She gives a number of good examples. I had a few more thoughts about the larger workplace issues that this discussion brings up: Read the rest of this entry »

I usually think of China as the great exporter (possibly The Great Exporter), but China is encouraging Malayasian companies to export halal food to the (more than) 18 million Muslims who live in China.

Via The Islamic Workplace

I thought I was having deja vu, but I really did read two completely different articles this week that made me facepalm.

In The Washington Post, we read the tragic stories of ordinary people who have had to begun scrimping and saving because of our floundering economy:

Gindraw-Parrott no longer buys brand-name products unless she’s at a warehouse store like Sam’s Club or BJ’s Wholesale Club. She’s even begun sending herself reminders on her BlackBerry so she doesn’t forget a case of water on sale at CVS or the twice-monthly sale on milk at Kroger.

…

Poli Marinova, a Bethesda marketing communications manager, said she has cut her grocery bills by almost 30 percent without switching to conventional foods. Instead, she skips “luxury items” like sushi and prepared sandwiches and soups. “We’re buying a lot less overall at Whole Foods. We used to buy juice, biscuits and baby food from there,” she said. “Now, we get a lot of that stuff at Costco or the Giant so we can afford to keep buying organic.”

Sorry honey, but if you are sending yourself reminders on your Blackberry to buy cases of bottled water, or still shopping at Whole Foods, you are not earning any sympathy from me.

A day later, I read in The Buffalo News more heartwrenching tales of deprivation:

“It’s a disgrace,” grumbled T.C. Crews, while pumping gas into his SUV at a Citgo gas station on Jefferson Avenue and East Ferry Street.

…

Steve Francoforte, a city worker from North Buffalo, said he expects his usual summer plans will have to change.

He said he will probably have to leave his Chevy Tahoe, which now costs $125 to fill, at home more and ride his more fuel-efficient motorcycle.

He also figures that he won’t take his 22-foot boat out on the water as often as he would like.

Call me insensitive, but stories like this belittle the true hardships that many people are dealing with right now. You know, the ones who drink tap water and don’t own SUV’s and boats.

More Women Charge Bloomberg LP with discrimination describes how the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has used questionnaires to women who have left Bloomberg and who have taken maternity leave to find 58 women who had their pay cut or were demoted or denied opportunities because they became pregnant while employed at Bloomberg.

This is such a tricky issue to navigate on a practical level for women. On the one hand, being open and honest about pregnancy seems the best way to behave, but that’s in a perfect world. In the real world, particularly financial services, this is part of a much larger pattern of pregnancy and maternity discrimination.  

If you’d like to read more about pregnancy discrimination, the best resource I’ve found is the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Facts about Pregnancy Discrimination.

This ruling seems a bit absurd to me. Let’s see if I can summarize:

Georgia Tech, a public university, has a university-affiliated group called Safe Space, which distributed literature describing some religious traditions and their relationships with gayness. A federal judge ruled that these materials favored some religions over others and are therefore unconstitutional

The details:

The case was filed on behalf of two Georgia Tech students, assisted by the Alliance Defense Fund, a legal group that has sued many public colleges accusing them of violating the rights of religious students. The portion of the suit about Safe Space argued that materials at the public university were effectively religious in that they endorsed some faiths over others — and that these materials were as a result unconstitutional. Judge J. Owen Forrester agreed.

The materials in question dealt with issues that may be faced by religious gay students, or by gay students challenged about the sexuality by people from different faiths. One passage cited in the ruling says that “historically, Biblical passages taken out of context have been used to justify such things as slavery, the inferior status of women, and the persecution of religious minorities.” Such attitudes have led some religious groups to declare “that homosexuality is immoral,” the group’s materials state, while others “have begun to look at sexual relationships in terms of the love, mutual support, commitments and the responsibility of the partners rather than the sex of the individuals involved.”

In another section, the materials discuss specific faiths, noting which faiths recognize same-sex unions, and the conditions under which some faiths will ordain gay clergy. While the Episcopal Church is praised as “more receptive to gay worshipers than many other Christian denominations,” the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is described as having “the most anti-gay policies of any religion widely practiced in the United States.” The section on Roman Catholic belief also notes that some theologians have argued, “much to the embarrassment of the Vatican,” that the medieval church recognized unions for same-sex couples.

Those passages seem pretty darn factual to me though they are generalizations. In any case, the materials are no longer used. A small case, but the implications for public institutions are big.

Via Inside Higher Ed

and perhaps should worry about your keyboard. And clean it.

I’ve collected a sampling of business travel-related writing:

Vacation Day Limits and Panicking Before Business Trips at the SF Chronicle

And from a special Business Travel section in the NY Times:

     Easing the Pain at Airports

     Making the Trip as Smooth as Possible

     Drumming Up Creativity (during Business Travel)

     A Cure-all for Jet Lag?

     A Checked Bag is Bound to Stray

It’s not a bad idea to reflect on what your body language may be telling your clients (or customers).

After reading Watching Civility Devolve in which the editor of Fence spars with a contributor over a missing copy of the journal and ends up in a playground dispute, I had all sorts of feelings raised about submitting to literary journals as a writer. And, over and above the feelings it stirred up in me, I kept wondering why the editor would want to share this email correspondence on their web site. It didn’t leave me with a positive impression of the journal. Was it supposed to be clever? to show the asinity of the contributors? to show the day to day grind of editing a literary journal? I’m sympathetic to all that as I worked on a literary journal and work as an editor, but reading the email exchange leaves me with a rancid taste in my mouth.

Then today I read the Virginia Quarterly Review’s comments that readers of submissions have made. Keep in mind that these “readers” are not readers of the journal, but readers of submissions to the journal that rate and review them in some fashion before they are mostly rejected. Is the airing of this to show how bad most writers are? how cliched? how clever the readers are? Because I’m left with the impression that the readers are mostly interested in impressing each other with their descriptions of terrible writing. Again, I’m left feeling like I ate something spoiled.

It would seem to me that when we operate in the gift economy (that is opposed to the corporate economy), where art is essentially a gift, and offered for (mostly) free, the art could be treated with respect regardless of whether or not one likes it.