In California Acts to Correct Ledbetter Decision, we learn that the California state senate is correcting that terrible Supreme Court decision that limited an employee’s ability to sue her employer about an discriminatory pay decision. You can read about the original decision in my first post on the subject, You have 180 Days.
It’s possible that I enjoy the creative subversion of the corporate machinery a tad too much. Periodically when I work on a product, I’ll notice that say part of it looks a bit phallic (e.g., like the giant penis that was supposed to teach kids math—it was supposed to look like a stand up skateboard). And then I’ll have a dilemma: How can I tell the client that their primary image looks like a penis? I have to admit that most often I just don’t say a word, mostly because I haven’t been hired to critique the design.
I can only assume that something similar happen with the Harry Potter broomstick with “grooved stick and handle for easy riding.”
We know this is intentional on someone’s part, right? It’s not like you can accidentally create a vibrator. You can, however, create one as part of your strategy to survive the workday and then see how far you can get into production before someone notices. And I checked snopes to see if this was an urban legend, and it’s not listed.
Via Feministing (again)
Co-op America has a list of 21 things that you may not have known you can recycle, including Tyvek envelopes. Most of the items are found (or used) in the workplace.
Speaking of recycling, has anyone joined bookmooch? I read about it last night in Vegetarian Times. Basically, you join, type in your books to give away to others, accumulate points with each book mailed, and then can request books that you want with your points.
I have to say that I was relieved to see this article. I’m a bit weary of the Boomer-Gen X conflict in the workplace. But if you thought that Gen X had the potential to drive the Baby Boomers nuts in the workplace, you’ll really be impressed with Gen Y (also known as the Millennials) in Boomers, Gen Yers mix it up. I’ll summarize for you—unlike the main conflict between Boomers and Gen X concerning work habits and work importance, the main areas of conflict between Boomers and Gen Y seem to center around authority and demeanor.
While Boomers grew up during the wild and crazy social action sixties, they are now considered part of the status quo (sorry). And Gen Y, for the most part, represent children of the status quo. They challenge authority and don’t give it the respect that Boomers think it deserves. And, God help them, Gen Y seems to expect promotions and raises while Boomers have grown used to waiting. That’s the authority conflict.
The demeanor conflict is just as vexing for those involved. While Boomers strived to fit in to corporate culture over the past four decades, Gen Y doesn’t understand that they may have to dress and act the part to fit in (and perhaps they don’t). Many of the conflicts originate from expectations about appearances (flip flops! tube tops! mini skirts!) and professionalism (that photo on facebook! that video resume! that gum cracking!).
You might like to read the full article for more on this particular Boomer-Gen Y management dilemma, and for a broader perspective Mixing and Managing Four Generations has good tips too.
Inspiration for play during the workday from dogs and polar bears
*almost dying of cuteness*
Via Treehugger
So if rumors about company mergers and acquisitions aren’t necessarily gossip, what is workplace gossip? A few examples come to mind (with names changed):
1. Did you hear that Hildegaard and Bartholomew are dating?
2. Did you know that Hildegaard and Bartholomew spent all night at work on that project?
3. Did you hear that Hildegaard and Bartholomew were married over the weekend?
4. Did you hear that Hildegaard is pregnant with the UPS guy’s kid?
Which one (or ones) of these is gossip? And why? All? None? Only #4?
Your thoughts in comments, please, if you have them.
It’s gossip week here at Surviving the Workday. I’m always a little skeptical when I hear about the horrors of office gossip because I find some of what’s labeled as “gossip” to be useful information. Not always believable, mind you, but helpful in terms of knowing what’s going on in the office.
In Office Gossip Has Never Traveled Faster, we learn that gossip has two varieties:
Gossip generally takes two forms, either rumors about company changes, such as mergers, layoffs, managerial promotions or staffing changes, and personal gossip about specific employees: who is doing well, having an affair or grappling with personal problems. Because people spend more of their waking hours today at work than with their families, offices are rife with gossip — and both kinds of rumormongering can be detrimental to the workplace.
I’m not so sure that rumors about company changes are gossip. I think it’s information-sharing and, as far as I can tell, it’s networking. One of the issues that fuels this sort of “gossip” is bad communication from management. If you are a manager and want to quell gossip about mergers, layoffs, promotions, or staffing changes, then you need to communicate to your employees. They are “gossiping” because you are not communicating well.
Elizabeth Weber in Confessions of a Prodigal Volunteer articulates why it is difficult to find the balance between volunteering and participating in church life:
I knew I’d erred in gravitating toward roles that, although worthwhile, didn’t feed my spirit. I’d come to care too much about the work, for a mishmash of reasons—ego, certainly, and strong convictions based on a by-now prodigious institutional memory. A sense of earned power—that occupational hazard of intense volunteer commitment—also tethered me. And if I set the work down, I feared it might lie there a good long while (horrors!) before others picked it up.
As Weber points out, volunteering in church requires that you not only serve others but serve your own spirit. It’s just as difficult to navigate as paid work, but is a practice that we don’t always pay attention to. Many of us volunteer until we are burnt out.
A key element of long-term volunteering is being mindful of your own needs as you volunteer and not just the many needs of others. You might like to read Volunteering 101, Why Volunteer, How to Know When Not to Volunteer, and Beyond Capitalism for information on other economies.
Via Philocrites
Too Much to Bare describes the naked trend in reference to recent magazine photos of Nicole Kidman and Maggie Gyllenhaal:
I think what I find so incredibly discomfiting about these pictures is their suggestion that, no matter how talented a woman is, how many plaudits she has received, how intelligent her reputation, how garlanded she has been for depicting one of the most talented writers of the last century while sporting a huge prosthetic conk on her noggin, at the end of the day, if she wants to stay in the public eye, if she wants the magazine covers and the leading roles, she has to be willing to reduce herself to tits and arse.
Possibly this is one of the major reasons I find popular culture depressing. I’d like to be able to see women continue their illustrious careers without having to get naked.
Smith Mag has a hundred-word descriptions of the weirdest and worst jobs of readers. You can submit your own. Here’s my favorite submission:
Through high school and college, I was a lunchlady at an exclusive Catholic boarding school in my hometown. I stood behind a stainless steel counter, under the hot lights of the serving line, doling out pizza, wiping down tables, and forming a harsh class consciousness that still hasn’t left me. I don’t remember the physical work so much as the bleak feeling that I wouldn’t amount to much, starting as I was from a financially meager and connection-less spot. Ten years later, the fear of somehow getting dropped back into that job persists: I periodically picture myself in a hairnet, making $5.50 an hour, weeping into the beef stroganoff.
Possibly I like the image of weeping into beef stroganoff a bit too much. I also worked in a kitchen, but that wasn’t the worst job. While I was in college, I had a job cleaning the bathrooms in my dorm on the weekend as well as a job with developmentally disabled adults that involved catheters. It’s hard to choose between those two.
What is workplace bullying? It’s harmful mistreatment of people with verbal abuse, threatening, humiliating or offensive behavior, or sabotage that prevents work from getting done.
(a) is driven by perpetrators’ need to control the targeted individual(s);
(b) is initiated by bullies who choose targets, timing, place and methods;
(c) escalates to involve others who side with the bully, either voluntarily through coercion; and
(d) undermines legitimate business interests when bullies’ personal agendas take precedence over work itself.
Some scary results for those of trying to survive the workday without being bullied:
The Workplace Bullying Institute offers telephone counseling for those who are bullied. It looks like it costs a $25 donation. Other resources on bullying may be helpful.
Frans de Waal analyzes the Alpha Female in Alpha Females I Have Known. It seems like he’s pointing out similarities between ape behavior and politics, but I couldn’t help think of the workplace and women. And not just because I’ve been called an alpha female as he defines one:
It [alpha female] refers to women who are in charge, for example, by flirting and dating on their own terms. It is also used maliciously for a loud-mouthed, controlling woman who has no patience with deviating opinions.
That sounds about right.
De Waal presents a number of observations, all of which seem to fit the modern workplace in the United States:
1. Age helps a female more than a male. Since physical strength and stamina are largely irrelevant in the female hierarchy, getting older, more experienced, and better connected offers females an advantage.
2. Female solidarity is the key to female leadership. Since males respect power better than age and personality, the alpha female must be heading a large coalition to effectively deal with males.
3. An alpha female needs to be able to rise above the parties. This is hard for females. Older female primates often head large families and have a natural tendency to be extremely loyal and committed to every member. This bias may be fine in relation to kin, but if extended to friends and politics, it becomes a problem.
4. While high-status males enjoy great sex appeal, the relation between power and sex is different for females.
Indeed. Read the whole article here.
First, let me say this: Southwest probably has the legal right to refuse service to Kyla Ebbert. That’s really not my concern. However, given the hundreds of hits on my blog this morning from people searching for Ebbert’s revealing outfit (photos here and here), I think it’s appropriate to say a bit more about why I find this entire issue concerning in terms of ethics, morality, and even theology.
In the past year, I’ve seen a number of news stories about policing (and shaming) women for wearing outfits that reveal their bodies in various ways beginning with the spectre of cleavage on Hilary Clinton. God forbid she has breasts because we know what they’re used for….breastfeeding. And both Victoria’s Secret and Applebee’s are apparently not comfortable with the entire notion of breastfeeding, asking women to use a exterior restroom rather than a dressing room, cover up, or leave the property. And then I wrote only yesterday about a Hollister store manager who required that the young female store employees present their work outfits to him in a fashion show so he could instruct them to make their shirts lower cut and pants tighter.
Now was Kyla Ebbert’s outfit too revealing? Was it lewd or offensive? Seated she looks like many other young women. Standing she looks like she shops at Abercrombie & Fitch (or Victoria’s Secret), which is to say, she actually bought one of those really short skirts. She subscribes to mainstream culture. Big deal.
Honestly, it doesn’t matter what I think or you think of her outfit. I’m very concerned that this culture sends a message to women that their bodies are both disgusting and offensive when they serve a biological purpose like breastfeeding and will inspire lewd behavior when they’re revealed in some fashion. In all of these instances, women’s outfits were policed by corporate employees and then women were publically shamed because of how they presented or used their bodies.
Do we do that to men? Do we consistently shame them in their bodies? And do we constantly present conflicting representations of how to present themselves at work with books on how to use their chests responsibly? I don’t think we do.
And how many male butt cracks have I seen in my life on an airplane? Has a man ever been removed from a plane because his thin pants made it obvious he was freeballing? I think not.
Now, this technically is called an Artist’s Survival Kit, and it’s a brilliant idea, free (you can donate), and applies to many sorts of work (even those that don’t seem like art). This kit for preserving your artistic self and treating yourself tenderly is the brainchild of Keri Smith:
For the really bad days, for the days when you want to quit, when you feel like everything you do is shit, when you feel your self-esteem plummet, when you decide that you would rather wait tables for a living, when you start to think you will never make a living making art, when you are working on something and feel like you hate it more than you’ve ever hated anything in your life, when someone makes an offhand remark about your work and afterwards you feel dejected, when you wish you had gone to school for accounting, when you start to believe that maybe your family was right, when you want to lie in bed for a month and eat chips.
The Artist’s Survival Kit has many tips, but I’m partial to Survival Card #4.
By the way, Keri also designs non-planners for those of us looking for alternatives, like the hipster PDA, to conventional Franklin planners.
What’s the primary workspace for the college students? Why it’s the dorm room. And why not have a clean green room that inspires you rather than a gray slovenly pit of despair that many of us lived in (Wesleyan’s Butt B, I’m thinking of you).
Here are some top tips for greening the dorm room:
Old Paradigm: regular coffee
Easy Greening: organic, fair trade coffee
Old Paradigm: no plants
Easy Greening: Top 10 house (dorm room) plants for cleaner air
Old Paradigm: plugs everywhere, no easy way to turn off electronics
Easy Greening: Take a power strip to attach all the sundry electronics *and* easily turn them all off to reduce phantom loads (electronic devices that keep running clocks, etc., even when the power switch is turned off).
Via Treehugger
Sigh. Apparently this is the second post in a series: Talk to your teenager about her after-school job. And, suggest avoiding Hollister as a first retail experience. Here is the tale of the opening of a test-market Hollister store in the Midwest:
It wasn’t until the days before we opened to the public that everything changed: The Douche informed us he would have to approve the outfits we wore on the job. We had to pay for all our clothes, but in order to qualify for the discount, he had to approve our purchases first. The approval process consisted of parading in front of him and subjecting ourselves to his critiques and suggestions as to how to make our clothes ‘hotter” — like cutting the necklines to make our V-necks lower, or buying jeans in a size or two smaller.
The Douche, of course, is the store manager. And it gets worse. It is really important to talk to adolescents about their experiences at work and not assume that all is peachy keen because they’re too young to deal with adult challenges in the workplace. You might find the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) a good resource for basic information about sexual harassment.
Yes, of course they will. We hope so. For their sake. Wave of Retirement Will Thin Ranks of Skilled Workers projects great numbers of job openings for Generation X due to the Baby Boomer retirement. I’m not quite as sure.
On the one hand, Baby Boomer retirement is good news for most of Generation X waiting for senior level positions. However, I hardly think many Boomers can retire anytime soon or will retire en masse. Baby Boomers have a three-part challenge: potentially paying for college tuition for their children, aging parent costs, and funding their own retirement. Those three factors don’t spell retirement to me (or for me for that matter)*. That spells working quite a bit longer.
*I’m not a boomer. I’m firmly in the middle of Generation X.
This is a test of the emergency blogcast system.
This is only a test.
I seem to be descending into the dreaded awareness of the pointlessness of my current work. This is perhaps the most interesting time to read the blog. Or worst. Depending. Also, I’m just going to go with it.
Now is not the time to give me unsolicited advice about perking up because you do not want to be virtually dope slapped. Seriously. And compassionately. Please don’t.
Perhaps I really need a cup of coffee or some sort of drug. Or a hike. Yes, perhaps that’s it. I haven’t been exercised.
Southwest generally has an excellent reputation not only with frequent flyers, but as an employer. My cousin works for them and seems to be in love with the company. Last summer, I had a long talk in Austin with the spouse of a Southwest pilot about how much she loved Southwest too. So I’m a little surprised to relate this story of discrimination and harassment.
Southwest tends to empower their employees and not honor the “customer is always right” rule, which I don’t have a problem with. The customer can certainly be wrong. However, I do wonder what exactly was going on with flight attendant “Keith” the day when he asked Kyla Ebbert to change clothes or leave the plane. She wore what seem to be totally ordinary clothes including a short skirt, tank top, and sweater. Not that this is any of my business. I don’t feel especially lewd when viewing her clothes. Wait, wait, wait…no.
The experience sounds humiliating for Ebbert, who was forced first to leave the plane, and then allowed on if she pulled her skirt down and tank top up. Some have argued that her clothes simply reflect current fashions, which tend toward raciness. However, the irony, which Feministing points out, is that Southwest required its female flight attendants to wear hot pants just as short as Ebbert in the 1970s.
It’s not that I object to Southwest having a dress code for flyers, though I think publicizing it is a good idea, but Ebbert doesn’t seem to violate current standards (or past) of appropriate attire.
What’s going on Southwest?
Based on my in-depth analysis today, I can tell you that Sedona is extremely popular with people who like pink and have a lot of money. Those conditions led to my inability to photograph the excesses of Sedona due to nausea. Not that rich people can’t be spiritual. They can. But why is it all for sale?
The photograph above is the canyon above Sedona, and below is a bristlecone pine with whom I began a relationship. Bristlecone pines are the longest living organisms on earth. I think this is a Rocky Mountain Bristle Cone Pine. The oldest one is around 2400 years old. Really.
Tomorrow we return to our previously scheduled programming.
has spread to rural Colorado
Please stop the abuse of scare quotes. And possessives for that matter.