Surviving the Workday

Blinds that simulate a window where one does not exist: the perfect workplace accessory? Or oddly even more depressing than working in a windowless room?

Steve Lopez of the LA Times surveys the merchants of Beverly Hills about their attitudes toward the economy: A strange trip into the land of $2500 sneakers.

One might expect more from the nation’s largest grower of fruits and vegetables than to have foreign (Nicaraguan) workers use a pesticide known to sterilize workers, but then one would be deeply disappointed in Dole. The take-away notion here is that U.S. companies can indeed be punished for being generally moral-free in other countries, but the financial penalty is not steep all things considered:

Overall, the workers were awarded $5.7 million from jurors who found that the Westlake Village-based corporation acted fraudulently when it sent workers into its Nicaraguan fields without warning them that the pesticide had sterilized California plant workers.

The pineapple. It is not so sweet.

I’m labelling this as fun, because it’s a “quiz” but it’s A) More like a poll and B) Utter claptrap.

Time’s Morality Quiz poses the classic questions used in tort classes across America. (There’s also a four page story about What Makes Us Moral, but I’m tired and don’t feel up to reading it. Also, I am irritated by these questions as usual.)

These “moral quandaries” portray a world of black and white, with no option for either self sacrifice or creative thinking (Isn’t there any wine in that cellar? Boozing the child up sounds like a more viable solution than smothering it.)

Also, I inevitably equivocate by wondering if perhaps it is five preschoolers on the trolley track, and the lone man is Hitler. Or maybe it’s five hippies and Christian Bale. Morals go right out the window there.

Number Trouble for Poets details one of the stickier issues with poetry publication: women : men publication ratio. Click on View to enlarge the graphics and you’ll notice a couple of things:

• the average percent of poems by women in journals has increased over time (but not to a 1 : 1 ratio);
• one journal published just about no women even over a decades (Ahem. NYRB. For shame.);
• few journals published equal numbers of women and men; and
• most journals publish many many more men than women.

This raises a number of issues to discuss: Do the women: men ratios in published work simply reflect what is submitted (i.e., Do more men submit their work? Many people think this is so). Are there simply more male poets? I find this hard to believe as many of my poetry workshops at Squaw this summer were almost entirely female. Why don’t more women submit their work? (I could write an entire post on why I don’t) And if the gap is due simply to lack of female submissions, do editors have a responsibility to solicit work? (Some editors do, while some rely on slush.)

On a side note, I’m beginning to think in addition to journal and pen fetishes, I have a graph fetish.

Spiritual Economics at Work claims that trust is a spiritual value, which can be leveraged in the workplace:

…employer turnover costs companies millions of dollars each year, and that employers’ communication with employees is key to earning their trust. Current research shows that a large majority of companies in the United States and around the world are struggling to attract and retain top-performing and critical-skill workers. Studies indicate that to attract, retain and motivate the best employees, companies must clearly communicate expectations about rewards and then deliver as promised.

These studies confirm that trust is a critical factor in employee retention and customer loyalty and can have a bottom line impact on an organization’s profitability.

I’m glad we’re back to profitability. That makes me feel deeply “spiritual.”

In all seriousness, I’m always interested in exactly what is classified as “spiritual” in the workplace because people often mean totally different things by “spiritual,” which has led to ”spirituality” encompassing just about every value.  

Doug Hicks in Religion and the Workplace has the best discussion of this phenomenon in Chapter 3 Which Spirituality in the Workplace?  He raises the questions, “Are these spiritual values? And if so, what sorts of values are not spiritual values?” Good questions because often any value attributed to community-building (e.g., trust) is also called “spiritual” when it’s useful (i.e. profitable).

I’ve been trying to write a post about Thanksgiving for literally a week: writing, deleting, rewriting, editing, and deleting again. GhostGirl and I are twins separated at birth with the unthankfulness issue this Thanksgiving. Why do I feel so unthankful on this particular day? I like feasts. I like families. Thankfulness (or gratitude) is part of my daily meditation practice, so I shouldn’t be appalled for a day dedicated to it. And I really like pie. (more…)

Today is Buy Nothing Day, a 24 hour period of consumer fasting at the (supposed) height of the buying season.

 Buy Nothing Christmas is not really about refusing to spend a dime over the holiday season. It’s about taking a deep breath and deciding to opt out of the hype‚ the overcrowded malls‚ and the stressful to–do lists. It’s about reminding ourselves to really think about what we are buying‚ why we are buying it‚ and whether we really need it at all.

While the massive advertising campaigns suggest that your salvation may be found in the purchase of 3 turtlenecks for $10 at Target, I will suggest that salvation might be found elsewhere.

We could talk about how we live an economic theory that all economic growth is good, regardless of the costs, but that’s for another time.

Yes, I know today is Thanksgiving. I’m a contrary person. Today I thought about three things I am unthankful for, because I have been a bitter, bitter girl lately.

1. People asking me when we are going to start having children: This is a tough one for me. I won’t go into great detail, but I never wanted kids and my husband does. You’d think we’d have worked that out before marriage but there you go. His mother is the kind of person who thinks not wanting kids is a mental health issue. Holidays are not pretty.

2. Reorgs: As I posted previously, reorgs suck. That is all I have to say on the subject.

3. All the unfinished home improvement projects: I’m like the anti-Ozymandius. I look on our lack of works, ye mighty, and despair.

And then, you know what? I started thinking about ways to fix these things. I came to no conclusions (yet–except that we need a contractor, a raise, and some duct tape, but not necessarily in that order) but sometimes, it’s good to think of things from the opposite perspective.

And for the record: I am grateful to have family that cares enough to ask about my life. I am grateful to have a job that doesn’t make me want to throw up every morning (Ive had that in the past, oh boy howdy) and I’m grateful I own my own home finally.

So what are you ungrateful for? And, more importantly, when are you going to get off your duff and start fixing it?

The Vegetable Orchestra uses vegetable instruments: listen and watch.

Lately, I’ve been noticing how the workplace is portrayed in games (yes, I’m a gaming geek.) Often, it is portrayed as a nightmare place where your boss might turn you into a mutant, or your zombie/double agent coworkers betray you at every turn. Come to think of it, that’s pretty realistic for some jobs.

In SimCity Societies, which I have been playing a lot lately, the dynamics are a little more complex. If your workers are unhappy, they go rogue and shut down their workplace (and then the workers sue for lost wages.) You can quash dissent through propaganda and riot squads, but then you have to provide them with bars to keep them mindless. Your productivity goes up, but everyone is angry and drunk.

If your town is a center of learning and creativity, everyone walks around happy but no one works so you have trouble providing them with even basic necessities. Also you are plagued by hippies who take up all the space in the ice cream parlors because they are lazy bastards (I lived in Santa Cruz, I can say that.)

I think what I’m trying to say is, balance is important for any society to function well. You need police, and ice cream parlors, and even hippies. Productivity is important, but not at the expense of worker happiness. Likewise, creativity is good but if everyone is off brainstorming, nothing gets done. The hard part is creating and retaining that balance.

We tend not to think of academia as subscribing to the corporate model of management, and I’m not sure why we don’t. Universities function as corporations and are led by CEOs who think of profit.  And one way to increase profit for a university is to decrease costs, which is often done by decreasing the number of tenure track positions. This means that the university saves on the costs associated with paying benefits and a full-time salary and gets hundreds of temporary workers (adjunct faculty) running from college to college to college to teach for a piddly amount of money. And, oddly enough, graduation rates decrease when universities hire large numbers of temporary workers.

You might want to read the Decline of the Tenure Track for more information on the corporate management practices in academia and Ms. Theologian consults academics for the experiences of one adjunct faculty member.

GhostGirl and I are experimenting with the format for the spirituality at work round up. So I’ve snagged three posts from a much longer post, because these all relate to the experience of women with work.  

Religious Accomodation  A Muslim woman wears a skirt of the same fabric and style as the standard skirt uniform at the Canadian Air Transport Authority, and, although she wore the skirt with approval and without incident for six months, she’s now been laid off without pay. Apparently it is now deemed too long. I guess she’s safe if she flies Southwest.

More Money, Less Housework Apparently the more money women earn, the less housework they do. And that’s not because their husbands are picking up the slack, assuming a heterosexual couple, which this study does. The lead investigator suggests that the “extra money” women earn is paying others to cook and clean. I don’t actually see anything wrong with that, but the study does point out how the amount of housework a woman does is not actually related to her husband’s income or work, as some had previously assumed, but reversely proportional to her own income. This suggests housework is still women’s work, even if women are paying other women to do it. 

Discrimination Five Boston health-care workers received a financial reward thirteen years after being laid off in a discriminatory fashion. A white male employee was told ahead of time that he was being laid off and walked around freely during the actual lay off while the five black women weren’t told ahead of time, were escorted out by security, and searched (one woman had her lunch searched, for Post-Its, no doubt (the most often stolen office supply)). It sounds humiliating.

for disillusionment, though, granted, I’m the last person to report on disillusion as I’ve already worked 250 hours in November and feel quite disillusioned by everything. I wonder how much disillusionment with work is simply overwork.

We begin with disillusionment with the army. Army desertion rates are at an all-time high, though they are the same or lower in other branches of the military.

Moving on to disillusionment with teaching. Yes, teachers in New York are also leaving their work in record numbers. But apparently if you’re a teacher, leaving your job is part of a “media stunt.”

And, for disillusionment with church, we have the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori trying to hold on to disillusioned factions of the Episcopal church.

Finally, for disillusionment with consumerism, you might try the Rev Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping and consider What Would Jesus Buy? (Nothing, most likely).

 And on that note, remember that Friday is Buy Nothing Day.

Feeling disillusioned? You’re not alone.

Andi Zeisler in The B-Word? You Betcha articulates some of the reasons “bitch” is a sexist term. Now Zeisler is the founder of Bitch Magazine, and quite comfortable using the term. That doesn’t, however, mean, she can’t articulate sexist implications:

So here goes: Bitch is a word we use culturally to describe any woman who is strong, angry, uncompromising and, often, uninterested in pleasing men. We use the term for a woman on the street who doesn’t respond to men’s catcalls or smile when they say, “Cheer up, baby, it can’t be that bad.” We use it for the woman who has a better job than a man and doesn’t apologize for it. We use it for the woman who doesn’t back down from a confrontation.

So let’s not be disingenuous. Is it a bad word? Of course it is. As a culture, we’ve done everything possible to make sure of that, starting with a constantly perpetuated mindset that deems powerful women to be scary, angry and, of course, unfeminine — and sees uncompromising speech by women as anathema to a tidy, well-run world.

Indeed. And, of course, you’ll recall that a supporter of McCain used the term in reference to Clinton most recently. I’m not personally a Clinton fan, but I think there is plenty to attack without using a female slur (or analyzing her cleavage, or clothes, or makeup).

I’m not sure I really believe that a lot of people have sex at office “holiday” parties as data in Office Party Dangers suggest. That may be because my work experience is mostly with nuns, straight women, and gay men, none of whom had any sexual interest in me (and vice versa). Which is fine. However, apparently there is another world outside my own where people have prodigious amounts of sex at office parties.

Tips for Management for Planning “Holiday” Parties (excerpted from Office Party Dangers, which explains the use of scare quotes)

- Develop company policies on expected behaviour at workplace social functions, especially where alcohol is available; ensure the policies are drafted by “stakeholders” or all departments to encourage “buy in” by employees;

- Revisit those social-behaviour policies just before holiday festivities to remind personnel they are all respectable, responsible individuals, and that the guidelines are to be helpful;

- Invite spouses and significant others — which acts as a deterrent to sexual fraternizing, particularly if the party will include dancing;

- Limit access to alcohol by issuing drink tickets or putting the focus on a multi-course meal so that everyone has fun but doesn’t over-imbibe;

- And finally, ditch the mistletoe, as it only serves to encourage intimate contact and the very type of behaviour that could spell trouble and sour the office atmosphere faster than the Grinch can steal Christmas.

Read Office Party Dangers to see that other people are having more sex at work than you are.

What sorts of changes do we expect with an aging workforce? Not only will Baby Boomers retire eventually (and in different ways) than their parents, you can expect more mid-career changes (Gen X), and difficulty finding skilled younger workers in technical areas (Gen Y). Searching for the Silver Bullet, a joint production of Met Life and Delong and Associates, studied four businesses and how they addressed an aging workforce.

The study found six key elements contributed to success:

1. Focus on solutions that allow continued access to experienced employees.

2. Avoid heavily centralized structures for managers.

3. Invest in training to make retention programs work. (Most interestingly to me, training includes mentorship training, with the idea that we don’t all mentor effectively naturally.)

4. Seek to integrate “hard” and “soft” benefits. (Frequently managers of each type of benefits do not actually talk to one another or work together.)

5. Build flexibility into programs to accomodate a multi-generational workforce. (Flexibility includes elder-care options, phased retirement, and return to work programs.) 

6. Stop searching for a silver bullet. A single solution didn’t work in any of the case studies.

 Read the whole thing, especially if you’re in HR.

Via Aging Workforce News

And are you Chinese and under 24?

You might be able to be a flight attendant on a Chinese aircraft, providing you look hot in a bathing suit, and can complete a ridiculous obstacle course involving a drink tray and make up brushes.

Yes, Fresh Faces in the Sky has all the details, including a lovely photo slideshow of the flight attendant competition.

Not that it’s too far from being a flight attendant in the U.S. 40 years ago. Until 1971, you could be fired from your job as a flight attendant for marrying, and simply were not hired if you were male.

Gee, why didn’t I know that? I have a shocking lack of herring knowledge.

 Lots of people are playing free rice, which donates grains of rice on your behalf per correct vocabulary word. And if you like word games, this is highly addictive. I’m on level 41….and trying to figure out bacillary….oh, now my vocabulary level is dropping as I miss words. Nice. I seem to have peaked at 41, not bad for an earth science major, but not so good for a writer.

Shelby wrote about life planning goals recently, which prompted me to think about the nature of the planning industry, and it is an industry, a movement of goal setting and the like for work and home life.

Not that goals (or lists) are bad in and of themselves (or good for that matter). But there seems to be a goal obsession in our culture, including umpteen books with lists of things you have to do and see before you die, even if you’re completely out of a financial bracket that allows you to go to Nepal for two weeks and hire a guide. I suppose the industry exists because there are big things that we really don’t plan for: retirement, emergencies, our own death. But much of the planning industry doesn’t seem related to big things, except tangentially, and focuses on consumption instead.

It was with this frame of mind that I encountered Top 15 California Destinations. I guess these are things we’re all supposed to see in California, providing we live here. It’s an alternative to the traditional Yosemite-Disney combo.

A few notes as you click through:

#2 National Steinbeck Center….well, yes, this might be interesting…but why would you make it a particular goal to see the National Steinbeck Center over other historical sites in California? Perhaps this is for folks with relatives in Salinas.

#3 Cold Springs Tavern…my brother and I have given our parents a gift certificate to here for their anniversary once…but still….the top 15 places in California? Really? It’s a restaurant.

#4 Grunion Run….I guess this might be a top place….if you like horny fish.

#5 Sandpiper Golf Course…this is the point where I’m wondering if Santa Barbara paid off the LA Times to get featured (#3 is also in SB). Also…um…it’s a nice golf course….I’ve hiked in the adjacent property…but, best 15? a golf course?

#6 Hidden Valley at Joshua Tree….I’m pretty sure Anne P and I camped here….or nearby. It’s very pretty. It’s also very dry.

I’ve now become bored with my own commentary and cannot make it to 15. What a weird and disjointed list. Perhaps they were aiming for something for everyone?

I will note that #10 Montana de Oro is really gorgeous. In high school, my YRUU group camped here.  And the last place is a ranch at Mt. Lassen that is only $128-195/adult/day, a bargain (a joke)

Perhaps it’s a sign of my own burn-out, but I’m really not into this idea of things I should do.

Slick Sales Job Pays Off  describes the volunter efforts by three Gen X Silicon Valley workers to clean up the beaches from the oil spilled by a cargo ship on November 7.

 In a matter of days they had launched a remarkably successful campaign, harnessing both the high-tech chutzpah and the environmental passion of the Bay Area.

Tapping into far-flung communities of techies and surfers, they marshaled volunteers over the Web. They set up a blog. They offered cleanup tips that others posted on Craigslist. They persuaded local businesses to pitch in by providing paper towels, synthetic gloves, even bagels.

I’m really struck by how smart all of this is. They worked quickly. They negotiated endless red trape. They found training for more than 600 voluneers on how to clean up oil spills. And this from a generation called slackers. Such a misnomer.