Someone takes Generation Y’s side!

Yet despite exhibiting some signs of self-obsession, young Americans are not more self-absorbed than earlier generations, according to new research challenging the prevailing wisdom.

Some scholars point out that bemoaning the self-involvement of young people is a perennial adult activity. (“The children now love luxury,” Plato wrote 2,400 years ago. “They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.”)

I do think there are generational differences. But I’m certainly not convinced that one of those differences is that Gen Y is narcissistic and the rest of us aren’t.

In Politics Don’t Stop at the Workplace Door, we learn about a particular workplace where discussions about politics seem respectful and welcome:

Employees at Southwest Title & Trust in Weston enjoy chatting about politics and current topics in the workplace, and company owner Fred Burgess approves.

“I encourage my entire staff to go out to vote and speak with each other about the issues,” says Burgess, who chairs the Weston Chamber of Commerce, but is not involved in a political party.

“I don’t think there should be a stifling effect in a workplace,” he says.

Of course, not everyone agrees (and I’m not convinced that avoiding discussions of politics is particularly stifling). And before discussing politics at work, you should check your employee manual because it may not be allowed.

A while back, I wrote about a re-org going on at my company. Now that we are several months into it, with no end in sight, I have come up with a list of things that have been universally perceived as, shall we say, less than positive, by the employees. I might add that my layer of management is equally feeling their frustration, it’s just the nebulous Powers That Be who are excited and satisfied by the changes.

(more…)

A short work story. Several years ago, I applied for a job with the city as an environmental educator. It involved writing materials on environmental education for the public, revising existing materials, and doing presentations on environmental education to school groups. It seemed perfect. I sent off my resume and application.

I didn’t get an interview, which was disappointing, but life went on as life does and I didn’t think too much about it.

Flash forward a year or two: I open a city publication to see a photograph of the environmental educator conducting a presentation. In a squirrel suit.

Bob Herbert’s column on Politics and Misogyny highlights the omnipresence of misogyny in the daily lives of women:

Its forms are limitless. Hard-core pornography is a multi-billion-dollar business, having spread far beyond the stereotyped raincoat crowd to anyone with a laptop and a password. Crowds of crazed photographers risk life and limb to get shots of Paris Hilton or Britney Spears without their underwear. At New York Jets home games, men regularly gather at Gate D to urge female fans to expose themselves.

In its grimmest aspects, misogyny manifests itself in hideous violence — from brutal beatings and rape to outright torture and murder. Fifteen months ago, a gunman invaded an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania, separated the girls from the boys, and then shot 10 of the girls, killing five.

The cable news channels revel in stories about women (almost always young and attractive) who come to a gruesome end at the hands of violent men. The stories seldom, if ever, raise the issue of misogyny, which permeates not just the crimes themselves, but the coverage as well.

And then there was the pregnant Marine. Herbert reminds us that in a recent survey a third of female veterans reported being raped (or attempted rape) during their service. Herbert’s point is that if we’re going to talk about sexism and politics, let’s actually talk about it. I’d only add that much of the misogyny that he cites takes place at work be it sex work or corporate office work.

Around here, you might get a house, if you managed to buy a while ago as we did. I have a friend who says that in order to buy a home in LA, someone has to die, and that seems about right. My grandmother died, and we took the money to pay off debts and put down on a house.  Someone died; we got a house, and it’s a small house, we should note, 600 square feet in a neighborhood that people often make disparaging remarks about because of clunkers on the street and chickens running around. Oh, and the cult across the street. It’s a house no one else wanted.  None of our friends own homes except if someone has died.

Recently Jim and I were discussing how our standard of living is still seemingly pretty similar between lower middle class while in graduate school and upper middle class now. We still have older cars, which is the mark of the beast in Southern California, wear used clothes, and don’t buy much. We have one cell phone, and no cable TV. We have less debt now, more museum memberships, and give more to charity. We probably eat a lot better, but we don’t think we can afford to eat at Grace. We try and save money, but on a regular basis much of this money finds a purpose or an emergency. Sometimes we have health insurance. Sometimes we manage to save for retirement. This is our version of middle class.

Now would it be different elsewhere? Maybe. Maybe not.

I think I’ve depressed myself.

I don’t tend to enter a lot of writing contests, but I’ve had a frustrating time finding an agent for a particular novel called Good Girls, so I decided to enter Amazon’s breakthrough novel contest. I’m now a semi-finalist, along with 800 or so lucky others, lots of whom I even know!

The next stage of the contest is dependent partially on customer reviews of a short excerpt, available for free download and viewing online. I could use your help, if you feel like reading and writing a review of the first 14 pages. Yes, that’s all! And, yes, it does seem sort of like a writing version of American Idol….

I’m always interested in this question, because it’s my general experience that just about all people think they are middle class in the United States. Poor people. Rich people. And middle class people. In fact, in college, I noticed how apparently other students thought they were middle class even though their parents were frequently executives with second homes. “But it’s not a big second home! It’s just a cottage!”

So just to get one thing out of the way: middle class income is somewhere between 25 and 100K depending who you ask. I think mathematically speaking, it’s closer to a range of 45-95K but that depends how you define “middle” (You probably recall the median v. average issue from middle grades math. It’s related to that). So we have one large rangish and then we have people often indicating that they’re considered middle class with incomes up to 200K, which has no mathematical relationship to middleclassness, but everything to do with how they perceive their reality.

Why are we so confused about what it means to be middle class? Partially because 50K buys a lot less or more in certain parts of the country than others, especially in terms of housing. Partially because whether or not you perceive yourself as middle class depends less on what you earn than on what your neighbors earn. Here’s an experiment from Why People Believe Weird Things About Money:

Would you rather earn $50,000 a year while other people make $25,000, or would you rather earn $100,000 a year while other people get $250,000? Assume for the moment that prices of goods and services will stay the same.

Most people choose the first option. Seriously. It seems very important that we earn more than others and/or perceive that we are slightly (or greatly) better off. You could say that your neighbor’s paycheck is as important as your own in terms of how you perceive your class status. That’s how we get families with incomes of 200K describing themselves as middle class. For their neighborhoods, they may be in the middle.

Resources

Middle Class Barely Treads Water

Do you suffer from middle class envy?

Who or what is middle class?

My friend BB sent me this great news: Trader Joe’s backs off Chinese goods.

You may recall my annoyance at Trader Joe’s for quietly selling a number of organic vegetables (fresh and frozen edamame, frozen spinach, garlic)  grown in China and seeming not to care about workers’ rights or environmental and health concerns. Apparently enough people complained for them to stop selling the products, at least single-ingredient Chinese products like I described above.

I don’t actually think this is an example of a formal boycott at work, but I would guess that with declining sales and increasing customer complaints, this was a wise business decision, and an example of a business responding to the demands of the market.  If I were Stephen Colbert, I would take full credit for this, and then return to shopping there. However, you may also recall how Trader Joe’s is the most crowded place in Southern California, and I’m still not sure I can shop there without mental health damage.

Yes, another weighty ethical moment in the hopes and dreams of the middle class.

We’ve talked about turnover and retention before. But here’s someone who is doing something right: For a Franchise, Success is in the Hiring. The article’s title is a bit misleading. In this story (and elsewhere, I suggest), success in employee retention seems to be treating employees with respect and paying them well in addition to initially hiring people who are honest and hardworking. This really is not that complicated as a formula: Pay well. Treat well. Most employees will stay.

This is the harassment edition.

 Racial harassment is at record levels in the United States, more than doubling since the 1990s, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The cause of the increase is under debate. Options presented in order in no particular order: 1 video games that glorify acts of hate (it’s mentioned in the article); 2 a workplace influx of Gen Y—a generation supposedly less tolerant of mistreatment than Boomers (or Gen X, apparently); 3 a sense that Blacks have achieved “enough” and a backlash against “enough”; and 4 an economy that sucks. (I’d vote for the economy as the likely source here, as people always seem to target others to take out their frustration when the economy sucks, but #3 has some merit too).

Two female former executives with Bell Canada have launched a lawsuit claiming harassment, which included all sorts of inappropriate language, exclusion, and a martial-arts retreat with full body contact. (That sort of typifies why I don’t like workplace retreats. People seem to throw many of the rules for behavior out the window just because they’re in the woods.) Oooh, here’s a lovely detail: one of them had her annual review right after being told she had cancer and was criticized for being “overly emotional.” That sounds a bit familiar.

Fun: Take the Are You a Bad Boss? quiz. You can also use it as a crib sheet for what not to do as a manager.

Timely Workplace News: Will sexy workplace safety videos be more effective? Mmm…innuendo. Will you find your birth mother at work? Perhaps that’s a good reason to attend the “holiday party”. Will workplace surveillance increase your stress and anxiety level? Hint: Not if you’re a manager.  Will the San Francisco Zoo continue to function in a the state of denial? Perhaps only until more animals escape. And what’s the best way to protest against a shrunken bonus at Merrill Lynch? Perhaps walking around in your own poo.

Notes about the Workplace: The second week of January sucks for some of us, working at home results in isolation for others of us, and discussing politics at work results in all sorts of awkwardness.

Spirituality: Are the incidences of mass violence in the workplace akin to the slave rebellions? We wonder. Are corporate workers truly enslaved? Some think so. Others do not.

Tips: There are no tips for surviving a miscarriage. There were, however, nice comments, which we did not respond to individually, and feel guilty about, yet too exhausted to respond further.

This is not a story for children.

American Apparel does one thing right: they keep a workforce within the United States to sew their clothes rather than subcontracting, losing track of labor rights, and paying workers pennies per day. So they’ve done one good thing. We like this. We wish they weren’t anti-union, but we’re setting this aside temporarily as we have bigger fish to fry.

American Apparel has an outlandishly sexualized workplace led by founder Dov Charney (and his cock sock, apparently, yes, you’ll see more about that) that regularly involves the sort of language and acts that aren’t appropriate for most workplaces and involve a great deal of abusing of power. Charney (and his sock, no doubt) are being sued by Mary Nelson:

Dov Charney walks around his office in his underwear, sleeps with employees, and calls women bitches, sluts, whores and the c-word - and that’s the stuff he admits to. In her civil case, which is slated to begin in Los Angeles tomorrow, former employee Mary Nelson charges the eccentric Charney, 39, once had a meeting with her wearing only a fragment of clothing called a “c- - k sock,” invited her to masturbate with him, and then fired her when he learned she planned to meet with a lawyer.

I wrote about American Apparel in more depth before before regarding a sexualized workplace and very similar stories came up including misogynistic language and Charney’s workplace masturbation habit and abuses of power. I hope the lawsuits continue. Just because you do one thing right with labor doesn’t mean you get to do a half dozen things wrong.

This is a workplace rights edition (betcha didn’t know there were different editions).

Transgender Woman Fired A transgender woman in Utah claims she was fired because of being transgender. Her employer says it’s because she disparaged the company in public. And Will Carlson, policy director for Equality Utah, says this demonstrates the need for legal protection against discrimination. 11 of 50 states have laws preventing discrimination according to transgender identity.

Labor Board Ruling  A National Labor Relations Board ruling may make using your work email for solicitations of colleagues for non-work reasons illegal, including social and political causes. What matters is how your employer interprets this decision (or if the employer chooses to ignore it entirely).

Supreme Court May Hear WhistleBlower Case The U.S. Supreme Court may hear a case involving two Nashville Metro school employees, one of whom accuses the other of sexual harassment and then firing her. This case is noteworthy as it involves an internal investigation with a whistleblower (not an external investigation). We have a penchant for whisteblower cases.

Employers Wage War on Workplace Obesity  Forbes has a lengthy treatment of the issues involved in employers penalizing people for being overweight. It’s perfectly legal to do this, providing you don’t live in a place with laws against discrimination by size.

For Friday, here’s the Bad Boss Quiz via the Good Boss, Bad Boss Toolkit on the NYT:

1. Have you ever publicly criticized an employee?

2. Do you take credit for your employees’ work?

3. Do your employees fear you?

4. Do you expect employees to do what you tell them without question?

5. Do you believe employees should know what to do without you telling them or providing guidelines?

6. Are you a yeller?

7. Do you demean employees as a form of punishment?

8. Do you play favorites?

9. Do you hate delegating?

10. Do you check everyone’s work?

I won! I won! I’m not a bad boss. Of course, I’m hardly anyone’s boss.

If you’re a boss, take note of this list—these issues come up over and over and over again with employees in their complaints about the workplace.

Well, this is a pretty gross response to a shrunken bonus. I wonder if that’s effective. (I’m guessing that it might be).

I have worked enough service industry jobs that my first thought was, Pity the janitor who has to clean that up.

I hope I’m not the first one to notice the San Francisco Zoo has a big problem: zoo safety questioned after near-escapes by polar bear and snow leopard.

This is not a joke. And, yes, that’s after a tiger escaped and killed someone a few weeks ago, the polar bear and snow leopard want out.

Let’s just say the problem is not the animals trying to escape. I would try to escape too.

Building an Ethical Framework Here’s a list of 10 questions to ask at board meetings about your ethical framework. And I’d choose one question per board meeting agenda as they demand serious and lengthy discussion.  They seem intended for corporations, but I don’t see why they wouldn’t work for non-profits as well. And if you don’t want to ask the questions out loud, they are interesting to wonder about.

Best Places to Work  Here is an official list by category of best places to work for GLBT people. The list favors big corporations as far as I can tell, and you’ll find some surprises on the list.

Transgender in India  People who are transgender in India have trouble gaining employment because others don’t regard them as human. The article uses “transvestite” but it seems as though the issues are portrayed seem to apply more broadly to transgender.

Drug Testing in Alberta  If you have a “safety-sensitive job” in Alberta, be prepared for drug testing. Consider yourself warned.

 And thank you for all of your comments on my last post. I appreciate it.

I wish there were tips for surviving a miscarriage, but, honestly, I’m surprised anyone survives at all. To me, it feels akin to rape in that once it happens you should immediately get a Do Over card to come back in the next life in a more protected and innocent form for a while. (more…)

I’m not sure why this week is so difficult, but I’ll try to pinpoint it (if only for my own record):

1. I worked the past two weekends, which makes this a very long week of hundreds of hours;
2. Jim has the flu and I’m fighting off whatever it is he’s got;
3. I have new projects starting, which always takes more energy than on-going projects;
4. It’s been overcast and rainy;
5. My favorite hike in the backcountry is off-limits because of the fire damage, and my current walk provide less exercise;
6. The offerings at the farmer’s market on Sunday were not very exciting, which means our food this week is not very exciting (Spinach, anyone? Squash? More spinach and squash? And how about some more spinach and squash?);
7. The entire world seems to be pregnant. For those of us with miscarriages in recent memory, this sort of feels like being the disfigured kid at a beauty pageant. Yet, rationally speaking, the entire world cannot be pregnant (the entire celebrity world can be, but I’m actually thinking they’re actually aliens that look human through plastic surgery), so I do know this is irrational, but still. Still. Still;
8. I’ve watched way too much of Season 6 of the Sopranos, which is depressing, especially after Tony kills Christopher. Why I should be surprised by this is a mystery;
9. Quarterlies are due soon. This is always depressing.

Anyone else having trouble surviving the workday?

According to a survey of UK workers, increased surveillance at work is associated with increased stress and anxiety:

More than 12 million people are scrutinised by electronic surveillance at work causing a sharp rise in stress levels, according to a survey by the Policy Studies Institute (PSI).

For 23 percent of UK employees, these IT systems are used to check the quality of work produced. Feelings of exhaustion and anxiety related to work are 7.5 percent higher among these 23 percent.

Perhaps most interesting in the survey is that the workers who were adversely affected include white collar workers, semi-skilled and manual laborers, but not managers.