From 2:30 a.m. to 6:30 a.m., Juana Rivas searches for recyclable items in residential trash in Pasadena.  It’s technically illegal because curbside trash is property of the city. Other than the threat of arrest, she faces barking dogs and irate homeowners in the wee hours of the morning. But with what she earns from recycling (20-25K a year), she pays her rent and feeds her family.

You can watch a slideshow of her workday here.

I have really nothing to add about Eliot Spitzer, except for two points:

1. The myth of the victimless crime is still alive and well. More details here.  Note the economic hardship. Note the abuse in childhood.

2. Spitzer was allegedly a difficult client for not liking to wear condoms with sex workers. To my way of thinking, this makes him an absolute moron.

It’s the around the world with the rights of workers.

Australia A call centre in Australia used a workplace poem to remind workers of the dress code: “Tempting as it is to put on a singlet and your thongs, in our work environment we have some rights and wrongs.” Read the complete poem in its glory here. Cringe.

U.S. The East Texas Review tracks developments in women’s rights apparently ending in 1973.

China Migrant workers in Beijing who are making over the city in preparation for the Olympics often have their pay withheld or denied, live in dirty dormitories with no medical care, and are often placed in unsafe workplace conditions.

With the promise of green cards and citizenship, a group of 500 Indian workers came to the Gulf Coast to work in ship yards.  They didn’t know that their green cards would soon expire, they would be expected to live in squalor, and would owe their employer thousands of dollars.

“These workers mortgaged their futures for the American dream and instead incurred substantial debt, were forced to live in squalid living conditions and were threatened with [deportation] when they tried to stand up for their rights,” said Jennifer Rosenbaum, a lawyer for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

This seems highly reminiscent of the Chinese workers in Tuscan factories.

When God Goes to the Office is one of these bizarre little articles that tries to summarize a huge social movement with a couple of anecdotes and experts. I know. I’ve written the same sort of pieces. The big issue that often comes up when employers and employees sing the praises of religion in the office is that often they are talking about One Religion (Christianity) and a particular brand of that religion (the conservative evangelical brand). That’s not really bringing religion to the office. That’s creating a workplace centered around one religion. Not so comfortable for many of us.

with daily jet travel.

Question to the Governor: Governor, also global warming came up in discussions today and there have been recent reports coming out that you’re flying up and down the state as much as on a daily basis in a jet that puts out a lot of global warming emissions. So how do you reconcile your public rhetoric on global warming versus your personal lifestyle choices?

Answer from the Governer: Are you always that positive? (Laughter) What a positive guy. I explained that one already. To me it’s very important that I serve the people of California, but also at the same time that I serve my family. And so in order to do both I fly two or three times a week up here to Sacramento and fly back again so I can be at night with my family, can do the homework with the kids, can spend time with my wife and everything, which is extremely important. I promised that to them and I promised to the people of California I would take care of the job. And that’s what I do. That’s why I fly up to Sacramento and all over the state. (Applause)

It’s so helpful for the governor to mock reporters in the name of service.

I feel as though someone has whacked me on the side of the head with a shoe and then set me in front of the computer and told me to work. How exactly does Daylight Savings Time cause so much bodily pain and suffering during the workday? It’s only an hour.

Dear Ms. Theologian,

What do you do when a secretary is consistently rude to you?
 
She doesn’t support me, and I know her boss is fond of her.  I’ve tried the “Claire, are you ok? You sound like you’re stressed out” approach and she doesn’t get it.  She’s rude-ish to everybody, but seems to save special contempt for me. 
 
I don’t want to go to her boss, and I don’t especially want to confront her myself as she’s already mean to me and would probably regard that as pulling rank.  So maybe I should just put up with it.  But it’s really irritating.  She sits near me and makes everyday office interactions much more annoying. 

-Irritated

Dear Irritated,

We truly have no idea what goes on in the inner lives of most of our coworkers. Some share a lot; some share a little; some share nothing. So we do not know if consistent rudeness is the result of any number of dead spouses, dead dogs, or dead plants, or any number of other situations. Let’s assume it’s the absolute worst and that she’s suffering with a type of painful incurable cancer, her spouse and friends abandonned her, her dog died, her plants are spindly, and chocolate no longer tastes good.

One day this summer, Ms. Theologian’s housemate at Squaw told her a story about how she managed to free herself of a stalker with a totally unjustified apology. Now Ms. Theologian is of the frame of mind that an apology is part of a social contract: I apologize to you, then you can choose to forgive me. Without the apology, there is no forgiveness according to Ms. Theologian (though you can let go, get over it, move on, whatever). Ms. Theologian thinks there’s the possibility that you can have an absolutely private conversation with her that says something like, “I really like and respect you, and sense that I may have deeply offended you, and I’d like to apologize for whatever I said or did.” Reword as you see fit, but make it an apology, and not a confrontation.

Other than that, Ms. Theologian thinks you have three options:

1. To continue with the current strategy, which appears to be to cope with the rudeness and become irritated, but sort of suffer through;

2. To fill your heart with loving kindness and be absolutely perfectly kind, respectful, considerate no matter how this person behaves to you. This allows you to sleep at night.

3. To simply mirror her behavior back to her, which will no doubt catch on until everyone in the office is some kind of rude.

Ms. Theologian votes for #2 or the unjustified apology.

-Ms. Theologian

P.S. If you have a work related question, send the question in an email to ms dot theologial at gmail dot com. It will be posted here with some sort of answer.  

Denver’s airport offers free wireless, but not access to all sites, including boing boing and other dangerous blogs.

 Our dentist’s office is in the city hall building and offers similar access. It’s free, but I couldn’t access my own blog, the blogs of others, political web sites of all affiliations, or anything remotely related to feminism. It’s hardly Internet access.

 It used to be that when I saw a Mattel toy, I presumed that Mattel made the toy in a factory the company built and manages, with workers it hired and supervises, and that it would not be so crass or dumb as to save a fraction of a penny on a $30 toy by using lead paint.But Mattel and other businesses know something they are not willing to tells us:

In today’s globalized economy, top companies have lost control of the quality of the goods that display their logos. They are powerless to prevent a recurrence of the toxic-toy tragedy—and they are terrified that their brands could be dragged through the mud when the next epidemic of dangerous products strikes.

The problem is not China. The problem is a business model in which companies outsource manufacturing under short-term, low-cost contracts to the firm that will follow their design standards most cheaply. All that is really Fisher-Price about Dora the Explorer is the design—the product itself is made in a factory over which the company has almost no control. It doesn’t manage the working conditions, environmental standards, or safety practices. As a result, it no longer controls the product itself. …

We’re not really paying for quality goods anymore—we’re paying for high-priced marketing and design combined with low-wage, exploited workers producing inferior products using shoddy safety and environmental standards. Often we have no choice—we can’t find products made under decent conditions by the companies that market them. Yet as long as we allow this business model to continue, we are complicit in a system whose ineluctable outcome is the poisoning of our children.

—Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, in the March/April 2008 issue of Sierra

Via Treehugger

Would you work more? Stay at work longer? Do a better job?

 A charter school in New York is paying teachers $125,000 or roughly twice he average salary of a teacher with the expectation that the entire school will improve.

The school’s creator and first principal, Zeke M. Vanderhoek, contends that high salaries will lure the best teachers. He says he wants to put into practice the conclusion reached by a growing body of research: that teacher quality — not star principals, laptop computers or abundant electives — is the crucial ingredient for success.

“I would much rather put a phenomenal, great teacher in a field with 30 kids and nothing else than take the mediocre teacher and give them half the number of students and give them all the technology in the world,” said Mr. Vanderhoek, 31, a Yale graduate and former middle school teacher who built a test preparation company that pays its tutors far more than the competition.

In exchange for their high salaries, teachers at the new school, the Equity Project, will work a longer day and year and assume responsibilities that usually fall to other staff members, like attendance coordinators and discipline deans. To make ends meet, the school, which will use only public money and charter school grants for all but its building, will scrimp elsewhere.

It will be interesting to see what happens. Would you like to make a prediction?

So take the National Grammar Poll of grammar gaffes by famous people. Vote for the worst.

 I voted for Paris.

Putting Some Fun Back Into 9 to 5 explores how different workplaces attempt to be more fun. Now part of this reminds me of the forced fun in The Office, which is, of course, no fun at all. And the article does a fair job of pointing out that what is fun to some of us is no fun to others. I also recall writing about an Attack Monkey, who was regarded as hilarious by some (read the comments), and not so funny by others.

Interestingly enough (to me), the notion of pranking keeps coming up:

And then there is Dr. Robert Woo, an oral surgeon of Auburn, Wash., who replaced two of his dental assistant’s teeth with implants. The woman’s family, as it happened, raised potbellied pigs, and she often talked about them with co-workers in the office.

While the patient was under anesthesia for the implants, Dr. Woo played a practical joke of sorts. He installed two bridges, which he had designed to look like boar tusks (which Dr. Woo must have thought were similar to potbellied pig tusks), and then took pictures of his sedated employee. By the time she awoke, proper new teeth were in place.

But the assistant learned what had happened when the photos surfaced at an office party.

She quit and sued, then settled out of court for $250,000.

And you’ll recall yesterday’s post on the Los Angeles Fire Department and the history of litigation related to discrimination, some of which involved pranking.

It seems important to consider empathy when pranking. How would you feel if you were medicated, fitted with pig tusks, and then photographed? Likewise, how would you feel if you were tricked into eating dog food? Not so fun.

I’m watching Yde, a Dutch student, who has come up with the idea of a web cam aimed at his bed, so we can watch him sleep (or sit in bed and watch TV). Advertising revenue for the past 21 days appears to have brought in more than most of us have earned in the past 21 days. Says Yde:

Sleeping is just a hobby of me, and it is the only thing I’m very good at. Everyone is asking what I want to do with me life, but what I really want to do is sleep. I stay in bed all day, except for taking a shower, going to the bathroom and making something to eat. That’s all I want to do. And I want to stay in bed until I’m very rich.

Via Treehugger, which focuses on the green angle of not using any resources….

The Shifting Careers column in the New York Times explores the idea of establishing a board of directors for your career (and perhaps life beyond career). You touch base with these people regularly, and rely on them for wisdom about big decisions. The comments on the article are funny, including my favorite, “Funny — back in the day, didn’t those used to be called ‘friends’?”

What do you think? Do you have a group of people that meet together and advise you? Do you rely on particular people for advice year after year? And, what about those folks you lost touch with, but very much liked, from former jobs? Is there a way to stay in touch with a board of directors of sorts?

Sandy Banks’ column on Firefighters on discrimination gravy train is interesting for those of us studying workplace cultural change. Basically, the Los Angeles fire department, like many other fire departments according to my firefighter friend, has a culture of hazing and pranks.

It looks to me that one of the few ways a workplace culture changes is when forced to financially by lawsuits. Here’s a short history of the lawsuits involved:

A pretty female firefighter who was kissed and hounded by her male boss got $320,000 to settle her harassment case.

A tough-talking, black lesbian won a $6.2-million jury verdict for being a victim of vile station-house pranks, including urine poured in her mouthwash bottle. Then, two white male firefighters who tried to protect her sued the department, claiming they were victims of retaliation. They walked away with more than $2 million between them.

A male captain reprimanded by the department when a female firefighter was injured during his training drill later wound up in court as a victim of unfair treatment. He said he was ordered by his bosses to go easy on female firefighters, and unfairly punished when he refused. A jury gave him $3.7 million.

Then, on Monday, two white fire captains who said they were made scapegoats in the infamous Tennie Pierce dog-food case won a $1.6-million racial discrimination verdict, bringing the price tag for that case to $4.5 million.

They were in charge of the Westchester station where Pierce — called “Big Dawg” — was tricked into eating dog food after his team won a volleyball game. A deputy chief recommended the captains be suspended — 30 days without pay for one and 24 for the other — but ordered the Latino firefighter who added the dog food to Pierce’s spaghetti suspended for only six.

Gosh, what a delightful place to work. It will be interesting to see how exactly the fire department manages to change its culture.

Here’s a funny piece by Jon Carroll on how to improve Starbucks (other than retraining the barristas). My favorite idea is the Solitude Corner, a place with no cell phones and no eye contact.

David Robinson of Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, responds to an interesting question about whether to take up a personally unappealing hobby to get ahead: Should you learn golf to get ahead in business?

That got me wondering what sorts of hobbies are associated with different professions and sort of demand attention. For example, writers and editors like to read (and participate in many things bookish). Anyone who said she didn’t like to read would be kicked out of the professions. However, most of us come to reading naturally, and I’m not sure that can be said about golf (though I suppose if you belonged to a club as a kid, you might learn). Other ideas on hobbies by profession?

I’ve been thinking of church experiences that seemed to work for me (and for the church), and have one more story spanning three years. Post-college, at a Unitarian Universalist church way away from home, I attended more than a few services, some lay-led in the summer, some minister-led in the school year, but didn’t really sense any place for me to participate. The services were certainly adequate, but I wasn’t moved (though I’m willing to live with that some of the time). I wasn’t particularly interested in the activities that the church offered, most of which seemed social (e.g., Women’s Club, Men’s Club, Senior Lunches). There were a fair number of abbreviations for things that I couldn’t figure out both in worship and in the calendar. I was on the church mailing list for a month, but then taken off despite still attending services. People seemed very interested in talking to their friends at coffee hour afterwards (not a bad thing in and of itself), though I managed to bring out my inner extrovert for a few conversations.

(more…)

Whaling is down. So you know what the whaling industry needed? An angle. And apparently that angle is that eating whale results in less carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere than eating other sorts of meat. That is one of the dumber arguments to be made for large scale whaling and rivals the wearing fur is green greenwashing.

Via Treehugger

George Barna proposed some categories for traditional and non-traditional church goers:

unattached - adults who have not attended congregations or house churches within the last year

intermittents - adults who attended congregations or house churches, but not during the last month

homebodies - adults who attended house churches within the last month

blenders - adults who attended congregations and house churches within the last month

conventionals - adults who attend congregations within the last month

While I’m clearly not in step with George Barna, I thought those were interesting distinctions to make.