Surviving the Workday

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.

Some children’s toys are made by children in near slavery in China:

“The Liangshan child labor case is quite typical,” says Hu Xingdou, a professor of economics and social policy at the Beijing Institute of Technology. “China’s economy is developing at a fascinating speed, but often at the expense of laws, human rights and environmental protection.”

Professor Hu said that while Beijing has pushed to improve labor conditions throughout the nation, local governments are still driven by incentives to grow their economy, and so they try to lure cheap labor. “Most of the workforce comes from underdeveloped or poverty-stricken areas,” he says. “Some children are even sold by their parents, who often don’t have any idea of the working conditions.”

The child labor cases are an embarrassment to the Chinese government, which has in recent years announced a series of nationwide crackdowns on child labor and labor law violations.

Embarrassing? Good. One alternative is to direct your toy-buying funds elsewhere: Not Made in China - a collection of China-free toys and household products (car seats, etc.).

Pick your favorites from 17 Signs of Impending Layoffs. I fear #4, the increase in secret meetings. That’s always ominous. Secret meetings aren’t necessarily unusual in some workplaces, but if there is an increase in closed doors and empty cubicles as your coworkers are whisked away somewhere….beware.

In a battle regarding paying a living wage to tomato pickers, a Burger King VP used his middle school daughter’s email to trash talk the tomato pickers. I don’t use this word often, but what a L O S E R.

Here’s part of the transcript from a show on NPR about the “reclassification” of employees at IBM from salaried to hourly (bad news):

LISA NAPOLI: It was just another workday for David Canizares, a network administrator for IBM. Then his boss called him and gave him the news.

    David Canizares: They said they wanted to be more compliant with federal regulations, so they were going to take us from exempt status to non-exempt status.

That was a fancy way of telling Canizares he still had a full-time job with benefits, but he’d no longer be classified as a salaried worker. He would be paid by the hour. And that wasn’t the biggest change.

    Canizares: They had to cut our pay 15 percent.

IBM said the cut was necessary because the reclassified workers would now get to earn overtime. In fact, to make the same pay as before, those workers would have to put in extra hours. But for a third of the reclassified employees at IBM, working overtime isn’t a possibility. So they’re taking home less money.

    Christopher David Ruiz Cameron: It’s about the bottom line.

Christopher David Ruiz Cameron teaches labor law at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles. Welcome, he says, to the modern workplace.

    Cameron: Every manager’s job is to figure out how to get as few employees to do the most work for as little money as possible. There’s nothing evil about that. That’s just how that works.

I see a few of my favorite tools listed on favorite “productivity” tools at Pimp Your Work. You can see if your favorites are listed too (a red pen? anyone?) I’m hoping GhostGirl can explain the PivotTable function in Excel to me.

Getting Married for Health Insurance makes me wonder again why exactly health insurance is tied to employment. Not that I haven’t wondered about it before….

Here’s the basic results of a recent survey by Kaiser, which is obviously an insurer:

Those who cited health insurance as a factor in deciding to marry tended to have modest incomes. About 6 in 10 were in households making less than $50,000 a year, said Mollyann Brodie, who directs Kaiser’s opinion research. They also were younger, with 4 in 10 between 18 and 34.

“We don’t know a lot more about them,” Brodie said. “Just that they answered that of all the reasons for getting married, [health insurance] was also a reason, was surprising.”

Most employers do not offer health insurance to unmarried domestic partners of employees.

But I found this detail a bit more interesting:

Nearly a fourth of Americans said they had decided to keep or change jobs in the last year because of health insurance.

A fourth seems like a lot, and most career counseling doesn’t really address that health insurance may be the reason you’re keeping your job (or leaving it) though this certainly echoes what I hear people saying.

This is just one of those stories that makes you shake your head. I’m not sure what this woman could have done differently to change the outcome, but it seems like a great tragedy: Critics Cost Muslim Educator Her Dream

Dental Clinics, Meeting a Need with No Dentist explores a training program to provide people trained in dentistry, but who did not attend four years of dental school, to low-income hard to access communities. The article brings up the same sorts of issues with professional organizations and those who practice as I’ve read about with midwives and the college of obstetricians and gynecologists. What do you do when the professional organization perceives itself as looking out for the health of the people, but seems to be only looking out for the wallets of those it represents?

History Will Not Absolve Us by George Hunsinger

10 Books on Judaism and Environmentalism

Why Jeremiah is Wright by Marlin Lavanhar and via the RadicalHapa

From a conference this weekend on Islamophobia: 

Marquette University Professor Louise Cainkar presented a paper about hate crimes against those of Arab origin, a category that includes Christians but is often conflated with Muslims in post-Sept. 11 pop culture. In analyzing patterns in the Chicago area, she found that hate crimes were fewest in African American neighborhoods in the South Side, despite the high prevalence of Arab shopkeepers. But anti-Arab hate crimes were highest in “white flight” suburbs. A mosque in a southwestern suburb of Chicago came under a “three-day siege” by neighbors after the Sept. 11 attacks and had to be protected by more than 100 police officers in riot gear, Cainkar said.

Cainkar believes the results showed, in part, that Islamophobia is a cultural phenomenon. The black neighborhoods had a history of community organizing around concepts of race and did not buy into treating Arabs as “the other.”

“Islamophobia can be defeated through work at the local level,” she said.

Spring Cleaning Tips (from a graphic designer) seem more realistic than other tips we’ve seen. Still…I’m not inspired to clean.

Getting Divorced? Lose Job too  Ken Gramm, a faculty member at Wheaton in Illinois, is getting a divorce and chose to voluntarily leave Wheaton rather than be terminated:

Wheaton, a non-denominational evangelical Protestant college, maintains a strong commitment to its statement of faith and community covenant, the latter a social compact based on biblical standards for Christian character and behavior. Wheaton’s long-standing policy on divorced employees stems directly from those two documents, the provost, Stan Jones, says.

“The college has uniformly emphasized the biblical expectation of marriage to be permanent, a picture of our relationship (the bride) to Christ (the bridegroom),” Wheaton’s policy reads.

I am surprised Wheaton can actually staff a campus with such policies. But perhaps I know more divorced people than most.

Seabury-Western Theological Seminary Lays Off Tenured Faculty  So much for tenure, eh? That pretty much says it all. Apparently the residential MDiv program is no more. Not a lot of good news recently in the land of cash-strapped Episcopal seminaries.

The Workplace Prof Blog Ponders the Supposed Abuse of FMLA  I’ve been wondering about this too. It’s unpaid leave. I suppose it could be abused, but I find it hard to believe it’s abused as much as employers say it is.

Not Made in China lists products that are not made in China. Many are made in the US; some are made elsewhere with fair trade regulations in place. Lots of kids stuff.

In college, I volunteered as a mediator at Community Action for Greater Middletown for renter-landlord disputes. It was far above my head in terms of skills, but I did learn that human beings are capable of all sorts of craziness within this renter-landlord relationship. S.F. landlords charged with tenant terror is probably the worst I’ve ever heard though not out of the realm of possibility.  

Possibly the greatest thing I read all day: The Liberation of Adjuncts Theology:

The author of the memo, Daniel C. Maguire, a professor of theology, said he found himself thinking about the treatment of part-time faculty members after discussing with his students the Biblical teachings about the powerful and the powerless.

“I teach ethics, and I was just recently talking about what the Bible says to us about how every society builds up royalty-slave syndromes, and royals let the slaves do their work for them,” he said. It happens in the business world, he said. It happened in ancient societies, he said. “And I told them that it happens here.” He explained: “I have tenure. I have good benefits, and there are people doing as much work as I am. And they don’t have health insurance. They are covering most of our courses so we can have these leisurely 3-2 schedules,” he said.

Robin who blogs as Miss Conduct at the Boston Globe requested experiences with friends and family members who have different values around money for a book that she is writing about etiquette:

What I’m finding harder to write about is relationships with people who have different values around materialism. Can someone whose idea of a perfect Saturday is to hit the mall and shop till she drops, fueled by the occasional triple latte, be friends with someone who wants to bake cookies and then take a nature walk? How do you cope with the in-law who insists on showering everyone with gifts from Neiman Marcus when the rest of the family has sworn to buy only handmade gifts this year? The co-worker who starts in on sweatshops every time you show up with a new outfit? The neighbor who buys a new car every two years–and then complains constantly about his credit-card debt?

I’m not looking for answers–though if you’ve got any, I’d love to hear! What I want are perspectives, stories, thoughts, feelings. If you don’t want to leave them in the comments, please e-mail me.

So there you have it with her email above and a link to her original post here, if you’d like to describe an experience in comments.

I do have an acquaintance whose life seems to revolve around shopping. We are family friends from childhood, and for years, I set aside time to shop with her once or twice a year until I went (mostly) sweat-shop-free and now I just don’t see her. Also, I made a snotty comment about Disneyland.

I’m so not happy about this, I might have to for a run:

Senate Republicans on Wednesday blocked a bill that would make it easier for people to sue over pay discrimination, an effort to roll back a 2007 Supreme Court ruling that limited such cases.

Republicans complained that the bill would produce a flood of lawsuits and criticized the chamber’s Democratic leaders for putting off the vote until the party’s two presidential candidates, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, returned from the campaign trail.

Though several Republicans broke ranks to support the bill, the 56-42 vote was four short of the 60 needed to break the GOP filibuster. Clinton and Obama spent most of the day in Indiana, one of the two states in the next round of Democratic contests, but both returned to the Senate in time for the vote.

You may recall that the Supreme Court ruling is Ledbetter v. Goodyear, which protected employers from being sued over wage discrimination. I wrote about in You Have 180 Days. Start counting….

Lately, I’ve been crazy busy at work. Busy, as in barely having time to chow down food. Busy as in, I used to email Ms T at least 5-6 times per day–now, I’m lucky if I can rattle off one email midmorning. Busy as in, when my hubby IM’s me to ask what to take out of the freezer for dinner, I feel like hurling my computer at a wall because IM slows my computer down and I just lost ten seconds, damnit!

The upshot of all this is that I feel a mental fatigue that makes me not feel quite up to spending half an hour or so writing something to post on my blog or this one (God, my blog, I haven’t posted there since December. Oy.) On the other hand, I am more happy at work than I’ve been for two years. Finally, my talents are put to use, and I am kicking ass at it. Rather than sitting around pretending to work and emailing Ms T 5-600 times per day, I am being challenged, and I am needed, and I am helpful.

I have developed a few habits to make room for “me” at work; to force a slowdown, and make it so I’m not ready to collapse by the time I get home to hubby and his thawed out chicken.

1. I take a lunch. Even if it is only 15 minutes, I stop all work and eat. I bring a book to work so I don’t surf the internet. Also when you are reading a book, people hesitate to bother you. If you are just surfing the web, they think you’re working. I ignore all IM’s and phone calls–they can wait.

And no, I don’t leave my desk. I know, I know, that’s a bad thing, but I have my reasons. One of which is an aversion to our cafeteria, and another is an aversion to the smokers who take over all outside seating areas. Whatever, it works for me.

2. I reserve time to just work. I block out that time on my Outlook calender and refuse to schedule meetings. Just knowing I will have an unmarred stretch of time to get things done is comforting.

3. I leave on time (or as close as possible.) Even if I still have work to do. Screw it. It’s not like I’m curing cancer or anything. They can wait (unless they really can’t. But I find that the mantra “Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part” comes in handy.)

4. I push back. When my manager tries to get me to agree to an unreasonable deadline, I tell him no. Now, I realize this isn’t always prudent. But if you get into the habit of saying yes, it’s almost impossible to go back.

5. I make sure my employees understand I expect the same from them–that they have a life, that they take a break, that their families come first. It’s amazing how much more productive they are (Sorry Ms T, but a manager really does see humans as production machines.)

The final part of my plan is that I need to start taking time for myself at home. Rather than just sitting around like a slug, waiting out that long stretch until bedtime, I can be doing something productive like writing blog posts, or giving myself a pedicure, or forcing hubby to vacuum. I’m still working on that part.

How about you? How do you make time for yourself at work?

The 10 Hardest Jobs to Fill in the United States:

1.     Engineers
2.     Machinists/Machine Operators (10)*
3.     Skilled Trades
4.     Technicians (4)
5.     Sales Representatives (1)
6.     Accounting & Finance Staff (8)
7.     Mechanics (3)
8.     Laborers (9)
9.     IT Staff
10.  Production Operators
*Rank in 2007 Top 10 Hardest Jobs to Fill

I’m really not sure what all of these specifically are. For example, “Technicians” (#4) seems pretty darn general. And I know a bunch of engineers (#1) who were laid-off, so I’m wondering what specific kind of engineer is so hard to find. On a different note, it does seem to me that many of these jobs require on the job training or apprenticeship, but not a college degree.  Other thoughts?

Via Workplace Prof Blog

What to make of an institution with recent allegations and investigations of sexual harassment that chooses Clarence Thomas as undergraduate commencement speaker? Possibly not the best PR move. And possibly unavoidable as Clarence Thomas had a standing invitation.

Here’s the backstory:

Already this year, one professor was placed on administrative leave and another resigned after investigations into allegations of sexual harassment. The former returned to the classroom this month, but a committee advising the university’s president recommended that the professor’s classes be videotaped for a period that could last through the end of fall 2008. Even more high-profile accusations were leveled against the university’s former women’s golf coach, Todd McCorkle, who left last year amid allegations of using crude, suggestive language with his players. The student newspaper, The Red and Black, reported last week that the former coach, now a golf instructor in Florida, was still for the time being receiving a salary of $94,464 from the University of Georgia. (The contract ends in June.)

Via Inside Higher Ed