Surviving the Workday

The Bachelor’s Degree Is Obsolete explores questions I’ve wondered about for a while about the bachelor’s degree (Why spend so much? Why take so long? And is it worth the debt involved)? The author also takes on the old canard about people with bachelor’s degrees earning blah blah more during their lifetimes than those without. It’s worth reading.

And here’s some career advice for those of us earning PhDs, but who wish to leave academia. My heavens! Whatever for? Kidding.

Via Inside Higher Ed

How much money would a stay-at-home-mom make, if a stay-at-home-mom made money? Salary.com, a website that is perhaps best known for its “cost of living” tool, has developed a wizard that helps compute the monetary value of a SAHM’s work.

According to their 2006 press release, Salary.com says they “consulted with Stay at Home and Working Moms and determined the top 10 jobs that make up a mom’s job description. If paid, Stay at Home Moms would earn $134,121 annually …. Working Moms would earn $85, 876 annually for the ‘mom portion’ of their work, in addition to their actual ‘work job’ salary.”

Any guesses at those top 10 jobs? Despite being the child of a former SAHM, a few of them never even crossed my mind. Compare your answers to theirs here.

The nice thing about the Mom Salary Wizard is that it’s not a generic figure tossed out, but a customizable one - this is important, because not every SAHM spends the same amount of time on the same tasks. It’s pitched as a potential “mother’s day gift” that children or partners can make for the moms in their lives, but I think it has more meaningful possibilities.

This came to me through a woman in my Real Wealth of Portland group, where we’re striving together to make aspects of our local “invisible economy” more visible. Author Riane Eisler notes that in 2004, a survey conducted by the Swiss government showed that if unpaid work done in the home were included as part of the Gross Domestic Product, it would represent 70% of the Swiss GDP.

So, what’s your mom (or dad) “worth?”

In Great Britain, a database listing employees with identifying information including photos, and their grounds for dismissal will be available for future employers to check on potential hires. The database, called the National Staff Dismissal Register (NSDR) raises a number of concerns for employees. First, and foremost, these grounds for dismissal don’t have to be reported for police. Employers seem to be able to literally enter any information without fear of penalty. Second, there is no method for addressing any inaccuracies in the database:

James Welch, the legal director of human rights group Liberty, also says that he is concerned that the register does not offer sufficient redress to the falsely accused.

“This scheme appears to bypass existing laws which protect employees by limiting the circumstances when information about possible criminal activity can be shared with potential employers.”

Aee. I’m all for sharing information, but as you can see in the comments, there seems to be a lot of room for abuse, and once on the list, what will you do for work?

Oooh! Look at this home office! It’s really a glorified shed, but so cute, bright, and tucked away in the shade in the yard. And, of course, if you put some wheels on the bottom, you might be able to get away building it without a permit. Not that I would ever suggest doing that. Never mind me forwarding this to someone I know who likes building sheds…..

Via Treehugger

After yesterday’s post, I remembered a survey in the United Kingdom of bosses and managers and how they felt weighed hiring people who might become pregnant (a pretty big group, mind you):

More than 75% of bosses would not take on a woman recruit if they knew she would become pregnant within six months of starting a job.
During the selection process, 52% of those surveyed will weigh up the chances of a candidate getting pregnant, taking into account age and whether they have just got married.
68% would like more rights to quiz candidates about their plans for a family.
Only 5% of bosses have employed someone knowing the candidate is pregnant.

I find the second and fourth point most disturbing. It’s interesting that in a place with paid maternity leave, there is what appears to be discrimination in hiring so as not to have to offer that paid leave and other parental leave and flexible work options.

I wasn’t going to post this link, but I’ve seen it three or four workplace blogs, and it seems now that I’m deliberately not posting it, which really wasn’t my intention. Basically, an attorney was laid off promptly after having a miscarriage, and rather than signing an agreement not to talk about it in exchange for three months salary, she refused, and sent her email to everyone under the sun to expose the callousness of her employer.

A number of points aren’t clear in the email, but it does raise issues about how we deal with the tragedies in the lives of coworkers.  If a coworker tells you she has a miscarriage, you need to express sympathy. Many people compare a miscarriage to the death of a child, including in support group structure, and while I won’t do that, it is just that big for many of us.

From Eight Violent Truths About Freelancing:

3. Freelancers Work For More Jerks Than Anyone Else.

Wait, What? I thought freelancers got to be their own bosses! How does that work?

It’s easy. It works like this:

1. Client provides project specs.
2. Freelancer completes and submits project.
3. Client changes specs.
4. Freelancer revises and resubmits project.
5. Client drops the order altogether, posts both sets of submissions anyways.
6. Freelancer finds new client.
7. Repeat.

Maybe #5 becomes “client doesn’t pay the invoice for 6 months” or “client offers half the original bid amount“, but you get the idea.

And that explains my jerk expertise. Feel free to ask any jerk-related questions. We’re talking about coworkers and colleagues of course. I don’t think Ms. Theologian has received any queries in a long time.

Sometimes I enjoy reading Gawker a little bit too much. For example, one story I’ve been following is about a professor at Dartmouth who threatened her students via email with a lawsuit possibly regarding simply not liking her, and then the university got involved (also via email), and it’s all very interesting for those of us who are interested in forwarded internal emails exemplifying a lack of The Golden Rule via Gawker:

Now it’s official: everyone involved in any capacity with the Priya Venkatesan affiar annoys the hell out of us. To recap, Ms. Venkatesan was a Dartmouth lecturer who decided to sue her students for harassment or something because they heckled her. She is clearly a pompous tool. Her students are also probably pompous tools. Now a pompous tool who writes for the Wall Steet Journal editorial page weighs in with an indictment against academia. Joseph Rago attended Dartmouth, you see, though he totally didn’t like it very much and didn’t even try very hard in his classes. Because of post-modernism.

I’m really not sure it’s possible to follow this story coming in cold, but I am greatly amused with blaming post-modernism for anything.

I do wonder what happens with many of us in adulthood to make us so stingy with praise, so reluctant to compliment others, and so content to fault-find. I know part of my work history explains it: editing is all about fault-finding. But it’s not just a problem for editors.

Thanks for a Whole Lot of Nothing is an article that explores praise in marriage, Christian marriage, in particular, though applicable to all in the sense that it is important to become aware of the small gestures others make that make every day livable.

Miss Conduct weighed in on Writers, blogs, e-mail, and civil discourse, at least partially involving the airing of literary dirty laundry post that I wrote. She manages to find the larger issue that had escaped me, which is to say, what to make of taking private correspondence (or internal communications at an organization) and making it public? She gives a number of good examples. I had a few more thoughts about the larger workplace issues that this discussion brings up: (more…)

More Women Charge Bloomberg LP with discrimination describes how the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has used questionnaires to women who have left Bloomberg and who have taken maternity leave to find 58 women who had their pay cut or were demoted or denied opportunities because they became pregnant while employed at Bloomberg.

This is such a tricky issue to navigate on a practical level for women. On the one hand, being open and honest about pregnancy seems the best way to behave, but that’s in a perfect world. In the real world, particularly financial services, this is part of a much larger pattern of pregnancy and maternity discrimination.  

If you’d like to read more about pregnancy discrimination, the best resource I’ve found is the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s Facts about Pregnancy Discrimination.

and perhaps should worry about your keyboard. And clean it.

I’ve collected a sampling of business travel-related writing:

Vacation Day Limits and Panicking Before Business Trips at the SF Chronicle

And from a special Business Travel section in the NY Times:

     Easing the Pain at Airports

     Making the Trip as Smooth as Possible

     Drumming Up Creativity (during Business Travel)

     A Cure-all for Jet Lag?

     A Checked Bag is Bound to Stray

It’s not a bad idea to reflect on what your body language may be telling your clients (or customers).

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.

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.

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?