Loves Labor Lost

I am pro union, always have been and have been a member of several in my lifetime and currently not and it infuriates me. I have repeatedly contacted the American Federation of Teachers, the State office of New Jersey Teacher’s union as well as their local here in Jersey City. Have they ever responded? No. Shocking, again, no, not really. Unions are a hot mess and it shows. And this is why unions are being rejected by many newly aspiring members at Amazon and Starbucks and led them to form their own surrogate type of union related to their locale and efforts at that shop or warehouse. That is not really a union per se but an attempt at least to have some collective bargaining rights and protections. But without a larger org behind them it makes it challenging to establish the kind of contracts needed to establish workers rights to guaranteed hours, paid leave and of course the big whopper, sick leave. During Covid this issue was almost universally one of debate and the bonuses that many employers paid during their designation of being an essential worker allowed but have long since gone.

Union efforts have been made at Dollar Stores, Newspapers and Magazines and even Book Publishers and Retailers. So we have a scale that covers the lowest of the low to the highest of the high and with that the success rates show that those who are higher up the rung manage to understand and know how to navigate the system thanks to better education and use of words as I like to call it versus the lower tiers. But neither are 100% successful and are met with great resistance from the elite whom are reclining on their super yachts being entertained by the parade of Gays and Artists invited to do what they do best – make them laugh. And I mean you Andy Cohen. And meanwhile the grinders of coffee and makers of take out continue on in oblivion. Funny who were essential and had to work in public versus those who had the privilege to work at home? Sure that worked out well for the right wing bitch Caitlin Flanagan at the Atlantic, where she can spew out her idiotic thoughts on such subjects as Public Schools are failing and masks are useless. Ah she is a prize of bitchery, idiocy and white privilege all rolled into a Karen of our worst nightmares. And it is that group that is the most resistant to return to the office, being coddled comes easy when you have a cashmere throw to wrap oneself in on a chilly day or air conditioning to control on during a heat wave. Meanwhile again my back to school gear, more K95 masks and door stops so I don’t have to hear another bitch Admin telling me not to use “instruments of learning” as door props. A union would have protected me and allowed me to do what I need to do to keep air ventilation flowing and with that also protected Students. And unions do that for its customers as well. Well not Subscribers to the Atlantic, we still have to rip out the Flanagan articles on our own but again if you have a pet it makes great liner.

Think about all the product recalls at Dollar Stores for expired merchandise. Had there been enough staff with the ability to check and shelf all current product and pull the expired ones that would not happen. They also can better serve customers who come in to shop and need to find items and ensure that they too are getting what they need and done so promptly and efficiently. How many times do you rant and rave about the lack of service in a store? Been to a Target recently or a Macy’s? The service runs the gamut from friendly and helpful to downright horrid or just non existent. You can wander Macy’s flagship in Herald Square and not see a staff member for miles or walk by them with merch in hand and not a single acknowledgement. And this is from one who actually loves that store and finds all kinds of treats and the one near me is always good for some cosmetics and household goods. Again price point matters and with that you can find assistance at a Nordstrom and Saks Fifth Avenue but when you move down the heirarchy to say Kohl’s it is obvious there are problems with the retailer and it shows. There is nothing wrong with buying merchandise that is less costly and with that there is a place for these kinds of retail outlets but I do believe it is all tied to service and way things are merchandised aka displayed, organized, and the ability to shop and compare all under one roof. When I worked at Macy’s I used to show the top of the price point and the lowest with at least one in between and allowed the customer to make the ultimate decision based on price point and my knowledge of the item and its quality. Not all things expensive are better quality you often pay for brand and name. Gucci and Addidas and their collaboration is a good example. The shoes are over $800 a pair and they are manufactured by Addidas with a license to put a Gucci logo on the shoe. Addidas average 75 bucks, that my friends is a hell of a markup but hey they are Gucci and you can go into the Gucci within the Macy’s store in NYC and walk out with a pair in your hand. There is marketing and merchandising right there. It does not intimidate nor does it make it harder to get, more access and availability means more choices and more money. These collaborations have been very profitable and it was Target that began that concept and today I cannot recall the last one they had and if anyone cared.

It is difficult to understand how a unionized store would make a difference to a customer but it does. Staff are secure in their jobs, they are rewarded with commission or a pay scale that enables bonuses tied to profit and with that they have health care and a safe workplace that enables them to be proactive to ensure that it is safe for all who both work and shop there. I would not work at a store that sold unsafe food as an employee you do shop there and get a discount so what would be the purpose of having that on your shelf. Amazon which is a nightmare of its own has massive problems and I have written about them throughout the blog but when the last figure came out that by 2025 Amazon will have gone through all of entire available labor force, these Mayor’s duking it out over Immigrants better get on the bus and get them to an Amazon warehouse fast as I need my asswipes and dildo!!

Again the shortages of food and products are tied to shipping and manufacturing all which comes from China and yet when we have said products produced here we have in the case of Baby Formula and vaccines the facilities being closed due to filth or other safety issues. Yeah cause in China they have top notch inspections, sure they do. Which again is tied to workers and their role in safety and security of that which they are handling. And I have written about Truckers, John Oliver has covered this and we too have a massive problem in the transportation industry that needs better oversight. And building back better means improvements on our rail lines and roadways to handle this type of traffic in both commercial and personal ways. You don’t want to go back to the office because of the commute, but then again you have to live further away thanks to the cost of housing and with that Covid made you scared to use public transport or in some areas it is non existent and you need to work so you drive. And with that we have the gas costs that dominated the news of late. It is always something right? Again blame the rich for taking trips and going places in their Mercedes. I can assure you it is not them, not at all. I travel and go by train that is not who is sitting next to me in bars or hotels either. It is the middle class, working class and with that they are very very Republican as they are sure that the busloads of Immigrants will take even that away from them. No you, you fucking moron, they are enabling you to have them. Who is working throughout this heat wave? Not you the Lawyer, the Accountant, the Tech worker, the Book Editor, the Architect, the white collar coddled class.

We also have a large class of health care workers, they too are somewhat organized as Nurses are but there too is a shortage of care in many of these corporate owned hospitals and in turn who is at risk? Patients. A union would benefit there to ensure that the numbers are right and the hours worked reasonable and that includes these idiots who are studying to be Doctors frankly as they are even more dangerous as they can kill you. And many times patient deaths are due to neglect and Covid may have proven that. For the record medical errors are the third leading cause of death, makes you want to race into a hospital right away, no?

I post this article from the LA Times that has caution to the wind of worker’s rights as the recession looms. Funny how that works that the pay scales of executives are never cut during down times and in fact are rewarded for cutting costs to ensure profit. Aka the Jack Welch school of management. Glad that old fart is dead, sadly his acolytes still are. And the article states that workers rights are there on the horizon and yet the Democrats are the problem people. Democrats the workers friend. See why Trump is popular? I do as it ain’t the management that loves him that is for sure. But then again why stop him as he manages to do their dirty work without getting the least bit dirty. He is one of theirs after all.

Labor unions are hot, but their moment may not last

By Noah Bierman and Don Lee The LA Times Aug. 11, 2022

WASHINGTON — 

American labor leaders see this as a moment for radical change: Workers in Starbucks coffee shops and Amazon warehouses are rising up and demanding representation. Polls show millions more support unions or wish they had the chance to join them. President Biden, with majorities in both chambers of Congress, wants to lead the most pro-union administration since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

“There’s a great reckoning and workers have had it,” said Mary Kay Henry, president of the Service Employees International Union, one of the largest and most influential unions.

Yet even as experts acknowledge the newfound excitement around labor, they caution that unions, which have suffered decades of declining membership, are unlikely to turn the tide. Unions’ moment of opportunity could already be slipping away. Republicans are poised to gain seats in the November elections. And a potential recession could wipe away the rare leverage workers have held in the tight labor market that emerged in the wake of the pandemic.

“The winds have been at workers’ back and that has helped spark labor drives in places that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago,” said Jake Rosenfeld, the author of “What Unions No Longer Do” and a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

But “there are clouds on the horizon,” he added.

Unions have long complained about the structural advantages held by employers fighting off organizing efforts. Employers can hold mandatory meetings where supervisors lobby against unions. And although firing workers for trying to organize is technically illegal, the penalties employers face for doing so are often small — and invariably come months or years after an organizer’s dismissal.

Employers can also drag out the union recognition process and the contract negotiation that comes after it, as they wait for employees to leave their jobs or for economic conditions to change. Employers’ power will only grow if the labor market, now one of the tightest in recent years, loosens, and workers begin fearing a recession.

“When they’re holding those captive audience meetings, they can say basically, ‘Well, the economy is about to get bad, so it’s going to be harder for you to find a job,’” said Jon Shelton, a labor historian at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.

About 1 in 10 American workers is in a labor union, down from a peak of more than 1 in 3 in the mid-1950s. Government workers are five times more likely than private-sector employees to be in a union.

The National Labor Relations Board has received more requests to hold union elections this year than during the same period in 2021. But much of the increase in these requests for elections is coming from Starbucks cafes, each of which employs only a couple of dozen workers, meaning the potential impact on overall union representation may be modest, even if those elections succeed.

Shelton criticized Democrats for their failure to rally enough support to pass labor’s top priority, the PRO Act, which would overhaul the rules governing organizing. In an interview with The Times three months before his death last August, Richard Trumka, the influential president of the AFL-CIO, praised Biden for thinking like a union guy, but said the success of his labor agenda would depend on passing that bill.

“If the PRO Act is not ultimately passed, then there won’t be a recovery for working people,” he said. “There’s nothing to drive it.”

Trumka predicted Democrats would muster 50 votes and find a way to pass the bill in the evenly divided Senate, with Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote. But it has been stalled, in part because Democrats have been unable to assemble the 50 votes or change the Senate filibuster rules, which require most legislation to get 60 votes.

The administration has tried to use its authority to make administrative changes that have helped organizers gain recognition at the National Labor Relations Board and to build in requirements on its signature spending bills that tie subsidies on things like electric cars to American jobs.

“The PRO Act is still a necessary step, but what’s remarkable about the Biden administration is they are using every tool and level of government,” said Henry, of SEIU.

Biden and Harris, who leads the administration’s labor council, have also used their platform to support unions far more than even prior Democratic administrations, recording messages of support for Amazon workers trying to unionize and invoking workers and wages in their speeches. In May, Harris and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh met with Christian Smalls of the Amazon Labor Union and Laura Garza of Starbucks Workers United at the White House.

Harris on Wednesday was in Las Vegas — a city that will be key for control of the Senate — to speak at the United Steelworkers convention.

“You helped make America the most powerful nation in the world,” she said, recalling her youth in the Bay Area, learning about steelworkers’ role in building the Golden Gate Bridge and other American monuments.

Harris talked about the decline of manufacturing in the 20th century and the impact it had on middle-class wages and communities. She praised steelworkers for leading “a new era in the American labor movement,” including help in unionizing Google contractors, and went on to talk about union workers’ role in building high-speed internet, clean drinking pipes and roads projects approved during Biden’s tenure.

She promised the administration’s climate and healthcare spending bill, which is expected to win final passage in the House in the coming days, would bring jobs “in steel towns and in coal country”: forging steel for wind turbines, cutting glass for electric cars, installing rubber for solar panels.

Biden’s pro-union rhetoric goes further than that of leaders such as Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. An emphasis on workers may have helped Biden defeat former President Trump in 2020. But many white working-class union members have left the Democratic Party and could help Republicans regain control of the House, Senate or both in the November elections.

Mark Wilbur, president of the Los Angeles-based Employers Group, which advocates for business owners, said the decline in unions is a result of their obsolescence, especially in California, which has more worker protections than other states. Workers, he said, don’t want to pay dues for something they don’t need and consumers do not want to pay added costs.

“One hundred years ago, it was really needed,” he said. “Workers died on the job. Those days aren’t really relevant anymore.”

Liz Shuler, who replaced Trumka as president of the AFL-CIO, said that she’s in touch with members of the administration daily and that unions are not giving up on passing legislation. But she believes many Americans are overlooking the hundreds of billions of spending the Biden administration has secured for infrastructure — building a semiconductor industry, electric car expansion, roads and highways.

“All of these huge investments have labor standards attached to them,” Shuler said, “to make sure that we’re going to benefit working people.”

She said her federation of unions is increasing its investment and cooperative efforts to help fledgling movements to unionize Amazon workers and other industries. Shuler pointed to the example of Microsoft, which agreed to make it easier for employees of one of its gaming subsidiaries to unionize, as a positive sign. But she said the struggle with Starbucks — which has raised wages and pushed back against organizers — shows resistance remains strong.

“The one missing ingredient is companies,” she said. “Companies are fighting workers with everything they have.”

The Amazon Drought

While I am not speaking of our major rivers drying up due to Climate Change, although that is likely, I am speaking of the river that runs through all our lives – Amazon.

Amazon has changed its Prime Policy over the last few years, raising prices, discouraging two hour delivery through offering incentives and have now charged for Whole Food Deliveries with stacked pricing dependent upon desired delivery time. I have noted that one of the quick food delivery start ups that were competing with Amazon, Avo, has dropped all residential delivery and I am not sure what is going on with regards to Manhattan quick service grocery deliveries after they were using spaces with no public access to buy goods, yet alienating further customers and doing so at a great financial loss. In other words the Amazon playbook redux. Amazon has shuttered its brick and mortar book stores and I am fairly certain Amazon Go will not be far behind. They are still working out the kinks on that but why? The reality is that Amazon is focused on employee free, technological means to serve customers for one reason, cost. But what is more surprising is that Amazon may actually have run out of workers and literally burned through the entire country’s disposable labor pool. So that may well be another. The opening up of warehouses in areas of the country that are economically depressed has served them well, they get immense tax breaks and they are currently America’s second largest private employer, but with that you are also under a different cloud when it comes to (pun intended) the way Amazon influences and affects much of our lives than simply being the online shopping marketplace.

And it appears that literally in the next two years Amazon will have run out of people. I will leave it there and let you read the Guardian article on this fascinating subject.

Amazon could run out of workers in US in two years, internal memo suggests

With exceptionally high turnover, the company risks churning though available labor pool by 2024

A worker sorts packages at an Amazon warehouse facility in Goodyear, Arizona. Photograph: Ross D Franklin/AP

Michael Sainato /The Guardian|Wed 22 Jun 2022

Is Amazon about to run out of workers? According to a leaked internal memo, the retail logistics company fears so.

“If we continue business as usual, Amazon will deplete the available labor supply in the US network by 2024,” the research, first reported by Recode, stated.

Amazon is right to be worried – its staff turnover rate is astronomic. Before the pandemic, Amazon was losing about 3% of its workforce weekly, or 150% annually. By contrast the annual average turnover in transportation, warehousing and utilities was 49% in 2021 and in retail it was 64.6%, less than half of Amazon’s turnover.

Even Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, is worried. Bezos originally welcomed high turnover, fearing long-term employees would slack off and cause a “march to mediocrity”. But in his final letter to shareholders as CEO last year, Bezos said the company had to “do a better job” for its employees. Amazon will commit to being “Earth’s Best Employer and Earth’s Safest Place to Work”, he wrote.

In part Bezos’s change of heart is down to a wave of unionization efforts at the company’s warehouses. But Amazon also faces a problem of scale. As the US’s second largest private employer, it is now struggling to replace all the workers it loses.

Workers and labor groups have long decried Amazon’s working conditions and high employee turnover amid high injury rates.

Matt Littrell, 22, a picker at Amazon in Campbellsville, Kentucky, since early 2021 who is trying to organize a union at the warehouse, said Amazon’s hiring practices, productivity quotas, attendance policies and unequal enforcement of rules are contributors to the lack of job security that drives Amazon’s high turnover.

One issue is Amazon’s “time off task” metric, he said, where Amazon monitors employees’ productivity and will issue write-ups, which can lead to termination if too much is accrued.

“Each one of those instances where I was taking too long to find an item counted against me, and that is all added up and then they count that as your total time off. And it doesn’t matter if you were doing your job – you were not meeting the expectation,” said Littrell.

Littrell said he walks 15 miles or more every shift as a picker because his warehouse doesn’t have robotics technology where items are brought to pickers. He noted the bins where items are stored are often overfilled, which can cause injuries or make it more difficult to find items, therefore making it more difficult to meet productivity quotas.

If an Amazon worker receives so many attendance penalties that they go negative in their allotted time off, they face automatic termination if they can’t get the absence excused by the correct department.

“You have to go through a big corporate bureaucracy to even get an accommodation,” Littrell said. “Even though they have all of these dystopian metrics for tracking you, what it boils down to is that if you actually want Amazon to go and find proof, you have to fight for it like your own union shop steward, you have to fight them every step of the way, and for a lot of people that contributes to burnout.”

Zaki Kaddoura, a stower at the Amazon JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York, and a member of the Amazon Labor Union, said productivity quotas were a driving factor in Amazon’s high employee turnover. He also cited having to handle heavy items, not being able to find space in stow bins, and workers being denied accommodations.

“Imagine doing that for 10 hours a day, every working day, while someone is pressuring you to hit these targets,” said Kaddoura. “I think that these quotas should be recommended, not required.”

A report based on analyzing Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha) data released by the Strategic Organizing Center in April 2022 found Amazon’s serious injury rate in 2021 was 6.8 per 100 workers, more than twice the average of 3.3 per 100 workers in the warehousing industry and a 20% increase from a year prior.

With the unemployment rate close to a 50-year low, Amazon is struggling to fill all the positions it needs. According to the memo, written in mid-2021, the company was in danger of exhausting its entire available labor pool in the Phoenix, Arizona, metro area by the end of that year, and in the Inland Empire region of California by the end of 2022.

A spokesperson for Amazon said in regards to the research memos, “There are many draft documents written on many subjects across the company that are used to test assumptions and look at different possible scenarios, but aren’t then escalated or used to make decisions. This was one of them. It doesn’t represent the actual situation, and we are continuing to hire well in Phoenix, the Inland Empire, and across the country.”

In Labor

Growing up in a union family and long being a member of a union, first as a retail clerk and later a Teacher, I have seen both the successes and failures of unions. There are historically significant legacies built by unions and those that have collapsed due to corruption and ineffective leadership. Gosh all men, all white and always over money and that happens in and outside of union organization. There are professional white collar organizations which are “unions” such as the Bar Association or The American Medical Organization that  act as lobbyists who generate laws and benefits that assist their professional members to enable them to retain higher status and job security in the same way organized labor once did. There are stil very strong unions that exist that we can say the same. Two come to mind: The Police Unions and of course Professonal Athletes, both who have raised a fist or bended a knee when it comes to the current state of affairs in this country.

 We are seeing a much stronger prescense of Teachers Unions with the issues surrounding Covid, which is not surprising as the last two years we have seen across the country, red for ed strikes that were about funding for education in the wake of school shootings and issues surrounding mental health and discipline in schools that had established a restorative justice, social emotional learning concept, encouraged under the Obama Administration to reduce the biased/prejudiced discipline that affected largely faces of color. With Trump any and all Obama ideas have been tossed in the dumpster but frankly that program was like all the rest, underfunded, inconsistent and poorly administered so not exactly something that we can say worked or worked well as in some cases schools that did get grants and established strong bonds with the community at large did see a reduction in suspensions but again, that was always on the chopping block as when funding goes so does the program. And with Covid that will now be utterly relegated to the back of the room as families now have to manage what Teachers have been trying to do with little to no support. Good luck homeschooling!

 Labor Unions were the great equalizer, not perfect, but they did enable a much larger group to climb the economic ladder to buy homes, have stability and in turn have better quality of lives. Want to know why we have so many health problems with faces of color in the time of Covid or why we have such significant crime in the communities of color? Well lack of stability, the prison pipeline and of course income inequality. Once the quo of the Status, aka white men, realized that Black people and Women could attain parity, have a voice and place at the table they quickly did their best to destroy, eradicate and devalue union organization with fear tactics and of course legislation, right to work laws that prevent if not prohibit union organization.

 Looking to meat packing plants with fake shortages they claimed due to a sick workforces while all the while still shipping food oversas, and of course neglecting to mention that the largest commercial customers were no longer in the supply chain which simply meant a diversion of product, was brushed aside and during a time when families were facing massive economic hardship they were paying more for food. Reminded me of the gas crisis of the 70s with politics presiding over consumer demand.  If there was union organization the exploitation of largely immigrant and undocumented workers would decline, work safety issues handled better and of course wages and health care/sick leave a part of the package. And frankly we as consumers would get safer food, its a win-win.

 Labor Unions have immense ability to mobilize the troops and of course it was Martin Luther King in his last days through his I AM A Man campaign to raise the wages of workers in Memphis that may have contributed to his death. It was one thing to get out the vote another to have the audacity to expect Black folks to be paid a living wage and on par with their white counterparts. Tennessee a shithole, it has not changed.

 We need a living wage, with that comes larger protections for workers, such as the Amazon folks, the other essential workers who kept going during the pandemic, truck drivers, postal and shipping clerks (Fed Ex, UPS, DHL) who were out there every day regardless. Many don’t get health care, have any type of sick leave and of course job security.

The clapping of hands and feeding health care workers was one of the most appalling things I have ever witnessed, as they are workers in a highly profitable system, they have Unions and of course Doctors are white collar professionals with a strongly political orgainzied group and yet we are giving them food and supplies to work? Are you fucking kidding me?

 Now we are expecting College Professors and Teachers who are not making shit for pay, regardless of the crazy bullsht with you have summer off, and no you are not paid for that time so go fuck yourself mom, now get back to teaching your little precious gem, are to throw themselves in front of gun toting maniacs, help a kid whose family is non-existent function, Students who rape and sexually assault others, handle drug use and now fucking Covid. Some dipshit cuntbucket on Facebook told “me” to take a medical leave and open the schools as that is what I am supposed to do. Again Facebook is like dumpster diving and I frequently go on Governor Murphy’s page to read the idiocy and some intelligence (and yes outing and tagging clearly trolls) to remind myself that I am on an island here when it comes to intelligence. What it tells me that while New Jersey as a state is highly rated for its public education, it clearly failed many with the immenese amount of idiocy I hear and read here.  But what it also tells me is that Education is largely pink collar and as women we are supposed to be mothers and caregivers and possess educational credentials on par with higher status professions (such as College Professors folks or Lawyers or Accountants or Architects etc aka largely male and  white professions) and take a bullet or a virus that both can kill so you the other mother can go to your better paying safer job.  Three words on that: GO FUCK OFF.

 With the current climate asking for racial justice one that must be made is income inequality and the way that wages and health care and in turn funding for education is the greatest issue, singularly the one that to me tops defunding the Police. That is a strawman and while the idea behind it is to use that money to fund programs to assist and aid communities in ways that better serve them, the reality is that wages, health care and housing, along with funding public education will truly bring that elusive equality that Martin Luther King labored for and gave his life for.  And with that it will benefit the most not the few.

Unions threaten work stoppages amid calls for racial justice 

The Washington Post
 By Aaron Morrison | AP
September 5, 2020

 NEW YORK — Ahead of Labor Day, unions representing millions across several working-class sectors are threatening to authorize work stoppages in support of the Black Lives Matter movement amid calls for concrete measures that address racial injustice. In a statement first shared with The Associated Press, labor leaders who represent teachers, autoworkers, truck drivers and clerical staff, among others, signaled a willingness Friday to escalate protest tactics to force local and federal lawmakers to take action on policing reform and systemic racism. They said the walkouts, if they were to move forward with them, would last for as long as needed. “The status quo — of police killing Black people, of armed white nationalists killing demonstrators, of millions sick and increasingly desperate — is clearly unjust, and it cannot continue,” the statement says. It was signed by several branches of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Service Employees International Union, and affiliates of the National Education Association.

The broader labor movement has been vocal since the May 25 killing of George Floyd, a handcuffed Black man who died after a white police officer pressed his knee into Floyd’s neck for nearly eight minutes during an arrest over counterfeit money. The death of Floyd in Minneapolis set off an unprecedented surge of protests and unrest from coast to coast this summer.

In July, organized labor staged a daylong strike with workers from the service industry, fast-food chains and the gig economy to call out the lack of coronavirus pandemic protections for essential workers, who are disproportionately Black and Hispanic. Now, in the wake of the August shooting of Jacob Blake, who was critically wounded by a white police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the union leaders say they are following the lead of professional athletes who last week staged walkouts over the shooting. Basketball, baseball and tennis league games had to be postponed. Some athletes resumed game play only after having talks with league officials over ways to support the push for policing reforms and to honor victims of police and vigilante violence.

 “They remind us that when we strike to withhold our labor, we have the power to bring an unjust status quo to a grinding halt,” the union leaders said in the statement. “We echo the call to local and federal government to divest from the police, to redistribute the stolen wealth of the billionaire class, and to invest in what our people need to live in peace, dignity, and abundance: universal health care and housing, public jobs programs and cash assistance, and safe working conditions,” the statement reads.

Among the supportive unions are ones representing Wisconsin public school teachers who, ahead of the mid-September start of the regular school year, urged state legislators to take on policing reforms and systemic racism.

 “We stand in solidarity with Jacob Blake and his family, and all communities fighting to defend Black lives from police and vigilante violence,” Milwaukee Teacher’s Association president Amy Mizialko told the AP. “Are we striking tomorrow? No,” said Racine Educator United president Angelina Cruz, who represents teachers in a community that abuts Kenosha. “Are we in conversation with our members and the national labor movement about how we escalate our tactics to stop fascism and win justice? Yes.”

 The Nonprofit Professional Employees Union, which represents several hundreds of professionals working at more than 25 civil rights groups and think tank organizations, told the AP it signed onto the union statement because “the fights for workers’ rights, civil rights, and racial justice are inextricably linked.”

 At the federal level, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives has already passed the George Floyd Justice In Policing Act, which would ban police use of stranglehold maneuvers and end qualified immunity for officers, among other reforms. The measure awaits action in the Senate.

 A Republican-authored police reform bill, introduced in June by South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, failed a procedural vote in the Senate because Democrats felt the measure didn’t go far enough to address officer accountability. Meanwhile, officials who serve on governing bodies in more than a dozen major U.S. cities, including Seattle, San Francisco, New York City and Austin, Texas, have voted to defund their police departments and reallocate the money to mental health, homelessness and education services.

 Although some unions have a history of excluding workers on the basis of gender and race, the marriage between the racial justice and labor movements goes back decades. That alliance was most prominently on display during the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which featured the visions of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rep. John Lewis and was organized by A. Philip Randolph, a Black icon of the labor movement.

 Today, Black workers are more likely to be unionized than any other segment of the workforce as a result of decades of collaboration between labor and civil rights activists, said New York University professor and civil rights historian Thomas Sugrue. “That connection has only intensified because of the importance of workers of color, particularly African Americans, in the labor movement,” Sugrue said. Public and private employers are faced with a “Which side are you on?” moment due to growing support for the BLM movement, said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party and a leading organizer in the Movement for Black Lives, a national coalition of 150 Black-led organizations.

 “If I was a decision-maker that was considering whether or not to meet the demands of the unions, I would be scared,” Mitchell said. “This movement is spreading. We’ve been on the streets consistently, we’re building on the electoral front, and now we’re seeing this conversation at the highest levels of labor.”

Stand Up Sit Down

Fight fight fight as the cheer goes.  Here is the real problem facing the American public, the willingness to do so.  The first week panic buying, hoarding and purchasing guns set the tone.  The tone that as Americans we know fuck all what to do in a crisis but go its about ME ME ME!

The endless mythology about Americans includes such Unicorns as Meritocracy, the Paul Bunyan up by the bootstraps or the concept of the American Dream or the national ethos of our society and of course the generous spirit of the people.  (The author of that piece alone says it all, Bennett was and is a fucktard of high order)  And now that is a perfect trifecta of bullshit.

We can now say sitting atop our pile of toilet paper and snacks that we are not the stereotype or prototype of goodness and perfection that we present to ourselves.  No, we are all assholes.

The below is an excerpt from a paper on the concept of American liberty.  It is from a conservative view natch but in reality aren’t most “liberals” really conservatives who like Gay and Black people, in small situations, largely confined to sports or the arts but aren’t they?

Abstract
Through publically agreed laws that correspond to a common set of public restrictions, the ‘people as a sovereign body’ serves to protect against violations of individual liberty and despotic power. Where no such common body exists, individuals are deprived of this protection. In such cases, individuals must obey without liberty, while those in power command under a state of license. Neoliberal theorists maintain that any common personality, with its corresponding set of public and arbitrary positive and negative restrictions on liberty, undermines individual liberty. Neoliberal theory only allows for private restrictions on liberty. Against these neoliberal assumptions, we argue that rejecting public restrictions on liberty does not promote individual liberty. To the contrary, it creates conditions in which free individuals become servile and political inequality becomes entrenched, where citizens are divided into those who obey and those who command. Tracing the consequences of neoliberalism, we argue that unless we take seriously both the people as a political category and the right to equal and reciprocal coercion, individual liberty will be at risk. The article argues that neoliberalism ultimately leads to the total exclusion of certain citizens under the veil of full liberty. With the vanishing of the people’s will comes the utter disappearance of certain citizens, who live in a spontaneous society as if they were stateless or lawless persons. To better understand the connections between the rejection of the concept of the people, private restrictions on liberty and the fostering of the servile citizen, this paper considers the political philosophy of Hayek and Nozick. It also considers key ideas from Locke and Kant—theorists who, despite the differences between their philosophical perspectives, and despite the fact that they both provided crucial inspiration for Hayek’s political economy and Nozick’s libertarianism, stressed the protective role of the people with regard to individual liberty.

Now we elected Trump, most of our States are governed by Conservatives with many States super majority ones where the Legislature is about a single color and that usually is the one of blood and it will take massive amounts of blood shed to change this dynamic anytime soon. Americans are not liberal in any sense of the word.   Is Sanders a liberal? Yes and it is why he would never be President as much like the deep in woods Conservative he is true blue.  No compromise, none.  Who is like that? Mitch McConnell.  The only difference is one is in power and one is not.  I am more afraid of the Jowls McConnell then Bernie any day but America the ignorant sees it different.  Americans are ignorant and arrogant traits shared by Jowls and that crosses the political spectrum.

I was concerned that because of Bernie’s incalcitrant strident nature little would get done and then I realized Trump is exactly like that and equally stubborn and unwilling to change or budge, the difference is that beneath it all I actually believe Bernie gives a shit, which Trump does not. And his missteps and miscalculations cost him and now we have white Obama only older and less charismatic.  Again I never thought Obama was a liberal man no, he is definitively a neoliberal as described above.    We are fucked either way in  the upcoming election.

But the reality is that we have to actually look to the more “less” liberal countries to understand how to handle the Coronation Virus as it will be a coronation in the upcoming election.  The reality is that we are now in 9/11 years and how do we change our way of thinking to adjoin with the reality of what it means to live in less realized Democracy, which for the record we have been for a decade.

The New York Times did an outstanding job explaining the trajectory of what we need to do to handle this and this is just one of what is more to come in the age of environmental meltdown and our   global economy.

They made some points that only a few days ago I had shared with my only person to person contact the Baristas at my coffee shop.  I said it will go on through May and into June and that we will have civil unrest, I predict around the end of May, by Memorial Day as the weather clears and that will be just over the two month mark where many are now unemployed and been housebound for over 60 days; Along with the added mixed messages and the endless trolling on the internet with Russian bots stirring the shit so expect a Charlottesville in a city with a well established Chinatown such as San Francisco or New York, even Seattle as that was the first city with the noted outbreak.  But yes it is coming and it is here. 

The next borders will be closing state lines and yes indeed Florida has declared mandatory quarantine for any resident from New York or New Jersey entering the state.  How that will be enforced and secured who the fuck cares, I knew that was coming once the local cities in New York and Jersey said to the rich folks, stay the fuck away from your second home.  And sure enough Westport, Connecticut is now ground zero there tied to a party from a wealthy woman and her international guest list.  Again I called it – rich white people problems.  And you thought those spring breakers in Miami were the virus whores. Wrong again.  Idiots yes and they will spread disease but they will also do so in STD’s.

And to do that we are going to have to start tracking people and that is not going to go over well but in a moral panic there is no better time in which to do it.  It is coming, it is here. 

So lets get out of here well, Jesus better take the wheel or not. I had said that many of these outbreaks were tied to the incest communities that I call religious sects or cults. as well they are just that. Yes including South Korea, I just thought that boy band was annoying but I recall the group marriages and shit of my youth.  They are all the same with the touching, the tribal nature and the endless bullshit that somehow makes them think they are exempt as Jesus is their savior and what-the-fuck-ever they believe that is all bullshit.  They actually think they are an “essential service” as this idiot did in Mt. Juilet just outside Nashville.

And as already mentioned Ohio has already found ways to stop abortions, Kentucky voting and now add another state to the right wing oppression virus, Texas, as it too is stopping abortions under the guise of elective surgery.  I have said that if one thing conservative religious kooks love is getting up into that vadge however necessary.  I used to say that in Tennessee endlessly and again proven not wrong.  But then again Texas get up into the anti vaxx crowd, they are the problem. But hey you old people you can die the Governor has given yyou permission to do that to save the economy. 

Bill Maher was joking, or not, that if the election was held and Trump lost he would not leave but hey what happens if they decide to forestall the election.  There are already issues surrounding voting and we have this Wartime President with all these powers. Hmm makes you wonder.

But let me ask the most critical question:  Who are “essential workers?” Well that is now going to include all food service workers, from Grocery Clerks, to Barista’s to anyone who handles both food and medicine. So that would include UPS/FedEx/USPS, Uber and others who are delivering all of this to us in lockdown who can afford to be in lockdown while this shit is going on.  They are all going to need to be thought of differently as then what when its over? Really?  Really?

I said to my wine vendor (between coffee and booze I do my part) that out of this will rise a new power broker, the small business that kept going during this shit and if they let this slip out of their hands cause the gloves were slippery they are making a mistake. The Dry Cleaners/Laundry, the Baker, the local Pharmacy and of course our Bodegas and small restaurants that pivoted so well to keep employees working and food being served are going to be a powerful force to reckon with if they choose to unite and demand change.

If not expect wages to fall again to 2008 levels and the excuses by big business about the closures, the endless bailouts to the big companies as they have the lobbyists patrolling the grounds of Congress like a virus waiting to attach to an unsuspecting Congressperson.  Where is the Small Business Association and the local of Chamber of Commerce when it actually comes to representing and voicing the concerns of those who are the ones they are supposed to be caring about.  Funny if same small business folks hit their meetings up and joined and starting changing that dynamic once meetings are allowed.

So you have a choice, to stand up or just sit down on the couch and stream something as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon are cleaning up in this crisis without ever getting up off the couch.

So I leave you with actual data and stats about Covid and compare it to other viruses with often worse outcomes. So wear a mask, gloves, stay at least 3 feet away and if you are sick with anything stay the fuck home and monitor your temp and in turn if not sick clean your house you have time and hoarded supplies so there you go.

And again change in behavior and in turn personal responsibility will do wonders on both health and mind going forward regardless.

Pay or Play

I am not sure what to make of the Trillion dollar valuation of Apple but this is a bite that will come out of the lowest rungs on the ladder in much more than a single apple but in fact a bushel.  Funny how that Jobs is no longer alive to see this milestone, the one tree that mattered to him twenty years ago has grown into a full orchard. Times have changed and there is no dialing back… yes pun intended.

What is interesting is that the companies that preceded this were American home and grown and they have faced near extinction in the process.    Think of GM, General Electric and Ford and those that have since come and gone and been swallowed by one hungry whale in the push to consolidate and monopolize industry.

So how does this affect workers in the time that we are now at what is considered full employment?  Low wages, gig economy, fewer benefits, less job security while the rich get richer.

Paychecks Lag as Profits Soar, and Prices Erode Wage Gains

By Patricia Cohen
The New York Times
July 13, 2018

Corporate profits have rarely swept up a bigger share of the nation’s wealth, and workers have rarely shared a smaller one.

The lopsided split is especially pronounced given how low the official unemployment rate has sunk. Throughout the recession and much of its aftermath, when many Americans were grateful to receive a paycheck instead of a pink slip, jobs and raises were in short supply. Now, complaints of labor shortages are as common as tweets. For the first time in a long while, workers have some leverage to push for more.

Yet many are far from making up all the lost ground. Hourly earnings have moved forward at a crawl, with higher prices giving workers less buying power than they had last summer. Last-minute scheduling, no-poaching and noncompete clauses, and the use of independent contractors are popular tactics that put workers at a disadvantage. Threats to move operations overseas, where labor is cheaper, continue to loom.

And in the background, the nation’s central bankers stand poised to raise interest rates and deliberately rein in growth if wages climb too rapidly.

Workers, understandably, are asking whether they are getting a raw deal.

“Sure, you can get a job slinging hamburgers somewhere or working in a warehouse,” said Christina Jones, 53, of Mobile, Ala. Ms. Jones spent eight months searching for a job with living wages and benefits, after being laid off from a paper company where she had worked for nearly 13 years. Dozens of interviews later, she landed work last month at a concrete crushing company as an accounts payable clerk for $14 an hour — two-thirds her previous salary.

“You hear, ‘Oh, the unemployment rate is as low as it’s ever been,’” Ms. Jones said, but “it was discouraging.”

Businesses have been more successful at regaining losses from the downturn. Since the recession ended in 2009, corporate profits have grown at an annualized rate of 6.5 percent. Several sectors have done much better. On Friday, for example, banks like JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup reported outsize double-digit earnings in the second quarter.

Yearly wage growth has yet to hit 3 percent. And when it does, the Federal Reserve — which has a mandate to keep inflation under control even as it is supposed to maximize employment — can be expected to tap the brakes.

Workers’ paychecks account for much less of the nation’s total income since the last recession, and the profits of businesses account for more.

As Fed policymakers have explained, allowing the economy to run too hot “could lead eventually to a significant economic downturn.” And persistent wage increases, unlike growing profit margins, are considered a signal that the heat is on.

The bank’s primary method of cooling the economy is to dampen spending and investing by raising interest rates and making it more expensive to borrow money — an antidote that could hurt profits in some sectors as well as trim payrolls. The thinking goes like this: Better to inflict some pain now, in the form of higher joblessness and sluggish wage growth, than to allow more pain later.

After keeping benchmark interest rates at near-zero levels during the recession, the Fed has been gradually nudging them up. So far this year, it has raised rates twice.

With tariffs piling up and potentially pushing prices higher, odds are that the Fed will push through two more increases before 2018 ends. The Labor Department reported this week that one inflation measure, the Consumer Price Index, had increased 2.9 percent in 12 months — the highest level in six years.

Discomfort with a tight labor market and growing worker bargaining power is to some degree baked into the Fed’s makeup. Pressure to raise wages during expansions will inevitably be seen as precursors to insidious inflationary pressure.

The conventional wisdom that higher wages inevitably lead to higher prices, however, is flimsy, some economists argue.

“It theoretically makes sense,” Michael R. Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said of the link between wage increases and inflation, “but empirically, it’s increasingly difficult to find a real strong link.”

A study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, for example, concluded that “the connections among wages, prices, and economic activity are more akin to a tangled web than a straight line,” and that “the ability of wages to help predict future inflation is limited.”

Regardless, there is plenty of evidence that workers have yet to receive their fair share of this most recent expansion — or even the previous one.

Since the century’s start, labor’s share of the nation’s income has sunk to the lowest levels in decades.

In 2000, when the jobless rate last fell below 4 percent, corporations pulled in 8.3 percent of the nation’s total income in the form of profits; wages and salaries across the entire work force accounted for roughly 66 percent.

Now, the jobless rate is again fluttering below 4 percent. But corporate profits account for 13.2 percent of the nation’s income. Workers’ compensation has fallen to 62 percent.

If workers’ share had not shrunk, they would have had an additional $532 billion, or about $3,400 each, said Jared Bernstein, an economic adviser to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. And at this point in the recovery, shifting some of those corporate profits to workers would have no effect on inflation, he noted.

In the tug of war between workers and investors, Americans living on a paycheck have seldom been left with a shorter end of the rope.

Fredy Amador has spent years working for various temporary help agencies, packing boxes of baby clothes, quality-checking packages of popcorn and doing other work at warehouses across the Chicago area. Despite what he says are frequent promises of permanent work, he has never been able to escape temp status.

Recently, his situation got worse. He used to receive holidays and paid vacations, he said, but the agency that offered them lost its contract to another firm that did not. “They want to avoid all the benefits,” said Mr. Amador

Average hourly earnings were 2.9 percent higher in January than a year earlier, a hopeful sign that wages might be gaining traction in a tight labor market. Their stubborn failure to do so is one of the mysteries of a recovery now in its ninth year.

Mr. Amador, 34, said he earns $12 an hour, far less than the $20 an hour or more earned by permanent employees doing similar work. For extra money, he drives for the ride-hailing service Lyft on the weekends. “Even if you have really good skills, you have to start as a temp,” said Mr. Amador, who moved to the United States from Honduras 12 years ago. “They never give you an opportunity to move on.”

Economists have offered various explanations for why workers are not doing better: the steady weakening of labor unions, the ability of American companies to find cheaper labor abroad or automate further, piddling productivity growth and the rise of superstar companies that are extremely efficient with a relatively small labor force.

The recent tax overhaul has further pumped up corporate earnings. Promises that lower tax bills for businesses would translate into higher wages have yet to materialize. Higher gas and medical care costs have eaten away at whatever gains most workers have made.

Nor are those extra profits going into business expansion. Since the first of the year, American companies including Apple, Wells Fargo and McDonald’s have announced nearly $680 billion in buybacks of their own stock, according to the research firm TrimTabs. In essence, they are directing a majority of the windfall to investors and chief executives, who tend to have large stock-based compensation packages.

Profits are also financing foreign mergers and acquisitions. “A lot of U.S. businesses are looking abroad to see what they can buy,” said Jason Gerlis, managing director of TMF Group U.S.A., a global consulting firm, “because it’s easier to finance or capitalize offshore.”

The reason is a change in the tax law that limited interest deductibility on domestic investments, but not on those abroad. International deals in the first half of 2018 nearly doubled compared with the same period last year.

The United States may be leading other big industrialized countries in economic growth, but its labor force does not fare well in comparison. American workers’ share of their country’s total output fell much sharper and faster than the average reported by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The United States also had a larger proportion of low-wage workers than nearly every other member.

When the economy was struggling, employers became accustomed to inboxes flooded with résumés and snaking lines of eager applicants. Many may have forgotten, or never learned how, to compete for workers.

When it comes to complaints of a labor shortage, as Neel Kashkari, president of the Minneapolis Fed, has said: “If you’re not raising wages, then it just sounds like whining.”

My Bad So Sad

I did laugh when Pharma Bro, Martin Shkreli, was sentenced to seven years in prison for – FRAUD. Not, however, for raising the prices of a when he increased by 5,000 percent the price of Daraprim, a previously cheap drug used to treat toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection that can be fatal to people with the AIDS virus or other immune system disorders.  A drug needed to save lives and that act in turn contributing to the untenable and consistent rise of prices of pharamacetical drugs. No, his punishment is for defrauding investors whom he largely restored while playing checkers with other peoples money to buy a Wu-Tang album or whatever.  Piss rich people off that will get you in jail sir! Just ask Bernie Madoff.

The Theranos Bitch looks as if she too will be walking into a courtroom soon, I just hope she likes orange. See women can break the glass ceiling. 

This was surprising as again had Pharma Bro turned out differently I suspect we would never see the Marni of the Valley Dolls again.  (You are own your own to figure those references out) but what it may also mean is the Unicorns are coming home to roost or whatever unicorns do.

The bullshit surrounding Silicon Valley of late particularly with the backlash against tech companies as evidenced by SXSW rejection of them after years of courting them is the first sign. The fall back of companies hitting Wall Street up to go public, as Dropbox found out and dropped more than boxes, and the sudden interest in the heartland by the Valley Bros makes one wonder if we are hitting up for another 2001.  Remember that? It was the dot com bomb, the one before the real estate collapse of 2008.

 Shit is hitting the fan and just not in the White House. Literally the Cabinet members seem to think the Federal Reserve is their personal bank in which to raid for trips, furniture and whatever floats their boat – such as a private telephone booth.  Next up hookers and blow!

This does go against the current economic reports but the confusion about wages and health care in the working class as again evidenced by West Virginia Teachers shows more are coming.   And this bankruptcy of ToyRUs is another bad sign with that proverbial fan working overtime with the tariffs and possible trade wars and of course Trump’s insanity that has led anyone with a functioning mind to ask what the fuck is going on here?  The reality is that whatever Trump did it made the poor finally want to stand up to the rich and ask questions that they refuse to answer.   Funny how that worked out.   And let’s hope for more.

It is like a perpetual wrong number where you call them and apologize to them for disturbing them – my bad so sad. Shit happens but it was not your fault. But then the rich make you believe it is.  Ah that is their true gift.  My bad. So sad.

Theranos chief executive Elizabeth Holmes charged with massive fraud
by Carolyn Y. Johnson The Washington Post March 14  2018

Elizabeth Holmes, founder and chief executive of the blood-testing company Theranos, has been charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with an “elaborate, years-long fraud” in which she and former company president Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani allegedly “deceived investors into believing that its key product — a portable blood analyzer — could conduct comprehensive blood tests from finger drops of blood,” the SEC said.

Holmes agreed to a $500,000 penalty and a 10-year ban on serving as an officer or director of a public company to settle the charges, but she did not admit or deny the allegations.

Jeffrey Coopersmith, a lawyer withDavis Wright Tremaine, said in a statement that Balwani “accurately represented Theranos to investors to the best of his ability.”

Holmes is relinquishing shares and ceding her voting control of Theranos, which was on the verge of bankruptcy late last year. She will not profit from her remaining ownership stake until money is recouped by other investors and shareholders.

In a statement, Theranos’s independent board of directors said the company is “pleased to be bringing this matter to a close and looks forward to advancing its technology.”

A lawyer for Holmes declined to comment.

Theranos, a blood-testing start-up that promised to revolutionize consumers’ access to their medical information, was a Silicon Valley darling once valued at $9 billion.

Holmes had the perfect backstory: a college dropout turned chief executive who had assembled a company board filled with powerful ex-government and military leaders and wanted to change the world. Her personal story about a fear of needles driving her to develop a better solution was heavily featured in the media, even as some medical experts puzzled over what was so novel about her technology and asked for evidence that showed how it worked and why.

The company fell from grace in a snarl of regulatory problems and the revelation that its proprietary technology was not being used in its blood tests, first reported by the Wall Street Journal.

The SEC alleges that Holmes, Balwani and Theranos raised more than $700 million from investors by misrepresenting the capabilities of the proprietary blood-testing technology that was at the core of its business — as well as by making misleading or exaggerated statements about the company’s financial status and relationships with commercial partners and the Department of Defense.

Theranos’s miniLab blood analyzer “was not commercially ready” in 2010 when Holmes and Balwani decided to try to sell their services to consumers through partnerships with pharmacy and grocery chains, the complaint says. The commercial partners are not named by the SEC, but Theranos opened wellness centers in Walgreens drugstores in Arizona and California. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Safeway spent $350 million to build wellness clinics in its stores. Both agreements have since been terminated.

When the technology was due to be launched in the first drugstores in September 2013, it was not ready, according to the complaint. Instead, Holmes and Balwani allegedly asked company engineers to modify technology already commercially available to analyze samples — but did not tell their commercial partners. Holmes and Theranos created elaborate technology demonstrations in which they showcased their proprietary analyzers but actually processed the samples on machines made by other vendors. For example, Holmes allegedly led executives from the pharmacy company on a tour including a room full of miniLab analyzers, leaving the impression that samples could be clinically analyzed there, though the analyzers were not able to be used for testing

The complaint also alleges that Holmes and Balwani reassured the grocery chain that their proprietary technology could perform 90 percent of the most commonly used blood tests, when the proprietary technology was capable of only a dozen.

Holmes met with investors, explaining her fear of needles and her vision for fast, cheap blood testing. Potential investors would receive a finger stick blood test and then see the sample inserted into Theranos’s device or taken away to be analyzed, leading them to believe samples were being analyzed on the technology the company had invented.

Holmes allegedly told investors the company did not need approval from the Food and Drug Administration. But in late 2013 and 2014, the FDA told Theranos and Holmes that the company needed FDA approval or clearance of its tests.

Theranos also projected that the company would generate more than $100 million in revenue in 2014; in fact, the company recorded $100,000, according to the SEC.

The SEC also alleges that Holmes claimed to investors that Theranos technology was being used by the Defense Department on the battlefield in Afghanistan and on medevac helicopters. Those statements “were important to potential investors because these relationships lent legitimacy to Theranos’s business and its proprietary analyzer,” the SEC alleges.

That technology was never deployed on the battlefield by the Defense Department, even though Marine Gen. Jim Mattis, who then led the U.S. Central Command, personally pushed for it. Regulatory officials in the military had flagged problems with Theranos’s approach. Mattis later joined Theranos’s board; he resigned to become defense secretary.

“The Theranos story is an important lesson for Silicon Valley,” Jina Choi, director of the SEC’s San Francisco regional office, said in a statement. “Innovators who seek to revolutionize and disrupt an industry must tell investors the truth about what their technology can do today, not just what they hope it might do someday.”

Princess and the Pea

If you are unfamiliar with that story I can recommend Once Upon a Mattress as  great fairy tale to watch while reading the endless ones that come from the Trump Administration.

The Princess is hitting the road to somehow get the idiots of America to believe that she is:

• 1) Actually important in the Administration
• 2) That she cares about Women and Women’s issues
• 3) The Trump Administration is competent

The gist of this non golf related taxpayer jaunt is about jobs and job training and the supposed “skill set” mismatch that has been ongoing now for well over a decade.  Gee Education funding might have resolved that, ya think?

Well as The Guardian found today that the firms that manufacture Ms. Trump’s line of “stuff” they employ a series of abusive tactics to encourage worker compliance. I think that might work well here, ya think?

I say get them here in red states where right to work means you get to work and that should be enough. Welcome Ivanka!

Ivanka Trump is hitting the road to boost workers. Her father wants to gut job-training programs.
By Danielle Paquette The Washington Post June 13 at 7:10 AM

Before he landed the apprenticeship that doubled his wages, Ron Robinson learned how to drive a forklift, mix cement and perform CPR. This training, he said, set him up for a lucrative construction job — and he got it all for free.

Over the past year, the Milwaukee resident went from cleaning houses for $12 an hour to helping demolish them for $24.

Now Robinson fears President Trump’s proposed cuts to the country’s job-training programs could jeopardize the very service the 49-year-old thanks for his upward mobility.

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“It’d be a big mistake for our future,” he said. “Losing this stuff would be a minus for the construction world and the state of Wisconsin.”

On Tuesday, Trump, his older daughter Ivanka Trump and Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta will travel to a technical college in Waukesha County, Wis. — 20 miles from Robinson’s home — to highlight the administration’s plan to downsize government-funded job training programs and replace them with private-sector partnerships.

The Trumps plan to tour job-training classrooms, meet with local business owners and talk about ways to connect job seekers to talent-hungry companies. That’s particularly challenging in places like Waukesha County, where the unemployment rate is 3.2 percent — significantly lower than the nation’s rate of 4.3 percent. Employers in such areas can have trouble filling roles, even as they raise wages, Ivanka Trump noted in a press call last week.

“The reality is that there are still Americans seeking employment despite low unemployment rates, and companies are struggling to fill vacancies for positions that require various levels of skills and training,” she said. “So the Trump administration is committed to working very closely to close the skills gap.”

A White House spokesman said the president wants to tackle this issue by expanding apprenticeships and deploying federal funds more efficiently. Further details, they said, will come Wednesday in a labor policy speech.

However, critics accuse Trump of hurting the people he says he wants to help.

The president’s budget proposal for 2018 called for slashing $2.5 billion from the Labor Department’s $9.6 billion budget, a reduction of about 21 percent, according to an analysis from the National Skills Coalition, a national worker advocacy group.

That includes a 40 percent cut to the Labor Department’s Wagner-Peyser Employment Service, which supports about 14 million job seekers annually and last year helped nearly 6 million people find jobs, and a $1.3 billion reduction to programs that operate under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, which Congress reauthorized in a bipartisan move three years ago.

Author Angela Hanks, associate director for workforce policy at the Center for American Progress, said the reduced funding to WIOA initiatives could lead to about 571,000 adults and teenagers losing access to the job training opportunities in 2018. Those services include resume polishing, literacy lessons and employment placement.

In her remarks last week, Ivanka Trump, who also works as assistant to the president, said raising more awareness about the benefits of apprenticeships will play a vital role in the White House’s workforce development approach. “There are very viable and respectable career paths outside of a traditional four-year college experience that should be considered and invested in,” she said.

The administration said only “unnecessary, overlapping, outdated and ineffective programs” will be part of the rollback, according to Trump’s proposal.

“To have substantial cuts right at the moment where states are implementing these strategies creates a real challenge,” he said. “It could cripple the effort.”

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, an economist at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute who served on Trump’s transition team, said the budget cuts are intended to eliminate costly redundancies.

“Closing down programs that don’t work and adding funds to those that do work would be a big step forward,” she said. Apprenticeships, she added, put more people to work as they upgrade their skills.

Economic development leaders in Wisconsin, meanwhile, are concerned that cutting Labor Department funds will hurt job seekers who desire to nab an apprenticeship.

Dawn Pratt, a human resources executive at Payne and Dolan, a construction firm in Waukesha, said federal money has helped support workers who want to take these entry-level construction roles but lack adequate knowledge of the job. That includes reaching out to people in economically disadvantaged communities, she said, and helping them prepare for math-based tests that employers often require.

“One of the things we’re working on a lot now with some of the grants that are coming down is apprenticeship readiness,” said Pratt, who sits on Gov. Scott Walker’s workforce investment council. “Years ago, we didn’t have to do that because you had actual trade training in schools.”

Nowadays, she said, young people don’t know about the path to make good money without a college degree. Much of her work involves community outreach.

“When you’re in areas where there’s not a lot of income, and there’s not that generational influence, how would you even know about apprenticeships?” she said. “How to prepare for it? How do you pass that exam? Half the people we reach don’t know the opportunity exists.”

One focus that appears to have escaped the cuts was apprenticeships.

Trump maintained Barack Obama’s $90 million in funding for apprenticeship programs.

Mark Kessenich, president of the Wisconsin Regional Training Partnership/BIG STEP, said his organization trains about 800 people each year on how to prepare for apprenticeships in the building trades.

Robinson was one of them — he finished the program last December. A construction firm in town immediately hired him as an apprentice doing odd jobs — preparing paint, tearing out old flooring — as he trained to become a journeyman.

Robinson, who now rents a two-bedroom apartment, feels he is on track to buying a four-bedroom house with a big back yard. Then he’ll adopt a dog — perhaps a pit bull.

“It’s a lot of hours,” he said of his BIG STEP training, “but you have to start off slow before you get to running, you know?”

Construction companies hire on average 85 percent of BIG STEP participants, Kessenich said — but draining federal resources could stall the initiative.

His organization receives financial awards from the state workforce development board, which receives funding from the Labor Department.

Last year, about a third of his budget — $1 million — came from those grants.

It’s unclear how the cuts could affect his program.

“It’s a major concern of ours,” he said. “When you cut resources, you cut access to properly trained workers. You get what you pay for.”

Welcome to Amazonia

I have frequently joked that Seattle should rename itself Amazonia as it is very much a corporate town, due to Amazon which is headquartered right in the middle of downtown Seattle. With it comes immense wealth as workers earn more in the higher paid positions (not all of Amazon is 6 figures), they in turn live there, as in immediately adjacent but why they don’t have cots and dorms on “campus” is beyond me.   Those workers ride, bike and live in the city so they pay the heavy sales taxes, support the mass transit and pay exorbitant rents to have the privilege in living in a city which streets are littered with the massive homeless population that this gentrification and reputation brought.

 I use littered as that is how many of the homeless are perceived, as litter, and the same is in San Francisco, another infamous City that has been transformed by the new tech class.  Homes are outrageously expensive and in turn the schools, the community that is not serving the tech sector are dutifully ignored or slowly eroding and in turn leaving.  There is a culture that is in tech that is often exposed and in turn excused as they are rich bitch.  See this article on Uber or the one on Amazon from the New York Times a year ago.  And before Bezos there were Gates and Allen and they too cast a long shadow in Seattle via their philanthropy or their business interests.  And Boeing too wielded great sway in the region as well.

I left Seattle as I was sick of the nature of the residents, rude, pushy, arrogant and more importantly thought of as “rich.”  So I moved to Nashville which is the same only with more stupid thrown in. But this too is very much an industry town.

What is the issue is that without these industrial Oligarchs there would be no towns, they built their businesses and in turn enabled workers to find a piece of the pie called the American dream and often Henry Ford is cited as one who developed the modern industrial age and the concept of the working middle class.  Yes that is quite true and then there is the story below.

I see the parallels today in the tech sector by calling their workplaces “campuses” and in turn providing all kinds of services and benefits to push workers and enable them more time to generate work product.  That concept of work life balance goes out the window when a concierge picks up and drops off your laundry so you don’t even need to leave the workplace to change, so why the expensive housing then?  Throw a blow up mattress under the desk and be done with it!

The rich think they know better. That they are smarter and therefore better than the rest or they would not be rich right?   Some are smarter but better I question that.  We have the faux Corporate chief who never ran a business in his life and when he did – his casinos – he ran them promptly into the ground.  His wealth initiated by his father’s true earned wealth, Trump has since subsidized it through bad loans, shady deals and numerous bankruptcy’s. Trump is a poor persons idea of rich and they excuse all the bizarre antics as just how rich people act.   Well there is some truth to that.  Co-dependency is not just about personal relationships they exist in the public arena as well.

The story below shares what happens when a rich person gets an idea and is sure they have the magic dust to make and create Nirvana.  A Nirvana that is not a band but a tortured idea of a reality.  Irony  that our Country is now in the hands of a reality star.  At this point one the Real Housewives could do no worse.

 Deep in Brazil’s Amazon, Exploring the Ruins of Ford’s Fantasyland

By Simon Romero

THE NEW YORK TIMES

 FEB. 20, 2017

FORDLÂNDIA, Brazil — The Amazon jungle already swallowed the Winding Brook Golf Course. Floods ravaged the cemetery, leaving behind a stockpile of concrete crosses. The 100-bed hospital designed by the acclaimed Detroit architect Albert Kahn. Plunderers destroyed it.

Given the scale of decay and decrepitude in this town — founded in 1928 by the industrialist Henry Ford in the far reaches of the Amazon River Basin — I didn’t expect to come across the stately, largely well-preserved homes on Palm Avenue. But there they were, thanks to the squatters.

“This street was a looters’ paradise, with thieves taking furniture, doorknobs, anything the Americans left behind,” said Expedito Duarte de Brito, 71, a retired milkman who dwells in one of the homes built for Ford managers in what was planned to be a utopian plantation town. “I thought, ‘Either I occupy this piece of history or it joins the other ruins of Fordlândia.’”

A statue of a man harvesting rubber stands near Fordlândia’s church. Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times

In more than a decade of reporting from Latin America, I made dozens of trips to the Amazon, lured back time and again by its vast rivers, magnificent skies, boomtowns, lost civilizations and tales of hubris consumed by nature. But somehow I never got to Fordlândia.

That finally changed when I boarded a riverboat this year in Santarém, an outpost at the confluence of the Amazon and Tapajós rivers, and made the six-hour trip to the place where Ford, one of the world’s richest men, tried turning a colossal swath of Brazilian jungle into a Midwest fantasyland.

I explored the outpost on foot, wandering the ruins and talking to gold prospectors, farmers and descendants of plantation workers who live here. Hardly a lost city, Fordlândia is home to about 2,000 people, some who live in the crumbling structures built nearly a century ago.

An encroaching forest frames the decaying walls of the Fordlândia hospital. Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times

Ford, the automobile manufacturer who is considered a founder of American industrial mass-production methods, hatched his plan for Fordlândia in a bid to produce his own source of the rubber needed for making tires and car parts like valves, hoses and gaskets.

In doing so, he waded into an industry shaped by imperialism and claims of botanical subterfuge.
Brazil was home to Hevea brasiliensis, the coveted rubber tree, and the Amazon Basin had boomed from 1879 to 1912 as industries in North America and Europe fed the demand for rubber.

But to the dismay of Brazil’s leaders, Henry Wickham, a British botanist and explorer, had spirited thousands of Hevea seeds out of Santarém, providing the genetic stock for rubber plantations in British, Dutch and French colonies in Asia.

The village of Fordlândia is now home to about 2,000 people, many of whom live in the original American-built structures. Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times

These endeavors on the other side of the world devastated Brazil’s rubber economy. But Ford despised relying on the Europeans, fearing a proposal by Winston Churchill to create a rubber cartel. So, in a move that pleased Brazilian officials, Ford acquired a giant stretch of land in the Amazon.

From the start, ineptitude and tragedy plagued the venture, meticulously documented in a book by the historian Greg Grandin that I read on the boat as it made its way up the Tapajós. Disdainful of experts who could have advised them on tropical agriculture, Ford’s men planted seeds of questionable value and let leaf blight ravage the plantation.

Despite such setbacks, Ford constructed an American-style town, which he wanted inhabited by Brazilians hewing to what he considered American values.

Old gravestones from the Ford era, tipped over after years of floods and erosion. Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times

Employees moved into clapboard bungalows — designed, of course, in Michigan — some of which are still standing. Streetlamps illuminated concrete sidewalks. Portions of these footpaths persist in the town, near red fire hydrants, in the shadow of decaying dance halls and crumbling warehouses.

“It turns out Detroit isn’t the only place where Ford produced ruins,” said Guilherme Lisboa, 67, the owner of a small inn called the Pousada Americana.

Beyond producing rubber, Ford, an avowed teetotaler, anti-Semite and skeptic of the Jazz Age, clearly wanted life in the jungle to be more transformative. His American managers forbade consumption of alcohol, while promoting gardening, square dancing and readings of the poetry of Emerson and Longfellow.

Trees grow among old equipment in the abandoned workshops of Fordlândia. Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times

Going even further in Ford’s quest for utopia, so-called sanitation squads operated across the outpost, killing stray dogs, draining puddles of water where malaria-transmitting mosquitoes could multiply and checking employees for venereal diseases.

“With a surety of purpose and incuriosity about the world that seems all too familiar, Ford deliberately rejected expert advice and set out to turn the Amazon into the Midwest of his imagination,” Mr. Grandin, the historian, wrote in his account of the town.

These days, the ruins of Fordlândia stand as testament to the folly of trying to bend the jungle to the will of man.

A resident of Fordlândia near the workshops and warehouses that were the center of Ford’s community in Brazil. Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times

Seeking to promote the automobile as a form of recreation — along with the golf course, tennis courts, a movie theater and swimming pools — managers laid out nearly 30 miles of roads around Fordlândia. But cars are mostly absent on the town’s muddy lanes, eclipsed by the motorbikes found in towns across the Amazon.

By the end of World War II, it was clear that cultivating rubber trees around Fordlândia could not be profitable in the face of leaf blight and competition from synthetic rubber and Asian plantations freed from Japanese domination.

After Ford turned the town over to Brazil’s government in 1945, officials transferred Fordlândia from one public agency to another, largely for unsuccessful experiments in tropical agriculture. The town went into a seemingly perpetual state of decline.

Passengers waiting for a riverboat look out on the American-built water pumping station. Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times

“Nothing happens here, and that’s how I like it,” said Joaquim Pereira da Silva, 73, a farmer from Minas Gerais State who followed his star to Fordlândia in 1997. Now he lives on Palm Avenue in an old American house he bought for 20,000 reais (about $6,670) from a squatter who fixed it up.

“The Americans had no idea about rubber but they knew how to build things to last,” he said.

Something about the failed utopia strikes a chord with scholars and artists in other parts of the world. Fordlândia inspired a 2008 album by the Icelandic composer Johann Johannsson and a 1997 novel by Eduardo Sguiglia about an Argentine adventurer who travels here to recruit plantation laborers.

An American-built bungalow that once housed Ford executives is now inhabited by a local vegetable farmer. Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times

Some descendants of workers who settled in Fordlândia, along with new migrants from other parts in Brazil, have small plots where zebu cattle graze. Others plant manioc in areas where rubber trees were chopped down decades ago. Many survive on small social welfare payments or pensions.

Then there are residents like Eduardo Silva dos Santos, born 66 years ago in the hospital conceived by Kahn, the architect who designed much of 20th-century Detroit. Mr. dos Santos now lives in a small house near the hospital’s ruins.

Scavenging material left by the Americans, he fashioned a fishing lantern from old car parts and a spice grinder from discarded machinery. Mr. dos Santos expressed mixed views of Fordlândia under American stewardship, growing up in the years after Ford unloaded the town.

Original wood floors and furniture adorn the old American Club. Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times

“This place in Ford’s day was clean, no insects, no animals, no jungle in the town,” said Mr. dos Santos, one of 11 children born to a family that depended on the rubber plantation.

“My father worked for them,” he said, “and he did what they ordered him to do. Workers are like dogs: They obey.”

But to Ford’s dismay, sometimes they didn’t obey.

Managers tried enforcing the alcohol prohibition, but workers simply hopped on boats to a so-called island of innocence nearby with bars and brothels. And in 1930, workers fed up with eating Ford’s diet of oatmeal, canned peaches and brown rice in a sweltering dining hall staged a full-scale riot.

They smashed time clocks, cut electricity to the plantation and chanted, “Brazil for Brazilians; kill all the Americans,” forcing some of the managers to decamp into the jungle.

A Ford-era fire hydrant, overlooking the Tapajós river. Credit Bryan Denton for The New York Times

The Amazon offered its own challenges to the Americans. Some couldn’t adapt to the conditions here, suffering nervous breakdowns. One drowned when a storm on the Tapajós River toppled his boat. Another manager left after three of his children died from tropical fevers.

Ford might have avoided such tragedies, and the ruinous management of the plantation, if he had sought counsel from specialists in caring for rubber trees or scholars of the Amazon’s capacity to thwart grandiose ventures. But he seemed to abhor learning from the past.

“History is bunk,” Ford told The New York Times in 1921. “What difference does it make how many times the ancient Greeks flew their kites?”

The Poors

I had read last week an interesting article and I laughed my ass off.

 Congratulations! You’ve Been Fired 
By DAN LYONS The New York Times APRIL 9, 2016

 AT HubSpot, the software company where I worked for almost two years, when you got fired, it was called “graduation.” We all would get a cheery email from the boss saying, “Team, just letting you know that X has graduated and we’re all excited to see how she uses her superpowers in her next big adventure.”

 One day this happened to a friend of mine. She was 35, had been with the company for four years, and was told without explanation by her 28-year-old manager that she had two weeks to get out. On her last day, that manager organized a farewell party for her. It was surreal, and cruel, but everyone at HubSpot acted as if this were perfectly normal.

 We were told we were “rock stars” who were “inspiring people” and “changing the world,” but in truth we were disposable. Many tech companies are proud of this kind of culture. Amazon keeps getting called out for its bruising environment, most notably in a long exposé in this newspaper last year.

On Tuesday, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, said that people who didn’t like the company’s grueling environment were free to work elsewhere. “We never claim that our approach is the right one — just that it’s ours — and over the last two decades, we’ve assembled a group of like-minded people,” he wrote in a letter to shareholders. Some viewed the statement as a sign that Mr. Bezos at least seems to recognize that it’s not normal for employees to cry at their desks. But it was also a defiant message that he had no intention of letting up. I am old enough to remember the 1980s and early ’90s, when technology executives were obsessed with retaining talent.

“Our most important asset walks out the door every night,” was the cliché of the day. No longer. Treating workers as if they are widgets to be used up and discarded is a central part of the revised relationship between employers and employees that techies proclaim is an innovation as important as chips and software.

The model originated in Silicon Valley, but it’s spreading. Old-guard companies are hiring “growth hackers” and building “incubators,” too. They see Silicon Valley as a model of enlightenment and forward thinking, even though this “new” way of working is actually the oldest game in the world: the exploitation of labor by capital.

 HubSpot was founded in 2006 in Cambridge, Mass., and went public in 2014. It’s one of those slick, fast-growing start-ups that are so much in the news these days, with the beanbag chairs and unlimited vacation — a corporate utopia where there is no need for work-life balance because work is life and life is work.

 Imagine a frat house mixed with a kindergarten mixed with Scientology, and you have an idea of what it’s like. I joined the company in 2013 after spending 25 years in journalism and getting laid off from a top position at Newsweek. I thought working at a start-up would be great. The perks! The cool offices! It turned out I’d joined a digital sweatshop, where people were packed into huge rooms, side by side, at long tables. Instead of hunching over sewing machines, they stared into laptops or barked into headsets, selling software.

Tech workers have no job security. You’re serving a “tour of duty” that might last a year or two, according to the founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, who is the co-author of a book espousing his ideas, “The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age.”

 Companies burn you out and churn you out when someone better, or cheaper, becomes available. “Your company is not your family,” is another line from Mr. Hoffman’s book. His ideas trace back to a “culture code” that Netflix published in 2009, declaring, “We’re a team, not a family.” Netflix views itself as a sports team, always looking to have “stars in every position.” In this new model of work, employees are expected to feel complete devotion and loyalty to their companies, even while the boss feels no such obligation in return.

UNFORTUNATELY, working at a start-up all too often involves getting bossed around by undertrained (or untrained) managers and fired on a whim. Bias based on age, race and gender is rampant, as is sexual harassment. The free snacks are nice, but you also must tolerate having your head stuffed with silly jargon and ideology about being on a mission to change the world.

Companies sell shares to the public while still losing money. Wealth is generated, but most of the loot goes to a handful of people at the top, the founders and venture capital investors. The Netflix code has been emulated by countless other companies, including HubSpot, which employed a metric called VORP, or value over replacement player. This brutal idea comes from the world of baseball, where it is used to set prices on players. At HubSpot we got a VORP score in our annual reviews. It was supposed to feel scientific, part of being a “data-driven organization,” as management called it.

Our offices were in a renovated 19th-century factory built by the furniture maker A. H. Davenport. Cavernous red-brick rooms where skilled craftsmen once labored on elaborately hand-carved custom pieces — woodworking treasures that today can be found in museums and in the White House — were now packed with young people who spent long days cold-calling prospects, racing to meet tough monthly quotas, with algorithms measuring their productivity.

The “business development representatives,” who were really glorified telemarketers, were paid around $3,000 a month, which works out to $18.75 per hour, if you work 40 hours a week, though many worked more. Grinding out phone calls, trying to make a number, hooked to a machine that watches you work — this is progress? The people who worked in the furniture factory probably didn’t have easy lives, either.

They certainly didn’t have a beer garden, as workers at HubSpot do. On the other hand, they didn’t go through weeks of training that felt eerily like a cult indoctrination, being told that they could use their “superpowers” to “change people’s lives” by spreading “delightion” to their customers.

 Given the choice, I think I’d rather make furniture.

And that model is what the technorati want to bring to all industry, from education to medication. The data driven, 24/7 fueled workforce that charged up on free coconut water and the ability to live in pods adjacent to work, will ensure a growth model that will enable America to be “great again.”

Oddly that is not the Trump application of that phrase but the Technocrat in Chief, Obama, who has embraced this model as the prototype of the new American economy. God help us Tiny Tim. I did laugh again when I read this moron’s response to the article, confirming for me that yes Virginia they are idiots.

To the Editor: Dan Lyons takes issue with the idiosyncrasies of start-up culture. Unfortunately, his essay fails to understand the millennial zeitgeist and what young people really want out of work and life. While he craves normalcy, stability and hierarchy, our generation seeks out adventure, progress and meaning. A start-up provides these things in abundance. Change is a constant, and no one knows whether the company will be around in six months. Despite the risk, this is an environment where we can truly feel alive. JEFF PAWLAK San Francisco The writer is a growth marketer for GrubMarket, a start-up.

But in reality that model is simply a tool for the Oligarchs to continue to secure their place in the pecking order of faux meritocracy and the belief that they are “changing the world.” To that a big whatthefuckever. The idea that failure is a type of notch of success, to be “graduated” versus be fired is just another whitewashing or “rebranding” that this generation have mastered well. Need a car? Why rent one when you can borrow one and have the owner even drive it? How about tools, food, stuff? Someone will do it for you. So this is the reality of the world and I think it shows you the world from the other side.

 We love ‘disruptors’. But it’s regular people who keep the world afloat

‘Someone had to make Elon Musk’s latte this morning and make sure it got to him in a clean cup’ Photograph: Devon Knight for the Guardian

David Ferguson
 

I used to be a dishwasher and have endless respect for people behind the scenes keeping things together. If only everyone did

Saturday 16 April 2016  The Guardian UK

This week, Fortune magazine pointed to a provocative essay by Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell titled Hail the maintainers, which says that as a society, we are overvaluing innovators and desperately undervaluing the engineers, cleaners, repair technicians and service personnel that keep everything running.

Waves of “disruptive” new technologies and business practices may be giving us successive generations of maverick entrepreneurs, but someone had to make Elon Musk’s latte this morning and make sure it got to him in a clean cup. If he falls off his hoverboard and breaks his arm, an ER nurse is going to help diagnose him and patch him together again, but when will we get to hear her Ted talk?

I have endless respect for people behind the scenes keeping the world together. I remember the pride I once took in being a restaurant dishwasher. Yes, the job is, in some ways, at the bottom of the food chain. It’s typically the lowest-paid position in any restaurant, and yet there is a simple, satisfying power to it. To customers, you’re invisible, but you’re ultimately the person who is keeping them safe from germs and cross-contamination, an invisible lifeguard at life’s watering hole.

Each morning, you show up, put on an apron and then tackle the day’s mound of dirty dishes. It’s sweaty, sometimes backbreaking, work, but the core mission is always the same: make it all sparkle and put it back where it belongs. Keep everything moving. Everybody’s got to eat and if they’re going to eat, they’re going to need some dishes.

Not everyone appreciates the amount of work it takes to keep the things as they should be, though. I learned that right out of college, when I was working as a ward clerk on a pediatrics unit making $5.75 an hour. At the time, I was singing in a rock band and staying out all night. Being a young 20-something-year-old, one day I just didn’t have time to iron my white dress shirt. I decided to wear it crinkly and call it a look.

Halfway through my shift, one of the doctors on rounds asked me what kind of a shirt it was, that he hadn’t really seen one like it. With a start, I realized that he had probably never in his life seen a dress shirt that wasn’t fresh and starched on the hanger or disappearing into his clothes hamper at the end of the day. He was completely incapable of recognizing a white cotton dress shirt in its native state.

I said a quiet vow to myself on that day that I would never take for granted the labor going into keeping my world running. Doctor what’s-his-face, I realized, probably doesn’t even know the names of the workers – undoubtedly women and given that this is the South, probably women of color – who pressed his shirt. He probably thinks shirts come out of the dryer that way, if he thinks about it at all.

So maybe janitors, line cooks and hotel workers think I’m strange for thanking them on my way by. I don’t usually word it, “Thank you for holding the world together,” or at least I haven’t yet. But that’s exactly what they do.

The Core

I have just discovered the line of ice creams by Ben & Jerry’s that have a core flavor in the center much like the jelly in the doughnut and oddly it got me thinking about my core.  Well core as related to Yoga and exercise and that if I eat many of these my core will become a pylon.

And when you realize that the spine is the core of the body and you think those with a strong spine can withstand a hurricane and the same with the idea of what a pylon is –. A steel tower supporting high-tension wires; A tower marking a turning point in a race among aircraft.;  A large structure or group of structures marking an entrance or approach;  A monumental gateway in the form of a pair of truncated pyramids serving as the entrance to an ancient Egyptian temple.

I must have one hell of pylon as I still stand.  So when I was in Yoga I decided to dedicate my session to myself.  In my quest to find anyone to help me as I navigate a system so broken and shattered that despite shoes walking through glass my feet are broken and bloody to bits and yet I am also still walking.  

And that brought the question: Am I a narcissist?  And I looked to the Attorney’s that I have met (and hired yikes!), those whose bizarre blawgs (the sane ones don’t call theirs that), the medical profession, the Police, the EMTs and Fire Fighters and how I have found their core rotting from the inside. The arrogance, the lying, the cover ups, the finger pointing and blame seeking are all characteristics to these professions. The education and the salaries are the only difference but the position of authority and importance are two factors they both share.

I have written about the study that found the 1% lack empathy and on that I can agree.  I think still my favorite was the bizarre conversation I had with an attorney at my gym whose practice centers on finding ways to hide the 1% money, legally I am sure.  She is actually oddly so stupid about other people and utterly odd to talk to that I can say she fits into the profile of having a conversation with an idiot.

There is one “blawger” who bemoans blogging as it no longer seems to appeal to intelligent people and he micromanages the blawg to not allow comments, posts only his posse and the random ones he does he does so to only rebuke and insult, yet while professing to not tolerate such.  Hypocrite or Lawyer?

You can now add, redundantly, to the list narcissist.  There is something inherently narcissistic about blogging, tweeting and facebooking.  You are actually addressing no one and everyone simultaneously,  doing the equivalent of a monologue in a drama.  Occasionally it may end up with a random exchange or some flogging, the internet drive by where a dog pile comes on hates you to an extent that it drives you away.  It never really lasts.  I have seen many a pledge to stop (Alec Baldwin anyone) but only to return.  The narcissism needs to be assuaged and gratified in ways that staring in a pond cannot.

The endless reality shows demonstrate that we will watch anyone do anything just to think that real people are either smarter or some how dumber than the rest of us.  It is the latter than has to explain the Kardashians or that teen agers are in fact teenagers and will watch anything.   That never changed clearly.

Which brings me to how to find the core in yourself and the one’s lacking from those whom surround you.  I think work patterns and professions do provide a clue.

I found this article in Psychology Today that discusses the attributes of a narcissist and that of a workaholic.   I think that may explain the fields of municipal servant.  Even Teachers and school Administrators as they vest many long hours in a low paying field so they need to validate and justify why.  I am frequently asked why I don’t full time teach and that is one reason why, I like life to have balance.

Now to truly believe this however, would assume that Doctors and Lawyers work 14 hours a day for a purpose, to do good. Right.  They are both of the professions that  advocate  the pledge “the maximum for the minimum.” The turn and burn of clients, seeing patients/clients in 15 minute intervals or less, the endless complaints  about how they have such a hard job and are not paid enough yet manage to remain still on pay charts as the highest paid private sector professions next to CEO’s.  So in other words bullshit artists that wear suits or white coats.

I also think this explains the odd behavior and claims that Martha Stewart makes claiming to not sleep, the Donald Trump (just the “the” before the name explains that) and the hysteria by many legislators who seem to take endless weeks off about while simultaneously complaining about the vacation of the President which is by any stretch of imagination is clearly a working one.

But all Americans to validate themselves and believe they are important have themselves hard wired 24/7 and that is who we seem to think and believe we are important, our work is and thereby valued.  The reality of such is a problem that many companies are now trying to shut that off at least one day a week and stopping communication during a vacation period.  I think most of that is fear and insecurity, America breeds that well.

Read the article and ask yourself if you fit that description or do you know who does.  The idea of the core of your being should come from within but we love to use extrinsic to excuse or justify why we are the way we are unless of course you are labeled by the same professions that can do so without justification other than by the position they hold.  That is some power unquestioned and unrestrained.

Perhaps it is time to rethink the expression “rotten to the core”it might need a broader brush.

The Personality of the Workaholic and the Issue of “Self”

The terrible trio of perfectionism, narcissism and workaholism

Published on March 20, 2010 by Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D. in Don’t Delay

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A study published this month explored the personality of workaholics. Of interest was the relation of narcissism and workaholism. That grandiose sense of self-importance that seems to be present in epidemic proportions in our society is related to the worst aspects of workaholism, so was perfectionism. I think these results reveal something interesting about the “self.”

In the latest issue of Personality and Individual Differences, Malissa Clark, Ariel Lelchook and Marcie Taylor (Wayne State University) published a study on the relation of various personality traits with workaholism. Although my “pet subject” is procrastination (those people who just can’t seem to get to a task), I’m also interested in those of us who can’t seem to let go of work tasks. These “workaholics” are people who work to the exclusion of other life activities, are consumed with thoughts and feelings about work and often do more than is expected at work. Certainly, their lives are not models of “balance.”

What caught my attention about this study is the focus on individual differences or personality traits that are related to workaholism. I’m particularly fascinated by the negative influences of narcissism and perfectionism in our lives, as these are traits that seem to be celebrated in many ways in modern American culture. 

For example, many cultural heroes of popular TV shows, particularly those shows that portray the lives of doctors, lawyers and successful business people, are hard-driving individuals who seem to have no life other than work. What each shares is a grandiose sense of his or her own self-importance that is central to the definition of narcissism.

In their study, Clark and her colleagues analyzed data from a sample of 322 working students, the majority of whom were female (73%), Caucasian (51%) or African American (27%) with an average age of 24 years and who, in addition to their studies, worked 36 hours a week on average. These participants completed self-report measures of the Big Five Personality Traits (Neuroticism, Extraversion, Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness and Agreeableness), as well as measures of Narcissism, Workaholism, Perfectionism and their tendency to experience positive and negative emotions.

The Results

There were a number of interesting findings in this study. As expected, most of the Big Five traits were related to workaholism: Neuroticism (emotional instability) positively to all aspects of workaholism, Conscientiousness negatively to the impatience component of workaholism, Agreeableness negatively to the compulsion to work, and Openness to experience was positively related to the polychronic control (multi-tasking) component of workaholism.

In terms of the other traits they measured, they found that:

• Narcissism was positively related to workaholism overall, as well as to the components of workaholism known as impatience (“I seem to be in a hurry and racing against the clock.”) and compulsion (“It’s hard for me to relax when I’m not working.”).
• The high standards dimension of perfectionism (high expectations of self) was related to overall workaholism.
• The discrepancy dimension of perfectionism (perceived gap between one’s performance expectations and self-evaluation of current performance) was a significant predictor of all components of workaholism.
• Finally, negative affect (NA) and positive affect (PA) demonstrated different relations with components of workaholism. NA (e.g., sadness, anger) was related to overall workaholism, as well as the components of impatience and compulsion. PA (e.g., happiness, joy) was related to the polychronic control component of workaholism.

Implications and concluding thoughts

Like all correlational studies, the relations among the variables leads us to much speculation and raises many new questions. Certainly the issue of causation cannot be addressed, and it’s important to note this as the authors dutifully do in their closing section of the paper.

Overall, the authors have contributed to the literature by including traits (narcissism, perfectionism and affect) beyond the Big Five that are typically discussed. In doing this, they demonstrated that each of these traits is related to workaholism or at least some component of it.

Where I disagree with the authors is in their closing comments where they write that their “Results suggest that workaholism may have both positive and negative components” (p. 790). They base this conclusion on their analysis of the structure of the workaholism questionnaire, which produced a 3-component solution. Two of these components are seen as negative (i.e., impatience and compulsion), while the third is seen as a more positive component of workaholism known as polychronic control, or the preference to juggle and be in control of many tasks at once. The thing is, while the authors refer to this as multi-tasking, it has a much more negative connotation when taking into account items that make up this component such as “I prefer to do most things myself rather than ask for help.” There are certainly control issues here that are not so positive, even if the measure of Positive Affect correlated with this component.

My point is, neither perfectionism nor workaholism has a positive side. Although it can be argued that perfectionism and/or workaholism result in improved performance in some organizational circumstances, both result in diminished relationships outside of work and undermine well-being overall. Each is harmful to us.

What I think we see in this study is another confirmation of how a number of negative ways of being in life coexist. In fact, I think we see these relations between perfectionism, narcissism and workaholism because they are all related to a third underlying variable – a weak sense of self that is plagued with many irrational thoughts (e.g., “I must be perfect to have worth,” “I must work to have worth.”) and an overcompensation for this low self-esteem with a paradoxical narcissism (individuals protect their weak sense of self with an overcompensation that portrays the self in a grandiose fashion).

It’s all a matter of degree of course. It’s important, even essential, to work hard, to set standards for oneself and to value self. Problems in functioning arise when we are:

• unable to stop working and only find value in self through work (workaholism),
• set unrealistic expectations for our performance (perfectionism), and
• value and pursue power and self-importance to support our grandiose self-conceptions (narcissism).

Each of these problems, I believe, has its roots in our sense of self. Nurturing a sense of self as an autonomous worthwhile being apart from our accomplishments or our failures is a key developmental task. It is ours, the task eternal.

Reference

Clark, M.A., Lelchook, A.M., & Taylor, M.L. (2010). Beyond the Big Five: How narcissism, perfectionism, and dispositional affect relate to workaholism. Personality and Individual Differences, 48, 786-791.