Back To The Good Old Days

The Trump admin has indicated that the Labor Department will revisit an Obama-era rule meant to reduce exposure to coal mine dust that causes deadly black lung disease. https://t.co/OK2utySi7r

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) December 15, 2017

Finally, relief for all those coal miners who want to die in agony https://t.co/pLVK3NXXh0

— Jess Dweck (@TheDweck) December 15, 2017

The Good Old, Bad Old Days

The days when popular art and class consciousness briefly flourished. Erik Loomis, This Day in Labor History: November 27, 1937—

On November 27, 1937, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) debuted its play "Pins and Needles," which would become the longest running musical of the 1930s. This cultural form of labor feminism at a time when organized labor was dominated by male workers is a vital and important moment both in the cultural history of work but also in the history of women and work.

And so, from the tuneful stroll down memory lane to the present... And ">the near future, thanks to so much of white organized labor deciding to vote for suicide.

A Company; A Staff; A Leader

NYT article causes a small stir. After which the Times prints this, noting Jeff Bezos' response to employees. The followup is also a reminder of one career move—from a position of prestige, to proximity to serious power—

Amazon spokesmen declined to comment further on Monday. Jay Carney, Amazon's chief spokesman, appeared on "CBS This Morning" to defend the company, which is based in Seattle. "This is an incredibly compelling place to work," he said.

Yes, the NYT can offer an exposé, but any news is likely to be just in the details, when we're talking about a corporate behemoth operating under its particular version of messianic capitalism. As usual, we see holy writ; here, called the Leadership Principles. (Never mind how directly that translates into German). There are fourteen bullet points, as these organizations always do aim for exceeding Ten.

It all serves as justification for the company to conduct (in the words of the Times' headline writer) "an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers." Why, then, should it be surprising if those in positions of authority behave as in the Times' examples—

A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. "I'm sorry, the work is still going to need to get done" she said her boss told her. "From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don't know if this is the right place for you."

A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a "performance improvement plan" — Amazon code for "you're in danger of being fired" — because "difficulties" in her "personal life" had interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover.

A former human resources executive said she was required to put a woman who had recently returned after undergoing serious surgery, and another who had just had a stillborn child, on performance improvement plans, accounts that were corroborated by a co-worker still at Amazon. "What kind of company do we want to be?" the executive recalled asking her bosses.

The mother of the stillborn child soon left Amazon. "I had just experienced the most devastating event in my life," the woman recalled via email, only to be told her performance would be monitored "to make sure my focus stayed on my job."

Or is it surprising that workers would be pitted against each other, with the company's "Anytime Feedback Tool" used to sabotage peers. Or is it surprising if this environment exists—

In interviews, 40-year-old men were convinced Amazon would replace them with 30-year-olds who could put in more hours, and 30-year-olds were sure that the company preferred to hire 20-somethings who would outwork them. After Max Shipley, a father of two young children, left this spring, he wondered if Amazon would "bring in college kids who have fewer commitments, who are single, who have more time to focus on work." Mr. Shipley is 25.

But regard for workers is a trivial distraction from the pursuit of greatness. After all, an eager world of consumers awaits fulfillment of 'really practical need'—

"A customer was able to get an Elsa doll that they could not find in all of New York City, and they had it delivered to their house in 23 minutes," said Ms. Landry, who was authorized by the company to speak, still sounding exhilarated months later about providing "Frozen" dolls in record time.

That becomes possible, she and others said, when everyone follows the dictates of the leadership principles. "We're trying to create those moments for customers where we're solving a really practical need," Ms. Landry said, "n this way that feels really futuristic and magical."

Check-Offs

It's not hard to fill in the boxes of the "Atlanta Cheating Scandal" story.

Demonizing public shools: check
Locating accountability at the bottom: check
Meting out disproportionately harsh punishment to those deemed accountable: check
Those punished happen to be black: check, check, anddouble-check

Charles Pierce observes—

... the ahistorical explosion of bullshit that is Judge Jerry Baxter, who called the convictions of eight former Atlanta school administrators in connection to a fairly massive scandal involving cheating on standardized tests "the sickest thing that ever happened in this town." (Somewhere in the bowels of a SuperMax in Colorado, Eric Rudolph finds himself off the hook.)...

After listing the individual prison sentences, Diane Ravitch adds—

...all of the convicted educators lost their license, their pensions, and five years of compensation.

If only all those bankers who nearly destroyed the economy in 2008 had been dealt with as harshly. But they were "too big to fail."

Richard Rothstein makes it all clear—

Eleven Atlanta educators, convicted and imprisoned, have taken the fall for systematic cheating on standardized tests in American education. Such cheating is widespread, as is similar corruption in any institution—whether health care, criminal justice, the Veterans Administration, or others—where top policymakers try to manage their institutions with simple quantitative measures that distort the institution’s goals. This corruption is especially inevitable when out-of-touch policymakers set impossible-to-achieve goals and expect that success will nonetheless follow if only underlings are held accountable for measurable results.
...

Certainly, educators can refuse to cheat, and take the fall for unavoidable failure in other ways: they can see their schools closed, their colleagues fired, their students’ confidence and love of learning destroyed. That would have been the legal thing to do, but not necessarily the ethical thing to do. As one indicted teacher told the judge before the trial, "I truly believed that I was helping these children stay in school just one more year," something from which they would have benefited far more than being drilled incessantly on test-taking strategies so they could pass tests legally.

As Pierce says—

The sentences are preposterous, but the sentences are not about the crimes involved. The sentences are a message that the power in this country is behind the "reform" grifting movement no matter what the cost to children or to public education in general. They will have their testing. (Ravitch finds one New Jersey superintendent who "hopes" kids will feel bullied by the testing regime. Bravo, sir.) It doesn't matter even if the people sharing in the grift -- like, say, the people involved in designing and running the computers on which the testing system depends -- are any good at their jobs or not. They will have their testing, and I include the current administration in this, come hell, high water, or hangin' judges, and you best not offend against it, or you are the worst thing that ever happened to Atlanta. Leo Frank wept.

TGIF

For all the institution's horn-blowing about being Sustainable, and, Green: I seem to be the only pedestrian around my new place, something that's been particularly aggravating this week. After work Monday, a boot toe's collision with uneven sidewalk ended by badly bruising both my knees and the palm of one hand. The next morning, invisible ice on a campus sidewalk sent me flying; the crash landing was onto the most painful of the previous knee injuries. Well, just one kneecap this time... but all very maddening, in that it happened on work premises, and that my knee hurt so much that it took a while to manage getting up.

This sidewalk begins at exactly the spot where the bus drops me mornings, and from there it leads to a convenient side entrance. The sidewalk also has the slightest degree of downward incline, which was where I'd gone sailing. So next day I tried a much longer (but flat) way, via sidewalks at the two major streets adjoining the buildings. No falls that day, but going the distance of just two blocks took nearly 15 minutes of negotiating pavement covered by ice.

Aside from parking lots, maintenance is indeed spotty. And I don't expect to ever hear a word from the building contact I e-mailed about the condition of the sidewalks.

Something that really gets me: one day, the snow and (subsequent mud) will be gone, and I'll want a nice solitary walk outside the factory. Which is just when the grounds will be full of walkers: administrative assistants who've changed to athletic shoes and puffed out their chests, striding purposefully to show they are becoming healthy, and doing their all to save their employer medical costs.

Meanwhile, I've lost track of the odd weather this week, but at some point, a shiny layer of thin ice appeared on every snow pile in town. It's lent my surroundings just a soupçon more surreality than before...

Not snow blobs on those trees, as it might seem, but buds—

Art budgets do exist to be used up (and what I've seen so far has been as bad).

Medium is message; rusted wheels and shredded plastic = recycling?

That's one small step for man; one giant leap for corporate expansion.

Keep Your Damn Social Democracy To Yourself

The day began with this.

"What was a longshoreman?" ... A verb tense chosen to set the tone of future NPR queries? It may not be long before "What was a union?"; "...a worker?"

Longshoremen are past tense, yet we are told they are powerful. Both are according to Renee Montagne, who also clues us in: they are on the West Coast, so are not the same corrupt East Coast longshoremen we know from "On the Waterfront."

Just a couple of things are off. "On the Waterfront" was fiction, a movie made in 1954 by a director eager to please red hunters. And beyond ominous remarks about a "powerful union," Montagne's piece was free the slightest mention of work conditions, corporate behavior, or any actual issues in the dock shutdowns.

Mercifully, this setup skipped a recent shtick NPR indulges in: introducing "history" by with feature film audio. Or maybe the omission showed some journalistic lines are not to be crossed—after all, "On the Waterfront" was set on the wrong coast.

In any case, the "history" here was superficial background to Montaigne's storyline that dockworkers and their outmoded "union" cost the economy millions a day, and just need to get with it—

MONTAGNE: Well, other unions have realized in this last - certainly this last decade that they needed to give up certain benefits to survive. Have the longshoremen gotten to this point?

Even if some comments to NPR's site challenged the narrative, it was already Mission Accomplished, when the broadcast reached its target audience: white-collars who've had any conception of workplace democracy educated out of them.

Even if there were challengers in online comments, it was Mission Accomplished: NPR reached its target audience of white-collars who have had any conception of workplace democracy educated out of them.

On to the first fully equipped day at my new locale. Buildings in this complex are sparkly glass boxes, full of high design furniture. It's like walking into Scandinavia—just without the social democracy and benefits.

A jam-packed day's festivities began with an early call to assemble, now that two units once separated by several city blocks have been combined into one happy family. Without booking a facility conference room, the only likely space to meet is such that everyone stands in a couple of converging aisles; the awkwardness of this did suit the makeup of the new happy family.

The newly added group's boss, Simone Legree, was ready with a spiel she was eager to get out. To wit: her staff have "strict productivity goals" daily, with ten people to do $7 million annual hospital billing. Staff are allowed two 15-minute breaks and a half hour lunch; they have to account for any other time spent, whereby they haven't met the daily goal. "Don't talk to my people" was her point, which she was in a hurry to make known and publicly rationalized.

Well, the only member of Simone's staff I'm likely to speak to is A. Friend, and I already knew to avoid her desk. A. has been harassed ever since falling into Simone's clutches, several years ago. A. and I are about the same age, but the median age in the unit is 30-ish. Simone's behavior can only come from sheer bias against A.'s age and her dressing plainly (most of the others wear heels and the height of mall fashion). Simone is no younger than A. or me, and in the looks department, she has a particularly pinched and unpleasant face. So for years she's tried to drive out the oldster, the better to surround herself with younger, dressed-to-the-nines women; presumably, their allure is supposed to rub off on her.

In the two days I've been around this group, it's no secret there are favorites. A. tells me she is "written up" if she's seen reading an e-mail from a family member. On the other hand, it's fine that the plastic-looking blonde across the aisle from me takes frequent face and hair touch-up breaks. Blondie also has TV windows open throughout the day.

Our end of the room has windows, which prompts Blondie's announcing to all who pass her desk: "I'm getting plants." Said as if it's an astoundingly brilliant thought, yet in a particular kind of bland tone. It strikes me as sort of a mid-West suburban Queen of England manner, of knowing she can count on people to fall over themselves admiring her least raise of a pinky. Though I may well be over-thinking this: it could be just that the botox keeps her face from moving.

The morning meeting's other main order of bullshit was from the overall manager: "Just because we've moved over here, doesn't mean the dress code has been relaxed. And no matter what you might see other people in the building wear, there are no sneakers." The department has always been thoroughly pretentious about controlling garb for office staff—almost inevitably women, and easily intimidated—and the administrators have no such sway over faculty, lab or IT staff. The real meaning, of course: "just because the bigwigs exiled you out of their sight, don't you peons think you can relax."

A. Friend, who's been unable to wear anything but sneakers, had to speak up here, "Do I need a doctor's note for my plantar fascitis?"

"Yes," said an annoyed manager.

From my side of the work group, She Who Is With Child is always on the lookout for any chance to broadcast the fact—as well as looking for any possible work bandwagon to join. So she jumped in, "Do I need a note if I'm pregnant and my feet are swelling?"

"We'll talk about it later."

Yes, they are hypocrites who play favorites. Their dress code is so meaningful, yet wearing jeans on Fridays is encouraged when the wearers cough up $1 for department fundraising. As the shindig wound down—and for all the "strict productivity goals" determining her staff's use of time—Simone began gushing about how great it is to meet, and that "once we're caught up from the move, I think we should get back to Morning Huddles: they're so useful"

That's a nutshell of my workplace, in all its varieties of sucking, and, sucking up.

Soon after the meeting broke up came a news flash: lunch will be delivered at noon by the department administrator. Huzzah: there was the usual office excitement over free food—which turned out to be platters of craptacular Jimmy John's subs.

It was easy for me to hold out for lunching later on something more palatable. I tried to make myself inconspicuous about the non-eating by talking to A. Friend and sticking to that spot. Until the administrator headed toward us...

Unlike the previous old goat, this guy has an affable manner, and a "Hi, how are you?" for everyone. Along with remarking on the weather, that's as much conversation as I'd ever had with him, though our paths often crossed in the other facility. Now, what he opens with is, "I hear you lost your walk"... I don't know if he'd previously overheard me talking about the office move, or what prompted this.

Whichever, his remark was in a tone not far from "Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah,!" Later, A. agreed that it was extremely weird for him to pounce on me and bring up that subject, and that his tone was pointed.

But while the administrator was in my face, I just said, "Oh well, I guess that would have changed soon, because I have to find another place to live since the stealth sale of the building I've lived in for eight years..." What the hell; I was so pissed off, I blandly brought up the other hostile real estate takeover ruining the year for me. Anyway, he began making sympathetic noises about home moves.

Soon after the administrator had pounced, the department chairman arrived—to be pounced upon himself, by Simone Legree. She began to schmooze mightily with the Great Man; from the corner of my eye, he sure seemed to be looking for an out.

Well, I had one: retreating to my desk, even if the office space was filled with the sounds of Simone's yakking and the GM's humoring her. It went on for some minutes, until I heard, "Oh! You haven't met my staff"; a beeline was then made for the desk of Blondie.

In the course of this venting, I do prefer being vague about where I work. But here I have to say that it is a medical department, which I'll call the Department of Mmm-mmm-ology. The new broom who swept me out of the old location is Doctor Broom, Chairman of the Department of Mmm-Mmmology.

Upon being introduced to him, Blondie said, "Oh, are you a mmm-mmmologist?

My desk is positioned for a perfect view of the good doctor, who was taken aback for the merest fraction of a second. No doubt concluding that you can't expect much from the help, he quickly replied, "Yes, and a practicing one..." He went on to make some shop talk, which I barely follow (and don't expect Blondie does at all).

After the Great Man had finally left the building, Simone came rushing back to Blondie and laughing, "I can't believe you said that to him!"

"Well, things are new to me—I'm trying to learn them."

"Oh, he's just so personable—that's it coming out!"

After more raving about the GM, Simone proceeded to bring her sub-lieutenants to Blondie's desk. It was an actual procession, as one by one they were led over, while Simone guffawed, "I can't believe she said that!... He took it so well!..."

This throughout the afternoon, as Blondie defended herself:

"Well, he saw me and just thought, 'You're so pretty'..."

"Well, what can I say; sometimes the blonde comes out..."

Somehow, this starts to seem like such a good idea...

Goat or Sheep?

Office move day just happens to coincide with the start of the lunar year. As to the ambiguity of the year's Chinese character—whether "horned animal" means goat, or, sheep—well, either suits the office situation. Whether or not the issue is taking blame, the expected response to any management whim is a simple, "Whatever you say, baaas-aaaa-aaaas."

Here's the institution's office move method: pack up your desk the day before, report to the new location at 8:00 a.m., and ... twiddle your thumbs. Anything needed to do a lick of work will be unavailable, when the movers don't start until 8 the same day.

"Downtime, until further notice" was the order of the morning. If it hadn't been for record sub-zero temperatures, I would have checked out the neighborhood, just to be sure of where the scarce bus stops are. Instead, I was stuck inside a sterile, factory-like building, trying to find some constructive use for the sudden free time.

I took the 10-minute hike toward the cafeteria, to visit my anticipated only positive thing about relocation: a satellite library. Just an office space, but I'd been told that book requests from the main campus could be delivered there for me to pick up. It seems I was misinformed: the "library" is a mere presence, hiring staff and touting itself online, but offering no useful services.

It does have a few computers, so I sat myself down, to try salvaging something from the time. The computer proved to be as useless as the "library": it couldn't so much as load institutional e-mail, or do much of anything else.

Meanwhile, the space next to the "library" was jumping: it's an IT office, that day offering workshops—on "Cloudspace ...", or, "Air... something"—a name along those lines. Whatever it was called, it's evidently the newest, shiniest thing being forced upon large groups of employees. And it has mystified them all, to judge from the way business on that side was booming.

I stuck it out with the bad computer for nearly an hour, as seekers of IT enlightenment came and went. Then came the point when a new group was milling around, talking loudly. The voices were women's—administrative assistant types, from the conversation. One began going on about "poopy diapers"—presumably, a current or recent experience she was waving around (so to speak) as a badge of work/home multi-tasking honor. That seemed to halt the conversation for a moment; then—Team Building opportunity—the others chimed in with their poopy diaper stories.

That did it for me: if I want to be subjected to such sparkling conversation, I can hang around my work group. Though my annoying co-worker most likely to bring up such topics is pregnant now, and on the lookout for any opportunity to discuss pregnancy details with any willing listener. I am not among the willing—just cannot avoid hearing—but at least poopy diapers are not yet part of her repertoire.

The day was a frustrating waste of time. I ran through all the 2014 calendar pages of weird supplier art I'd saved for making origami boxes. Also untangled the knots from eleven or twelve twisted pairs of $1 store earbuds I'd tossed aside over the years. Now it will be easier to test them (and find, no doubt, that all are dead).

One of the discomfiting things about this move is being thrown together with a unit previously at a different building. For years, the staff were only to be seen at the year-end holiday party. They always presented an odd picture then, sitting together at a table with no intention of mingling. The exception was A. Friend, whom I've known ten years, and with whom I worked until her transfer to this other group. I know A. to be extremely conscientious about her work, yet ever since her move, she's complained about harassment by the supervisor (whom I'll call Simone Legree). I never witnessed what went on, but found the annual look at the robotic rest of her office was unsettling.

Now, some of these women sit in cubicles opposite my side of the aisle. (Not A. Friend: she's been placed directly across from her supervisor's office, to provide Simone L. maximum scrutiny). When I finally had a desk, the member of their team directly opposite noticed my sit-stand monitor platform. She asked what it is and why do I have it, so I demonstrated. Because of the apparent whip-cracking on her side of things, I tried to be discreet, but did want to suggest the department has ordered these platforms at the recommendation of an ergonomics evaluator, and that, "the department supports getting a work station evaluation if you need one." Her co-worker in the next space had also come to see the thing (so she also got my spiel). Both complained about sore necks, so I tried showing them a quick loosening trick that's based on wing-like movement from the back of the shoulder blades. The second neighbor was very interested, and actually tried it along with me; in the middle of the our wing-flapping, along came a glowering Simone L., to clip them.

Even aside from Simone's demeanor, there's a strange dynamic in that unit. It seems the data entry is transmitted to a sort of hall monitor (or, Simone Legree, Jr.) She travels between her office and the workers' desks, to have them explain or justify something they've entered. Simone, Jr.'s office is on the corridor leading to all exits; each time I passed by, she jerked her head around, presumably to check that it wasn't one of her staff making unauthorized movements.

And I need to pass Jr.'s office to reach the kitchen or rest room. Both are shared with a department that's been settled in the building for some time. They are a muckety-muck group dealing with scientific research rule compliance. Unlike any other department I've encountered in my (on and off) fifteen years at the institution, staff are mostly women around my age. They may be mostly administrative assistants or middle managers, but most seem high-powered. That may be vicariously, through proximity to muckety-mucks, or some of these people may be key players in the line of defense against things reaching the institution's lawyers. In any case, the concentration of women of mature ages is unusual: I don't know if they have particular training and long experience, or if they have reached the heights of Compliance via previous decades of crushing underlings.

They certainly are rigorous in enforcing kitchen compliance. That was clear from the extensive communication media: their refrigerator duties whiteboard, a detailed status log on the status of a pending ice-maker repair, and such. To prepare for the intruders, Compliance had plastered every appliance and drawer with their unit's acronym; I happened to be in the room to hear our manager's admin assistant being told, "You can use these two shelves."

From the other side there is a sniffy regarding of persons and lunches. Well, to have hoity-toity ladies inspecting my co-workers: it's Whole Foods meets Sam's Club. No doubt, those women think Whole Foods is a benevolent organization made of happy Team Members.

The rest room is another jointly used space. I was there around 3:00, and heard one Compliance woman to another, "Oh! Out of toilet paper already!" Well, what would you expect from the sudden importation of over twenty women?

By around that time, I finally had a connected computer. And new junk e-mail, from a vendor jumping on this bandwagon:

"Science to You in the Year of the Goat. Chun Lian is a decoration used during the celebration of the Chinese New Year. Typically, the Chun Lian writes a happy, hopeful, and uplifting message about a good New Year to come."

"This Chun Lian is for you.
Share it with your friends and co-workers. Have a great year!"

"You will be happy with whatever you do"

And: don't forget to buy!

"In the year of the goat, use good quality antibody"

They are the year's honorees, after all, and this company is "Your Source for Quality Sheep and Goat Polyclonal Antibodies"

Cleaned out

Today was packing up the desk day: preparation for tomorrow's work unit move. For me, a move from ten years' in walking distance from home, to a suburban industrial park and commuting by limited bus service.

It's the consequence of a new department chair's setting his eye on my bosses' office space: those guys have to be cleared out, for the space to be renovated so the new guy can move in his chosen. It's the usual effect of the new broom, and he—always "he"—is handed lots of money to blow on such things.

It happened with the arrival of the previous Great Man, but his decorating schemes affected me minimally. And when Dr. G. Zuss departed, his former administrative assistant was kicked upstairs to a new position, thus clearing her out of the Chairman's office and away from sight. As of tomorrow, I will be working in the general locale to which she was exiled.

Real estate grabs are the theme of my 2015. I made it as far as January 12, when there was a surprise notice that the building I live in had been sold that day. The office move had loomed over me since December, but that was knocked from the forefront of my overloaded brain by the stealth of the apartment sale. The building was bought by the worst kind of student property management company, and the fifty percent rent increase for the same nothing, is almost the least of it. Suffice it to say, I would never knowingly rent from this kind of outfit. With the challenge finding bearable housing in this little college town, and with my new longer weekdays... so much for any free time this year.

It's a good thing I won't have to bother much about keeping up with other things, as news will pretty much be of two types: 2016 horse race, or, "ISIS is coming!"

Time does march on; a find from the desk cleaning—

"solid poop this am!!!!!"

Subject line of message from Clever Sister. Which refers to her cat's recent medical episode and vet visits.

On the other hand, it really does apply to a variety of office situations I've experienced, beginning at 8:00 today.

No doubt, could also apply to pretty much any other workplace.

For Crying Out Loud

My routine work e-mail arrives in automated cycles, typically in batches of 15-25 at a time. I need to watch out for problems in need of attention, so they don't get buried in the message volume (and I have to hope any emergencies won't take up too much time). Otherwise, the routine mail will need various bits of data extracted; many other items have to be re-formatted, saved to files, and uploaded to multiple places. This is all while I'm working on new stuff that generates more of this e-mail volume. Of course the less time I have to manage e-mail, the more those batches start piling into multiples of 15-25, sometimes for hours at a time.

In the midst of the pile-ups, I so enjoy seeing institutional messages touting programs and workshops— "Work-Life Balance!" "Relieve Your Stress!"—and the like. Topics are continually recycled, even as the same institution dreams up novel methods to Increase My Stress.

In e-mail today was a call for volunteers: to join "VOICES of the Staff."

This, says the e-mail, is "to continue the dialog between ... staff and leadership." Now there's a "dialog" I had no idea existed on this particular planet. But it may be that management is beaming VOICES into the heads of susceptible volunteers.

More of the goodness promised—

VOICES offers staff members an opportunity to:

• Serve as a "sounding board" to provide feedback to executive officers on major
initiatives
• Establish connections that open new channels of communication
• Provide creative suggestions on staff climate and satisfaction issues
• Recognize their own and each other's value and talents

While I hate to bring up the obvious, there is clearly a logo for this enterprise.

Thanks For Caring...

... enough to shed oh so many fake tears—in the noise machine response to the CBO forecast that a raise in minimum wage could lead to job losses.

Fewer jobs projected, because people might not have to hold down three to survive? Surely that would put us on the road to becoming less Exceptional.

Edroso here, citing more wingnut concern for working stiffs.

Freedom's Most Fervent

Roy Edroso goes over the latest—

Last week the Congressional Budget Office issued another report on the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Its most widely-reported revelation was that 2.3 million Americans may leave their jobs because Obamacare would make it inadvisable to them to keep them.

We should say "widely-and-variously-reported," because our rightblogger friends first publicized the news to mean that Obama was going to fire all those people; then, when even the normally hapless American press started explaining that this was not so, came up with other explanations, most of which boiled down to this: Under Obamacare, you no longer have to keep a despised job to have health insurance -- which is terrible, since keeping a job for the insurance is the American Way.

Or, as Edroso puts it here—

...about the CBO finding that, since Obamacare lets Americans quit jobs they no longer need for insurance, 2.3 million of them might do so, and the outrage this engenders among rightbloggers. Yes, freedom's just another word for -- actually, at this point, who knows?

Of course, there won't stop at that, when there will always be another meme to grasp at. Edroso helpfully presents this one—

...in 2010 Nancy Pelosi said something about the Affordable Care Act: That citizens who'd been keeping jobs (first, second, or third) just so they could keep health insurance that went with it would, thanks to the ACA, have a chance to drop it and try to become "an artist or a photographer or a writer."

Pelosi also said Obamacare left citizens free to "start a business and be entrepreneurial and take risk," but none of the brethren heard that -- their brains were too inflamed by visions of dirty bohemians spending their taxpayer dollars on Gauloises, Moleskins, and beret cleaner.

Ergo: right launches War on Poetry. Which at least brings entertainment, courtesy of Edroso's commenters...

RogerAiles

Rick Santorum stands ready to condemn man on doggerel text.

dex

so much depends
upon

a red faced right blogger

glazed with freedom

beside the white
chickenshit voters.

Meanwhile: promising they shall "overcome," and that "the whole world is watching," capitalism's biggest boosters threaten a private corporation—which dared endorse an 'Un-American' union election be held in the South.

Now here's a happy employee...

Dollar store display
Photo: Clever Sister

Hands-On

Puff piece this may have been, but the subject was one of great interest—

For 160 years, the pianos made by Steinway & Sons have been considered the finest in the world. So when hedge fund billionaire John Paulson recently bought the company, it struck fear in the hearts of musicians: Would the famously handcrafted pianos be changed, for the sake of efficiency? Paulson, who owns several Steinways himself, says nothing will change.

[music]*

Great pianists need great pianos. Vladimir Horowitz, the famous Russian pianist, used to travel with his own personal Steinway when he concertized around the world...

*Seque here was a Horowitz clip: the opening notes of Mozart's C major Sonata (K330). It's music that always takes me back to the first time I heard it: played by the fine pianist who taught my keyboard literature course in college.

Classes were memorable, both musically and in Dr. T's use of sometimes corny jokes as teaching aids. The jokes worked: quite a few years later, I remember them well, as I do the musical points they illustrated.

Memorable, too, was the class trip organized by Dr. T.: a charter bus ride through several states to Astoria, Queens, and a tour of Steinway factory.

Here's a transcript of the NPR piece, describing the many hand crafting processes in use, and quoting veterans of 30, 40, 50 years at the factory. Some workers' families were employed there for generations before them; other workers just happened to grow up in the neighborhood and get interested in the place. Despite use of newer technologies, much of the hand crafting (and the generally good job security) is a throwback to old modes of work. The factory's atmosphere was a focus of the documentary filmed a few years ago, and it's something I remember from touring the place (even if that was... ummm... about 40 years ago).

We visited rooms where small groups worked on different stages of piano making, and they were enthusiastic about showing us what they were doing. People really seemed to enjoy their work and appreciate meeting a class of interested music students. A woman cutting leather (for key action dampening) offered us scraps to take home. We were puzzled, so she tried again—"Do you do crafts?"—until she had a taker. In other areas, other workers looked around their discarded materials for some possible souvenir to share.

In the room where a tester played a finished instrument, he ended the piece, spun his stool around to face us, then said, "Ya like Goishwin?!" Not waiting for a reply, he spun back to the keyboard. We listened to some spirited playing, from someone who was likely a former kid from the neighborhood.

The tour ended at an instrument showroom, where the guide invited our professor to play. He chose the first movement of the Mozart K330, one of the loveliest pieces we had studied. We all were fans of Dr T's playing and approach to teaching music history; our group's applause at the end was very heartfelt.

I'm no musician, but I've never forgotten the keyboard course, the class members, or Dr. T. And I haven't forgotten the high school music ed experiences that later led me to look for more.

The key was my year of singing in the H.S. choir. It was very much a group of average kids who listened to pop music most of the time. But we were the raw material for an ambitious plan of our director's: that we would learn the choral parts of the Bach "Magnificat" and perform them with professional soloists.

At that age (16 or so) I liked some classical music, but thought of Baroque as a repetitious, tinny harpsichord sound. Learning and rehearsing Bach's choral writing opened a new world, though. It was a revelation, just encountering the beauty of individual parts as we learned them. But when the vocal sections later combined to rehearse an entire chorus, the results were new and awe-inspiring.

All these decades later, I remember an afternoon after rehearsal. As the group walked through an empty hallway outside the gym, someone began singing his choral part; soon, everyone else joined in with their respective parts. The acoustics were pretty damn good, and I'll never forget that moment and the rush of feelings it inspired: awe at the music's beauty, as well as the powerful physical sensation of sound reverberating through my body; thrill at the possibilities that seemed ahead of us all; the sheer joy of spontaneously creating this together—and of doing something so out of the ordinary as impromptu mass singing in a school corridor.

It's a scene that always comes to mind in recent years, as arts education has been the first thing cut.

But, my school experience was in another century...

This is the 21st, after all, and art is meant for the elite. If the public deserves a look or a listen, surely a benevolent hedge fund manager will be willing to endow it. Maybe he even won't fire (for now) the craftspeople who contribute to his hobby.

A "Coup" By Any Other Name...

TBogg returns to the Internets; just in time for the spectacle.

Yes, the start date of the Heritage Foundation's insurance industry payoff, the House shuts down all possible parts of governance, aside from itself.

As expected, members distinguish themselves—

Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC) told a local television station that she would not be deferring her pay during the government shutdown, as some other members have done.

"I need my paycheck. That's the bottom line," Ellmers told WTVD in Raleigh, N.C. "I understand that there may be some other members who are deferring their paychecks, and I think that's admirable. I'm not in that position."

According to Ellmers's official website, she was a registered nurse for 21 years before being elected to Congress. Her husband Brent, the website says, is a general surgeon.

On the October 4 Majority Report, Sam Seder and Cliff Schecter got pretty much everything in.

That there are 800,000 furloughed workers losing (at the very minimum) one week of pay; another 1.2 million are working without pay.

That children are deprived of Head start and mothers left without food for babies, thanks to Congresspeople who claim to be "pro-life."

That there will be losses to scientific research, since experiments can't be stopped and re-started on whims.

The damage relates to what Sam presented as the problem of investment. If people don't see an immediate, direct benefit to themselves—and have been told to hate public expenditures—then science, like the general public good, is easily undermined.

It's not as if we have a responsible media to explain why investment matters. Since Reagan, and, as Cliff put it, "the death of news as a public service," the public is led on about "public spending = welfare queens get something I don't."

Of the Republicans' tantrum—shutting down the government over not having been able to overturn "Obamacare," and now "needing something" for their trouble—Sam suggested there might be some offering to ease their hurt feelings; perhaps, "ritual bloodletting of poor people on the floor of Congress."

A long, but interesting post by aimai: The Punishers Want To Run The Country or We Are All Tipped Waitstaff Now, with Republicans as "the dissatisfied and angry diners at the table of life."

Since the Supreme Court's States Rights cleverness with the ACA, it's not hard for the NYT to find people treated this way. Real people, with names and stories, who are clearly being harmed. suffering; so oddly unlike those anonymous welfare queens of legend.

As Sam Seder says, "welfare reform" has been the Establishment's great legacy enhancer, as bestowed on Bill Clinton. In the form of cuts to "entitlements," Obama has begged the GOP to simply consent to its own prior agenda.

Charles Pierce just re-ran an old story, written in response to that earlier round of "welfare reform": the story of a very real family, and the gravely disabled child who died when support for his medical care needed "reform."

Hunkered In A Bunker

From a few months back, but fitting for Labor Day: Sam Seder's interview with Rich Yeselson, about this article.

Yeselson highlights the historical memory being lost: of how strong organized labor once was—in numbers and in daring—and how hard labor's opponents needed to work to reverse things. The rise of labor came in the decade after the 1935 passage of the National Labor Relations Act, which itself was a response to increased worker militancy. By 1945

... union membership quadrupled from almost 3.6 million to more than 14.3 million workers. During this period, American labor dominated the daily life of much of the nation and drew the obsessive concern of politicians and the press. Even some Southern states had union membership percentages in the high teens—statewide numbers that would be among the highest in the nation today but were among the smallest then. In a six-month period in 1937 alone—the year of the great sit-down strike at General Motors (GM) in Flint, Michigan—the CIO signed up two million workers in a nation with a population of about 130 million.

Organized labor made a no-strike pledge during the war. As the fight ended, wartime production levels decreased, along with workers' hours. An anticipated end to wage and price controls prompted further worry about inflation. The whole situation made Americans, whether in unions or not, fearful of a return to the Depression's economic conditions.

The American labor movement responded to these uncertainties with the greatest strike wave in the history of the United States. It started almost immediately after the war and continued right through 1946. Clerical workers walked out at the citadel of capitalism, the New York Stock Exchange. About 68,000 textile workers struck in the East, while 35,000 oil-refinery workers struck across seven states. In the Northwest, 40,000 lumber workers struck. In the Midwest, it was 70,000 Teamsters. In Oakland, a strike that started at the loading docks of two downtown department stores spread quickly to include 100,000 workers who effectively halted the city’s commerce and services for two days—the most dramatic general strike of several during the period. 100,000 workers who effectively halted the city’s commerce and services for two days—the most dramatic general strike of several during the period.

At the end of 1945 and into the next year, was the UAW's 225,000 member strike against GM (which Walter Reuther "used as an effort to bring European style co-determination to American labor-management relations"); 350,000 mineworkers struck in spring 1946.

All in all, about 10 percent of the entire American workforce withheld their labor in 1946. There were about 5,000 separate work stoppages involving about 4.6 million workers. ... To imagine this kind of union militancy today is to imagine 14 million workers striking in a single year.

1946 also saw midterm elections: Republicans won, under the slogan "Had enough?" Big majorities in both houses opened the way for them to create new labor laws, with backing from corporations and smaller business, the Federal Reserve Board, and the publishers of most major newspapers. In Congress, Republicans also had perfect allies in Dixiecrats eager to rid the South of unions and to forestall all moves toward civil rights.

Thus the paradox that at the high-water mark of its power and size, the labor movement generated an even more powerful backlash from the nation's power elite, which was augmented by an obsessive determination from the white South to make its region as union-free as possible. Southern elites, led by their nearly unified bloc in both houses of Congress, feared an ongoing alliance between labor and the first signs of a sustained African-American civil-rights movement, fueled by the return from the war of African-American soldiers newly emboldened to seek justice. The CIO, observing the same phenomenon, hopefully launched "Operation Dixie" in 1946, a well-funded effort to organize throughout 12 Southern states. Southern elites ruthlessly race-baited, red-baited, and intimidated poor black and white workers. Operation Dixie failed dismally, only making the Southern bloc more determined to stop unions in the region. Ira Katznelson, the great historian and political scientist, has called this implacable opposition of the South to African-American rights and the labor movement "the Southern cage."

Passage of Taft-Hartley would shift the balance in numerous ways. The overall insidious effect, Yeselson finds, was that

... Taft-Hartley bureaucratized labor unions. Unions required more and more lawyers—and more and more union stewards adept at labor law—to untangle the welter of laws, board decisions, judicial decisions, and contractual obligations that now ensnared the modern labor organization. This pervasive legalistic framework made the labor titans increasingly cautious, and it drained the energy and creativity out of the members and their rank-and-file leadership—the idea was to wait for the lawyers to tell them what would fly before the NLRB or the courts.... Taft-Hartley unmistakably signaled that anti-union political, economic, and cultural elites could contain both the leaders and their ranks. The bill shaved a risk-taking edge off labor that, perhaps, it didn’t realize it needed until subsequent moments of institutional crisis, like Ronald Reagan's firing of striking air-traffic controllers in 1981.

By the 1960s, says Yeselson, Taft-Hartley had been so effective that "even with its deep penetration in the workforce at the time, even at the apex of LBJ’s enormous Democratic congressional majority, labor could not repeal a comma of it."

"Fortress unionism" is Yeselson's concept of where private sector unions need to focus their energies now: defending regions and industries that remain unionized; strengthening locals and enhancing member education and activism; building coalitions with progressive groups; investing in "alt-labor organizations."

In the end, it's up to workers.

...union growth occurs when working-class activism overwhelms the quotidian strictures of civil society, forcing political and economic elites to accept unionization as the price of civil peace. During episodes of massive union growth, the workers don’t confine themselves to the careful strategies of union staff—they disregard them, and force the union to play catch up....

Yeselson notes the successful tactics Justice for Janitors used in a number of cities: going over the heads of cleaning subcontractors by targeting the real employers, commercial real estate owners.

There's another good Majority Report segment: Sarah Jaffe at the end of last year, as New York fast food workers held their first walkouts. It's a valuable history, with Jaffe suggesting the issues of low-wage adult workers are similar to those of earlier assembly line workers, prior to being organized and forcing those jobs to pay living, ultimately middle-class, wages. In this instance, housing activists saw so many of the working poor trying to subsist on depressed wages paid by local franchisees of powerful national companies.

Robert Kuttner has a good summary of these issues and possible strategies, in his rundown of recent actions around the country.

Kuttner's aticle is among Digby's list for reading, and taking encouragement.

All In A Day's Work

An incident not long before Labor Day, 2013. Elementary school bookkeeper uses kindness to prevent heavily armed intruder from shooting up the place; someone who in another media context could serve as one of those leeches who laze around as public employees.

Obama's Lincoln Memorial speech was in commemoration of a political event where organizers kept elected officials away from the platform. It was fine on history

...we would do well to recall that day itself also belonged to those ordinary people whose names never appeared in the history books, never got on TV. Many had gone to segregated schools and sat at segregated lunch counters. They lived in towns where they couldn't vote and cities where their votes didn't matter. They were couples in love who couldn't marry, soldiers who fought for freedom abroad that they found denied to them at home. They had seen loved ones beaten, and children fire-hosed, and they had every reason to lash out in anger, or resign themselves to a bitter fate.

He concluded with the usual dream world rhetoric: work hard and you'll succeed, as we are a country full of good people, like "that successful businessman who doesn't have to but pays his workers a fair wage and then offers a shot to a man, maybe an ex-con who is down on his luck..."

And this kind of thing is so routine now as to be considered a fine standard—

That tireless teacher who gets to class early and stays late and dips into her own pocket to buy supplies because she believes that every child is her charge -- she's marching.

Teachers "dipping" into the pocket—and fundraising, and corporate sponsorship— it's merely expected that education should be financed this way.

And after all, the message machine is happy enough with assuming a single mother needing to work three jobs is "uniquely American."

After noting the current president's fine rhetoric for a day, the pundits are no doubt relieved to get back to cheering on an attack against Syria, and a Grand Bargain with Obama's fine friends across the aisle.

Gulp, Indeed

"Courage": it's what's for Morning Huddle.

As usual, the boss had his little reading comprehension problems, but gamely droned on—

Merriam Webster defines "courage" as "mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty." Courage can also be action in the organization, especially in the face of fear or reprisals...

My bold, as this substitute for "fear of reprisals" implies that the meanings of "fear" and "reprisals" both stem from mere emotions that are easily overcome by the power of belief in a buzzword.

No one else notices.

The expert on Courage, to whom the Huddle script's author has turned day after day, is—

"Author and consultant Bill Treasurer exhibits his own courage during a high-diving stunt."

He may not have trademarked the word, but Mr. Treasurer has written the book.

The high dive photo is from this fine publication's cover story. It's a shame the available cover image is too small to fully savor—

A lucky thing that consultants exist; without them, heroic school administrators might be expected to spend money on students, or, teachers. And administrators at my public institution have plenty to spend for consultants; hiring adequate staff for rising workloads (or enough hospital employees to work with patients) would break the bank.

De-huddled back to my desk, I forwarded the Treasurer article to Clever Sister. She promptly found the "talent" agency ("Checkout Who's Hot!") representing the guy.

They can supply "entertainers" available, like the act CS was especially struck by—

The Bill and Hillary Show

Jan Mcinnis
Hillary Clinton Impersonator!!!

Frank King
Bill Clinton Impersonator!!!

There are motivational speakers of every stripe and schtick. Including—

Alan Veingrad is a motivator, entertainer, and financial and insurance strategist. He may be the only former NFLer in history to become a Torah-observant Orthodox Jew.

And—

"Vinny Verelli, the Goombah Guru"

Sadly, "Vinny" is a fake, though we do get to see the actor's resume.

Some highlights of Jonathan's performing career:
• Tour of Samuel Becket's Waiting For Godot to 12 Florida State Prisons
• Classes with the Polish Mime Theatre in Wroclaw, Poland
• Master class with Marcel Marceau in New York City
• World premiere production of Tiger Tail with artistic supervision by Tennessee Williams
• National tours with the Claude Kipnis Mime Theatre, including a week at Carnegie Hall
• 11 years on and off cruise ships as entertainer, port lecturer and Cruise Director
• Still receives residuals 11 years after taping an episode of, "Wildest Police Videos."

All very diverting. And if any of these folks' wisdom is searchable by buzzword of the week,I will no doubt hear them quoted in a Morning Huddle to come.

One morning's installment of Courage came when the boss was out, so it was read by a substitute.

"... create Gulp Goals: have sweaty palms... you should be challenged enough that your body reacts."

Reader and audience this day were all women, and they stopped for nervous laughter. Presumably, concerned that Management might expect them to let their deodorants fail.

Quote of the day: "The opposite of courage is not cowardice but conformity." The pinch-hitter usually has decent reading comprehension, but here she stumbled, attributing the quote to what sounded like "Ro-no May."

A serious author whose name, I believe, was once known to a fairly general public. Though hearing the quote in this context, and tryng to imagine what meaning this group takes from it... that's hard to find words for, other than the overused "Orwellian."

At some point in the blur of recent weeks gone by, the morning theme was, "T.H.I.N.K. about what you are about to say"—

Is it True?
Is it Helpful?
Is it Inspiring?
Is it Necessary ?
Is it Kind?

A search suggests this gem is based on parables attributed variously to Quakers, Sufis, and the Buddha. As an acronym, it's big with home schoolers and the disciplining children crowd; in other words, it fits our institutional need to train for unquestioning obedience.

Way back when—sometime last summer, when this current management kick began—Clever Sister asked if I had consented to joining the Cult of Huddle. Of course, I never did; of course, consent is implied by being employed.

It's just one small way that every day this workplace feels more like a psychological experiment from the days before informed consent.

Loose Lips

Digby has been quite attentive to this. (More graphics here).

Sinister? At the very least, inappropriate in a democracy. And I have to say: it also seems pretty much an extension of your average organization's approach to employee management.

Sure, your foreign types have their own attitudes toward spying on citizens.

That article's author makes a point of noting that the NSA's reach made a former high-ranking Stasi officer feel "appalled." Or was the emotion jealousy?

A former victim of the Stasi says—

"When the wall fell, I wanted to see what the Stasi had on me, on the world I knew. ... A large part of what I found was nothing more than office gossip, the sort of thing people used to say around the water cooler about affairs and gripes, the sort of things that people today put in emails or texts to each other."

At this week's Morning Huddle (and here, I do have to repeat myself)—the theme is Don't Worry.

I also have to repeat myself in quoting the suggestion to go for a stress-relieving walk (just remember: move along; nothing to see).

To quote more of the Stasi/Homeland Security-Industrial Complex comparisons—

[the German spokeswoman for Stasi records]...noted that Stasi victims have a large advantage in finding out what was studied.

"It's easy to make information available when it was gathered by a state that no longer exists," she said.

Stefan Wolle is the curator for Berlin's East German Museum, which focuses in part on the actions of and reactions to the Stasi. What becomes clear when studying the information the organization gathered is the banality of evil: Simple pieces of everyday life are given much greater importance than they deserve when a secret organization makes the effort to gather the information.

"When the wall fell, I wanted to see what the Stasi had on me, on the world I knew," he said. "A large part of what I found was nothing more than office gossip, the sort of thing people used to say around the water cooler about affairs and gripes, the sort of things that people today put in emails or texts to each other.

"The lesson," he added, "is that when a wide net is cast, almost all of what is caught is worthless. This was the case with the Stasi. This will certainly be the case with the NSA."

It's All So Simple, Workers

Charles Pierce sums it up—

... the real walking id of the Court's preposterously Janus-faced conservative faction is Justice Samuel Alito, who turns out to be not only a reliable reactionary voice on almost every issue, but a colossal dick besides.

It began with two decisions concerning the possible remedies that can be sought by employees who face racial, sexual, or some other kind of harassment in the workplace. The two decisions—Vance v. Ball State University and University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar—were as bad, and as thoroughly detached from empirical reality, as they possibly could be. Especially the former. The case involved a kitchen worker at Ball State who accused a supervisor of harassing her because she was the only black person working on the staff. Spectacularly, the case turned, essentially, on who qualified as a "supervisor."

Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it's far easier for a plaintiff to win a harassment case against a supervisor than fellow employees, even if the latter have been vested by upper echelons with supervisory functions. The hitch, as Ian Millhiser explains, is that the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit decided that only those with "the power to hire, fire, demote, promote, transfer, or discipline an employee" are fit to be called "supervisors."

In other words, your supervisor can't harass you, but he or she can subcontract the job of making your life a living hell to whoever wants it. However, Sam Alito, who will never have a supervisor again in his life, has no problem seeing past the problems of those of us who will. The alternative, he argued, "would make the determination of supervisor status depend on a highly case specific evaluation of numerous factors."

Which is precisely the way the world works in 99 percent of the jobs in this country these days. His extraordinarily tortured explanation—even by Supreme Court standards—continued.

"In such cases, the victims will be able to prevail simply by showing that the employer was negligent in permitting this harassment to occur," he said.

I think we can all agree that this is a very interesting concept of the word "simply," which does not carry the same meaning in the world without supervisors as it does in the world the rest of us inhabit. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented, and seems to be familiar, at least, with the fact that we don't all work as justices of the United States Supreme Court.

Justice Ginsburg's dissent was Alito's cue: start the attention-getting histrionics.

"Scalia is simply the court jester," Pierce concludes. "Alito is the king of dicks, the last and lasting vengeance of George W. Bush."

In my little corner of the work world, the Morning Huddle theme of the week is, Don't Worry.

Helpful tips are offered; "Creating a playlist of different music types can be a stress reliever," for one.

Or, "go for a walk."

Need one add: if you do go for that walk, just remember to move along; there's nothing to see here.

Huddled Masses

The Morning Huddle Theme of the Week: "Talkin' 'Bout My Generation."

De-huddled back to my desk, I search for phrases from this particular rehash of "generational workplace styles." While I can't identify the precise source being cribbed, the wording of this version from Regent "University" is quite close.

Another thing I find is that, despite beliefs on Regent's end of the political spectrum, it is corporate clichés—not Black Helicopters—with which the UN is armed. Exactly the same corporate clichés as Regent's (illustrated by celebrity photos, in the UN version).

Back to the office...

Monday: "Traditionalists (1927 - 1945)... believe in the value of hard work, loyalty, and sacrifice and have respect for rules..." Among the wisdom offered: in the old days, generations lived and worked together in families. I have to bite my tongue to keep from saying, "Tell it to the kids sent to orphanages during the Depression, when their parents couldn't support them."

The session ends with obligatory Tom Brokaw quote.

It seemed I must have nodded off and missed a day, because by Tuesday we were already on Gen X. There was much "Yay, us!" at the reading of dates (1964 – 1982). Dates that apply to all attending—except for the fossil who's a bit stuck on critical thinking.

"Gen X-ers value work-life balance, and would turn down a promotion if it's not right for them." Now that made the group squirm. They looked at each other, unsure if they had heard correctly, yet reluctant to challenge the holy writ. Even so, I heard mutters of, "turn down a promotion...?"

(When I reported this later, Clever Sister said, "For a promotion? They'd turn Granny in—to the Gestapo!")

Well, it seems our supervisor had been in such a hurry to get to Gen X that he skipped Boomers. Day 3 was his backtrack, with such out of sequence revelations as, "Boomers are hard working, competitive, had to struggle for college and careers after the war." Um... didn't there use to be cheap tuition and plenty of work (or at least for white men)...?

As the "1946 - 1964" generation is not theirs, they had nothing to say. Although the group's designated joker (and designated butt of jokes) did suggest that he might be a boomer, since the dates include 1964. "You have corns older than that!" said the [manager] boss, to much hilarity over his witticism. But the thought that Gen X also starts in 1964 did provoke speculation that generational labels may overlap. It was a real head-scratcher, as they all are so willing to believe your dates are your traits, if the text hath so decreed.

That morning's Thought of the Day: "The older generation thought nothing of getting up at 5 am to work. And the younger generation doesn't think much of it, either." The [supervisor] boss cracked himself up—30 seconds later, when the meaning of what he had read managed to sink in.

Yes, it's a very, very long week, indeed... Day 4: "Millenials grew up with multi-tasking, and want frequent feedback." This time the boss was out, so this was proclaimed by a substitute—who also objected, on the basis of her own kid's behavior. Though I would just amend this by substituting "constant feedback from peers," for anything to do with the workplace.

Resuming her reading: "Millenials expect aunotomy in the workplace..." "aunotomy"... No one heard a thing—"aunotomy" must have seemed merely a big word known to the guru of Morning Huddle.

Aside from the morning rah-rah (and knowing I am the only one of the huddled who yearns to breathe free), there are other meetings. These days, the big ones are about imminent plans for making the whole institution "paperless." It will be a dream come true, bring the Millenium, or something like that, depending on the speaker's purity of faith (or talent at parroting institutional BS).

From what I've seen so far of the plans, they will make it take much more time to achieve the same results. And there appears to be no easy way of tracking work done, following up problems discovered later, or dealing with any other big-picture needs.

But it's just part of the escalating speed of makeovers—"Do it this way"; "Now do it that way"; "It's done this other way, and has never been otherwise"—in my department as well as all other parts of the organization of which I'm aware. Following one of the pep sessions, this suddenly popped into my head—

Ho-hum... In the ongoing psychological experiment that is the workplace, this sort of thing starts to seem like just your average executive decision—

Esposito: From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish.... In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check. Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now... 16 years old!