Hearts in misery

Today’s earworm is a nod to the bad week Kenneth “The Cheese” Cheseboro and Kraken Karen, Sidney Powell (both, BTW, lawyers), have had. They’re among the 18 co-conspirators indicted in Fulton County, Ga., with Cadet Bonespurs on RICO charges associated with attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

Karen and The Cheese demanded—as is their right under Georgia law—a speedy trial, so DA Fani T. Willis said, “Sure thing—y’all show up in the courthouse on 23 October. We’ll get ‘er done.” Calling their bluff, so to speak.

But then the two defendants immediately moved to sever their cases from one another, basically citing, “Ew—s/he has cooties and besides I’ve never met this sleazeball.”

However, Judge Scott McAfee reminded them of the definition of RICO under Georgia law—which is that anyone associated with any part of a criminal conspiracy is a co-conspirator and therefore cooties don’t count, so no severance.

So let’s have Neil Sedaka singing “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do”. Because it is.

Wild hearts

Time for more sidewalk art, found on the cluster tot lot path yesterday.

Someone really likes hearts.

 

Domestic wildlife

Came downstairs yesterday and this is what I saw as I walked into the kitchen:

Yes, that’s a slug. About four inches long.

I have no idea how it got into the house, except that it probably came in on the bottom of my shoes when it was much smaller. And, of course, no idea how long it’s been in my house.

Well, yesterday was its last day. It went into the kitchen sink, where it took a shower of kosher salt. Then out into the trash barrel.

I'm considering whether I need to take a blowtorch to the entire interior of the house.

Working it out

Staying for a moment on yesterday’s Labor Day theme, I’m seeing some post-pandemic shifts in white-collar employment trends. The big panic in 2020, of course, was “how are we going to hit our numbers this quarter if employees aren’t working in the office???” Turns out employees saved their corporate bacon by working from home, collaborating by video calls and chats, and generally stepping up to the challenges of managing professional and personal responsibilities. It wasn’t without strain, but it’s generally agreed that productivity met or bettered in-office metrics.

Go figure.

But starting last year, companies have begun flapping their hands about having staff return to offices, because reasons. Some of it is probably tied to angst about all the rent they’re paying for office space, which is empty or only sparsely occupied. I’m frankly unclear about the soundness of this rationale—it’s emotional rather that practical. They want to feel like they’re getting something for the tens of thousands they’re paying commercial real estate landlords, I guess.

Then they claim that, well, productivity may be right up there, but creativity is suffering, and people need to be in the office together for that to happen. Yeah, that’s the ticket. People need to be milling around in the open-plan office, bumping into one another and thereby sparking…big ideas! Innovation! 10x!

They never give you any examples of the “watercooler serendipity” moments that are supposedly no longer taking place. (And, to tell you the truth, while they yap a lot about innovation and 10x, any real suggestions of anything but incremental change make their bowels wobble.) What were all these acts of creativity that presumably provided all the sparkle magic that working remotely has removed? Dunno.

But corporations are telling us they’re serious now about RTO: workers better come back or else. They’ve moved from enticements (“Remember the free snacks/meals?”) to mandates to threats. Google has decreed that employees must adhere to the hybrid (three days per week) in the office. Anyone not complying will have that in their personnel file. Amazon is telling people who moved out of commuting distance to an office that they need to move back. Even Zoom, the company whose fortune was made by pandemic-induced working from home, is telling staff to get back in the office.

In my own search, I’m seeing more job listings that specify on-site and hybrid requirements than remote ones. seems like this change has taken place over the past few weeks.

Last week I had an interview with a recruiter for a cybersecurity firm in Columbia, Md. It was a terrific opportunity, one in which I’d really add value. The interview ended when the recruiter (who is situated in North Carolina and apparently hasn’t been in the corporate HQ because he said he had no notion of the geography) said that the person doing this job (completely research and analysis, so requiring nothing more from the company than a computer setup and connectivity) “has to be in the office on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.” He was very vague about why this was so.

For me that would be a 50 mile commute, from suburban Virginia across the District They Call Columbia to exurban Baltimore. It would be insane whether I did it by car or public transportation.

(Although that ended the interview, I emailed him with a copy of my résumé, including a matrix of my skills and experience mapped to the job requirements. He didn’t bother to reply.)

There are indeed some jobs that require the workers to be on site. Surgeon (although robotics and video are chipping away at that). Firefighter. Manicurist. Prison guard; probably. There are many more jobs that corporations have signaled they don’t think are worth staffing, eliminating them in favor of computerized self-service. Retail and airline operations now want you to perform all the tasks formerly attended to by humans.

But for whole swathes of the workforce, jobs can be performed wherever there are computers and connectivity, without any loss of productivity. The pandemic demonstrated that, and all this corporate assholery is just precisely that: management (who, let me point out, are not in the mandated return-to-office cohort) demanding that workers jump through hoops as a reminder of who holds the power in this equation.

It's nothing they’ve not tried before; it’s just dressed a little differently. But I’m wondering how it’s going to play in the GenZ era?

 

 

Gratitude Monday: Worthy of Their Hire

Here in the US, it’s Labor Day, the holiday that’s meant to honor the contribution of American workers to our society and economy. So, I’m expressing my gratitude for the benefits that organized labor has brought to the workplace. Yes, I’m talking labor unions. Without them, there’d be a whole lot more miserable employment conditions than exist even now.

There are basically only two reasons why you and I are not working in sweatshops with dangerous electrical wiring, hot and cold running vermin and no toilets—unions and litigation.

Business management in companies both large and small do not provide more or less sanitary and safe conditions, ventilation and some standard of minimum wage out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it because over the past 150 years unions have fought with blood and treasure for the concept that labor is part of the value-add of both products and services; and because they’re terrified that if they screw up and get sued, juries will strip their corporate assets in punitive damages like a plague of locusts ranging across Iowa.

I’m not saying that unions haven’t become part of the problem—many of them are every bit as bloated and arrogant and greedy as corporate boards, and in fact you’d have trouble distinguishing one stance from the other across the negotiating table. And I’m also not saying that America’s propensity toward litigiousness doesn’t suck up resources, like some cosmic Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, that couldn’t have been better spent on something like, oh, curing cancer.

But it takes the kind of jackhammer represented by Big Labor and Big Lawsuits to get the attention of the heirs of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. If you doubt this, I refer you to the history of the textile industry in America: the corporations first moved their factories from states with unions to the South (God bless right-to-work), and then—when even minimum wage became too much for them—to Mexico, India, China and other countries where there’s no concern about pesky things like sweatshop conditions, unsafe factory buildings or child labor.

And it’s not limited to schmattas, either. Thirty years ago during my sojourn in the great, cough, state of North Carolina (which is probably still electing Jesse Helms to the US Senate, corpse though he be), there was a fire in a chicken processing plant that killed 25 (mostly Latino) workers and injured 54 others. Exit doors from the factory floor had been locked, trapping the men and women in the inferno. Exactly like the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in 1911.

I’m not going to talk about the wages paid or the conditions in the factory, but the plant had never suffered a single safety inspection, so the managers weren’t troubled by having to fork out for any, you know, protections. North Carolina is a right-to-work state, and it don’t hold with no unions.

Let me also bring to your attention the decades of work by César Chávez and the United Farm Workers to bring decent wages, as well as working and living conditions, to the men, women and children who tend and harvest the food we eat. I know that I personally find it easier to swallow fruits and vegetables when I know they aren't the product of slavery-in-all-but-name.

Labor Day was made a national holiday in 1894, in the wake of the Pullman strike, which ended after President Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops to suppress the strikers. As a sop to thousands of workers who’d lost their jobs and their homes, Cleveland created a national holiday to “recognize” labor.

I find that a monumental act of condescension—declaring a holiday "for the workers", kind of like Flag Day, without any meaning behind it. It wasn’t even a paid holiday. And it was set for September to distinguish it from the international socialist/communist labor day of 1 May. But it played well with Cleveland’s corporate constituents.

So it’s incumbent upon us, in times where enormous inroads have been made in the gains unions won for us (I laugh at the notion of a 40-hour week, because no tech employer for the past 15 years has expected anything less than 60 hours per week from its salaried staff), to consider where we’d be if they hadn’t existed. There's a worrying trend in Red states to turn back the clock; think "child labor", and puke. So the still work to do.

I applaud workers at Starbucks and Amazon, among others, who are treading in the footsteps of the Wobblies and others as they organize, even in the face of all the intimidation the corporations throw at them. I stand in awe of the members of the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild/American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, who are striking for what’s essentially survival in the entertainment industry, against megalithic corporations whose senior management cannot fathom the notion of scraping away 0.013% of their profits to fairly compensate the people who are their product. I look forward to the time when unions help workers of all collars achieve balance in their work life.

And I am grateful today for the battles that labor unions fought. They didn’t always win, but they did move us forward.