I find it interesting that the NY Times published this article about bullying at school and then published this one about workplace bullies. I thought that this meant that the Times was doing a series, but unfortunately, they’re not. Which is too bad, because I think bullying is an interesting area to explore. It’s like there’s two worlds in America—the officially recognized one where people are kind and polite, and the one lurking right underneath where bullying happens.
The article about Billy Wolfe from Fayetteville, Arkansas is really the sort of feature story that the Times still excels at. It really captures the essence of bullying. The kid selected is picked for reasons lost to the mists of time, or most likely for arbitrary reasons that were rationalized after the fact. The abuse is back-breaking and non-stop. Most school officials look the other way, because, let’s face it, there’s almost something biological in people that makes them dislike the unpopular even if the unpopular are unpopular for no reason at all.
But what I really liked about the article was that it really clues you in to why bullies bully. Let’s face it; they’re proud of their behavior. Picking on other people to make yourself feel more powerful has this ability to make other people believe that you’re something special, at least for short periods of time. I got bullied in school a lot, but it really petered out in high school, and I think it’s because kids grow up and the social rewards of being brutish start to peter out as kids get more sophisticated. But Wolfe is 15, and so he’s in the thick of it.
In a study that seems almost designed to send a lot of people off in a defensive spin, the Institute for Social and Economic Research has released findings that stay-at-home mothers* tend to be less happy on average than women who have income-bearing work. Much less happy.
Of course, for those who think a woman’s place is in the home, this news is only relevant in the P.R. department. The idea that women should be “happy” performing their womanly functions only arose because of the demands made by feminists. So for your social conservatives, the idea is that women are made to mop, we’re all happier being ourselves, ergo, women are happiest pushing mops. Bona fide scientific evidence against this is mostly an attack on their P.R., not on any fundamental belief about women’s roles.
More problematic is what this means for people who accept that women have plenty of other roles to play in the world other than stay-at-home-mother, but nonetheless posit that it’s just another choice like any other, and they’re all perfectly fine and equal and don’t ask too many hard questions about why, if stay-at-home-parenting is a delight like any other, do men reject the opportunity? Yes, yes, there are men who stay at home—93,000 fathers compared to 5.4 million mothers in 2003. It’s kind of embarrassing, in the face of those statistics, to even get close to suggesting that the gendered nature of housewifery has changed one iota.
It’s not surprising that staying at home is correlated with lower levels of happiness, and it has nothing to do with devaluing the work or anything like that. The work is isolating, for one thing, and human beings are social animals. But I think it’s more than that—dependence can be debilitating to the ego, and so can doing work that is generally undervalued. While I have no doubt that a fraction of stay-at-home mothers are genuinely appreciated by their husbands and feel independent and valued, I suspect most families that resort to this model of family stick with the old-fashioned sexist frame that undervalues women and robs them of financial autonomy. After all, if you don’t bring in the money, you have to ask for it, and again, while there’s no doubt a fraction of husbands out there who are not going to abuse the power that comes with being the sole breadwinner, human nature dictates that power is corrupting and most men with that power will be less than perfectly benevolent dictators. Again, if these generalizations don’t fit you, calm down. Averages almost by definition require individual variation.
The survey found that part time workers with children did the best, probably because part time workers both had some financial autonomy and better-valued work outside the home, but also had more time freed up to attend to the plethora of at-home responsibilities that don’t dry up just because you get a job.
*I prefer the term “housewife”, which reminds people that men are in fact involved in the decision to pull a woman from the public workforce and keep her doing valuable, underpaid, and dependent work at home. It also gets us out of the media-preferred catfight “mommy wars” realm, which makes the staying at home vs. working thing sound like a battle between women that doesn’t involve men at all. But I understand and respect that some women would prefer to have themselves called stay-at-home mothers than housewives.
Update: In comments, Elaine brings up a good point. It’s a social thing as much, if not more than a sexual thing. A man who is privately excited by the new post-pregnancy curves could still be embarrassed to present a wife who has them. A woman in the job market, responding to the bias against mothers, might wish to erase some motherhood evidence from her body to get a leg up at work.
A gazillion people have emailed me this article in the NY Times (link to Salon, because I couldn’t get the Times to load) about plastic surgeons who’ve zeroed in on the potential of pathologizing the stretched-out and puffier forms the body can take after having a baby or two or more. You have your babies and then off to the plastic surgeon to make sure your husband gets to fuck the same body before you had kids. The package includes a tummy tuck, breast implants (or a lift), and general liposuction, which I do believe has the highest infection rate of all plastic surgery. Turns out the popular notion of the “MILF” hasn’t taken hold with a lot of people who can afford to erase the “M” part from their bodies.
The word “vanity” is getting thrown around a lot, though last I checked, being vain is the only acceptable reason to get plastic surgery, now that a full 95% of women claim to be doing it for themselves and not to fit a beauty standard set upon women or compete with other women for male attention. I would like to quarrel with the idea that women who get the “mommy makeover” are vain. In my eyes, they are economic rationalists of the highest order. They have figured out what feminists have been noting for a long time—that the gap between men and women economically is now more a gap between mothers and everyone else. Once you have a baby, your value on the market as a worker goes through the floor, relatively speaking, and your dependence on male income into the household to maintain your living standard rises, especially now that you have dependents. Even if you have a job, your ability to climb the ladder at work is getting a pinch due to discrimination against mothers.
In other words, your need to maintain your husband’s sexual interest in you is rising at the exact same time your body is losing some of the markers of conventional attractiveness. Is it any wonder that some women buy a little painful, expensive advantage against competitors for their husband’s attention in such an environment? You need to keep him or replace him easily more now that your value as a worker has decreased.
Others have seen this and thought, “More evidence that we have impossible beauty standards,” and that’s true. But it’s also true that this is evidence that we need federally subsidized day care, more worker protections for working mothers, better maternal leave (and maybe even mandatory paternal leave), more flex time at work, and less social stigma on motherhood.
Neil had a post up last month about how the attempts to equate John Edwards taking money from unions and trial lawyers with Hillary Clinton taking money from corporate lobbyists is part of the larger conservative effort to redefine “class warfare” in a way that makes it look like workers’ rights are a bad thing.
John Edwards once got a debate question about how he could consistently rail against corporate lobbyists while accepting lots of donations from trial lawyers. Aren’t they just as bad? And how about the other group that likes Edwards so much — organized labor?
The answer is simple. If you think that consumers have been robbing corporations blind, or that the balance of power between workers and executives is unfairly tilted against executives, then these donors should make you look darkly at John Edwards. But if you think consumers need better protection against corporations whose products disembowel little girls, or if you think that the next president needs to fight tooth and nail for working people’s interests, you should be happy that trial lawyers and unions support him.
The “omigod trial lawyers and unions” crap is straight up monocle-clutching robber baron shit. It’s a philosophy that would posit that the real tragedy of a mine collapsing is not the loss of the coal miners’ lives, but the loss of profits that come from rebuilding the mines. It’s the philosophy that made people defend child labor and shoot into crowds striking for some time off so their families know what they look like. It’s the blatant belief that anyone who clears less than a million a year is subhuman. Literally subhuman, as demonstrated by this advertisement that ran in the NY Times a week ago.
At least you’re not a porn video clerk. Unless you are. (Hat tip.)
This article by Shankar Vedantam about the pay gap between men and women and the role of sexism is really interesting. It’s been well understood for a long time now that one reason that men get paid more than women is that men haggle over salaries more often. Vedantam trots out the usual evidence for this: Male doctoral students are more aggressive about asking for teaching assignments than female doctoral students, in experiments where subjects are given money to perform tasks men will ask for more than women more often, men are far more willing than women to haggle over salaries when they’re hired or ask for promotions.
The usual interpretation of the evidence by both feminists and conservatives and squishy sexist liberals is that men are more aggressive than women. Why men are more aggressive is usually the point of controversy. Conservatives would have you believe male aggression and therefore women’s second class status is biological and immutable, a matter of men having more testosterone and less estrogen or whatever the handy essentialist theory is today. (Read Woman: An Intimate Geography to see why biological theories of male aggression are suspect—female aggression isn’t as monolithically muted as people would have you believe nor is testosterone related to aggression as much as you’d been led to believe. Social pressure pushes women into a situation where they have to channel their aggression into passive-aggression while men are given social space to use their bodies in a more aggressive fashion, but that doesn’t say much about baseline aggression levels. Nor should assertiveness be taken as the same biological phenomenon as aggression. Someone asking you out on a date is not performing a muted version of a rape.) The mainstream of feminism has mostly taken to arguing that men are trained from birth to be more assertive, suggesting that the solution is finding ways to bring girls up to be more assertive. Feminists also maintain that discrimination is a factor in the pay gap, but that nuanced position is often lost in the debates over nature vs. nurture.
But Linda C. Babcock and Hannah Riley Bowles addressed what’s always bothered me about the parameters of the debate—what if, instead of saying that men are more aggressive, we rephrased the assertion to be, “Women are more docile by training.” It doesn’t initially seem like a big change, but if you refocus the question on what training women receive to be more docile, then you’ve repositioned the debate on actual discrimination that causes the pay gap. Women are more docile than men, because they’ve been trained to be more docile. And the way we are trained to be more docile is by having our attempts to ask for more smacked down while men’s attempts to ask for more are rewarded, aka discrimination. Therefore, women’s lack of aggression stems from a realistic assessment of the likelihood that asserting themselves will work, as is men’s.
Bloggers I love are mocking the hell out of Peggy Noonan’s miserable new edition to the “you can’t get good help these days” genre. She has a series of complaints about overly pushy and underly pushy servicepeople and salesmen, but she is vague and doesn’t really want to commit to anything but blaming the little people for being insufferably and irritatingly alive.
That said, she does have one thing mildly right—the increase in aggressive sales tactics over the past couple of decades has made shopping or even obtaining customer service or leaving your house a miserable experience.
Here’s a moment in the pushiness of the Gilded Age. I walk into a shop on Madison Avenue daydreaming, trying to remember what it was I thought last week I should pick up, what was it . . .
“Hi! Let me help you find what you’re looking for!” She is a saleswoman, cracking gum with intensity, about 25 years old, and she has made a beeline to her mark. That would be me.
“Mmmm, actually–”
“We have summer sweaters on sale. What size are you?!” Her style is aggressive friendliness.
In another shop, as soon as I walk in the door, “How are you today? How can I help you?” Those dread words.
“Oh, I’m sort of just looking.”
“I like your bag!”
“Um, thanks.” What they are forcing you to do is engage. If you engage–”Um, thanks”–you have a relationship. If you have a relationship, it’s easier for them to turn you upside down and shake the coins from your pockets.
It is like this in all the shops I go in now, except for the big stores (Macy’s, Duane Reade drugstore), where they ignore you.
There are strategies. You can do the full Garbo: “Leave me alone.” But they’ll think you’re a shoplifter and watch you. Or the strong lady with boundaries: “Thank you, if I need help I’ll ask.” But your reverie is broken. Or the acquiescent person: “Take me under your leadership, oh aggressively friendly salesperson.” But this is bowing to the pushiness of the Gilded Age.
From Ezra, I see that David Brooks is trying to minimize the damage done under the Bush administration to the great unwashed 95% of us who have to actually work for a living by claiming, falsely, that the economy is working out just great. In particular, Brooks claims that real wages are not an issue, that what feels like slippage and stagnation in your wallet is actually rising. You must just be crazy if you think otherwise.
I’m no economist, but claims like Brooks’ send me into a skeptical nosedive. I live in a town heavily populated with government employees of some sort, the sort of people who actually have old-fashioned stability and middle class wages to live on, and even then, I know their annual percentage wages are below the inflation rate. It seems to me if you can buy less every year with your annual salary than you could the year before, then that’s a sign that your real wages are going down, not up. Considering that gas prices are rising so quickly and taking food prices with them, this pinch seems even more pronounced than what it was before. Granted, there’s probably some economist mojo going on that I don’t understand with this, but in real-world, human-beings-trying-to-survive terms, the Bush economic policies of robbing working people blind to increase the wealth at top doesn’t actually do anything to help said working people.
Luckily, Ezra’s put together a number of refutations that demonstrate that Brooks is engaging in misinformation and blatant lying. In his initial post, he easily demonstrates that wages aren’t up and the poor are (unsurprisingly) not doing so well under Bush. He follows up to show that Brooks lied even more than he initially thought. In fact, it looks like Brooks might have packed in more lies and bullshit into this small space than previously thought possible, outside of the realm of speeches offered by members of the Bush administration, of course.
I get all red-faced and stompy when I see various misinformation techniques, from outright lying to pretending that the improvements in the fortune of the very rich is enough to bolster the claim that the economy is doing well, used to cover up what is essential a huge transfer of wealth from your pocket to those who need the money the least. It’s worse than most garden variety political bullshit, because these lies that are meant to establish the false belief that most Americans are doing just fine under conservative economic policies have a great potential to be internalized by hapless, hard-working people. If you believe that everyone else is doing great, then your stagnant wages/unemployment/impending bankruptcy seem like personal failures, when it’s quite likely that you’re just being ground up by a system designed to grind up hard-working people like you so that the very wealthiest can own more houses than they really have time to visit. Lies like the ones Brooks are telling are a form of kicking people while they’re down; first you grind them up in the system and then you make them feel like it’s their fault that you fucked them over.
Yes, I realize that Brooks is just another conservative with his head up his ass and he probably isn’t thumping his fingers together with the glee of getting that a dig in on the very people he helps screw over economically with his ass-kissing support of the Republican party. He just doesn’t care about people enough to care who he fucks over with his defense of conservative economic policies. Still, it feels like an added dig, a desire not just to exploit people but to make sure they feel as bad as possible about it. It’s a classic example, in the end, about how indifference to people’s suffering can often be indistinguishable from openly encouraging it.
Matt and Atrios have both come to the defense of Harry Potter in the face of some cheap literary snobbery being shot at the books. What I find interesting about the phenomenon is that taking shots at Harry Potter is far more trite than anything Rowling put to paper, except maybe the scene of Harry yelling at Dumbledore. If you’re going to try to be a literary snob, please aim higher than, “I can read big kid books.” Which is what Ron Charles does with his cheap shot snobbery.
But all around me, I see adults reading J.K. Rowling’s books to themselves: perfectly intelligent, mature people, poring over “Harry Potter” with nary a child in sight. Waterstone’s, a British book chain, predicts that the seventh and (supposedly) final volume, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” may be read by more adults than children. Rowling’s U.K. publisher has even been releasing “adult editions.” That has an alarmingly illicit sound to it, but don’t worry. They’re the same books dressed up with more sophisticated dust jackets — Cap’n Crunch in a Gucci bag.
I pity the adult who, in a misguided attempt to feel better about himself, squelches the child inside. Surely there are better methods of feeling like a grown-up than forsaking all childish pleasures like breakfast cereals, fantasy novels, comic books, and masturbation, right? Maybe you could buy a mutual fund or learn to drive a car.
Photo: Triangle Factory Fire
Sheila O’Malley reminds me that today marks the 96th anniversary of the Triangle Factory fire. Sheila has a link up to some pictures, or you can visit Cornell’s Triangle Fire web site.
Fortunately, nowadays workers are treated much better than the workers who died at Triangle, and even if they are not, at least it’s no longer happening on U.S. soil as much, and that is what matters.
A giant has passed. Over his many decades of work in California’s wine industry, Ernest Gallo was a central figure in some of the most important farm labor organizing in US history. Unfortunately, he was on the wrong side.
Oddly, Gallo died during one of the historical periods in which his wines were not being boycotted by the UFW. So go ahead and drink to his memory with some of his plonk, and enjoy. Because right now it’s Krug/Mondavi that’s the bad stuff:
¡Viva La Causa, Ernesto!
The US has hit a 32-year-high when it comes to the number of Americans living in poverty.
WASHINGTON - The percentage of poor Americans who are living in severe poverty has reached a 32-year high, millions of working Americans are falling closer to the poverty line and the gulf between the nation’s “haves” and “have-nots” continues to widen.
A McClatchy Newspapers analysis of the 2005 census figures, the latest available, found that nearly 16 million Americans are living in deep or severe poverty.
A family of four with two children and an annual income of less than $9,903 - half the federal poverty line - was considered severely poor in 2005. So were individuals who made less than $5,080 a year.
This isn’t because people are lazy, or that we’re lazier now than in the past. Although productivity is up, wages are down. Middle- and low-wage workers are not seeing their pay keep pace with inflation, let alone productivity. They’re being squeezed. The power of unions have been eroded, and some of our so-called allies buy into the anti-union rhetoric of the right. We buy into and never question the ideals of personal responsibility for everyday people, without holding the people in power accountable or pushing policies that provide working people with fairness and justice. (Here’s an example: When banks take part in the feeding frenzy of sub-prime lending and mortgages, it’s stupid to tell people that they should just find a cheaper place to live when the entire market is overinflated. )
Then again, maybe we’re all being selfish and lazy. Maybe we should cut out the lattes. Maybe we should stop eating out every day. Maybe we should get a second job and still take out time for our families. Maybe we should just stop whining and complaining, and realize that the money should rightfully go to our betters.
Not that I’m being sarcastic or anything. Oh, no.
One of the lucky ones? Photo by matx
Last week*, The National Organization for Women posted their letter to the Senate (PDF) supporting the minimum wage increase that the U.S. Senate is expected to pass today.
Included as an attachment to the letter are what libertarian and conservative bloggers would doubtless term “a bunch of anecdotal data that doesn’t prove anything,” but what NOW simply calls “real people’s minimum-wage stories,” because that’s what they are. I wrote earlier this week about the tendency of right-wing pundits to abstract human beings right out of existence when calling for greater civility in online discourse, but really, it’s a habit that permeates nearly all conservative thinking: If I can reduce you to a lone data point on the great big scatter plot of life, I can deem your lived experience irrelevant, and that makes me feel better about ignoring your problems.
They won a contract! The reader who emailed me about the abuse she suffered in jail after getting arrested at the protests emailed a bunch of us to remind us: Civil disobedience can work!
The contract seems kind of paltry to my spoiled eyes—minor raises, increased hours, but no full-time work. They also got some paid holidays and vacation. (A commenter at Ezra’s points out that they got their raises and hours close enough to benefits-bearing that it may become easier for the company to topple over soon.) Nonetheless, this victory is something to crow about because not only will these minor improvements do a lot to relieve the workers, but it’s a big step forward for the continuing success of the SEIU, which is the fastest-growing union in the country. When I first started hearing about them a number of years ago, I recall thinking that unionized service industry workers should be obvious, but to Americans it probably isn’t. Hopefully this success will continue to raise their profile, which will in turn embolden more service industry employees to unionize.
From Progressive Gold, I found a story at MyDD of the cops deciding their job is union-busting through violence. SEIU is organizing janitors’ strikes to protest the ridiculously low wages and benefits janitors get, and the cops decided to strike break by trampling protestors with their horses. Here’s pictures:
MyDD also has some video footage. One of the protestors had a horse step on her arm and was rushed to the hospital. The rest were arrested.
I’ve been in a crowd the cops decided to trample with horses before—just downtown standing on the street—and suffice it to say, they are hardly exacting tools. I got beaned upside the head with a horse butt, but was okay, if miffed. (I was the dictionary definition of “standing there minding her own business”.) But directing horses over a group of people laying on the ground? What if a horse stepped on someone’s head?
I’ve been meaning to blog the crisis in Oaxaca, which has gotten more attention since journalist Brad Will was shot to death while amongst the protestors. In a lot of ways, I think I’m mostly in shock (though I shouldn’t be) at the depravity of this world that the police state is shooting protestors led by a teachers’ union.
BFP has the details. At this point in time, there’s not much I can say for what we can do for the resistance in Oaxaca, but publicizing their struggle is at least for something.
For those who don’t know, Discoballmouseatarians have our own special religious garb.
As of yet, no one knows that this is an indicator that the wearer is a member of a minority religion, but now that I’ve come out with it, I expect any day now that you’ll start seeing bullshit arguments about how Wham! Tshirts are the source of sexual harassment, physically prevent the wearer from speaking, or are somehow a form of sex discrimination in and of themselves. But at the present time, people indulgently assume we’re trying to be ironic. But just you wait.
In case you haven’t heard, the latest dust-up is over a teacher in England who might lose her job because she wears a veil to show her allegiance to one patriarchal Sky Fairy while the majority of people around her believe in an entirely different patriarchal Sky Fairy. Though to be fair, there’s almost surely some atheists out there who approve of haranguing Aishah Azmi for her choice of clothing because even without the justification of saying Jeebus told them to, some people love to dogpile a woman they think is out of line.
What’s frustrating about these dust-ups is that it seems that a lot of people can’t tell the difference between disagreeing with someone’s beliefs and trying to impose that disagreement on them by force. If you’re trying to force someone else to give up a deeply held belief and to live like you do, that doesn’t say much for your confidence in your own views. In fact, trying to win someone over with reasonable arguments instead of bullying them is part of the Church of the Mouse and the Disco Ball’s low key belief system. We Discoballmouseatarians sum it up as such: “You can lead someone to the dance floor, but you can’t make them dance, much less be any good at it.” And that goes double for instances of cutting someone else’s paycheck off for harmless religious observances—they’re not going to be persuaded to dance to your beat if they’re worried about how they’re going to pay their rent.
Not that I think that people who want the government to punish people for having religious views different than your own actually want those of us who disagree with them to convert. Truth told, I think for the majority of the people clamoring to have Azmi fired, the main allure doesn’t go any deeper than wanting to dogpile someone for being different.
How do you not mock that?
There’s been a lot of politically motivated firings at PBS, but few have reached the heights of ridiculousness that were reached when Melanie Martinez, the host of children’s show “The Good Night Show”, was fired for being in two satires of abstinence-only education 7 years ago. Feministing now has an interview up with her, and it’s pretty interesting. She’s in good humor about the whole thing.
Martinez was obviously fired for two major reasons: 1) She criticized BushCo policy, if indirectly, and so it was an attempt to silence through intimidation dissenters of any BushCo policy large or small and 2) She exposed the lie that is the Madonna/whore dichotomy. The first one is obviously terrible, but it’s been covered before and I don’t know what much more I can say about it beyond pointing out that this sort of political tactic is undemocratic. The second one is of interest to me, because it seems so ridiculous on its surface. If you watch the videos, they are mostly kind of silly, but I suppose there’s no doubt that Martinez knows what sex is and has a raunchy sense of humor about it. In wingnut eyes, that sort of knowing about sex apparently precludes being in charge of children—which is pretty confounding to those of us who remember that the number of virgin births in human history is somewhere between 0 and 1.
But this quote from Martinez about the mail she got from supporters who were angry about #1 is fairly illuminating on the Madonna/whore dichotomy.
Friends have sent me links to blogs, and it seems like it’s only support but some of the blogs’ petitions have comments like: “Give her another chance, you were young once,� “People can change in seven years,� “She is a mom now.� Please, nothing has changed the way I feel about the videos. I think they are hilarious and still a relevant parody on what the kids are taught in school today.
The decision to be in the videos was made by a socially aware adult married actress, albeit a comedic one! Not as a “mistake� or a “poor decision made in college which should now be forgiven.� Definitely not a “skeleton in my closet�! It’s always been listed on my resume. I wanted to act in them because it was a funny smart parody of the abstinence-only teaching in schools that I am against. Not abstinence per se, but the popular federally funded abstinence-only curriculum. Children deserve to be taught a responsible comprehensive sex education curriculum. The spoofs were a way to get people to realize how absurd the notion is, particularly back when the video was made, the Not Me Not Now group. They base their teachings on scare tactics. And what about alternative lifestyles? To them, they don’t exist!
I think it’s funny that even many of her supporters still buy into Madonna/whore dichotomy in that they believe that her growing up and becoming a mother has somehow purged her of that slutty knowingness of things like vibrators and anal sex, or at least the willingness to publically support sex education and contraceptive use. I’m beginning to wonder if a lot of people just have a simple formulation: The penis goes in woman and taints her with evil, but if a baby comes out later, that purifies her. And if mothers are so pure, how the hell do people think women have multiple children?
At least this formulation explains one thing, which is why anti-choicers go after pregnant women seeking abortion so doggedly—in no small part, they see her as abandoning her opportunity to give birth and shove the sluttiness out.
Interesting post from John of Dyxmaxion World over at Ezra’s over the weekend about the effect of the events in Seattle in 1999 on the debate over global trade, and the success Cambodia has had with, “the inclusion of human welfare concerns as part of the calculus of capitalist investment,” showing that “improved working conditions can boost exports.” Anyway John says about Seattle:
Of course, this isn’t the criticism we heard from the major media. Instead, we were told that the anti-globalization movement was, in Thomas Friedman’s words, “The Coalition to Keep the World’s Poor People Poor.” Nick Kristof regaled us with stories of young women who escaped prostitution to work in sweatshops. Even Paul Krugman, in his pre-shrill days, dismissed any substantive criticism of neoliberal economics - though Krugman at least had the intellectual honesty to engage those arguments, in his April 2000 column “A real nut case.” (For Krugman’s column, and the response to it, see here.)
The reaction of the neoliberal philosophers to any critiques, including advocating stronger labour protections, was to say that we on the left had no idea what we were talking about (we hadn’t taken Econ 101, obviously) and that our proposals would just make things worse. As the above example of Cambodia shows, that simply wasn’t true.The success of Seattle, more than anything, was breaking the consensus that existed in the public realm before then. An important fact that often goes unmentioned is that while the op-ed page of the NYT might have been unanimous, there has always been a raging debate in the academic sphere over what the proper mix of policies for development is. (My favourite source for anti-consensus economic thinking is the Center for Economic and Policy Research.) For Friedman, Kristof, and yes, Krugman to try and present the issue as a consensus was dishonest, and it’s a good thing that we’re seeing the Washington Consensus challenged.
I had never thought about how one sided the globalization debate was prior to Seattle, before. It obviously was, and a lot of ways still is, but I had never really thought of the significance of that massing of protesters before as an indication that the neo-liberal consensus on trade was not in fact a consensus and was very much opposed by many. And in a lot of ways it brought, a somewhat more critical view to the public discussion. Maybe not by much, but some. The impact of globalization is being considered more seriously by more now. Anyway, I think that’s very exciting.
That you’re too stupid to live.
This presentation put on by the OSHA director of BushCo–who is supposed to be working for, not against workplace safety–erases all doubt that the members of the Bush administration are knee jerk class warriors and will take any and all opportunities to brainlessly attack the working class as a matter of principle.
Number one thing that BushCo thinks of you if you work for a living–you have the mental capacity of a four-year-old. Here is an illustration from director Ed Foulke’s presentation:
I shit you not. He actually has children drawing adults getting themselves into dangerous situations so that he and his effete, aristocratic friends can sit around laughing, “Ha, the plebians are so stupid that we need small children to educate them.”
But all this presentation does is illustration how Foulke thinks like Marie Antoinette. As Jordan at Confined Space says, the overriding theme of these pictures should be evident to anyone who’s ever actually had to work a day in her life. Let me show you the pictures, I’m sure we mental inferiors to the huge brains at BushCo will get it better than they do.
For those of us who realize that the poor certainly don’t have cake if they don’t have bread, it’s evident that what each of these pictures illustrates is someone who has been told to work in unnecessarily hazardous conditions or be fired. While I’m sure that Foulke believes your average blue collar worker has a trust fund to fall back on and only performs these jobs for fun, the reality is that people are making quick and dirty risk assessments of these situations and realizing they’re willing to risk it rather than willing to go without food or rent money.
This is why Bush would never come out and explain himself to Cindy Sheehan. How do you say out loud that the lives of ordinary Americans are worthless to you? This is probably also why they’re chomping at the bit to take away people’s reproductive rights–one, so that people in these hazardous situations have big families to feed and even more incentive to put their lives in danger and two so that the bosses never have to worry where their replacement workers are going to come from.
That’s Tom McClintock’s anti-minimum wage argument in a nutshell. It’s the same hysterical hand-wringing you see everywhere else, that if the minimum wages goes up to meet inflation then all the jobs will disappear, just you wait and see. I love that argument, since it’s based on the assumption that labor isn’t actually a requirement of running a business and paying your workers is basically charity. For what it’s worth, I think the mania for slashing labor costs comes from the desire for the bosses to maintain that illusion, that they don’t need the workers. Because once you admit that your business only exists because of the labor of others, you realize that your ownership/power exist only due to something that I won’t quite charitably call a collective delusion.
This might be my favorite part:
If a simple legislative act increasing the minimum wage to $7.75 is all that is needed to improve the lot of the working poor by just a little, then why not raise it to $10 an hour and get them to the poverty level? For that matter, why not raise it to $50 an hour, assuring every working Californian a comfortable living? The truth is that if your labor is worth $6.75 an hour and the minimum wage is raised to $7.75, you simply become unemployable. The first rung of the ladder is gone, and there’s no place to start.
The first rung jobs will be gone, but apparently he’s unconcerned that the management jobs will stay put. Because there will still be money in play without anyone out there actually doing the profit-producing work, you see. You can sell widgets day in and day out without anyone making widgets to sell–didn’t we learn that in the dot com boom? Also, there’s no reason not to drive down the wages of the working class because there’s no reason to think that in order for the bosses to sell widgets there should be people with enough money to buy widgets as well.
Frankly, I’m not sure why McClintock is bothering to write this editorial at all. The rich will do just fine with no one making or buying widgets–they’ll still make money somehow. By magic, if I recall correctly. Hell, I don’t see why we don’t all magic some money into existence without having any actual work done, so no one has to slave away all day for a paycheck that can’t even keep a roof over their heads ever again.
(Thanks for the picture, epi.) For the record, these are good Christian pandas–they are not having fun but doing their duty. But a cute duty it turns out to be.
Take it from this porn liberal, there are lots of enemies of sex out there. And they are right wingers. Why some liberals find this incessant need to keep pretending that feminists are trying to ruin their fun when they have perfectly good enemies on the right, I’ll never know.
Actually, I do know. They aren’t liberal or progressive, at least not when it comes to gender issues. And as a big proponent of sex-positivity, let me be the first to declare that this attitude is just as sex-negative as anything flying out of Rick Santorum’s mouth.
The reasons for the attention may be worth pondering. Countless public figures have been accused of sexual harassment since the world learned that the semen-like stain on Monica Lewinsky’s dress was, in fact, semen. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 2003 gubernatorial campaign was dogged with numerous accusations of unsolicited groping. Last month, Australia’s Labor Party leader John Brogden attempted suicide after he admitted to fondling a reporter while drunk.
Still, Dov Charney is a relatively unknown figure, and Overmyer says she is surprised by the extent of the public’s interest. She suggests it’s not Charney’s specific actions but his company’s sexually brazen culture that’s on trial. In many ways, Overmyer may be right: fifteen years after Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas insinuated sexual harassment into the popular consciousness, a new wave of court decisions, legislation and business practices is renewing the debate.
Is Dov Charney the tighty-whitied Rosa Parks of those who seek to desegregate business and pleasure?
Same old chauvinism disguised as “sex positivity”. Wanting a world where women can feel positive about sex, where it’s not a condition of our employment or survival, where it’s not used to humiliate or overpower us, is “sex negativity”, apparently. If a woman doesn’t like being held up for ridicule by an ass-grabbing asshole, then god knows she’s a dour feminist who hates sex. Fucking your subordinates is the brand-new sex positivity. It’s so brand new that Strom Thurmond was engaging in it when he impregnated his 15-year-old maid. Nothing more daring than bringing back the era of the secretary who plays wife to her boss in all sorts of ways, while of course not even having the privileges given to the actual wife. Men are so oppressed by feminists who want to take away their sex toys female subordinates, that maybe the only way to rectify this is to assign every well-off man his very own sexy secretary who has to have sex with him or else sleeps in the snow. It’s only fair.
Man, when they made it illegal to fondle women at work and intimidate them by hanging out and appraising their body parts, they might as well have banned sex. What we silly sex-hating feminists don’t get is that sex is zero sum game. If women can feel good about sex instead of afraid of having it used as a weapon to put us in our place, then men have to lose by definition.
If Charney is such a hotshot superstud, then why can’t he just suck it up and lay off his employees? If he’s near as hot as he says he is, then he should surely be able to get laid by a woman who he’s not paying, I would think.
Pinko Feminist Hellcat has more.
Tangentially related–Susie Bright and Ariel Levy talk about real sex positivity. You know, the kind that Charney types aren’t so hot on, the kind where women are more than props for men’s ego trips.
I agree with Ol Cranky wholeheartedly–the decision by the Supreme Court of California determining that a manager having sex with his subordinates can be the basis of a sexual harassment lawsuit does not bode well for Dov Charney. And all I have to say to this is DOH. Of course having sex with your subordinates can create a hostile enviroment even without any over quid pro quo stuff going on.
One problem I think with people’s understanding of sexual harassment laws is that it isn’t just harassment that’s at stake. It’s a matter of discrimination. In an atmosphere where having sex with boss is winked at–something that’s actually pretty standard in some industries that you more, um, artistic types might be familiar with–it’s pretty much accepted that the woman who brings her kneepads to work is going farther in her career than the woman who does not. Unless one’s sexual skills are part of the actual job, which they are if you are a prostitute or a porn actor and that’s pretty much it, then one’s willingness to have sex with someone shouldn’t be part of your career advancement.
As Ol Cranky puts it, this entire debate isn’t just between women who’ll fuck the boss and women who won’t, but matters very much to men and will more and more as the traditional belief that women aren’t as smart or talented as men gets put to rest, since that means that the boss won’t be thinking so much “should I hire a man for his brains or a woman for the sex” when he knows that a woman can offer both sex and brains to him. (Or vice versa, I suppose, though I doubt many female bosses are willing to risk their reputations by fucking their underlings.)
And of course, this is also unfair to the women who do have sex with the boss, because even if it’s not a quid pro quo situation, it’s hard really to argue that a woman is in a position to be fully consenting if she knows that her promotion or even her job is in jeopardy if she says no. She may even swear up and down that she wanted to, but that’s a troublesome thing to say, especially if it’s coming from a woman who wouldn’t have had sex with that particular man if she just knew him as a friend. All around, sex with underlings should simply be avoided just as surely as teachers shouldn’t be fondling their students. Too much trouble. If you’re really in love and it’s worth it, then you can get another job. If it’s just sex you want, go outside of work for it.
