You should read lots of Studs Terkel. A great man.
ST's Working could be like a Bible, a bedside book. Terkel was a genius at interviewing, getting monologues that show how extraordinary everybody is.
Watch the kind of stuff in the OP. I am not as concerned with unemployment or employment to population ratio as I am with wage-share of National Income or wages + Benefits. This is not so much about social justice as that I believe economic growth comes from Capitalists investing to meet increased worker consumption. Kalecki.
Even Krugman believes "sticky wages" are the problem in slow growth, and wants to slash wages, through devaluation or inflation. This is not only grossly unjust, but will neither accelerate growth or even increase the rate of profit.
If wage-share does not increase very soon, Capital will spin like a top seeking imaginary profits in fictitious capital transactions (capital savings) and we will crash.
Google means never having to admit you don't get a reference.
If Marx were a DC tour guide, he would have written Das Kapitol.
Anyway, except for 2.1, which I can't speak to having never read it, I agree with bob.
David Dayen on Student Loans guess he's freelancing. Longish, with lots of links.
Princeton professor Jesse Rothstein argued in a recent working paper that graduates burdened by debt will choose higher-paying jobs to pay off the loans, draining the talent pool for lower-paid, but critical, "public interest" job sectors like education, government or nonprofits. This further erodes the nation's seed corn and funnels the best and brightest into the financial industry or other higher-paying power centers
It's a plan.
Obamas Fix Nearly as Bad as GOP I think it's worse.
Here's the problem from the student debtors' perspective: The president's plan doesn't cap the rates, which means they could spike to unprecedented heights as the economy recovers. (Right now, the ten-year note pays interest at around two percent, but before the recession it was closer to five. Even at that unremarkable level, figuring in the president's "add-on"--which would put the rate 0.93 to 3.93 percentage points above that of the ten-year note, depending on the type of loan--pushes students nearly to or over the dreaded 6.8 percent fixed rate.) The plan that passed the House last week, written by Representative John Kline, caps rates at a steep 8.5 percent.
Don't listen to Krugman on "bond vigilantes" Remember Paul Volcker, and understand that Bernanke can take interest rates to 20% overnight. Slowly boiling the frog is the more likely scenario.
Oh, and Obama is evil.
Google means never having to admit you don't get a reference.
I did google him. But I've never read anything by him and hadn't known who he was.
Reading his complete works is probably too much work for a blog post.
There ought to be a "Best of Studs Terkel" or Studs Terkel's Greatest Hits" or something. Bob could select and edit it.
Working title: "The Party at Doggie and Stud's"
So I bought my copy of "Working" a couple of years ago, and it's quite good. Where to next? "The Good War"?
10: That is an exceptionally low bar to clear.
13: The Good War is outstanding. Working is outstanding. Race is interesting but dated (someone will be along momentarily to explain that it's timeless, I'm sure). I like Talking to Myself quite a lot. Same with Chicago.
Oh, The Great Divide is also really interesting. And so, too, is My American Century and Terkel's book about faith.
13: Hard Times for the relevance, then maybe Division Street, or according to interest.
People do know that some interview tapes are On Line
Hmm, there's also The Studs Terkel Reader.
Google means never having to admit you don't get a reference.
Incidentally, this is why I'm excited about getting Glass, so that when neb starts reading Heidegger at a party I can flick my eyes to the side then knowingly nod. I actually do this in meetings, if someone mentions a researcher or named chemical reaction or protein I don't know I'll pull out my phone and check it so I understand the context.
Oh, I can't believe I didn't mention Hard Times, which, especially when read in tandem with a good history of the Depression, is probably Terkel's best work.
I can't believe that there isn't a definitive literary biography of Terkel. Am I missing something?
re: 20
Presumably with some sort of fMRI add-on, so that your colleagues/neb don't hear you speaking out loud?
The article has a touch frustration with, "powerful well-off person finally figures out something that most people have known for years" I'm inclined to think better late than never, and that it's good that she went and paid attention.
Back to the original post, this is exactly the reaction I had. Who is this person who doesn't know that showing up at a jobs fair with a resume is a terribly unlikely way of getting a decent job, and what rock have they been under?
25: Someone who hasn't been out of a job and looking in decades, if ever.
I think the "remove yourself from consideration for other jobs to get a 25% chance at a temporary contract job" is new.
I've tried to read a couple of Studs Terkel books and, I suppose to my shame, found them kind of boring, in the way that newspaper columnists who pay a lot of attention to people who make a big deal of their hometowns and the fact that they come from those hometowns are kind of boring, but that was probably just adolescent cynicism on my part.
in the way that newspaper columnists who pay a lot of attention to people who make a big deal of their hometowns and the fact that they come from those hometowns
I am not sure I recognize this genre.
Although it's not like I've been reading a lot of newspaper columnists lately, so what do I know? Nothing, that's what! NOTHING.
27: I'd gladly sign such a contract and violate it immediately. I seriously doubt they'd do anything and if they did chances are whatever penalty they managed to extract would be relatively minor, I assume.
30, 31: That genre tends, these days, toward the "reasonable right wing," like David Brooks and that other dipshit with the beard-playing-the-part-of-his-jawline at the NYT, but I think it used to be a full-spectrum cliché: liberal columnists would heap praise on some poor benighted bastard for being stupid noble enough to escape his hometown, attend good schools, see the larger world and them come back and teach ninth-grade health class.
Or Charles Kuralt, except on paper.
Every now and then my cynicism shocks even me.
Burmashave.
24- I believe if it's tethered to a phone you can use that for text input.
OP- Just had a discussion at work about how there are many people between jobs who want to keep their resume current who ask to volunteer for us. Our policy is we do not do unpaid interns or volunteers, is that the right policy to have or are we lose-lose because we could certainly use the help and they're the ones asking to work for free.
newspaper columnists who pay a lot of attention to people who make a big deal of their hometowns
Somebody like Bob Greene? (I'm not sure he's the person I was trying to find, but he does look like he fits the description).
38: From a wiki-skim, I think I had in mind a more "You should be like this noble self-sacrificer" tone: something like R/od Dr/eh/er's rubbish here.
37: My office does that. OTOH, my understanding (and IANALaborL) is that we have an exemption from labor law as the state, and it's generally a violation of law to have people doing what would normally be paid work for you for free, even if they want to, because $0 per hour is less than minimum wage. Unpaid internships are only legal insofar as they're being trained rather than doing significant useful work: while this rule gets ignored in practice, it's still the rule. (I am completely unsure of where the boundary line of what sort of organization is allowed to have unpaid volunteers and who isn't lies, so maybe you are allowed.)
I'm guessing we are not allowed to have unpaid volunteers. We could do unpaid interns since we are certainly a training institution but we require departments who want to take on interns to pay them some minimum stipend.
37: Arguably even if using unpaid interns helps them individually, it's hurting jobseekers as a class by devaluing their work, and perpetuating inequality. Apart from the legal issues.
42: Yep. I am literally nauseated thinking about our volunteers, both how we're exploiting them and how using them is closing the legal job market to people who can't afford unpaid auditions of indefinite length. The individuals in our office are better off doing what they're doing than not working as lawyers: they're being well trained and avoiding a resume gap. But it's still disgusting.
I mean, I'm not continuously nauseated, but every so often I think about the issue and get that stomach-flipping-rising-gorge feeling for a moment.
Metal health will drive you mad!
But don't get a tattoo, or you will be unemployable for life and it will be all your fault!
I've got a trainee starting work for me in a couple of months, and I'm feeling pretty guilty about that. Even though they are being paid a wage well above minimum, it's still less than we'd be paying someone at the same grade as my other supervisees.
Hah. Sally's off getting her ears pierced today, and I had to tell her she wasn't allowed to pierce anything else for the foreseeable future. Couldn't she express herself through her hair and clothes? Hair grows out.
53: I don't know why you feel bad about that because they don't (if they are really trainees) have the same experience level as your other supervisees.
My guess is that he means they're coming in on a different track -- that his other supervisees were paid more when they were initially hired.
Like all guilty people from Scotland, he should walk around muttering about spots that won't come out.
Hamilton Nolan over at Gawker has been posting "Tales of the Unemployed" (archived here), and while I read a bunch of them, they were so depressing that I had to stop.
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NMM to the Lucky Star bus company.
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I read "Tales of the Unemployed" every week and they terrify me.
30-34: I assumed he was talking about Royko, but maybe also Herb Caen? Who by the way is probably the most overrated newspaper writer of all time.
Strong claim in 62. And yet, I think I would be comfortable substituting "almost certainly" for "probably."
Except that there's Richard Cohen, who, if he has any rating at all, is in competition.
re: 55
The person isn't specifically well qualified for the IT side of things, but is ridiculously overqualified in other areas. So I'm a bit ambiguous about it. They have a good reason to want to retrain in this area [or think they do] but still, given the kind of work I'd like the person to do, in some ways I'd feel better hiring them a grade or two above as a non-trainee. I don't feel super guilty about it. They are being paid, and it is a route into a new career for them. And my own route in was similar, albeit one or two pay grades higher. But still.
re: 56
Sort of, yeah. My other supervisees are hired in, on grade X. They have (or should have) certain skills and aren't expected to get much training. This person is being hired in explicitly as a trainee, and as such, are expected to get training and aren't expected to have a lot of job-specific skills. And they come in on grade X-4. The job market being what it is, though, people are applying for trainee positions that maybe a few years back would have applied straight in for other non-trainee jobs. Perhaps not at the grade of my other supervisees, but more like grade X-2. It's not egregiously exploitative, but it's not perfect.
62,63: I thought about Caen as well. In DC the current contender for writing about DC as "our town" is John Kelly, but he doesn't have as distinctive a style as Caen, Royko, etc.
I'm reading this post title as "Looking for Mr. Good Jobs."
66 I'd forgotten this.
God, do I not miss Washington.
Sigh. I miss having a great local paper. I guess the LA Times still isn't terrible, but it's still a shadow of its former self.
Who is this person who doesn't know that showing up at a jobs fair with a resume is a terribly unlikely way of getting a decent job, and what rock have they been under?
I wonder if part of the surprise is the lack of "entry level" jobs. Not just that the jobs are terrible, but that they lack any potential for advancement.
the LA Times still isn't terrible, but it's still a shadow of its former self.
I assume you mean when Otis Chandler was publisher, and not his father or grandfather.
Sarah Bloom Raskin (the Fed governor in question) is not particularly privileged (lifetime public servant, former banking regulator for Maryland), is upper middle class I'm sure but not wealthy, and unfortunately is not that powerful either. She has been focused on the inequality issue for a long time but was looking for a relatable story to introduce the reams of statistics when she makes speeches, so she came up with this one. If you fault her for anything, it shouldn't be for being out of touch, but for coming up with an outreach strategy that irritates Unfogged.
Little-known secret: members of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors who are not the chair are generally not very powerful at all.
71 -- of course. For a while my kid was in preschool with the ludicrously named kid "C/handler C/handler."
I wonder if part of the surprise is the lack of "entry level" jobs. Not just that the jobs are terrible, but that they lack any potential for advancement.
This is what always hits me about the job market, that there seem to be so few jobs where someone without experience can get indoors and start building experience. It's as if any decent job is only available to someone who could nepotize or crony themselves into a prior job that they were expressly unqualified for, and that they couldn't have possibly gotten without a connection.
She has been focused on the inequality issue for a long time but was looking for a relatable story to introduce the reams of statistics when she makes speeches
That's good to know (and hearing that makes me more irritated with the Huffington Post).
It's as if any decent job is only available to someone who could nepotize or crony themselves into a prior job that they were expressly unqualified for, and that they couldn't have possibly gotten without a connection.
It's like Hollywood: "The most famous entrance paradox in the world of jobs is the policy of Actors Equity, the stage actors' union. That is, you can't become a member without working in a show and you can't work in a show without being a member."
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The Making of Japan's New Working Class: "Freeters" and the Progression From Middle School to the Labor Market ...David H Slater, uhhh 2008 I think
I have been reading the book version and going "fucking wow." Just a terrific deconstruction of how class sorting and working class passivity is accomplished, and where the "soft authoritarianism" of Japan comes from. Very long, but very readable and brilliant.
Group living is a cultural context that shapes individual subjectivities in line with the moral and practical expectations of adult society, and as such, it is an important part of whole-culture socialization, an important part of learning how to participate in a wide range of institutional contexts. But as noted above, it is at the same time a management strategy, a form of governance that allows social control to be legitimately secured. The importance of securing order is clearly an important consideration for teachers at any high school. But more than that, the sort of order and control, the representation of legitimate authority and consent, provides a context within which students learn how to define themselves, their peers and those around them.
Two things I would add:
1) He starts at middle-school, so I would add that elementary school in Japan is all about group living and social solidarity, way way above learning anything. In Elementary School you make lifetime friends, across classes and future outcomes. In fiction it is almost always elementary school people fondly remember. Managerial-level elites are not deeply resented, but do have responsibilities that last a lifetime toward the lower classes that can be called.
2) "Cram schools" of varying sorts are critical to class sorting, yet I have rarely to never seen them mentioned in School-based anime. I have seen cram schools in socially conscious films. Not at all in Azumananga Daioh. Chobits is of course all about a test failure and cram school, and is an important part of its deeper message.
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Ugh.
In another month and a half or so, this temp assignment will be over, so I'll be dealing with this all over again.
so few jobs where someone without experience can get indoors
Cubiclist.
The lack of entry-path jobs, unless you have connections or money, is one of the courtier-society things I don't know what to do about. Retreat to the country like a Confucian gentleman, I guess.
I certainly agree objectively that there's a huge lack of entry-path jobs, but it's been somewhat strange that my family seems to have largely avoided the problem and I'm not sure how (it certainly wasn't connections or money). I guess hairdressing, policing, and teaching are unusual professions in that they have relatively formalized training programs. It may also be that competition for entry level jobs is weaker in smaller cities?
Policing, at least in bigger agencies, is still a meritocracy when it comes to getting hired. There's loads of agencies still only requiring a high school diploma. If you're good at the tests and have a clean background you can get in. Trapnel, you should go test with SFPD on their next hiring round. Hell, you might not like it, but it sounds like you don't like what you're doing now. Might as well be getting more money and a pension.
The current annual entry-level salary for Police Officers is: $88,842 to $112,164
Holy shit. I mean, as much as I loathe the repressive state apparatus ... have I mentioned lately that I'm making $12-15/hr, without benefits?
This thread inspired me to check if my local library has any Terkel as an ebook. And it does have Working! I've started it.
82: You've seen the BART Police recruitment ads, right? Now with 70% less shooting of the prone.
Well, it's not like the profession couldn't use some more people who view jail as a last resort option. SF is a pretty big department, like 2000 sworn. You can avoid assignments you disagree with like narcotics by simply not applying for those spots. And where else are you going to get photo ops like this.
Now with 70% less shooting of the prone.
Heh. I haven't seen those.
I would be so happy if trapnel became a cop. The idea of the spirit of Unfogged gradually infiltrating the US policing culture is the best thing ever.
Gswift and trapnel both, in their own way, embodying the spirit of Unfogged.
The idea of the spirit of Unfogged gradually infiltrating the US policing culture is the best thing ever.
The best thing ever would be Nosflow ending up on the Supreme Court, but I admit that seems unlikely.
Another way to get entry level experience is the Armed Services. Not for everyone, obviously, but neither is being a cop. Of course not much call for an assistant machine gunner in the real world, but many of the specialties translate well.
I have a friend who joined the NYPD after 9/11, is now happy with more responsibility in the Southwest. I think he got his Bachelor's, certainly nothing higher. Seems happy, socializes with the other guy I know there who is a musician. Not an authoritarian personality.
89. bob gets an NPR commentator's slot, leverages it into red-carpet celebrity, then becomes cultural attache to Japan.
This is my first "real" job I've had that wasn't more or less nepotism. I'm still a bit confused about how I got it: I saw it advertised on craigslist, sent in my resume, gave what I vaguely remember as a good interview, and got the offer. What, no networking, no linkedin profile, no SEO for my resume? Did I really not send thank-you e-mails to the supervisor and HR person before and after the interview? That's not the kind of thing I'd be good about, but it's indispensable to getting a job, isn't it?
However, it still fits the pattern in the end: no opportunity for advancement. (Maybe a tiny bit, but not an explicit path to it, and it's nothing I'd want.)
I do feel some survivor's guilt about my current job, because it did come about partly through knowing (or being known by) the right people. The contrast between the not-so-well-connected institution where I was a grad student, and the super-influential institution where I was a postdoc, was startling.
Here's the thing I'm not sure I get with regard to cops: They're always complaining about being assigned to watch the evidence or whatever, after they fuck something up, but that sounds like an incredibly sweet job. Sit around on a comfy office chair, checking the sports scores, waiting for people to fill out forms? For $80 grand a year, plus benefits and overtime? Versus having to drive around jacking up black kids and maybe get shot? Bit of a Catch-22 situation there, it would seem to me.
Right. Plus you don't need to train the new rookie college boy.
I wonder if I'd be MORE scared to become a cop in the relatively rural place I now live, than in a city. Would you feel better being "called out to a domestic" in an apartment building, or at the end of a dirt road somewhere?
Wait, could x.trapnel move to SLC, and get assigned to be the rookie college boy working with gswift? They could both liveblog the experience, and then K-sky could write the screenplay and make a mint! (I would expect the merest of percentages for coming up with the idea.)
"But look at these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor ignorant folk who know little of the law. Think of the deeds of hellish cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such places, and none the wiser.
98: I'm seeing Lethal Weapon 3, with neb as Joe Pesci.
They're always complaining about being assigned to watch the evidence or whatever, after they fuck something up, but that sounds like an incredibly sweet job.
That's because there's a fair number of guys who get this as their first real job. They've never felt the despair of the cubicle farm and don't appreciate the what a good job this is.
get assigned to be the rookie college boy working with gswift?
I am in fact a field trainer.
I wonder if I'd be MORE scared to become a cop in the relatively rural place I now live, than in a city.
There's something to that. You see more action in the cities but there's loads more backup and resources available if a call goes sideways.
You see more action in the cities but there's loads more backup and resources available if a call goes sideways.
For me, the action is the juice.
89. bob gets an NPR commentator's slot, leverages it into red-carpet celebrity, then becomes cultural attache to emperor of Japan.
Wait, could x.trapnel move to SLC, and get assigned to be the rookie college boy working with gswift?
That would be pretty awesome.
Is there a police duty that involves random inspections of something?
Vice units do a lot of bar checks, including the titty bars.
How many if any titty bars are there in SLC?
There's several in the valley with at least two fairly close to downtown.
UT continues to shock with its non-UTness. I'm just glad that visiting NBA players no longer have to stay in Vegas when they play the Jazz.
109: Is any of them close to the place that has all those billboards up and down I-15 advertising AK-47 assault rifles at rock-bottom prices?
Asking for a frenemy.
If you're talking about Get Some Guns then I think the closest one is Southern X.
that sounds like an incredibly sweet job. Sit around on a comfy office chair, checking the sports scores, waiting for people to fill out forms? For $80 grand a year, plus benefits and overtime?
You're sounding...definitely tempted there, Natilo.
106: checking for what? In the latter case, I imagine prostitution? Drug dealing?
All kinds of stuff. Are they checking ID's, are they overserving, etc. etc. And with the strip clubs there's various rules about how much you can show in a club that can serve alcohol vs. non alcoholic clubs, rules about contact with the clients, and so on.