Labor and Education

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The AFL-CIO report, “Young Workers: A Lost Decade,” shows that not only have young workers lost financial ground over the past 10 years—they have also lost some of their optimism.

* More than one in three young workers say they are currently living at home with their parents.
* 31 percent of young workers reports being uninsured, up from 24 percent without health insurance coverage 10 years ago.
* One-third of young workers cannot pay the bills and seven in 10 do not have enough saved to cover two months of living expenses.

Based on a nationwide survey of 1,156 people by Peter D. Hart Research Associates for the AFL-CIO and the AFL-CIO community affiliate Working America, “Young Workers” examines young workers’ economic standing, attitudes and hopes for the future. It also draws a comparison with findings from a similar 1999 AFL-CIO study, as well as with attitudes of workers older than 35.

Labor Day 2009

To many people, the labor movement is all about the bling. In education, this means better salaries for teachers, pensions, and health care. Labor Day, though, ought to be a reminder that the labor movement has never been so narrow and that even the seemingly narrow goals often have a wide ranging and unpredictable impact. A shorter work week creates the weekend, but it also creates the leisure time necessary for all sorts of political organizing and change.

In education, the labor movement represents an attempt to democratize knowledge in several senses. A strong union would correct the imbalance of power in which administrators can override teachers, employees, students, and parents. Administrators should administrate, not govern. The current imbalances won’t be addressed until the union movement extends from kindergarten to graduate school and beyond. As the AFL-CIO suggests, a strong union movement would ensure that education is widely available.

The reactionary mind says that “college education” isn’t for everyone. That may or may not be true. It is not up to us to decide who will benefit from an education. In a democracy we decide for ourselves. That’s why restricting educational access through testing or financing is undemocratic and dysfunctional. An educated culture would not eliminate jobs that were once only taken by the uneducated, either. It would transform those jobs in ways we can’t predict. That’s why Labor Day is important.

Posted in: Economics, Professional, Union, Writing

Surveillance and Resistance

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As the electronic record grows and we conduct more and more of our business and our conversations on company servers, more analytical firms will spoon through our digital soup. Their job is getting harder. E-mail has gotten much shorter and terser over the past eight years. In the workplace, we switch from IM to telephone to BlackBerry and often don’t use any proper names. It’s difficult to stitch these conversations together so that they make sense to outsiders. Yet some people still assume that anything they write will be lost in the giant sea of e-mail. Charnock says she still sees messages like: “I probably shouldn’t put this in e-mail, but …”

Yes, it’s lame if a manager needs to rely on an algorithm to figure out who her most valued employees are. Yes, the Big Brother-ish aspect of all of this gives one pause. But if you set aside that reaction, most of what Charnock is talking about is common sense. Are you in the mainstream of your workplace or off in a little eddy of your own? If so, why? Are you being productive in your own time and style or just getting really good at Desktop Tower Defense and wishing you did something else? Your electronic tracks don’t indicate your true value as an employee—Who cracks better jokes in the weekly meeting? No one!—but it’s naive to think they don’t reveal anything at all.

Sent Mail- Does your outbox reveal how productive you are? Michael Agger, Aug. 26, 2009, at 7:04 AM ET

My old economics professors, Dr. Harry Cleaver, used to talk about “chipping away at the working day” as one of the important ways that we resist capitalism. We come in late, take an hour instead of an hour and a half for lunch, leave by mid-afternoon on Friday. Surveys tend to show that people are working more and getting paid less, but there’s a lot of this hidden resistance.

It’s never so simple, of course, because employers are always looking for ways to do the opposite: to get us to work more, and more productively, for the same amount of money. Here’s the class struggle in an industrialized country writ small. We push for more money and more time to do what we want; the bosses push to take more and more of our time while paying us less and less.

If you work in a factory, the time-clock (and the motion study) govern your world. In education, and many other professions, things have always been looser. We are just now seeing the dawn of a new age in this basic struggle, one in which companies take full advantage of new communication technologies to monitor and shape employee behavior. It’ll be fun to see how folks fight back.

Agger gives us a hint of what’s next. If an employer uses the GPS on your phone to track your comings and goings, we’ll develop a application to fudge the data. If your boss uses email to check to see that you are on the job, someone will design clever automatic response software that will pass any Turing test. Students and professors are likely to be at the front of this wave of resistance.

Posted in: Writing

Nodding Like Stanley Fish

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Founded by Lynne Cheney and Jerry Martin in 1995, ACTA (I quote from its website) is “an independent, non-profit organization committed to academic freedom, excellence and accountability at America’s colleges.” Sounds good, but that “commitment” takes the form of mobilizing trustees and alumni in an effort to pressure colleges and universities to make changes in their curricula and requirements. Academic institutions, the ACTA website declares, “need checks and balances” because “internal constituencies” — which means professors — cannot be trusted to be responsive to public concerns about the state of higher education.

The battle between those who actually work in the academy and those who would monitor academic work from the outside has been going on for well over 100 years and I am on record (in “Save The World On Your Own Time” and elsewhere ) as being against external regulation of classroom practices if only because the impulse animating the effort to regulate is always political rather than intellectual.

August 24, 2009, 9:30 pm, What Should Colleges Teach?, Stanley Fish

I’ve been watching ACTA for a year or more simply because they are a very reliable guide to the reactionary academic mind. Increasingly, too, they are a great guide to the way conservative thinking is going undercover, attempting to hide its messages beneath a veneer of common sense thinking. The latest manifestation of the emerging agenda is www.whatwilltheylearn.com.

I am not sure I like “nodding along” with Stanley Fish, but I was. (I’m not surprised to find that he would feign surprise when he agrees with a very conservative organization.) I don’t agree with everything he says, of course. It’s not so easy to create a course that is “only about writing.” I am suspicious of a list of goals for a writing course that begins with “grammar.”

On other hand Fish seems to see the ACTA’s agenda pretty clearly. They use a modern sounding rhetoric focusing on creating and or maintaining communities when in fact the goal is to disrupt or even disband communities in the name of a restoration of what was supposed to be an American golden age. Pre-homosexuality, pre-feminist, pre-minority and so on.

American democracy matured, at least to some extent, and things got complicated and messy and the ACTA would like universities to take up the goal of making things simple again. I think Fish is also right when he suggests that ACTA’s not so hidden agenda is the autonomy of the university, particularly the academic freedom of individual professors.

Fish and the ACTA are exaggerating, of course. Most people who teach at colleges are not tenured professors and so do not have the sort of academic freedom that Fish seems to suggest is the norm. So Fish is being as nostalgic as the ACTA. Fish seems to see the ACTA as a vanguard instead of a gesture that seeks to consolidate goals already achieved.

What’s at stake here is not so much ‘general education’ as the leadership of U.S. education and the system of privileges accorded to the academic elite. Neither Fish nor the ACTA are much concerned that writing, for example, is by and large taught by adjuncts and graduate students. It’s not about the rest of us. They are fighting over the power of top-of-the-pyramid professors.

Posted in: Professional, War