Category: employment

Normally, this Level of Incompetence at this Level of Status Results in a Promotion, not a Demotion

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But it appears that the Norwegian culture is different form ours, as former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland has been demoted from his position as head of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee:

Norway’s Nobel peace prize committee has demoted its chairman, Thorbjørn Jagland, in a move unprecedented in the long history of the award.

The committee, which said the former Norwegian prime minister would remain as a committee member, gave no reason for its decision.

However, the renowned diplomat drew criticism shortly after becoming committee chairman in 2009 for awarding the prestigious Nobel to newly elected US president Barack Obama.

The move stunned the world and the recipient alike, as Obama had been in office less than nine months and the US was waging simultaneous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

After six years at the helm of the committee, Jagland, 64, will be replaced by deputy chair, Kaci Kullmann Five, the organisation said on Tuesday.

“There was broad agreement within the committee that Thorbjørn Jagland was a good chair for six years,” Kullmann Five told reporters, but declined to comment on the discussion.

Commentators and former Nobel laureates had criticised the committee’s decisions under Jagland’s stewardship.

Hitting back at critics after Obama’s prize, Jagland said the organisation wanted to praise the US leader’s early vision of a world free of nuclear weapons and capture “the spirit of the times, the needs of the era”.

Last year, a federal study estimated that the US will spend $1tn (£649bn) upgrading its nuclear arsenal over the next three decades.

Ohhh ……… Bummer of a birthmnark, Thorbjørn.

Your award recipient is responsible for more spending on nukes than the rest of the world combined.

………

And in 2012 Jagland became the face of a body that handed the award to the European Union for its commitment to “peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights”.

“The EU is clearly not the ‘champion of peace’ that Alfred Nobel had in mind when he wrote his will,” Archbishop Desmond Tutu wrote in an open letter with two other former laureates.

Jagland, a former leader of Norway’s Labour party who has served as prime minister, foreign minister and speaker of parliament, spent much of his career trying to bolster support for Norway to join the EU.

So the that award appears to be an attempt to political agenda that he has personally held for years.  (And then there is the whole thing that the EU seems like the most forceful attempt at German hegemony in Europe since that bloke with the funny mustache)

It is rather unsurprising, that Nobel Laureate Desmond Tutu roundly condemned the selection of the EU as, “Clearly not the ‘champion of peace’ that Alfred Nobel had in mind when he wrote his will.”

Oh Snap.

I Haz a Sad

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Jon Stewart is leaving The Daily Show later this year:

Jon Stewart, who turned Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” into a sharp-edged commentary on current events, delivering the news in layers of silliness and mockery, said on Tuesday that he would step down after more than 16 years as its anchor.

Mr. Stewart disclosed his plans during a taping of the program on Tuesday. Comedy Central said he would “remain at the helm of ‘The Daily Show’ until later this year” but did not elaborate on Mr. Stewart’s next steps or the future of the show.

In becoming the nation’s satirist in chief, Mr. Stewart imbued the program with a personal sense of justice, even indignation. For a segment of the audience that had lost its faith in broadcast and print news outlets or never regarded them as sacrosanct in the first place, Mr. Stewart emerged a figure as trusted as Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow.

Bummer.

I understand where he is coming from, he’s been doing this for nearly 17 years, and his directorial debut, Rosewater, was very well received, and I really don’t think that he can take his role as the “Most trusted man on cable news” any further.

Being a comedian is like being a shark: If you don’t stop moving, you die, and Jon Stewart has no where to go as presenter on his show.

Because People Don’t Want to be Tricked into Being Scabs

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It looks like Teach for America is having problems recruiting, because potential recruits now realize that this is not an innovation in education, but rather a way to get young dupes to act as scabs in the war against teachers’ unions:

Teach for America, the education powerhouse that has sent thousands of handpicked college graduates to teach in some of the nation’s most troubled schools, is suddenly having recruitment problems.

For the second year in a row, applicants for the elite program have dropped, breaking a 15-year growth trend. Applications are down by about 10 percent from a year earlier on college campuses around the country as of the end of last month.

The group, which has sought to transform education in close alignment with the charter school movement, has advised schools that the size of its teacher corps this fall could be down by as much as a quarter and has closed two of its eight national summer training sites, in New York City and Los Angeles.

“I want the numbers to be higher, because the demand from districts is extremely high and we’re not going to meet it this year,” said Matt Kramer, a co-chief executive of Teach for America. But, he added, “it is not existentially concerning.”

………

A mention of how fewer people are going into education generally might be the trend driving this.

Of course, the reason that teaching has become less attractive is because ratf%$#s like Teach for America have waged a war on job security, benefits, due process, and professionalism.

But there is another reason that TFA cannot get recruits, even if the New York Times buries this below the fold:

But Teach for America’s belief that new college graduates can jump into teaching without much training, as well as its ties through prominent alumni to the testing and standards movement, may also be taking a toll, driving away the kind of students the program once attracted.

When Haleigh Duncan, a junior at Macalester College in St. Paul, first came across Teach for America recruiters on campus during her freshman year in 2012, she was captivated by the group’s mission to address educational inequality.

Ms. Duncan, an English major, went back to her dormitory room and pinned the group’s pamphlet on a bulletin board. She was also attracted by the fact that it would be a fast route into teaching. “I felt like I didn’t want to waste time and wanted to jump into the field,” she said.

But as she learned more about the organization, Ms. Duncan lost faith in its short training and grew skeptical of its ties to certain donors, including the Walton Family Foundation, a philanthropic group governed by the family that founded Walmart. She decided she needed to go to a teachers’ college after graduation. “I had a little too much confidence in my ability to override my lack of experience through sheer good will,” she said.

The Times spends a lot of time ignoring the elephant in the room, the fact that TFA is, at is core, a weapon in the war against the teaching profession

The Latest Unemployment Numbers are not Good

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While most of the coverage has been about a fall in the unemployment rate, specifically a fall in the U-3 rate, from 5.8% to 5.6%, but this misses a lot.

Specifically, workforce participation fell again, so the number is primarily as a result of people giving up, “Long-term unemployment remains highly elevated, and the work force participation rate, already at historically low levels, slipped in December.”

Additionally, wages fell in December, indicating that the ordinary worker is still being screwed by the job market:

The big disappointment was on wages. In the November numbers, one of the brightest signs was an 0.4 percent rise in average hourly earnings, which was a hint that maybe, just maybe, a tighter job market was leading employers to raise wages after years of resisting.

It turned out to be a false signal. In Friday’s revisions, November wages rose only 0.2 percent. And even worse, in December they fell 0.2 percent.

………

Over the last year, the average hourly wage in America has risen 40 cents, from $24.17 to $24.57 an hour. That is a mere 1.65 percent, in the same ballpark as many inflation readings and not a meaningful rise in real wages.

We need to see an improvement in the takehome pay for the median worker before we see anything like a strong job market.

We are the Texas of the Developed World

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I am paraphrasing the late Molly Ivins here, but the fact that the United States antediluvian approach to child care is driving women out of the workplace, and so making us less competitive than other members of the developed world, should be an subject of national shame:

Since Kerry Devine, 32, and her friends began having children, she has noticed a stark difference between her female friends in Auburn, Wash., where she lives, and those in England and Cyprus, where she grew up. In the United States, they almost all stopped working outside the home, at least until their children were in school. Yet, she says, she can’t think of a friend in Europe who left work after her children were born.

Ms. Devine quit her job after she had her first child, a girl, four years ago, because she thought 12 weeks of maternity leave was too short. “I just didn’t want to leave her in day care or pay for the expenses of it,” she said. When she gave birth to twin boys this year, a return to work — she had been a property manager for apartment buildings — looked even less plausible.Since Kerry Devine, 32, and her friends began having children, she has noticed a stark difference between her female friends in Auburn, Wash., where she lives, and those in England and Cyprus, where she grew up. In the United States, they almost all stopped working outside the home, at least until their children were in school. Yet, she says, she can’t think of a friend in Europe who left work after her children were born.

Ms. Devine quit her job after she had her first child, a girl, four years ago, because she thought 12 weeks of maternity leave was too short. “I just didn’t want to leave her in day care or pay for the expenses of it,” she said. When she gave birth to twin boys this year, a return to work — she had been a property manager for apartment buildings — looked even less plausible.

Her story would have played out differently, she said, if she had been living in her native England. Like many European countries, Britain offers a year of maternity leave, much of it paid, and protections for part-time workers, among other policies aimed at keeping women employed.

One would think that the supporting family values would actually involve supporting people who actually have a family, but the “family values” crowd seems to think that all they need to do is to tell women what to do with their ovaries, and hate te ghey, and it is Mission Accomplished.

F%$# that

Welcome to the Handmaiden’s Tale

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A judge in Minnesota just gave a free pass to employers who don’t want to cover contraceptives. I’m wondering when a Jehovah’s Witness gets to deny coverage for blood transfusions:

A federal judge in Minneapolis ruled Monday that the owner of Hastings Ford and Hastings Chrysler Center does not have to pay for health insurance coverage for certain contraceptives such as Plan B, ella emergency contraceptive and certain kinds of IUDs.

Douglas Erickson said in a lawsuit that contraceptives that prevent a fertilized egg from being implanted in a woman’s uterus violate his belief that life begins at conception. Erickson’s businesses have 63 full-time employees and about 15 part-timers.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson is the latest in a string of decisions involving family-owned businesses that have sued to become exempt from a portion of the federal Affordable Care Act because of their religious beliefs.

………

Planned Parenthood of Minnesota and North and South Dakota issued a statement Tuesday after the ruling became public.

“It’s unbelievable that we are still fighting for access to birth control in 2014, with some politicians who want to get rid of the birth control benefit completely,” the statement said. “We know firsthand that access to birth control is both a health care and economic concern for women.”

Here’s a hearty f%$# you to the Supreme Court over the Hobby Lobby decision.

Call me a Curmudgeon, But………

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The most recent news on employment, which shows good employment growth, is good news, but I would not start singing Hosannas yet.

There are a number of temporary externalities, most notably a 40% drop in the price of oil in the past 6 months and renewed froth in the housing market, that account for much of this, and neither of them are sustainable.

Also, it increasingly looks like the big casino on Wall Street is back, and they can f%$# up anything.

Least Surprising Headline of this Week

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The Tech Worker Shortage Doesn’t Really Exist

—Businessweek

After the lede comes something that I have been saying for years:

“There’s no evidence of any way, shape, or form that there’s a shortage in the conventional sense,” says Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University. “They may not be able to find them at the price they want. But I’m not sure that qualifies as a shortage, any more than my not being able to find a half-priced TV.”

All about a labor shortage in tech is not about a real labor shortage, it’s about creating a captive low wage workforce.

F%$# that.

Desperately Hydrating

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Went to work today.

We are still working on that deadline.

For the first time in a really long time, I milled some simple parts.

Some people will handle this without batting am eyelash; no sweat.

Some people shut down in such a situation.

I kind of fall in the middle: I just go too work, but until I am comfortable, I sweat.

I sweat a lot.

So I was flop sweating while I was “Making Chips,” and I really needed some supplemental hydration.

I am just glad that it wasn’t August.

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Welcome to Serfdom

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The latest case of non-compete agreement abuse, how about a $15-an-hour janitor?

Back in the spring, Benny Almeida was unemployed for a spell. So he took the first job offer that came his way — $15 an hour to work as a water-damage cleanup helper in Bellevue.

“At that point what savings I had was gone,” the 26-year-old says.

But three months into his work for ServiceMaster of Seattle, Almeida got a better offer. A rival firm he had also applied to called to say it now had a job opening — paying $18 an hour.

………

Sounds like your typical American free-enterprise story. Except Almeida either forgot or didn’t understand that he was part of the latest corporate fad in squeezing blue-collar workers: noncompete clauses even for low-wage jobs.

To get the $15-an-hour job last spring, Almeida was required to sign a “restriction on competition” clause that said if he leaves, he can’t work for two years for any firm doing similar work in ServiceMaster’s “geographic area” — which the company’s lawyer told me means King, Snohomish, Island, Yakima and Kittitas counties.

ServiceMaster of Seattle, a franchise in a $3.4 billion national corporation, now is trying to force Almeida to forfeit his $18-an-hour job at Superior Cleaning of Woodinville.

The noncompete clause would mean Almeida also couldn’t work in any water- or fire-damage job, janitorial, office cleaning, window washing, floor or carpet cleaning or other job ServiceMaster does.

“ServiceMaster of Seattle hereby demands that you immediately cease all employ with Superior Cleaning,” reads a “notice of violation” letter the company’s law firm wrote to Almeida (who lives with his aunt in Lynnwood).

I’m waiting for McDonald’s to claim that, “Do you want fries with that?” is a trade secret.

Seriously, where is Madam la Guillotine when you need her?

Way to Go, Francis

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Pope Francis has demoted right wing Cardinal Raymond Burke yet again:

In a move that reflects the loosening posture of the Vatican on major social issues, conservative U.S. Cardinal Raymond Burke was removed by Pope Francis from yet another top post.

Burke, who has long been vocal about denying communion to Catholic politicians who support abortion, was dismissed as head of the Holy See’s highest court and given the post of Patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, a largely ceremonial job overseeing charity to seniors.

At 66, Burke is considered young by church hierarchy standards. The dismissal is a set-back to his Vatican career as well as a clear message from Pope Francis to those not hewing to his progressive view of the Catholic Church.

The move was expected by Vatican-watchers given that Burke, the former archbishop of St. Louis, had openly criticized Francis’ less doctrinaire approach to the faith. Last year, Francis had removed Burke from the Congregation for Bishops, a group tasked with the appointment of new bishops worldwide.

In addition that Burke was playing partisan politics in the United States, which created a long term risk for what is arguably the richest community in Catholicism, Burke was also ignoring the basic structure of the Church.

I may not know the finer points of canon law, and quite honestly I have no desire to, being a Jew, but I do the middle ages on weekends as a hobby, and so I do have a decent understanding of a feudal system of government.

Basically, a Bishop is like a Count, a Cardinal is more like a Duke (Technically called. “Princes of the Church”), and the Pope is the Monarch in charge.

The important bit about this is that Bishops and Cardinals are in fealty to the Pope, and calling out the guy in charge in public is frowned upon in such a system.

Raymond Burke should consider himself lucky.

A few hundred years ago, (or in any case, certainly before the Magna Carta was signed) if a Count or a Duke acted this way, it would keep the headsman gainfully employed.

Pig Felching Rat Bastards of the Day

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Ford Motor Company, who fired about 100 workers by robocall over this weekend:

Nearly 100 workers at Ford’s Chicago Assembly Plant got a robocall on Halloween telling them their services were no longer needed and they were terminated.

It wasn’t a trick or a morbid prank.

Dozens of workers missed the call or didn’t believe it, so they showed up to work Saturday anyway, according to an autoworker who wished to remain anonymous. They found their ID badges had been disabled and were told by security they had been fired.

“As part of our normal business process, we’ve temporarily adjusted our workforce numbers at Chicago Assembly Plant,” Ford Motor Co. said in a statement.

Remember what I said about honey and rabid wolverines?

HR at Ford should get this treatment too.

Reasonably decent Jobless Numbers

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Pretty good, with the 4 week moving average hitting an 8½ year low:

Initial jobless claims held steady at 287,000 last week.

 Expectations were for claims to rise slightly to 295,000, up from last week’s 287,000.

 Last week’s report was revised up slightly to 288,000.

The 4-week moving average of claims fell to 287,750, down 7,250 from last week, the lowest 4-week moving average since February 4, 2006.

Another Day, Another Shooting

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This one was at a UPS complex in Birmingham, Alabama:

A recently-fired UPS employee on Tuesday shot dead two supervisors at the company facility where he had worked in Birmingham, Alabama before turning the gun on himself, police said.

The gunman, who was wearing a brown UPS uniform, had been terminated earlier this month and had learned a day earlier that he had lost his appeal to get his job back, police said, adding that his motive was not immediately clear. Police had earlier said that the man was fired yesterday.

The shooting occurred shortly before 9:30 a.m. at a large, brick UPS service center atop a hill in the Inglenook section of Birmingham, close to the airport, police said.

Yep, the American gun fetish is such a good thing.

I get that, barring a nigh apocalyptic change in American body politic, we will not see any meaningful change in our gun control regimes.

The gun nuts own our country, the rest of us just live in it.

To quote Tom Tomorrow, “The occasional horrific civilian massacre is just the price the rest of us have to pay ……… Over and over again, apparently.

Welcome to Amazon, Washington Post Employees

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Now that he has the Washington Post, he is getting ready to treat them like his Amazon employees:

The Washington Post announced large cuts in retirement benefits on Tuesday, declaring that it would eliminate future retirement medical benefits and freeze defined-benefit pensions for nonunion employees.

The company also said that in negotiations that started Tuesday, it will seek to impose the same conditions on employees covered by the union — one of the first indications of how The Post’s new owner, Amazon.com founder Jeffrey P. Bezos, will manage relations with the staff of the news organization.

The changes will hit hardest at employees hired before 2009 who could plan on receiving pension payments based on their income and years of service. Each of those employees could see scores — or hundreds — of thousands of dollars less over the course of a retirement. More recent hires do not have traditional pension plans.

Here is the kicker:

The Post’s existing pension plan was about $50 million, or approximately 20 percent overfunded, last Oct. 1 when Bezos bought The Post.

No money problems, he just wants to loot the WaPo pension fund, because that’s what capitalists do.

Anglo-Saxon hypercapitalism is a truly nasty piece of work.

The Jobs Numbers Suck.

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Nonfarm payrolls rose by 142,000 in August. Generally improvement in the employment situation starts at about 200,000:

American employers hired fewer workers than forecast in August and the jobless rate dropped because people left the workforce, bolstering those on the Federal Reserve who want to be more deliberate in removing monetary stimulus.

The 142,000 advance in payrolls was the smallest this year and followed a revised 212,000 gain in July, figures from the Labor Department showed today in Washington. The reading was lower than the most pessimistic estimate in a Bloomberg survey of economists. The unemployment rate fell to 6.1 percent last month from 6.2 percent, reflecting a drop in joblessness among teenagers as well as the decline in labor participation.

………

The median projection in the Bloomberg survey of 91 economists called for a 230,000 increase in August payrolls. Estimates ranged from increases of 190,000 to 310,000 after a previously reported 209,000 July gain. Revisions to prior reports subtracted a total of 28,000 jobs from overall payrolls in the previous two months.

The participation rate, which indicates the share of working-age people in the labor force, decreased 0.1 percentage point to 62.8 percent, matching the lowest since 1978.

Basically, this just sucks.