Man's Work

I could swear I read somewhere when I was young that the average railway brakeman in the 19th Century had a one in seven chance of dying in bed.  This is surely wrong.  But does sound like the brakeman's job was no day at the beach:

Coupling and braking had been a technical and safety problem for the railroads since their very invention. The coupling between cars involved a crude link-and-pin device that required brakeman to stand between the cars, guide the link into a socket, drop the pin in place, and, if necessary, hammer it down. Not easy, not safe. In the dark, with a slippery oil lantern in one hand, it was even more perilous. It was said that if a man was looking for work as a brakeman and claimed to be experienced, he was asked to show his hands—missing digits were the key to confirmation he had previously worked in the job....Braking, too, was primitive in the extreme. Locomotives had no mechanisms to slow them down apart from putting them in reverse, which good drivers did only in emergency. Instead, once the driver got the signal to slow down, a brakeman had to clamber along the roof of the train from the rear and apply the brakes fitted on each car. Normally, there would also be a brakeman at the front who would work his way toward the back of the train. There was no end of potential for accidents with this arrangement, nOt least the risk to the brakemen themselves. As a former brakeman described the process, it “took nerve, coordination, timing and a perfect sense of balance, to go over the top of a freight car—winter or summer ...  rain, snow, sleet, ice all over the roofs and on brake wheels and handholds.”

 Christian Wolmar, The Great Railroad Revolution 166-67 (2012).   Wolmar makes a few more general points about railway labor in the golden age of railroad construction--say, 1863 to 93.  He shows that the owners were avid for  manpower to chop trees, blast away rock faces, spread gravel and lay track.  Most of these were awful jobs--fit only for Irish or Chinese (sarcasm).  But nobody in those days worried about the end of work. 

Footnote to the Workapocalypse

Thinking about all that talk re the non-future of jobs: I spend more time than is good for  me at a motel next to  campus, 90 miles from home.  I was reflecting the other day on the folks who make it happen.  In particular, the handyman/gardener/factotum.  He's a Latino, maybe 50, substantial, not portly.  Neatly dressed (neater than I sometimes, I suspect).  Thing is, he seems to be a happy man, and I suspect I might know why: fact is, he's got a pretty good job.   He gets to do different stuff in different seasons and on different days. He hoses down the parking lots. He moves around some of the heavy-duty trash (he has kind of a private trash yard out back by the fence). He manages those lovely gardens and flower boxes that change from season to season.  And he has one--no, maybe two--of those closets full of stuff that a handyman might need.

Of course I haven't any idea what he might earn and I suspect it is not as much as an investment banker (nor a law professor).  But if they know what is good for them (I think maybe they do), then they are paying him a bit more than the market rate.  Fact is, he is what someone on Downton Abbey would surely call "a treasure." You just can't get that kind very often.

But more than that, he comes close to being his own boss.   I suppose somebody tells him what to do sometimes, but I don't recall that I've ever seen it.  My take is that as long as he gets the job done--and it looks like he does--then nobody much cares how he goes about it. No, turn it around, then his bosses have the good sense to stay out of his way.   Interesting work at decent pay with no hassles from the boss--wouldn't we all want just that?

I suppose I can compare him to the gardeners on campus.  Back when I came first here, the gardeners seemed to work as "employees" or maybe even "labor"--with lots of managers, telling them what to do.  At some point a few years back, that seemed to change.  My impression is that now, each gardener has his own turf.  It's his (or her--several women) responsibility to keep it spiffy,. his (or her) decision to figure out how.  Maybe that, maybe something else--but whatever, it seems to work.  The place looks on the whole pretty nice and I don't recall ever seeing anybody just learning on a rake.

I think you may see some of that attitude evening among the janitors.  I get the impression that maybe they, too, are on a "results" model: all is well as long as the place does not smell like pee (okay, there's more to it than that, but I couldn't help myself).  I ran into one here on a Sunday. By way of small talk, I said, "don't they ever give you a day off?"  She said something like "well, I like to do my big projects on weekends when people are out of the way."  Wow.  On her free time?  Overtime?  Comp time?   Or just pride of craft.  Granted she has to clean up shit, but it is not a shit job in the David Graeber sense.

[Fn.:  Readers are invited to compare all those happy service employees to my favorite Simpsons character, Groundskeeper Willie,  Wiki describes him as "incompetent," along with "feral" and "quick to anger."   I'm not so sure.  My guess is that he might be better at his job than people realize, although he does seem to feel the need to keep the rest of the world at bay.]

Orwell, Kipling, and the Passing of a Caricature

Forget about 1984.  Here's the quintessential George Orwel.  He's talking about Rudyard Kipling

[B]ecause he identifies himself with the official class [Kipling] does possess one thing which 'enlightened' people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility.  The middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity.  All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries re at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have international aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all want to live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our 'enlightenment', demands that the robbery shall continue.  A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling's understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases.  It would be difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words than in the phrase 'making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep'.  ... He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.

I hope I will be forgiven for saying I think this is wonderful stuff. But that's not my point right now. What I really want to get out of this passage is to identify it as an index of how much our life has changed. Specifically: I suspect this would have been a pretty much incontrovertible statement prior to—well, perhaps March 10, 2000, the day the NASDAQ peaked at 5,048.62 (I see that right now it is 3,675.64). Others will say earlier, perhaps all the way back to 1973. I think that's a stretch, but it's a detail. Things is there was some point before which the Nice People—meaning ones that Orwell and, yes, I, had plenty of opportunity observe, were able to insulate themselves from the travail in the world an cluck about its evils without every worrying that they themselves would have to pay any real cost.

After—whenever—this seems not to be true any more. It's our kid, or at least our neighbors', or the kid of somebody our neighbor just told us about, who isn't getting onto the escalator, who is beginning to wonder whether it will ever happen at all.

I wouldn't say we are quite like Spain, where there seems to be an invisible fault line through the middle of society, and where the oldsters keep the family functional by sharing out their welfare checks. Or Greece, where the hurt seems so widely distributed. But I'm betting there are a lot of people who might once have found a place in Orwell's detested target audience, and are busy now just trying to figure out how to hold on.  For this crowd, Orwell's commentary reads less like speaking truth to power and more like a nostalgia trip.

Bonus extra: not quite the same point, but one of Orwell's most attractive qualities was his compassion for the working stiffs—specifically the old colonial mercenary army. That is:

[F]rom the body of Kipling's early work there does seem to emerge a vivid and not seriously misleading picture of the old pre-machine-gun army--the sweltering barracks in Gibraltar or Lucknow, the red coasts, the pipeclayed belts and the pillbox hats, the beer, the fights, the floggings, hangings and crucifixions, the bugle-calls, the smell of oats and horse-piss, the bellowing sergeants with foot-long moustaches, the bloody skirmishes, invariably mismanaged, the crowded troopships, the cholera-stricken camps, the 'native' concubines, the ultimate death in the workhouse.  It is a crude, vulgar picture, in which a patriotic music-hall turn seems to have got mixed up with one of Zola's gorier passages, but from it future generations will be able to other some idea of what a long-term volunteer army was like.

I wonder what some later writer will say about "the pre-drone army"?  And what the hell is a pipeclayed belt?  Meanwhile, we are off on another of those lush, cosseted vacations we are always going on about.  I'll check in after a couple of days from Stockholm.

The Worker and the Cartels

My friend Steve is from Rochester.  This comes a surprise; I had thought he was from Buffalo. No,  no, says Steve, Rochester.  Kodak.  If you got on board at Kodak at 18, you were pretty much set for life.

Which prompted me to reflect back on a theme I've explored before: the 47-73 years as a time of sleekly well-protected semi-cartels, where management could make their deals with unions because they could charge prices above marginal cost.   Thing is, there is a flip side: as Steve suggests, the worker who wangled his way to the protective bosom of the appropriate cartel, his life might have been boring and in some ways constrained but it was pretty safe.  Oddly, we tend to think of this sort of corporate welfare as an artifact of the glory days of Japan.  But consider: AT&T (there's a reason why they called it "Ma Bell"); IBM, General Motors, and yes, Kodak, and more.

I can relate in a small way.  I worked for the none of the above but I spent a decade in Louisville, in the warm lap of one of those newspaper monopolies against which we used to fulminate until they all began to crumble or wither away.    I'll grant that Louisville might have been a little special: unlike the seed, feed and dry goods merchants who refashioned themselves as press lords in so many communities, our Corporate Masters in Louisville actually fancied themselves friends of journalism and expended some effort to make it happen.

This doesn't mean they paid well; nobody ever earned a decent paycheck in journalism outside the celebrity class.  But they were willing to give you some scope; if you sold them on the notion that you had a viable project, they'd give you the time and the backup and you didn't need to worry about being canned for time-wasting (nor for any other reason; they were notoriously reluctant to fire anybody).   

Needless to say, these comfy little boltholes are mostly gone now, attendant upon the decay of the protective structure that supported them. This protective structure certainly had its downside, but we may lament the demise of its virtues.  

A corollary: as I guess I've said before, I suspect we observe here one important reason why so many are so mad at public employees: those who remember how they or their parents flourished in the realm of the semi-cartels are bound to get a little shirty when they see public employees continue to enjoy some of the protections these private-employer folks no longer enjoy.  Disclaimer, this is not an endorsement of the Kasich/Walker platform,.

Pay footnote:  I suggested that the newspaper pay was lousy.  Actually, the pay in Louisville might have been a smidgen better than among its competitors.  The reason would be that our Corporate Masters, notoriously liberal on their editorial page, fought tooth and toenail to keep the unions out of the city room.  One way to do it was to make the pay just enough better than the union competitors that we would regard ourselves as blessed to go without.  And come to think of it--I said they were slow to fire and they were.  But one guy who did find himself unceremoniously squeezed out of his job was the feckless chap who actually tried to organize a union,.

Journalism Footnote:  One index of how much our Corporate Masters wanted to be thought of as real journalists: in 1965 I won a modest but satisfying prize from the American Bar Association for some reporting law issues. To receive the prize, the publisher sent--not me, but himself, the publisher, who for aught I could tell didn't even known the stories were in the paper until after news of the bauble arrived.  I honestly didn't mind: I never much fancied this kind of ceremony and as I recall, it would have meant  trip to Miami in the summer. But I took it as an index of how desperate he was to be thought a real player and not some glorified bookkeeper.

Kodak footnote:  Actually,Steve's parents were not part of the Kodak family.  They subsisted in the treacherous no-man's land of the retail carpet business.  But Steve is happy to report that it saw them out: they were able to sell it for a satisfying price as they moved into retirement. 

[For added verisimilitude, I tried to scare up a cut of the old "carpets from the looms of Mohawk" commercial, but apparently not everything is on the web.   Búm búm bàbabàba búm búm.]

From the Front Lines of the Generational Wars

Reading the NYT story this morning about the decline in law school applicants, I got struck by a curious irony.  The subject is generational wars and the labor force.  We've been telling ourselves for years on of our major headaches is the giant vampire squid of retirees extracting sustenance from an ever (relatively) smaller workforce.

Maybe someday, but for the moment, it's just the reverse, isn't it?  I mean--we may not yet be Greece or Spain, with youth unemployment rates north of 50 percent.   We don't have anything like those numbers yet, but the youth number does run something like double the general rate.   Conventional unemployment numbers those who aren't trying because they are in school.  They don't count those who have simply quit trying and I wonder--is the "quit trying" (home in mama's basement) number higher for kids than it is for adults.  And I read that the pension model is in some places exactly the reverse of the common understanding: the old are sharing  their pension checks with the unemployed young, turning the old age benefit into a general support net.

At any rate if we are going to depend on the kiddies in our dotage, we'd better find some way to put them to work.

More Schmatta

Following up on that last post: exactly what is the relationship between the rag trade and the pajama game?

You Knew That, But...

...here it is again:

Much important work is done by people with sore backs and calloused hands who don’t get paid that much...

So this guy, whose car gave out on the Dan Ryan Expressway.

Against My Better Judgment, I Keep My Promise

Oh, I may regret this, but what the hey.   I talked over the last couple of days (link, link) about the idea of a "bubble quiz" to test knowledge of "business."   Formulated more precisely than before, I think what I'm struggling for is a list of the kinds of things "business people" know that they kinda sorta maybe wished the President knew.  Or, if not "knew," precisely, at least understood in some broad intuitive sense.

I invited contributions from some of my buds, mostly involved in the bankruptcy trade. They came up with some good offerings, albeit with some overlap (evidently we think along parallel lines). I have to acknowledge that I'm not satisfied with my list: I think it is probably too limited, a failure of imagination on my part (inside the bubble?). I note also that when I say "business," apparently I mean "small business"--one-person or one-family operations, nothing Jack Welch- or Steve Ballmer-ish.

So, think of it as a start. Note that unless specified, the proper punchline for each question is, "what do you do next?"
If you've got any interesting contributions, toss 'em into the comments. Maybe I'll do a revised version. Anyway, here goes:

What's the employer's share of FICA?

What's Section 6672?

You ruin (!!) run a restaurant.    One day you come to work and find that none of your cooks have shown up.   What do you do?

You catch your secretary with her hand in the petty cash.  You tell her she's fired.  She says go ahead if you want to, but she'll complain to the authorities that she you (!!) demanded sex from her.   What do you do?

You fire an at-will employee because of incompetence; that is, for cause. Employee files for unemployment.   Any decision in his favor will be adverse to your pocketbook.  What do you do? 

Angry customer files frivolous lawsuit.  Insurance company declines to defend.  You don't know any lawyers who do this kind of work.  What do you do?

You're $400 short of payroll, and your next tax deposit is $600.  Do you "borrow" from it, since you think you'll make up the shortage next quarter?

Vendor is short on your order.  When you complain, vendor makes it clear  that if the shortage is made up, she won't do any more business with you.  Se's got the best product out there.  What do you do?

An ex-con, a pregnant woman with sleeve tatoos, and a chap who speaks only marginal English apply for an entry-level, minimum wage job.  There are no other appicants.   Can you just withdraw the notice, wait a month, and see who applies then?

Employee is surfing Internet on company time.  Nothing illegal.  Still does  it after warning.  Fire her?

People!  Help me here, please!  I want to spruce this up.

The Lump of Labor Utters Its Minatory Snort

Go read the chart. Read the article too, if you like, but at least read the chart.

What Should Scalia Do with his Time?

The topic for the moment a few moments ago was the question whether professors work hard enough.  Speaking for myself only, the answer would be "yes, but" (details below).  But  now I'm reading Antonin Scalia as he encounters the prospect of actually reading the Affordable Care Act, on which he is supposed to pass judgment.  "You really want us," he bleats,  "to go through these 2,700 pages?"  Link. 

Well strictly speaking, I suppose the answer is "no."  I suspect the parties would stipulate that there are large chunks of it that really aren't germane to the issue(s) before the court and therefore not necessary reading for a judge as he gets ready to give judgment.*

But it raises the larger question--do Supreme Court judges work hard enough?  Recall that this is a crowd that is in court (= in the classroom?) only a few hours a week, only some weeks of the year--with long holidays and summers off.  Moreover it is they who get to decide how hard they work.  Recall that the court now hears fewer than half the cases every term as it used to, and that the reduction is due entirely to the judges' own whim  discretion--i.e., it is they who vote whether to hear  a case or not.  Meanwhile it looks to me like they have something like 36 clerks in gross.   At this rate, somebody ought to be able to extrapolate how soon it will be one clerk per case .  And the clerks, of course, are just the beginning.  There's no end to the amount of support staff available to keep them comfortable and mellow.


So, how to achieve a  better economy of effort?  In the old days, one way to burn off the surplus energy of the underemployed was to pile them all into a car and deploy them in the small towns of the south as magazine salesmen.    I never did that, but I did spend one summer day cleaning out an underground oil tank (for my brother-in-law--I think he was trying to encourage me to leave his house, which I did).  Or we could consider having them crawl into cages to catch chickens (paid by the piece).  Or scraping gum off the bottom of bus seats.  Or selling Tours of Homes of the Stars along Hollywood Boulevard.  


Or, oh yes, send them back to the countryside to dig irrigation ditches.  Any other suggestions?

Addendum: do I work hard?   The short answer is "yes."  I've always worked a lot of hours at my professor job, more than I did when I was a newspaper hack, sometimes more than I did as a lawyer.   Perhaps not more than I did as a judge, but then I liked being a judge and it didn't seem like work.   And that is the dirty little secret: as a professor I do work hard but I have almost total control over what, when and how I do it.    And that's the problem with professing: not that it's too easy, but that it is way, way too much fun.  Eat your heart out, Nino.

*Or maybe not.  See link.

The Nautical Graveyard

I don't suppose there is any journalist now working who knows quite as much as William Langewiesche about life red in tooth and claw.  Here he introduces us to the ship's graveyard at Alang in Gujarat:

Today [2004-5] roughly 90 percent of the world's annual crop of seven hundred condemned ships end their lives on the beaches of Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh--and fully have of them die at Alang.  With few exceptions, the breakers are not highborn or educated men. They are shrewd traders who have fought their way up; even those who have grown rich have never lost the poor man's feeling of vulnerability.  They have good reason to feel insecure. With the most modest  of labor costs, shipbreaking is still a marginal business that uses borrowed  money and generates slim profits. The risk of failure for even the most experienced breakers is real. Some go under every year. For their workers the risks are worse: falls, fires, explosions, and exposure to a variety of poisons from fuel oil, lubricants, paints, wiring, insulation, and cargo slop.  Many workers are killed every year.  Nonetheless, by local standards, the industry has been a success. Even the lowliest laborers are proud of what they do at Alang.

So Langewiesche in The Outlaw Sea 204-5 (2004).  Here's a longer account.  For comparison, the reader may wish to match Langewiesche's story with Jon Ronson's superb Guardian account of people who go missing from cruise ships.  And we aren't talking about those who debark at strange ports.

Welcome to the New World: a First Look

Fascinating piece up at The Washington Monthly about a topic on which I was almost entirely ignorant --"Western Governors' University," and in particular its position as a challenge (as the reporter describes it) to the for-profits--Phoenix, Kaplan and suchlike.  Interesting all the way around (are the for-profits really so far into the dumper?--I never knew).  But perhaps most interesting is their personality-hook story: the lead-in personal account meant to humanize the abstractions  In truth his story is only loosely linked to the larger WGU story but it is fascinating in its own right.  Indeed, if you want to get a sense of what the new world looks like, I think you could do worse than consider this guy: one John Robinson of Woonsocket, RI, third-shift emergency medical tech, but also the home-schooling stay-at-home parent of what sounds like an, ahem, challenging youngster: 

“I was starting to feel the burnout,” he recalls, citing what is widely held to be an inevitable fact of life for emergency medical workers. He was desperate to climb out of his job. The problem was that there was no clear next rung on the ladder for him to reach for. Robinson’s career had been a series of false starts. After serving as a military policeman during the first Gulf War, he’d studied criminal justice at a local community college for a while, then decided it wasn’t for him. He earned his EMT certification—a relatively quick credential—a couple of years later. Fully aware that ambulance work wasn’t really “a lifelong career kind of thing,” Robinson set his sights on a nursing degree, going so far as to earn all the academic prerequisites. But then, just before he pulled David out of school, Robinson ran aground in the great sand trap of contemporary American public higher education: due to a shortage of instructors, there was a two-and-a-half-year waiting list for the nursing program at his local community college. Other state schools, he heard, had wait lists as well. The system was maxed out. As Robinson’s name inched slowly up the rolls— and as he continued his routine of homeschooling by day and sirens by night—he and his wife started to discuss a new idea. For years, he had been working with kids in his spare time: at a Sunday school, in martial arts lessons, in an afterschool program for children in public housing projects. And now, with his son, Robinson seemed to be making real progress. It was a giant leap—but what if he became a teacher? Better yet, what if he specialized in teaching kids like David, kids who needed special ed? By all accounts, the country was in dire need of such teachers, and the job promised security and solid benefits, perks he had always lacked as an EMT. With newfound resolve, Robinson began his search for a degree program in special education. And for the first time in his life, he didn’t look to a nearby state college.

..and then, and only then, do we  move on to WGU.  On the face of things, you've got to admire this guys' grit and perseverance--and savor the irony that about the only opportunities available to him are those rooted in coping with social dysfunction--and that even here, he has to scramble and claw over obstacles just to find his place.   Good luck to him, I say, and I hope the hopeful representation of WGU in the rest of the piece is at least half as true as the author present it.

Today's Factoid

Per John Mauldin's weekly letter, growth in "actual number of" private-sector jobs since 2000: zero, even as population grew by 30 million  Wonder what he means by "actual."

[I almost highlighted the datum that Newark lately went through its first  murder-free month in 44 years, but the "news" turned out to be a bit over a year old.  Still worth reporting, though, too bad it didn't last.] 

Employment Numbers

Sane and comprehensive account of employment numbers from Spencer.  I really should add these guys to my sidebar.