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- Parsing the Body Language That Leads to a Fight
- 22 Current Demographic Facts That Everyone Should Know
- The Expendables: How the Temps Who Power Corporate Giants Are Getting Crushed
- We May Be More Afraid of Paying for Cancer Than Having It
- Train Crash in Spain Killed as Many as 1 Day of Commuting in the U.S.
- Prince George Alexander Louis and You
- Why Are There No Reality TV Shows About Writing?
- Music Bridges Cultures? Actually, Not So Much
| Parsing the Body Language That Leads to a Fight Posted: 25 Jul 2013 04:41 PM PDT  For the sake of argument, say you've gotten into a pretty heated exchange with someone you know when that person takes a deliberate look around the vicinity. Prepare for an altercation. Turning the head is one of the two strongest non-verbal cues of an impending fight, according to a new study by two criminologists, Richard Johnson and Jasmine Aaron, at the University of Toledo. Struck, as it were, by the relative paucity of research into what cues could predict a fight between adults, the two surveyed 178 undergraduates about what behaviors suggested to them that trouble was brewing. There's a lot of folk wisdom about what to look for before somebody up and slugs you, presumably offered as a way to avoid said slugging, and the researchers found plenty of it on the Web in discussions about body language. (A lot of those stated they came from "scientific research," but the Toledo duo could never track down any of that alleged research.) This being the Web, a lot of the advice contradicted other advice; staring at you is a warning sign—as is avoiding eye contact. Maybe that's why movie tough guys always wear sunglasses, since merely having eyes apparently is an incitement. The two top choices were intuitively the most obvious concerns—invading your personal space and taking a boxer's stance.Writing in the journal Criminal Justice and Behavior, the researchers explained that they presented a written description of a tense scenario to their subjects, leaving the age, race, gender, and social status of their putative assailant (an "adult acquaintance") as a cipher. They were then given 23 actions that person might take next, and were asked to rate how concerned they would be about impending doom as a result. The two top choices were intuitively the most obvious concerns—invading your personal space and taking a boxer's stance. While anyone who wants to be Max Schmeling would be a concern, getting in your face could easily vary across cultural definitions of where your face begins and whether close talking, or perhaps in this case close yelling, is OK. Three other behaviors signaled potential violence—the aforementioned glancing around, clenching hands (making a fist?), and the verbal cue of making a threat. After those, a range of actions generated some concerns—a tense jaw, hands in pocket, pacing, neck stretches, rapid breathing, sweating, taking off clothing (how Marquess of Queensbury!), and yelling among them. Wanna ratchet things back? Placing hands on your hips or avoiding eye contact were seen as the least threatening of the 23 options. The study participants, of course, were only a subsection of Midwestern undergrads under age 30 (median age 20). But they were split among men (56 percent) and women, and somewhat diverse. Seventy percent identified as white, 20 percent as black, and seven percent as Latino. There were some differences between those subsets, but not much. Men were more concerned about putting your hands in your pockets, while women feared the boxer's stance more (to blatantly stereotype, getting into the stance isn't how I've seen girls’ fights devolve, so I have no doubt it's a scarier signal to them). In general, the researchers suggest, while there's a documented difference in how the sexes perceive non-verbal cues, "cues related to human aggression may be so primal that they transcend sex differences." There were also some smallish differences among ethnicities. Caucasians and African Americans shared a greater concern for looking around as a predictor than did Latinos, while Latinos were more worried about tensed jaw muscles. The researchers didn't ask about their subjects' history of violence, whether they were brawlers or crawlers, and were quick to note that their results point to “cognitive perceptions” which might, or might not, hold true in a real or even simulated confrontation. Past experience certainly could color response: I'm fine if you put your hand in your pocket, but maybe somebody who's stared down the barrel of a Glock has a different take on that. The study, which is apparently the first word on this subject, will no means be the last. It's an important issue to examine. Consider the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case, which was likely fueled by stereotypes—a punk in a hoodie versus a puffed-up cracker—then ignited by non-verbal cues. Recognizing their potential might have been a good first step toward avoiding the lethal result. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| 22 Current Demographic Facts That Everyone Should Know Posted: 25 Jul 2013 12:00 PM PDT  The other day I was surprised that a group of reporters failed to call out what seemed to be an obvious exaggeration by Republican Congresspeople in a press conference. Did the reporters not realize that a 25 percent unemployment rate among college graduates in 2013 is implausible, were they not paying attention, or do they just assume they're being fed lies all the time so they don't bother? Last semester I launched an aggressive campaign to teach the undergraduate students in my class the size of the U.S. population. If you don't know that—and some large portion of them didn't—how can you interpret statements such as, "On average, 24 people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in the United States." In this case the source followed up with, "Over the course of a year, that equals more than 12 million women and men." But, is that a lot? It's a lot more in the United States than it would be in China. (Unless you go with, "any rape is too many," in which case why use a number at all?) Anyway, just the U.S. population isn't enough. I decided to start a list of current demographic facts you need to know just to get through the day without being grossly misled or misinformed—or, in the case of journalists or teachers or social scientists, not to allow your audience to be grossly misled or misinformed. Not trivia that makes a point or statistics that are shocking, but the non-sensational information you need to know to make sense of those things when other people use them. And it's really a ballpark requirement; when I tested the undergraduates, I gave them credit if they were within 20 percent of the U.S. population—that's anywhere between 250 million and 380 million! I only got as far as 22 facts, but they should probably be somewhere in any top-100. And the silent reporters the other day made me realize I can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good here. I'm open to suggestions for others (or other lists if they're out there). They refer to the U.S. unless otherwise noted:
This post originally appeared on Sociological Images, a Pacific Standard partner site. SOURCES | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Expendables: How the Temps Who Power Corporate Giants Are Getting Crushed Posted: 25 Jul 2013 10:00 AM PDT  It’s 4:18 a.m. and the strip mall is deserted. But tucked in back, next to a closed-down video store, an employment agency is already filling up. Rosa Ramirez walks in, as she has done nearly every morning for the past six months. She signs in and sits down in one of the 100 or so blue plastic chairs that fill the office. Over the next three hours, dispatchers will bark out the names of who will work today. Rosa waits, wondering if she will make her rent. In cities all across the country, workers stand on street corners, line up in alleys, or wait in a neon-lit beauty salon for rickety vans to whisk them off to warehouses miles away. Some vans are so packed that to get to work, people must squat on milk crates, sit on the laps of passengers they do not know ,or sometimes lie on the floor, the other workers’ feet on top of them. This is not Mexico. It is not Guatemala or Honduras. This is Chicago, New Jersey, Boston. The people here are not day laborers looking for an odd job from a passing contractor. They are regular employees of temp agencies working in the supply chain of many of America’s largest companies—Walmart, Macy’s, Nike, Frito-Lay. They make our frozen pizzas, sort the recycling from our trash, cut our vegetables, and clean our imported fish. They unload clothing and toys made overseas and pack them to fill our store shelves. They are as important to the global economy as shipping containers and Asian garment workers. Many get by on minimum wage, renting rooms in rundown houses, eating dinners of beans and potatoes, and surviving on food banks and taxpayer-funded health care. They almost never get benefits and have little opportunity for advancement. Across America, temporary work has become a mainstay of the economy, leading to the proliferation of what researchers have begun to call “temp towns.” They are often dense Latino neighborhoods teeming with temp agencies. Or they are cities where it has become nearly impossible even for whites and African-Americans with vocational training to find factory and warehouse work without first being directed to a temp firm. In June, the Labor Department reported that the nation had more temp workers than ever before: 2.7 million. Overall, almost one-fifth of the total job growth since the recession ended in mid-2009 has been in the temp sector, federal data shows. But according to the American Staffing Association, the temp industry’s trade group, the pool is even larger: Every year, a tenth of all U.S. workers finds a job at a staffing agency. In December 2011, a Chicago temp worker died after he was scalded by a citric acid solution. The skin cream and shampoo factory he was assigned to failed to call 911 even as his skin was peeling from his body.The proportion of temp workers in the labor force reached its peak in early 2000 before the 2001 slump and then the Great Recession. But as the economy continues its slow, uneven recovery, temp work is roaring back 10 times faster than private-sector employment as a whole—a pace “exceeding even the dramatic run-up of the early 1990s,” according to the staffing association. The overwhelming majority of that growth has come in blue-collar work in factories and warehouses, as the temp industry sheds the Kelly Girl image of the past. Last year, more than one in every 20 blue-collar workers was a temp. Several temp agencies, such as Adecco and Manpower, are now among the largest employers in the United States. One list put Kelly Services as second only to Walmart. “We’re seeing just more and more industries using business models that attempt to change the employment relationship or obscure the employment relationship,” said Mary Beth Maxwell, a top official in the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division. “While it’s certainly not a new phenomenon, it’s rapidly escalating. In the last 10 to 15 years, there’s just a big shift to this for a lot more workers—which makes them a lot more vulnerable.” The temp system insulates the host companies from workers’ compensation claims, unemployment taxes, union drives, and the duty to ensure that their workers are citizens or legal immigrants. In turn, the temps suffer high injury rates, according to federal officials and academic studies, and many of them endure hours of unpaid waiting and face fees that depress their pay below minimum wage. The rise of the blue-collar permatemp helps explain one of the most troubling aspects of the phlegmatic recovery. Despite a soaring stock market and steady economic growth, many workers are returning to temporary or part-time jobs. This trend is intensifying America’s decades-long rise in income inequality, in which low- and middle-income workers have seen their real wages stagnate or decline. On average, temps earn 25 percent less than permanent workers. Many economists predict the growth of temp work will continue beyond the recession, in part because of health-care reform, which some economists say will lead employers to hire temps to avoid the costs of covering full-time workers. THE RISE OF ‘TEMP TOWNS’ Even though some assignments last months, such as her recent job packaging razors for Philips Norelco, every day is a crapshoot for Rosa. She must first check in at the temp agency in Hanover Park, Illinois, by 4:30 a.m. and wait. If she is lucky enough to be called, she must then take a van or bus to the worksite. And even though the agency, Staffing Network, is her legal employer, she is not paid until she gets to the assembly line at 6 a.m. In Kane County, Illinois, where Rosa lives, one in every 14 workers is a temp. Such high concentrations of temp workers exist in Grand Rapids, Michigan; Middlesex County, New Jersey; Memphis, Tennessee; the Inland Empire of California; and Lehigh County, Pennsylvania. In New Jersey, white vans zip through an old Hungarian neighborhood in New Brunswick, picking up workers at temp agencies along French Street. In Joliet, Illinois, one temp agency operated out of a motel meeting room once a week, supplying labor to the layers of logistics contractors at one of Walmart’s biggest warehouses. In Greenville County, South Carolina, near BMW’s U.S. manufacturing plant, one in 12 workers was a temp in 2012. A decade before, it was one in 22. In temp towns, it is not uncommon to find warehouses with virtually no employees of their own. Many temp workers say they have worked in the same factory day in and day out for years. José Miguel Rojo, for example, packed frozen pizzas for a Walmart supplier every day for eight years as a temp until he was injured last summer and lost his job. (Walmart said Rojo wasn’t its employee and that it wants its suppliers to treat their workers well.) In some lines of work, huge numbers of full-time workers have been replaced by temps. One in five manual laborers who move and pack merchandise is now a temp. As is one in six assemblers who work in a team, such as those at auto plants. To be sure, many temp assignments serve a legitimate and beneficial purpose. Temp agencies help companies weather sudden or seasonal upswings and provide flexibility for uncertain times. Employees try out jobs, gain skills, and transition to full-time work. “I think our industry has been good for North America, as far as keeping people working,” said Randall Hatcher, president of MAU Workforce Solutions, which supplies temps to BMW. “I get laid off by Employer A and go over here to Employer B, and maybe they have a job for me. People get a lot of different experiences. An employee can work at four to five different companies and then maybe decide this is what I want to do.” Companies like the “flexibility,” he added. “To be able to call someone and say, 'I need 100 people’ is very powerful. It allows them to meet orders that they might not otherwise.” But over the years, many companies have upended that model and stretched the definition of “temporary work.” At least 840,000 temp workers are like Rosa: working blue-collar jobs and earning less than $25,000 a year, a ProPublica analysis of federal labor data found. Only about 30 percent of industrial temp jobs will become permanent, according to a survey by Staffing Industry Analysts. By 4:52 a.m., the chairs at Rosa’s temp agency are filled, and workers line the walls, clutching plastic bags that contain their lunches. From behind the tall white counter, the voice of an unseen dispatcher booms like a game-show host, calling out the first batch of workers: ___ Mendoza, ___ Rosales, ___ Centeno, ___ Martinez, … It is a practice that George Gonos, a sociologist at SUNY-Potsdam who has spent his career studying the temp industry, calls the modern version of the “shape-up“—a practice in which longshoremen would line up in front of a boss, who would pick them one by one for work on the docks. The day after Thanksgiving 1960, Edward R. Murrow broadcast a report called “Harvest of Shame,” documenting the plight of migrant farmworkers. Temp workers today face many similar conditions in how they get hired, how they get to work, how they live, and what they can afford to eat. Adjusted for inflation, those farmworkers earned roughly the same 50 years ago as many of today’s temp workers, including Rosa. In fact, some of the same farm towns featured in Murrow’s report have now been built up with warehouses filled with temps. As before, the products change by the season. But now, instead of picking strawberries, tomatoes, and corn, the temp workers pack chocolates for Valentine’s Day, barbecue grills for Memorial Day, turkey pans for Thanksgiving, clothing and toys for Christmas. African-Americans make up 11 percent of the overall workforce but more than 20 percent of temp workers. Willie Pearson, who is African-American, has been a full-time worker at BMW’s South Carolina plant for 14 years. But since at least 2005, he said, he hasn’t seen anyone who’s “been hired straight on. It’s all been through temporary agencies.” The company says “after six months they can hire them,” he said, “but I’d say it’s only one out of five” who actually lands a full-time job. BMW did not return calls for this story. Latinos make up about 20 percent of all temp workers. In many temp towns, agencies have flocked to neighborhoods full of undocumented immigrants, finding labor that is kept cheap in part by these workers’ legal vulnerability: They cannot complain without risking deportation.
The industry arose after World War II as the increase in office work led to a need for secretaries and typists for short assignments. At the time, nearly every state had laws regulating employment agents in order to stop the abuses of labor sharks, who charged exorbitant fees to new European immigrants in the early 1900s. Presenting temp work as a new industry, big temp firms successfully lobbied to rewrite those laws so that they didn’t apply to temp firms. In the 1960s, agencies such as Kelly Services and Manpower advertised their services as women’s work, providing “pin money” to housewives, according to Erin Hatton, a SUNY Buffalo sociologist and author of The Temp Economy. And they marketed the advantages of workers that the host company wasn’t responsible for—a theme that continues today. One 1971 Kelly Girl ad that Hatton found, called “The Never-Never Girl,” featured a woman biting a pencil. The copy read:
Carl Camden, the current chief executive of Kelly Services, said the anachronistic language was a response to the chauvinistic attitude of the time. “It wasn’t typical to see women working,” he said. “So you had that work often positioned as not real work. The way the media could sell it as sociologically acceptable was making money for Christmas, something you were doing on the side for your family.” (Manpower didn’t return calls for this story.) Gradually, temp firms began moving into blue-collar work. At the end of the 1960s—a decade in which the American economy grew by 50 percent—temp agencies began selling the idea of temping out entire departments. Relying on temps only for seasonal work and uncertain times was foolish, the agencies told managers over the next two decades. Instead, they said companies should have a core of, say, five employees supplemented by as many as 50 temps, Hatton wrote. The temp industry boomed in the 1990s, as the rise of just-in-time manufacturing drove just-in-time labor. But it also gained by promoting itself as the antidote to bad publicity over layoffs. If a company laid off a large portion of its workforce, it could make big news and leave customers feeling sour. But if a company simply cut its temps, it was easy to write it off as seasonal—and the host company could often avoid the federal requirement that it notify workers of mass layoffs in advance. More recently, temp firms have successfully lobbied to change laws or regulatory interpretations in 31 states, so that workers who lose their assignments and are out of work cannot get unemployment benefits unless they check back in with the temp firm for another assignment. ‘YOU ARE NOT DRIVING GOATS’ Rosa came to the United States in 1997 from Ecatepec, Mexico, where she struggled to raise two sons on her own as a street vendor of beauty supplies. When she found out a neighbor had hired a coyote to help her cross the border, Rosa joined her, leaving her children with family and taking a bus to the frontera. They walked for three days across the desert to a meeting point, where a bus took them to a safe house in Phoenix and then to Cullman, Alabama. By the time she arrived in Cullman, Rosa recalled, her shoes were so full of holes that her first mission was to go to a strip mall and dig through a clothing donation bin for a new pair. “I worked in a poultry plant and a restaurant at the same time so I could get enough money to send back to Mexico,” she said. Like Rosa, many undocumented immigrants who spoke for this story landed full-time jobs when they first arrived in the 1990s. But many of them lost their jobs when factories closed during the recent recession and have since found only temp work. Another temp worker, Judith Iturralde, traced the shift back even earlier, to the immigration crackdowns after 9/11. She said that after she returned to work from surgery in 2002, the compact-disc warehouse she worked at told her it could no longer employ her because she didn’t have papers. They directed her to a temp firm, she said, and a few years later, she returned to the same warehouse, still undocumented. After raising enough money, Rosa returned to Mexico and brought her two teenage sons across the desert and back to Alabama, where they worked full-time at a lumberyard. After her son got hurt on the job, they moved to Chicago, hoping for a better life. But the only work Rosa was able to find was at temp agencies. It is now 5:03 a.m. at Staffing Network, and the first batch of workers waits outside to board the school bus for Norelco. The agency said it offers complimentary transportation for its employees’ benefit. But worker advocates say vans help the temp agencies by ensuring they provide their corporate clients with the right number of workers at the right time. Many metro areas don’t have adequate transportation from the working-class neighborhoods to the former farmland where warehouses have sprouted over the past 15 years. So a system of temp vans has popped up, often contracted by the agencies. Workers in several cities said they feel pressured to get on the vans or lose the job. They usually pay $7 to $8 a day for the round trip. Workers describe the vans as dangerously overcrowded with as many as 22 people stuffed into a 15-passenger van. In New Jersey, one worker drew a diagram of how his temp agency fit 17 people into a minivan, using wooden benches and baby seats and having three workers crouch in the trunk space. “They push and push us in until we get like cigarettes in a box,” said one Illinois worker. “Sometimes I say, 'Hey, you are not driving goats!’” Several workers said the temp agency had left them stranded at times. Vicente Ramos, a father of six who lives in New Jersey, recalled how several years ago he and other workers walked for three hours one night after the van failed to show up. “We were getting hungry and thirsty, and we could barely walk, and our feet were hurting,” Ramos said. “They still charged us for the ride.”
The dispatchers have called several other workers named Rosa. Each time, her ears perk up, but it is always another last name. She goes to the counter and asks the dispatchers if they think there will be work today. They tell her there’s not much but to wait a little longer in case a company calls to say they need more bodies. Two months before, in November, Rosa walked into the temp agency with something to say. She had been attending meetings of the Chicago Workers’ Collaborative, a non-profit that advocates for temp workers and is funded by various religious and anti-poverty foundations. Though Rosa became increasingly active, her only source of income is temp jobs. “My name is Rosa Ramirez,” she said, flanked by leaders of the workers collaborative, who recorded the speech on a cell phone. “We wanted to read some points that we want to change here in this office.” “Stop forcing workers to wait without pay before the work shift,” Rosa said, standing in the center of the room and reading from a paper she had brought. “Allow workers to go directly to the worksite, because some people have children, and they can’t find care that early.” The workers sitting in the bucket chairs looked down nervously, not sure what would happen next. Rosa read on. “Don’t force employees to wait outside of the office until transportation arrives during the winter months.” “We don’t want to be loaded into trucks or vans,” Rosa said. “Because they carry us like sardines.” Looking back on that day, Rosa said she feels empowered at times but at other times defeated. “I no longer could stand the abuses,” Rosa said. “I see people accepting them, and so I thought by standing up and speaking, I was hoping that people would join me and would agree and would stand up for themselves. But unfortunately, the majority of the people did not.” Staffing Network said in a statement that workers weren’t required to come to the branch office. Many workers, it said, get hired by calling about job opportunities and then go directly to their worksites. “Our track record of being a fair and lawful employer is evidenced by the fact that more than 65 percent of the temporary employees we hire and place have worked with Staffing Network for one year or more,” the company wrote. “We provide all employees opportunities to voice any questions or concerns about any aspects of their jobs—without any retaliation.” Unions, on the ropes nationwide, have historically done little for temp workers. The temp industry initially won union backing by promising never to cross picket lines. But in 1985, the Federal Trade Commission ruled that the trade association could not force its members to honor that pledge; so they didn’t. “Unions have had two souls when it comes to temp workers,” said Harley Shaiken, a longtime labor economist at the University of California-Berkeley. One is to try to include them, he said, but “the other is circle the wagons, protect the full-time workers that are there.” Will Collette, who led an AFL-CIO campaign against the temp firm Labor Ready in the early 2000s, said it was nearly impossible to organize workers with such a high turnover. And recent rulings have tied union hands. A 2004 order by the National Labor Relations Board barred temp workers from joining with permanent workers for collective bargaining unless both the temp agency and the host company agree to the arrangement. Some temp firms have even promoted themselves as experts at maintaining a union-free workplace. In a proposal for the off-road vehicle maker Polaris, the temp agency Westaff, a division of the Select Family of Staffing Companies, said its team was specially trained to spot early warning signs of union activity, such as “groups of workers huddling, then quieting when managers appear.” Meanwhile, a whole ecosystem of contractors and subcontractors benefits from the flexibility of just-in-time labor. For example, Walmart’s two largest warehouse complexes are southwest of Chicago and in the Inland Empire east of Los Angeles. Both are managed by Schneider Logistics, which in turn subcontracts to an ever-changing cast of third-party logistics firms and staffing companies. Such layers of temp agencies have helped Walmart avoid responsibility when regulators have uncovered problems or when workers have tried to sue, accusing the company of wage or safety violations. For example, when California inspected Walmart’s Inland Empire warehouse in 2011 and found that workers were being paid piece-rate according to how many shipping containers they unloaded, rather than by the hour, regulators issued more than $1 million in fines against the subcontractors for failing to show how the pay was calculated. Neither Walmart nor Schneider faced penalties. Asked if the layers of subcontracting allow Walmart to escape blame, spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan said, “Absolutely not.” “We work very hard to abide by the law,” she said, “and we expect all the businesses that we do business with and that they do business with to comply with the law.” Schneider treats its associates with “dignity and respect,” spokeswoman Janet Bonkowski wrote in an email. “Our suppliers are independent,” she said. “When we utilize third-party vendors, we contractually require full compliance with all required laws and that all parties conduct business ethically.” As work is downsourced through a cascade of subcontractors, some workers have been paid wages below the legal minimum or seen their incomes decline over the years. Berto Gutierrez, who has worked several stints at the Walmart warehouse in Elwood, Illinois, provided ProPublica with a copy of a 2011 paycheck from subcontractor Eclipse Advantage. The check shows he was paid only $57.81 for 12.5 hours of work, or $4.62 an hour. Neither Eclipse, Schneider, nor Walmart provided an explanation for Gutierrez’s paycheck. In 2007, Leticia Rodriguez was hired directly by Simos, the logistics contractor running the online part of Walmart’s Elwood warehouse. She said she worked as a supervisor on an annual contract for $49,500 a year, with health insurance. In 2009, when she declined to come in on what she described as a long-awaited day off, she was fired. Rodriguez returned to the warehouse six months later, this time starting at the bottom, loading trucks for one of Schneider’s staffing companies. She said she was paid $15 an hour, but within a year the staffing company lost the contract. Eclipse Advantage took over, and Rodriguez went to work for that company. There, she said, she got paid piece-rate, averaging about $9.50 an hour. But six months later, Eclipse left, and she and all the other workers lost their jobs. Rodriguez has since interned at the union-backed campaign Warehouse Workers for Justice, earning $12,000. Eclipse’s president, David Simono, declined to comment. Simos didn’t return calls. Walmart said it couldn’t comment on the specifics of a subcontractor’s employee but said it provides all its workers opportunities for growth.
And don’t look for Obamacare to fix it. Under the law, employers must provide health coverage only to employees who average 30 hours a week or more. After pressure from the temp industry and others, the IRS ruled that companies have up to a year to determine if workers qualify. With the major provisions of health-care reform set to take effect in 2014, there’s growing evidence that 2013 is becoming a boom year for temping out. TempWorks, which sells software that keeps track of payroll and worker orders, says sales to staffing agencies have been going through the roof and that temp firms tell them the uptick is because of Obamacare. Unlike the way it monitors nearly every other industry, the government does not keep statistics on injuries among temp workers. But a study of workers compensation data in Washington state found that temp workers in construction and manufacturing were twice as likely to be injured as regular staff doing the same work. In April, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration announced an initiative to get better information on temp-worker safety. “Employers, we think, do not have the same commitment to providing a safe workplace, to providing the proper training, to a worker who they may only be paying for a few weeks.” OSHA director David Michaels said in an interview. “I mean, we’ve seen just ghastly situations.” In December 2011, a Chicago temp worker died after he was scalded by a citric acid solution. The skin cream and shampoo factory he was assigned to failed to call 911 even as his skin was peeling from his body. In August 2012, a Jacksonville temp was crushed to death on his first day of work at a bottling plant when a supervisor told him to clean glass from underneath a machine that stacks goods onto pallets—a job that OSHA said he wasn’t trained to do. And in January, a temp was killed at a paper mill outside Charlotte, North Carolina, when he was overcome by toxic fumes while cleaning the inside of a chemical tank. “There’s something going on here that needs direct intervention,” Michaels said. A TEMP WORKER BILL OF RIGHTS But worker advocates and some temp agencies say the Massachusetts Temporary Workers Right-to-Know Law, which took effect in January, provides a model for other states. That law requires temp agencies to give workers written notice of the basics: whom they will work for, how much they’ll be paid, and what safety equipment they’ll need. The law limits transportation costs and prohibits fees that would push workers’ pay below minimum wage. Agencies must also reimburse the worker if they are sent to a worksite only to find out there is no job for them there. Similar state bills have passed in New Jersey and Illinois in the past few years. But while the American Staffing Association has a code of ethics containing similar guidelines, it has fought against such laws and blocked them in California and New York. “All laws that apply to every other employee apply to temporary workers,” said Stephen Dwyer, the group’s general counsel. “We thought that heaping new laws on top of existing laws would not be effective.” Even in states that have them, the laws are honored mostly in the breach. For example, Illinois prohibits temp agencies from charging for transportation. But many have gotten around the law by using so-called raiteros, who act as neighborhood labor brokers for the agencies and charge for transportation. The law also requires an employment notice stating the name of the host company, the hourly wage, and any equipment needed. Out of more than 50 Chicago-area workers interviewed for this story, only a handful had ever received one. Passing through Chicago’s working-class suburbs recently, Rosa pointed out the car window to a row of small redbrick homes. “I’ve always dreamed of having a little house, a really small, little house,” she said. Asked if she thought she’d ever be able to buy one, Rosa laughed. “Earning $8.25 an hour?” she said. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do that.” Back at the temp agency, Rosa continues to wait with about 50 other people. Around 6 a.m., she again inquires if there will be any work. The dispatcher tells her to give it 15 more minutes. Then he breaks the news: There is no work today. This post originally appeared on ProPublica, a Pacific Standard partner site. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| We May Be More Afraid of Paying for Cancer Than Having It Posted: 25 Jul 2013 09:58 AM PDT  A new white paper commissioned by insurance company Sun Life Financial argues that fear of medical care's cost can outweigh concern about the malady itself—up to and including death. In a survey of more than 4,000 full-time workers in the U.S. last August, the company reports, "Many workers feared the financial impact of a critical illness even more than dying from one." While it's worth remembering Sun Life's business—selling insurance, including this new thing called critical illness insurance—in reviewing its report, the results certainly pass the sniff test. There is a palpable fear about the cost of critical care and its cousin, long-term care, in the U.S. (and beyond). The medical industry itself uses words like “titanic” to describe the cost. Most health insurance, as Sun Life is quick to note, only goes so far toward covering what can quickly become astronomic costs, both financial and mental, for the patient and their network. And this just for the working population, which is healthier and younger. Spare a regret for those chronically critically ill, another $20 billion a year Pandora's box, or for what's been termed “the burden of survivorship.” Sun Life asked what particular critical illness was scariest, and cancer was the hands down winner, cited by 56 percent of women and 42 percent of men.According to the Sun Life survey, conducted by Kelton Research, when asked their greatest concern when facing a critical illness, 47 percent cited finances, followed by dying at 29 percent and "emotional burden" by 22 percent. Cost was especially spooky to older workers, presumably more acquainted both with mortality and responsibility. In a handy graphic demonstrating this age-related ratcheting, among workers 40 to 50 those earning less than $50,000 a year were twice as concerned with finances as with dying, single workers earning less than $50,000 and single parents with a household income of less than $100,000 were three times as concerned, and single women earning less than $50,000 were four times as concerned. Younger workers, those between age 22 and 39, were less worried overall, but again, single parents and single women (I suspect there's a lot of overlap in those categories) were most concerned with the cost of care. Sun Life asked what particular critical illness was scariest, and cancer was the hands down winner, cited by 56 percent of women and 42 percent of men. Heart attacks came second, cited by more men (37 percent) than women (25 percent), followed by stroke. Those fears pretty much track the claims for critical care insurance monitored by another insurance company, Gen Re Life Corporation: 61 percent were for cancer, 18 percent stroke, and 11 percent heart attacks. (Kidney failure and coronary artery bypass surgery join these three on similar lists.) The point here isn't to sell a new kind of insurance (even if it might be needed); Sun Life and its peers can do that on their own. Having seen my mom battle Alzheimer’s before she was finished off by lung cancer, for instance, I’m personally interested in how to pay for long-term care. But my concern here is to once again point out the paralyzing influence that cost has on care. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Train Crash in Spain Killed as Many as 1 Day of Commuting in the U.S. Posted: 25 Jul 2013 09:22 AM PDT  Here in Barcelona the news of the horrific train derailment last night in Galicia, on the Iberian Peninsula’s opposite coast, has taken two forms. The first involved questions about whether cutbacks in the rail service had led to a mechanical failure. For the past decade, Spain’s government has been cutting funds from its traditional, low-cost train system, while spending billions on a new network of bullet trains, called the AVE, which translates to “High Velocity Spain.” The AVE has been a controversial project because it’s expensive to build and operate. Those costs get passed on, making some journeys now twice as expensive (if three times as fast) as they were with the old trains. The AVE’s buildout has been deeply political, leaving some regions with too much train service and others with less than they need. It’s been a constant debate in this country: An analysis of the AVE project by local economist Germa Bel, recently a visiting professor at Cornell, became an unlikely best-seller here three years ago. The derailed train was not an AVE, but part of an older, secondary high-speed system called the Talgo. It didn’t help that the train was likely very full, because this weekend is a regional holiday in Galicia, the northeast region where the crash occurred. Unlike a plane crash or even a school shooting, which are both unthinkable but also somewhat improbable still, a train accident fits a bit too neatly into the Spanish imagination.So, early this morning, the big question about the crash here was whether money spent on the AVE had left the older system, of which the wrecked train was a part, vulnerable. Less than a day on from the disaster, that’s looking less and less likely compared to the possibility of driver error—which brings us to the other topic in the air here. The early reports suggested that the train pulling into Santiago de Compostela was traveling as much as twice its speed limit when it hit a curve in the track. A widely-circulating video of the crash shows the train traveling through a cement-walled urban easement, below a highway, at shocking speed, when the second or third car back from the engine skips the rail and hits an adjacent wall, flipping the rest of the train as it goes. (We’re not linking to the video; a lot of people lost family in those cars, and it’s easy enough to find the pictures if you happen to be a transportation engineer.) Since the video emerged a few hours ago, the conversation is broadening beyond the train system to what this accident means for the Spanish public’s faltering sense of trust in its government. Already we’ve had our first mini-scandal related to the crash, in which a condolence statement from Spanish President Mariano Rajoy contained language apparently cut and pasted from a condolence statement about an earthquake in China, presumably by an unthinking person on Rajoy’s staff. That Rajoy himself is from Galicia, where the train crashed, hasn’t helped the sense that he responded to the tragedy with canned emotion. Rajoy is also neck-deep in a complex, Watergate-like scandal involving illegal payments from his political party’s former treasurer, and this has gotten into the emotional stew around the crash. In a country where many basic institutions are being treated with skepticism, the worst train wreck in 40 years is, besides a human tragedy, a sudden metaphor. Spain is now literally a country off the rails, with fatal consequences. In the cold language of political posturing, this is bad optics. Rajoy is scheduled to speak in the Spanish parliament next week on the scandal, and it remains to be seen whether the Galicia train disaster will prove a useful distraction for him—the local news is talking about nothing else—or whether it has only deepened the sense of chaos in this country, and sorrow. The practical fear is also real. Unlike a plane crash or even a school shooting, which are both unthinkable but also somewhat improbable still, a train accident fits a bit too neatly into the Spanish imagination. The crash of a train here has the psychological impact closer to what an elevator’s plunge would produce in New York, or a ferry capsize would in Seattle. Trains are fundamental infrastructure here, at least as important as roads, and every one of Spain’s 46 million people takes them at least weekly. If the drivers or the tracks are unreliable, that really hits home. That sensation of worry is different than it is in the U.S. The daily death toll on American roads is about 85 people, according to the Association for Safe International Road Travel, a group which tracks such things. Put another way, the death toll for the worst train accident here since the ’70s is roughly the same as the average loss of life for America’s road system, daily. The macabre comparison is a bit facile and a bit of a cheap shot. One giant accident doesn’t have much in common with 85 individual ones, and comparing transportation systems by their odds of killing you is reductive: We all know cars are far and away the most dangerous way to move large numbers of people. The drastically different responses to those losses is still hard to overlook on a day like today. If only by numbers, what happened today in Spain happens every day in the U.S. and appears likely to continue for the foreseeable future. Here they’re mourning visibly, together, and very angry, also together. In the U.S. these events occur no less tragically, but less visibly, one family at a time. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Prince George Alexander Louis and You Posted: 25 Jul 2013 08:00 AM PDT  Tweet and update your celebrity baby blog, for he hath been proclaimed George Alexander Louis, the Prince of Cambridge. Yes, the Royal Baby has been named—and snappily so by monarchy standards: Grandpa Prince Charles waited a month for his name. But with the number of births in England per year at around 688,120, why do we care about little George to the point of worldwide frenzy? Prime Minister David Cameron described the baby's birth as an "important moment in the life of our nation" which, as Prince George is third in line for the throne, makes sense if you think the monarchy is important to begin with. (Where would we be without slideshows of the royal corgis?) But for the rest of us who are not subjects of a queen, the answer likely lies with an all too familiar obsession with tabloid-ready infants. As Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse aptly notes, Prince George sits at "the intersection of celebrity worship, royal worship, and the burgeoning baby-industrial complex." An obsession with celebrity pregnancies and births doesn't do us any favors.In The Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Media, Erin Meyers argues that our interest in famous kids is drawn from our desire to see celebrities—who reside in a seemingly unattainable world—in an identifiable situation: motherhood. While we don't often weekend jet-set to Bora Bora, we have pleaded with a one-year-old to not eat dirt. Meyers says the "celebrity mom profile" grew with the magazines of the 1990s, when celebrity moms began to "embody a highly romanticized and idealized vision" of motherhood as a "pinnacle of 'natural' feminine achievement." Twenty-first-century media coverage expanded our celebrity interest to unabashed scrutiny of the hot-or-not bodies of the famous. This naturally led to the now-common search for the baby bump, which Meyers says lead to the discovery of a "potentially inappropriate pregnancy" or "always inappropriate weight gain." Fellow scholar K. Megan Hopper furthers Meyers' point in her paper, in which she writes that "the impact of the sexual objectification of pregnant celebrities" has led to a discussion of "what type of pregnant body is desirable and what type of pregnant body incites discussion and criticism." We can see this in the gossip media coverage of Kim Kardashian and Kate Middleton, who have been juxtaposed by different outlets because of similar due dates. Kardashian was memorably described as "HUGE" during her pregnancy, while Milddleton was a "slim duchess." So it makes some sense that, after judging celebrities’ pregnant bodies for months, that our interest would transfer to their kids. Yet, an obsession with celebrity pregnancies and births doesn't do us any favors. In Hopper's research, pregnant women were asked to evaluate themselves after looking at pictures of pregnant celebrities. When the subjects studied the pictures they began to see themselves as objects that should also be evaluated for ideal beauty. For women 28 to 30, looking at a full body of a pregnant celebrity especially lead to increased self-objectification. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Why Are There No Reality TV Shows About Writing? Posted: 25 Jul 2013 06:00 AM PDT  Singing, cooking, dancing, designing, modeling—these are all art forms we’ve grown accustomed to watching people with varying degrees of skill perform on reality TV competition shows. At one point or another, network executives have also tried their luck with similar elimination-based programs about telling jokes (Last Comic Standing), applying makeup (Face Off), taking photographs (The Shot), acting (Scream Queens), making conceptual stuff (Work of Art), impersonating females (RuPaul’s Drag Race), and even filmmaking (On the Lot). Indeed, the format is so formulaic by now that if there’s some talent a dozen or so people possess, there’s probably a television producer encouraging them all to do it on camera against each other. So why not writing? Why hasn’t anyone tried that yet? Where’s the American Idol of critical essays or Iron Chef of short stories? When America’s illiteracy rate is arguably at its lowest in history and the general public is actively engaged in rearranging the alphabet to communicate meaning via emails, status updates, and website comments, it seems the time is right for the century’s most prolific television genre to feature the craft of writing. Just over a year ago, Entertainment Weekly published an article addressing this omission from primetime, in which staff member Stephan Lee composed a “ridiculously detailed” pitch for a reality show about book writing. Lee’s proposal contains everything from struggling MFA students to a variety of episodic challenges (ghostwriting, book tours, day jobs) to satirist Gary Shteyngart being one of the judges to the elimination catchphrase, “You’ve been slushpiled!” The working title: Great American Author (though Lee admits the network would probably change this to The Next Best-Seller). Lee’s article was well-received, and the top comment simply states, “Now THIS I would watch! Why aren’t you the one coming up with tv shows??” Still though, a reality TV competition show about writing has yet to materialize. Why? “Literally seeing the process of writing would be torture.”“BECAUSE WRITING IS BORING,” said Peter Hankoff, a Los Angeles-based television producer, director, and writer who has worked for National Geographic, History Channel, and Discovery Channel. “How do you watch writing? Do you see how fast men and women can type?” As Hankoff explained, the very first question he asks when either assigned a new show or developing one on his own is “What the hell are we looking at?” Admittedly, footage of someone quietly sitting hunched over her MacBook in a dark corner of the public library doesn’t sound all that riveting. Unlike the sound of onions sautéing in a seasoned pan or the sight of dancer rhythmically moving his limbs before a big mirror in a studio, the image of a jaded writer mumbling to herself before dispassionately pressing and holding the delete button for eight seconds straight just doesn’t seem appealing. Visually, the craft of writing simply isn’t that strong in the performance department. “If you were doing America’s Got Writing, I guarantee no one’s watching that show,” said Hankoff. “Even I’m not watching that show, cause what am I going to watch?” Another practical production obstacle would be getting the audience to read the contestants’ work—because viewers would probably have to do it on their own time. How else could America develop informed opinions about who’s overrated, who’s misunderstood, who’s lacking in confidence, and who’s in possession of a style that deserves the prize, among all the other archetypes these shows tend to generate, if the public can’t read the writing in full? “Are contestants supposed to read their 5,000-word essays out loud for a panel of judges?” asked Meredith Blake, an entertainment writer for the Los Angeles Times. “Unless they’re writing haikus, there’s no way to do this in a manner that doesn’t suck up huge amounts of time…. Even if the contestants are just writing 500-word stories, 10 500-word stories equals 5,000 words. That’s a lot of time spent just sitting there reading, which no one is going to want to do and makes for really boring TV.” Judy Berman, editor-in-chief of the New York-based art and culture site Flavorwire, agrees: “For a short story, you really have to read it to have an opinion—and though I could imagine a show incorporating some kind of online element where the stories are available to read before the judges announce their decision, I just don’t think most viewers will be committed enough to read tens of thousands of words a week in order to follow a reality TV show.” While it’s true that there have been reality shows in which writing is involved, they've either eschewed the competition aspect or focused on things other than writing. There was Tabloid Wars, which followed around editors and reporters at the New York Daily News, and another called The City, which “documented” a young woman who worked at Elle magazine. In 2007, MTV aired 10 episodes of I’m From Rolling Stone, whereby six young journalists competed for a gig at the illustrious publication—though, judging by the trailer, it looks like the show focused much more on celebrity appearances than word choice or story structure. For those skeptics who think it just can’t be done, however, the United Arab Emirates has a long-running competition series titled Million’s Poet, in which contestants write and perform Arabic poetry, American Idol-style. In 2008, Variety deemed the show a “runaway success,” as it captured more viewers than soccer when it debuted the previous year on Abu Dhabi TV and is now hailed as one of the most successful Arab television shows ever. Still, if there were even a chance of profiting from such a show in the American context, you’d think a network executive would have at least given an idea like Lee’s a try by now. “I personally think you can almost make a good show about anything,” said David Madsen, a television producer, novelist, and screenwriter, who’s also the co-founder of the website Write Reality, which runs a contest whereby people can submit reality TV show pitches for a chance of seeing them come to fruition. “It all depends on who’s in it, the execution, and the quality of the idea.” That said, Madsen sees more problems in launching a skills-based show about writing than he does virtues. Again: What is the viewer looking at? Writing is cerebral and often done alone, making the creative act nearly impossible to capture on film. “Literally seeing the process of writing would be torture,” he said. As for this notion that everyone alive today with a smartphone who relentlessly composes tweets and sends text messages is therefore greatly intrigued by the power of letters to evoke feelings and challenge thoughts, Blake considers the link tenuous at best. “While more people are literate than ever before, that doesn’t mean there are masses yearning to watch a show about people vying to become America’s next top poet or literary critic,” she said. “It also doesn’t help that the viewer who would be interested in that kind of show, at least theoretically, is exactly the type of person who would reflexively eschew reality TV—the type of person who probably watches Breaking Bad, but has a knee-jerk reaction against reality TV.” Although Blake laments the outright prejudice some hold against the reality genre, perhaps a competition show about writing could bridge the gulf between lovers of Project Runway on one side and fans of Mad Men on the other. It’s an opportunity, at least. FOR NOW, AN AMERICAN reality competition for writers just doesn’t seem likely to happen. While a small group of keeners would certainly tune in each week to commiserate with the contestants’ burden of pounding out paragraphs and to listen to the judges articulate why a certain phrase or punctuation mark works or not, it’s clear that would-be investors of such a show don’t think they’d make a good-enough return. Even with the drama and jealousy and unholy ambition some reality TV contestants tend to subsist on, the medium of writing just doesn’t come across as a suitable subject matter. “I think writing as a performance has the luxury of not necessarily being connected directly to a reading audience,” said Margaret Eby, an entertainment reporter for the New York Daily News. “Food, live music, dance—all of them have a quality of immediacy that writing doesn’t have. I think the best shot for a reality show about writing is one about writers. Fifteen creative non-fiction writers in a house? People would stop being polite and start turning every anecdote into a 5,000-word musing for n+1.” | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Music Bridges Cultures? Actually, Not So Much Posted: 25 Jul 2013 04:00 AM PDT  Can we train ourselves to be more comfortable with, and less fearful of, people from different cultures? Well, we can try, and for some, that means tasting their food and listening to their music. Bad idea. Newly published research suggests that approach could have the opposite of its intended effect. It finds listening to unconventional music prompts people to denigrate outsiders. A research team led by University of Limerick psychologist Paul James Maher reports that hearing "music that is difficult to reconcile with existing expectations about music structure and sound" can kick off a chain of unfortunate thoughts and emotions. According to this analysis, people unconsciously grasp for the sense of meaning the odd sounds fail to provide—and often find it by affirming their allegiance to their own social group. The next time you think about inviting a closed-minded friend to a multicultural fair, think again.In the European Journal of Social Psychology, the researchers describe three experiments which provide evidence backing up their thesis. One featured 60 students from the University of Limerick in Ireland. Half listened to a four-minute-long piece of music that is typical of contemporary electronic pop: Da Funk, by the French group Daft Punk. The others listened to Interstellar Narcotics by the avant-garde electronic music artist Venetian Snares. "This artist is known for making music in odd numbered time signatures that can arguably be considered unconventional to most people," the researchers write. Afterwards, all were asked what portion of an imaginary 100 million Euro social-services budget should be set aside for services to the "traveling community," which the researchers describe as an "often marginalized minority group." Those who had listened to the less-conventional music allocated significantly less money to that much-maligned community. In another study, 63 University of Limerick students listened to one of two versions of the instrumental song One Late Night by the blues artist Dr. John. Half heard the original recording, while the others heard "the same piece of music that had been edited by an experienced musician to make it appear less coherent, while keeping the length and tempo the same." They then read a scenario in which an Englishman, driven by ethnic prejudice, severely beat an Irishman, and was subsequently taken into custody. Participants were asked what would be the "appropriate jail sentence" for the perpetrator. "Participants who had been exposed to the unconventional music gave significantly longer jail sentences to the English offender," the researchers report. "It appears the deviation in (musical) structure was enough to elicit out-group derogation." These results "are consistent with studies demonstrating that people compensate for 'meaning threats' by reaffirming meaningful frameworks elsewhere," the researchers write. Unfortunately, in these cases, this compensation apparently took the form of reaffirming the participants' loyalty to their society, which showed up in a decreased willingness to empathize with outsiders. So the next time you think about inviting a closed-minded friend to a multicultural fair, think again. "Traditional music from one culture or society can often sound unconventional to outsiders," the researchers note. "Celebrations of culture and tradition are often accompanied by music, and as a result, attempts to celebrate and share diversity may have the reverse effect." |
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