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hub-pub-bub · 5 years

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Wage theft is when your boss doesn’t pay you what you’ve already earned. When I learned that Massachusetts had “blue laws,” that my bosses weren’t obeying them, and had shorted me around three thousand dollars, it was wage theft.

This was the law: retail employees were to be paid at a “premium” rate on Sundays and holidays, time-and-a-half, the same as overtime. But none of the booksellers where I worked had ever been paid it. And while not being paid overtime is a textbook example of wage theft, when I tell people, they are happy to qualify it for me with a “Well…” or an “Okay, but…” I don’t know where this instinct comes from. Maybe it’s because “wage theft” makes it sound premeditated, more like a crime. (But it was a crime!) Or maybe it’s because I worked at an independent bookstore, and indie bookstores are beloved pillars of the community. (What would that mean about the community?) Maybe it’s because it doesn’t makes sense that an independent bookstore would do something like this. Everyone knows indiebookstores are thriving! (Which is true—it’s the people who work in them who are struggling.)

I found out when I was trying to see if I could afford to take a sick day. I felt like I was coming down with something, but taking a day off meant losing a not-insubstantial chunk of my monthly take-home pay ($11.50 an hour). Since there were sick hours adding up in a box labeled “time-off accrual” on my pay stubs—and surely they had to amount to something—I went to mass.gov to check the law. But they amounted to literally nothing, as it turned out: Massachusetts businesses only have to provide paid sick leave if they have more than eleven employees, and we had ten. My “sick days” meant I couldn’t be fired for staying home sick (as long as I wasn’t sick more than five days per year).

But I learned something else. There were links to related pages and I clicked the one about “blue laws,” which I didn’t know we had in Massachusetts.

Later that day I emailed the bookstore’s owners. Is there a reason our bookstore is exempt from blue laws, I asked, or was this an oversight?

They responded the same night. They’d heard that other area bookstores had to pay the premium rate, they said, because their booksellers were unionized, but that otherwise there was some exemption. They said they would investigate, that they’d talk to their lawyer and get back to me.

After that the story gets so routine you could probably write it yourself. When I followed up a few days later, they said their lawyer was on vacation but that they’d update payroll and we’d receive the premium pay on Sundays and holidays from then on. When some of the other booksellers and I contacted the Attorney General’s Fair Labor Division, they only sent a form letter saying the matter was too small for them to investigate personally, but we were welcome to pursue legal action (on our own time and at our own expense). I found some free legal clinics on wage theft, but only once-a-month and while I was scheduled to work. Ten days after the first email, I followed up again; “still the same conflicting intel,” they said, “but when we told our lawyer that we started paying 1.5 for sundays and holidays, the matter dropped. (lawyers are expensive!) let me know if it’s not reflected in your check.” A coworker who already planned to quit asked the owners specifically about back pay–which I hadn’t had the courage to do—and they told her no, they weren’t going to pay it, and they said it in writing.

I ended up speaking to a lawyer, who offered to represent me on a contingency fee basis: I wouldn’t have to pay if we lost, and the bookstore would be responsible for my legal fees if I won. But he recommended I not move forward until I got a new job. It isn’t legal to retaliate against an employee for bringing a case, he told me, but, you know, it also isn’t legal to ignore blue laws.

I said thank you, I’ll consider my options.

One day in November one of the owners called me into the office at the bookstore. She gave me $500 in cash and $500 in store credit, about a third of what I was owed. I spent the store credit on gifts for the holidays and I looked for a new job. I ignored a follow-up call from the lawyer and tried not to wallow in the humiliation. I was not successful. Even now it feels like admitting something shameful: I was fooled, maybe, or I’m some kind of miser. A few people asked me, what if they can’t afford to pay back pay and they go out of business? You hear it more than once and it’s easy to forget it’s not a ransom, that you didn’t pluck the number out of nowhere.

It’s hard to compare independent bookstores to other kinds of retail stores. Bookstores sell a cultural product and booksellers insist that bookstores can’t be compared to other retail stores because they sell a cultural product. And bookstores don’t exploit their employees more than other retail. But what grates is when bookstores market themselves as more than stores, as community hubs.

“Independent bookstores act as community anchors,” the American Booksellers Association declares, at the bottom of every page on their site; “they serve a unique role in promoting the open exchange of ideas, enriching the cultural life of communities, and creating economically vibrant neighborhoods.”

This same lofty idealism justifies why booksellers don’t need to be paid a living wage, like employees of nonprofits or teachers: because bookstores are so vital for the community, the assumption goes, the job should be reward enough itself. The work is so important that maybe booksellers should make personal sacrifices, working well below the value of their labor.

I spoke to around twenty booksellers while I was writing this, and I was struck by how many are willing to make trade-offs. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been. “Independent booksellers consistently describe their work as more than just a way to make a living, and more than just a means of escaping the constraints that come from working for somebody else,” writes Laura Miller, in her 2006 book, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption; “These booksellers see themselves as bettering society by making books available.” Plenty of the booksellers I spoke to saw bookselling as a calling. Because of course they do! If they weren’t willing to make sacrifices, they couldn’t still be booksellers. And how else could bookstores get away with paying them—they, who generally have to have a college degree; who have to spend a lot of unpaid time reading across all genres and topics; who have to have at least a little knowledge about everything, from the ancient Greeks to Dog Man 7: Brawl of the Wild; who, at at least one store, famously have to correctly answer quiz questions before being hired—so little, while so successfully preserving an image as a (generally progressive) force for social good?

And it is so little. A bookseller in Southern California with eight years of experience still earns less than $20 per hour; “I can’t think of another industry where you could work for eight years and still be making that little,” he said. A different Southern California bookseller/assistant events manager earns $17.50. A bookseller/assistant events manager in the Boston area is earning $14. A former bookseller in Northern California was making $14.25, a quarter above the minimum wage. A part time bookseller in Chicago makes $13, the city’s minimum wage. A former bookseller in Minnesota was salaried after two years at $30,000 while a bookseller and events manager in Tennessee started at $25,000, six years ago, and now makes $31,500.

I started at $11 per hour and ended around eighteen months later at $11.50, and as far as I know, none of the booksellers at that store even earned $15. The median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Boston is $2400 per month, which I could cover if I worked 50 hours a week, didn’t pay taxes, and didn’t need money for food, utilities, medical care, or literally anything else.

The booksellers I spoke to reported quite a range of benefits—in one year, for example, a Bay Area bookseller accrued three weeks of vacation time, and in the same time period a Pennsylvania bookseller got three days. But some booksellers told me that their benefits were mostly on paper. Not being fired for calling in sick or going on vacation doesn’t make it financially viable, after all. A Minnesota bookseller told me she has ten paid vacation days per year, but the store has so few employees that taking time off means she’d have to make up the missed hours working overtime. A bookstore in California offered a health insurance program, but gave employees a fifty-cent raise if they didn’t enroll.

It’s not so bleak for everyone. Unionized stores generally fight for better benefits and act as safeguards against labor law violations; I talked to a handful of booksellers whose stores had some kind of profit sharing, which can make a big difference.

But… I don’t know. There’s a bookstore owned by people who, all evidence suggests, really give a fuck and want to do right by their booksellers. They pay at least $15 per hour, and I heard one of the owners say on a podcast how much is required of booksellers; “If you’re a college graduate, and you’ve spent all this time reading, in addition to going to college—yeah, you deserve $15 an hour. Period.” But when his interlocutor mentioned a bookstore that had profit sharing, the owner was quick to say it wouldn’t work at his store. (And it wouldn’t, yet—the store is young and not yet profitable.*) But “It’s also a matter of loyalty,” he said, and explained that he couldn’t envision employees staying longer than a year. “I would love to find a bookseller who I know would be around long enough. Right now it just hardly seems even worth doing all the work. No one would qualify, because they won’t stick around long enough.”

Tell me, what are they going to stick around for? The bookstore owner said all of his employees are part-time—they’re either in grad school or working other part-time jobs. Are they supposed to stick around for a part-time job that pays $15 per hour?

What is there to be loyal to?

IndieBound—an ABA project—has a section on its website dedicated to answering Why Support Independents? One answer is that “Local businesses create higher-paying jobs for our neighbors.” But you can also find a page at the ABA website on “The Growing Debate Over Minimum Wage,” warning that “a minimum wage increase that is too drastic could result in reduced staff hours, lost jobs, or, worse, a store going out of business.” There’s also an “Indie Fact Sheet” to print out and give to local politicians; “Many indies pay more than the current minimum wage already for senior and full-time staff,” it says; “They do this because offering superior customer service is one of their competitive advantages—it is what separates them from their chain and remote, online retailing competitors. This also helps indies retain and attract good employees.”

See? Many bookstores pay their booksellers more than the minimum wage! It’s not their problem that that same minimum wage isn’t enough to cover a one-bedroom in any state in the country. It’s not their problem that inflation has eroded the value of the minimum wage. It’s not their problem that low wages are an affront to basic dignity or that higher minimum wages save lives. They’re just fiercely committed to their neighbors and their communities.

The ABA is happy to help its member stores fight even modest wage increases. “If the minimum wage is raised,” the Indie Fact Sheet continues, “it inevitably means indies will have to increase the wages of senior and full-time staff, in addition to increasing the wages of any minimum-wage workers. This increases the ripple effect. A seemingly ‘insignificant’ wage increase can have a dramatic effect on the bottom line, sending a profitable store into the red.”

There’s no mention of the dramatic effect an increase in the minimum wage could have on employees.

At Winter Institute–an annual ABA conference for independent booksellers–there’s a town hall where members can share their concerns. According to the ABA’s coverage of the event, an independent bookstore owner went to the mic to speak about the minimum wage. “I’m very happy the staff is getting a pay bump,” she said, “but that’s a huge adjustment to make every 12 months and once you get a handle on it, then it’s going up again. I feel like this seems to be going countrywide and that is something that is extra important to our nonexistent margins.”

Why this framing? Why not ask how other stores are handling the adjustment? Why not pay employees a living wage now so as not to have to change business model every year? Why does a bookstore owner feel comfortable getting up and saying this in front of an audience of booksellers?

If your local indie bookstore skirts labor laws or advocates against them, at the expense of its employees, can you still be sanctimonious for shopping there? Is your local indie bookstore thriving if its employees skip doctor’s appointments they can’t afford? If your local indie bookstore’s trade group doesn’t have resources for booksellers on paid sick leave, health insurance, or wage theft–in an industry famous for its tiny margins–is it an industry you’d recommend joining?

“We find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of being believers in social and economic justice while struggling to pay our employees a salary they can survive on,” writes Elayna Trucker on shopping local and running a bookstore; “We urge our customers to Shop Local but make hardly enough to do so ourselves. It is an unintentional hypocrisy, one that has gone largely ignored and unaddressed. So where does all that leave us? Rather awkwardly clutching our money, it seems… All of this brings up the most awkward question of all: does a business that can’t afford to pay its employees a living wage deserve to be in business?”

I am so glad I don’t have to come up with an answer. I have no idea. I haven’t the faintest idea at all.

In the end it was a tweet. I left the bookstore after the holidays and started a new job in January. In February, after a night of shitty sleep, I tweeted, “I have been spending hours lying awake at night doing nothing but feeling this intense shame like a stone in my chest about experiencing wage theft at my last job and I am sincerely just hoping that tweeting about it is enough to make it stop so let’s see if it works.”

A day or two later I got an email. “It’s filtered back to me that the $1000 we gave you to settle the Sunday pay issue,” they said, “didn’t resolve it.” They said some things about how they hadn’t known until I told them. They cut me a check for the back pay that same day.

I didn’t delete the tweet. I don’t know if any of my coworkers got back pay.

A little later, I read an article about the student-run Harvard Shop in Cambridge. The Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office found that the store owed almost $50,000 in back pay to their employees and $5,600 in fines for violating blue laws. “In this case, we unknowingly did make a mistake in how we were paying our students for Sunday and holiday pay,” the store’s manager said.

I only saw the article because the union I joined at my new job shared it on Twitter.

In Seasonal Associate, Heike Geissler’s barely-fictionalized account of her time working at an Amazon fulfillment center, she writes: “What you and I can’t do, because you and I don’t want to, is to think your employer into a better employer, and to compare these conditions to even worse, less favorable conditions, so as to say: It’s not all that bad. It could be worse. It used to be worse. We don’t do that. You and I want the best and we’re not asking too much.”

I loved bookselling. I loved it for the same reasons everyone does: the community of readers and booksellers, the joy when someone came back into the store and says I recommended the perfect read, the pride when authors reach out directly to say how much my work meant to them. The free books, the discounts, the advance copies, all of it. And I do believe that bookstores can be forces for social good, insofar as bookscan be forces for social good, which I think they can. It is self-evidently better to get your books from a local store than from Amazon, and for precisely the reasons the IndieBound website gives.

But it’s not enough to Not Be Amazon, and framing bookstores as moral exemplars regardless of how they treat their employees isn’t to the benefit of booksellers. Bookstores “thrive” by hiding how much their booksellers struggle. “Any thriving I do personally is in spite of my store,” one of the booksellers I spoke to said. Working at a bookstore is not as bad as working at an Amazon warehouse; I didn’t walk dozens of miles per day and my bathroom breaks weren’t monitored. But are we willing to let that be the baseline?

*clarification added after publication

#bookshops #book seller #wage theft #living wage #unions

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abeat · 7 years

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Ranting

Tumblr is my safe space to rant. My Facebook ‘friends’ can be iffy. Although I am divulging my top secret real life location....I am pissed about something and need to rant somewhere.

So I live in Ontario, Canada and for the non-Ontario people in the world who happen to read this Tumblr for some reason, the college teachers are on strike. That means that even though I worked my ass off to get into this damn program, I cannot attend class and I cannot even go to my work placement that I -just- got because there is no teacher to ‘monitor’ me.

I can understand where the teachers and colleges are coming from. More than half of the teachers are on contract. They have to re-apply for the same position every few months, do not receive benefits and have no job security. While I was taking a general education class, I actually had a chance to get to know my teacher at the time and she was telling me stories of how she was struggling to provide for her daughter. So I sympathize on that front. Being on contract work for 8 years is simply BS and is part of a larger problem of corporations giving less and less of a damn about their employees anymore. But I digress.

I can also understand how the Colleges are trying to save on costs and the teachers are demanding a 9% over three years. 7.75% over four years does not seem like a terrible compromise to me, but whatever. What do I know? I pay for things I really don’t care about, like the gym, the varsity teams, the library that is too noisy to actually work in and the student pub. Can we not funnel money out of that? I would be very curious to know what some of the administration staff make too. I am confident that if we had a system where students could opt in or out of these and thus direct that money elsewhere, we could have avoided this whole issue.

Right now, no one is even at the damn bargaining table. Everyone keeps saying “oh we care, don’t worry, you’re not going to lose your semester, this is for YOUR benefit”. Bull-fucking-shit. This was, and remains, all about the profit. Whether it is teachers demanding more of a share of the profit or colleges wanted to hog money for whatever reason. The teachers have every right to demand better salaries and conditions and what not, just like the Colleges have every right to try and make money, but I really wish both sides would drop the pretense of giving a damn about the students. If that were -really- true, both sides would be at that bargaining table day after day trying to work something out!

Another thing that pisses me off is how “Oh, you should have a part-time job already lined up! Go work at that for awhile. :D”. What if you’re an international student who needs to get a working visa? On top of paying nearly double what a domestic student pays, and most likely living in residence, where the fuck are they supposed to get the money for that? What if you’re in a very intense program (like mine!) where sure you could use money but if you don’t get the grades, then what was the fucking point? Though I’m sure that’s true of all programs. I have no idea what happens when the strike ends. Do I get a days’ notice? A week’s? Then what? Cancel all of my shifts and smile and say “Oh! I don’t need these now. You handle it :D”. I’m not a fan of my workplace but it doesn’t mean I want to do something so shitty to them. So far I’ve basically told them to call me if they need someone but don’t schedule me because it’s hard to know what I can commit to. I don’t really want to say “OKay, they’re on strike, go ahead and schedule me whenever”, the strike ends and then I have to go back to class. “Oops! No can do. :D”

My favourite thus far is this. Apparently there is this wonderful, mystical $72 million dollar strike fund for the teachers. So they should have money, right? I’m pretty sure my tuition fees paid someone’s salary that in turns paid union dues. So they turn around and say “Oh! We’re so poor! Spare us the interest for awhile!” ). What about the students working their asses off to be at school? Anyone going to through a few bucks OUR way? Probably not. Am I petty to hope their request is denied? I mean it was -their- idea to go on strike in the first place. They have this almighty strike fund. And they have the gall to ask for even more alms? When I went to my orientation before my program started, my damn teacher was telling us how she went scuba diving in Honduras so her ears were plugged. I don’t have the damn funds to go on vacation! Think I should ask for money from the strike fund so I can go to Disney World while they’re on strike?

I’m just frustrated. My life, and the lives of all students across Ontario, are in limbo while waiting for this damn fiasco to end. I don’t think I’d be so mad if they were at least making a damn effort to meet half-way. I don’t really buy their damn claims that they care about the students because I think if they really did, they would still be trying to work this out.

#rant #ontario college strike

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toldnews-blog · 6 years

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New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/united-states-of-america/denver-is-so-expensive-that-teachers-have-to-get-creative-to-make-ends-meet/

Denver is so expensive that teachers have to get creative to make ends meet

Yes, it’s about money, many have told CNN. But it’s also about the uncertainty of living paycheck to paycheck. It’s about the necessity of taking on a second or third job. It’s about the untenability of carrying on this way much longer.

Katie McOwen has had to make some tough decisions when it comes to money.

At the end of this month, she’s giving up her one-bedroom apartment and will move into a friend’s basement. The move sacrifices some of her independence, but it affords her some wiggle room with her finances.

The sixth-grade math teacher at Place Bridge Academy in Denver said she makes about $50,000 per year. After paying $1,050 in rent, plus student loan payments, bills and other expenses, there’s not much left over. She also nannies during the summers to supplement income.

“I really am living paycheck to paycheck right now,” McOwen said. “If my car broke down or anything, I would be really hurting.”

McOwen is lucky that she doesn’t have to make car payments. She drives a 2000 Honda Accord, which just hit 310,000 miles. It works now, but she worries about the future.

“I know if something really happens, I will be in big, big trouble,” she said.

Why? Because she wouldn’t be able to go to work.

The 35-year-old is originally from West Virginia, the state that launched a teacher strike and inspired similar movements across the United States last year. Her mother and sisters, who also live in Denver, have talked about moving back east, or somewhere near there, to find a more affordable life.

“My option was to either move there or I’ve been contemplating moving into a camper van,” she said with a laugh. “I knew something was going to have to change. It was either to move completely out of Denver or to bunk with my friend.”

He drives Lyft after school and has multiple roommates

Sean Bowers shares a place with three people.

They split the $2,500 rent. He lives in the smallest room and pays $600.

Change is coming, though. Two of Bowers’ roommates are dating and they’ll be moving out in May.

That fact of life has Bowers trying to figure out what he’ll do. Splitting that much rent between two people is more than he can afford.

“We’re just at that time of our life and it’s getting harder and harder to find roommates,” said the high school physical education teacher. “All my friends are either married and don’t want to live with another random person, or I’m looking out for random people on Craigslist.”

If he opts to get a new place, he will have to pay yet another security deposit and the first month’s rent.

“I’ve had to take out loans before for just the security deposit and the first month’s rent because I don’t have that extra $800 to $1200 to throw down,” the 30-year-old said.

Bowers’ base salary is $42,000, but he does a lot outside of daytime hours to make extra money. He writes curriculum over the summer, runs a ninth-grade academy and he is the head track and field coach at North High School in Denver.

School and coaching duties mean that he’s in school from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. in the winter and spring. After all that, Bowers rolls into his other job as a Lyft driver.

He typically drives five to 10 hours a week with the goal of making an extra $100, he said.

“When you are teaching the lesson, when you are with the kids and when you see the change, you forget about all the financials,” Bowers said.

Yet he wishes he had a little time to “go home, rest, relax and work on other skills as a person,” he said.

“We’re not asking for a million dollars,” Bowers said. “We’re asking for an extra $200 to $300 per paycheck so that I can save up so that I can buy a house and live in my community and not jump from house to house.”

She hasn’t had a savings account in 9 years of teaching

When Kelsey Brown left her teaching job in North Carolina, she hoped things would be better.

She moved to Denver in 2014 and started making well over the $28,000 she had before. One day she realized the extra money wasn’t adding up as much as she had hoped.

“As the years went on, I still have no savings account. I still don’t know where my money is going,” the 31-year-old said.

The Spanish teacher, now teaching her ninth year, made $56,000 before taxes last year. Yet, the rising costs of rent in Denver have been tough to stay ahead of.

The one-time incentives schools get when they reach certain levels of achievement also makes it hard to know how much she’ll make.

“You can’t bank anything on what you’re going to make each year because they have these little bonuses that come and go,” Brown said. “Two years ago, I made more than I’m making now.”

The newlywed works three jobs beyond her day job at North High School. Brown coaches the women’s varsity lacrosse team after school, coordinates an exchange program to Madrid and participates in a Spanish-language summer camp.

All of that brings in extra income, but it comes at a personal cost.

“I am burned out. There are days that I am walking in the building knowing I’ll be there until 8 p.m. that night,” she said. “There are just days that I, I don’t know how much longer I can do it.”

Brown got married in November and she gets to spend only about 30 minutes a night with her husband.

She gets up at 4 a.m. on school days, goes for a run and does not get home until after 5 p.m. “We live for the weekends,” she said.

She’s thinking of taking on a second job as a server

Sophia Leung is a first-year teacher who’s had to get creative with keeping down her expenses.

“Little products at home, like cleaning supplies, we’ll go to the dollar store instead of Target or even Walmart,” the third-grade math teacher from Ashley Elementary School told CNN.

Leung is 26 and lives with her sister and sister’s boyfriend in Westminster, just outside Denver. The three share a two-bedroom apartment that’s 700 square feet.

Leung does not plan to strike Monday because she cannot afford to.

“I really, really want to because I do support the mission … but I literally financially cannot afford to,” Leung said. “For me to lose out on $200 of pay a day, it does impact my bills for the month.”

She’s not a part of the union, the Denver Classroom Teachers Association. She currently can’t afford the $70 monthly fee, especially as she’s in only her first year teaching, she said.

While doing her taxes, Leung discovered that her sister made slightly more money by working full time as a server. Leung said she made just under $43,000 as a teacher.

“I’ve worked in the service industry before, and I know how much money I can make being a server,” she said. “Seeing that my sister made more than me as a server with no college degree and here I am working full time … it was a big shocker.”

Leung’s sister works flexible hours, gets free health care and a 401(k) benefit offered through her employer.

“If I can get benefits elsewhere and have a more flexible schedule, why wouldn’t I do that?” Leung said.

Leung said she loves being in the classroom with her students and she’s getting her master’s degree. Yet, the financial burden of being a teacher has her wondering whether she can afford it without getting a second job.

“I see a lot of friends who are now my age settled in their careers not having to have second jobs,” she said. “It makes me really wonder if this is the right field for me. “

She was the state’s top rookie art teacher but she’s thinking of leaving

Kevlyn Walsh is 30 and lives with her parents. It gives her a chance to save about $1,000 a month and focus on paying down bills.

“I can see that my bank account has more money in it,” Walsh told CNN.

The digital art teacher is already working three other jobs. When she’s not in the classroom, Walsh works as a restaurant hostess, runs an Etsy business and does freelance graphic design work. Walsh makes just under $47,000 before taxes each year.

Working multiple jobs in a day means Walsh has to carry a change of clothes and meals with her so she’s ready to transition from teacher to hostess. School gets out at 3:15 p.m. and she has to be at the restaurant by 4 p.m.

“I drive to my restaurant, I change my clothes in the bathroom … then I work another 4 to 5 hours at my restaurant and then I get to go home around 9,” Walsh explained.

Walsh loves teaching photography and graphic design to upperclassmen at East High School. In her first year of teaching, she won the Colorado Art Educator Rookie of the Year in 2017.

Despite the accolade and her passion, Walsh is considering moving to another district or leaving the teaching profession if the teachers aren’t able to get a raise during the strike.

“I’ve been really involved with the union since last year because I started to feel and realize how bad my salary was and I wanted to do something about it,” she said. “We have to get paid more or I’m going to leave.”

“I truly don’t know if I’m going to keep teaching,” she said.

#here&039;s how Denver teachers are affording to work there - CNN #Living with roommates and working multiple jobs #united state news #US #us headlines #us latest news #us local news #us national news #US news

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itsjayyyy · 6 years

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September 18, 2018 4:53 pm

wow since it’s been a few days since an update, I had a lot of things to open this entry with, but of course only one topic can be the first i talk about. so, the most recent one: I was just laying in bed thinking about how I need to study for my bio exam tomorrow and also complete the next two modules for econ, but then I realized it’s tuesday and econ hw is due monday nights, and freaked out. I literally went through all five stages of grief, before I was like “it’s okay, it’s only the homework, the exam will pull my grade up” and opened my laptop to start reading for bio. but then I checked econ and apparently because there’s an exam this week, there wasn’t any homework due so HOLLA.

so this past weekend has been annoying, as always. I was at ioa for friday, but we only had three workers total (we normally have 6) for closing, so it was hell trying to close on time. and then saturday I went to usf, which is always hell. not to mention, hhn started so we had to spend an hour cleaning so the night crew would be set. and at the end of my shift, the usf manager has the nerve to say to me that she wants me to pick up some shifts this week. I tell her that I have four exams, and I’ll have to check my schedule, but she says “oh but your availability says you’re free after 4 on tuesdays, thursdays, and fridays” what the fuck!!!!!! don’t go looking at my availability when I’m not your employee!!!!!!! so I kept saying I had to study, I had to see, two of my exams are online, etc and she kept pushing for me to at least take shifts on friday afternoon and saturday, since I should be done with exams by then. I took the saturday shift because by this point my shift ended a minute ago and I wanted to leave, and told her I’d call her to let her know if I can take friday (I won’t.) SO SUNDAY I walk in to ioa (home sweet home), and we have a new coworker!!! And by new I mean he used to work at usf but transferred here permanently. What. “Oh jay we send you to usf because they’re understaffed and we’re overstaffed.” Okay. So I tell my manager that they’re stupid for accepting MORE workers when we have that issue, and she has the audacity to say to my face “oh it’s more than that, he didn’t like it at usf” as if I haven’t spent the last two months telling both ioa and usf managers that I hate usf. Okay. So Sunday, when I next work at ioa, I’m going to speak to my highest manager and tell her that she either tells the scheduler that I am not to work at usf again, or I quit. I have enough money in my savings account to last me a while.

wow. rose deadass drank 6 apple juice boxes out of the 8-pack we had. this bitch clearly doesn’t care if I starve huh.

so yesterday I met up with heather after class in the student union. did I mention how much I love cafe bustelo? I really love it. a good cafe con leche really warms me up. we talked for a while, then I walked her to class. In our conversation, our birthdays came up at some point (I think I said something along the lines of “you didn’t get me anything for my birthday this year! and she said “you didn’t get me anything either!”) and I was like “I bet you don’t even know my birthday” and she said april 22nd. and then later she was like yea well I bet you don’t know mine and i immediately said march 19, so she said she’d buy me starbucks today to make up for it.

today’s morning was really gr8 and also really un-gr8. like, I woke up at 7 thinking I had to leave the house at 8:30 for my ortho appt, and laid in bed for a while before finally getting up and showering. but when I stepped out of the shower and saw the time was 8, I realized that I didn’t leave the house at 8:30, my appointment was at 8:30. cue getting dressed while still partially damp, forgetting heather’s gov’t textbook, and going 75 in a 45 zone. I thank the gods daily that motorcycles don’t get red light tickets.

while driving down the main road leading to my university, I had this white car weaving between traffic. at one point he was behind me, but then when I slowed down in a turn he switched to the right, which ended up being right behind a campus shuttle (you know, the ones that drive 5 mph under the speed limit at all times and you can barely see around. and they’re diesel, ugh!). as he saw me speed up at the end of the curve, he switched back to behind me and sped up too, but as soon as I reached level with the front of the shuttle (and the pickup on the other side of me), I slammed on my brakes so he couldn’t try to go around. Definitely risked getting run the fuck over, but it was so worth it seeing the look of frustration on his face.

I got nearly instant karma, though, because he entered the university through the first turn, when I went for the second a little ways up since it’s closer to my garage. but the traffic light was down, so I had to merge into one lane with everyone else, and then they wouldn’t even allow left turns because it’s too complex for the person directing traffic, so I had to make a right then a u-turn. But it was made up for by the fact that the trike that normally parks in my spot was probably also deterred by the traffic, and I got to claim my righteous spot.

so when I got on campus, I went to heather’s class, or rather, the building it was in since I couldn’t find room 106 exactly. I remembered that my annoying coworker said that her classes were in that building + the one next to it also on tuesdays, but I thought that there was no way I’d actually bump into her considering there are over 60,000 students and the buildings are pretty large, plus I didn’t know what time her classes are.

well, now I know that her class gets out at the same time + same building as heather. we walked towards the starbucks (which is near her next class), and I introduced her to heather, we talked about how it was to work at universal, the sort. and then she was like “well I gotta go to class now, bye!” and i was like bye and smiled and when she was more than 20 feet away I turned to heather and said “that’s the coworker I told you that I hate.”

I love pumpkin spice season!!!!!!!! got a frappuccino tho, because it’s never truly fall in florida. heather got a mango dragonfruit refresher bc I recommended it to her, and it’s funny because the person ordering before us was also named heather and also ordered a mango dragonfruit. As a barista, that’s like my worst nightmare. Luckily they were able to tell it apart because the other heather got a grande. We sat in the starbucks for a while, I explained how weed is a lot more safe than cigarettes, talked about pine hills’ reputation, and how samantha’s mom is so damn disrespectful. This woman drove heather home one day when picking up samantha, and the whole ride was bragging about how samantha was going to be so successful because she’s majoring in some type of psychology and will be making over 90k a year. and then she turned the conversation to how teachers don’t make that much money, and she asks heather how she could do that, just take such a low-paying job. and lemme tell ya how MY GIRL HEATHER FUCKIN SNAPPED. she done said she tired of people saying teachers don’t make a lot of money yall. she said to samantha’s mom, “I don’t know how you’re looking down on my salary when you have three children from three different men with only a salary of $30k.” Y’ALL. the point that heather was trying to make the point that “people from working-class families act as if a salary less than 100k is unacceptable even for an unmarried, childless young adult despite working class families often having a household income of 50k while supporting children just fine,” but damn she really went there. goin off on this good catholic woman for having baby daddies. well samantha’s mom and samantha became very upset. and they told heather’s dad who would not leave her alone until she apologized. as in, he was banging on her door telling her she had to apologize. I said put headphones in and ignore it, she was like “girl you don’t understand haitian parents. my dad literally opened my door with a knife when I locked it.” so she had to apologize :/ but she also made it clear that she didn’t like the way samantha’s mom disrespected her. she tried to make it seem relatable, and be like, “oh what if i said that to your mom, wouldn’t you tell me to apologize” and I’m like???? no???? I would make my mom apologize for being disrespectful first the hell??? then I reminded her about how I literally lived on the streets for 3 weeks because my mom was disrespectful to me.

today after class I decided to take the city bus home, for 4 reasons: I wanted to stay humble and remember where I came from, I wanted time to be able to finish this book, not walking the last half-mile home every day this semester has caused some weight gain, and I really wanted to hold my parking spot against that damn trike, and it seems he comes too early in the morning for me, so I just left my bike there overnight. yea I’m petty.

The book was really good. It’s definitely a hard read, for sure. In the sense that it really will make you cry. At the end, it listed all of the school shooting victims since columbine, plus a small snippet about them (it was like 20 pages long). The one that really got me was an 8 year old, whose text read “shoot me first,” as he wanted to take a bullet so it wouldn’t be used against his classmates. Then, below that entry, a seven year old, who said “shoot me next.” Just typing that is making my eyes water again.

The walk home was super tiring. I’m super out of shape, it was hard for me to even imagine that I did this every single day the entire first semester of college. And I have to do it tomorrow morning again, ugh. Can you believe heather wakes up at 5:30 am???? I’m never seen out of bed before 7, and even then it’s only for things like appointments. But I guess I really should start waking up earlier, because whenever I get on campus around 8 I feel great because I have so much time to study and stuff. but that means I have to buy a coffee on campus, and I don’t know if I want to commit to that expense.

edit: so I originally posted this to my main, and when I saw that I copied it, then deleted it, then tried to paste it into a new post, but I guess I didn’t press ctrl hard enough because it didn’t copy. and I was about to cry bc this is close to 2k words, but then I realized I had a tab of my main open that still had the original post showing, so I copied from there.

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takebackthedream · 6 years

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After an 'Educator Spring,' Teachers Storm Elections by Jeff Bryant

For Progressives, the stunning upset victory by first-time congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez over a prominent incumbent candidate in New York seems to be a sign that a wave of change coming in the midterm elections. But a perhaps bigger, clearer sign of change is the groundswell of educators entering political contests.

As an outcome of the wave of teacher walkouts and protests that swept through West Virginia, Oklahoma, North Carolina and other states – a chain of events increasingly referred to as an “Educator Spring” – “angry educators are flooding down-ballot races,” Politico reports.

The number of educator candidates is staggering, with nearly 300 coming from just the American Federation of Teachers union alone. Many of them are winning – and not just as Democrats.

By taking their cause to the streets and then to the ballot box, teachers have made education a top election issue – not just in states, like North Carolina, where walkouts occurred – but also in states, like Florida, where they didn’t.

It’s an electoral phenomenon that is little understood, much less reported.

An Angry Wave of Teachers

The specific issues teachers call attention to vary from state to state, district to district, and even school to school.

In West Virginia, poor teacher pay and the state’s dysfunctional employee health insurance program brought teachers to the state capital. In Kentucky, the triggers were unpopular revisions to public employee pensions and the general lack of funding. In Arizona, teachers objected to years of under-funding while the state splurged on school vouchers and charter schools. In Oklahoma, teachers protested against low pay and the lack of a permanent way to increase school funding.

In North Carolina, the list of teacher grievances was long and varied – from unmanageable class sizes to inadequate funding to stressed out work schedules. But for the vast majority of teachers I spoke to at the rally in Raleigh, the economic trigger was the lack of funding across the board. Many believed fixing the funding was the top priority from which so many other issues could then be resolved.

The teachers’ actions brought to light to many who weren’t aware that education funding has not recovered from the Great Recession, and the majority of states fund schools less now than they did in 2008, and teacher salaries have been mostly flat or down since the 1990s.

But there was also a larger context that brought teachers out into the streets.

The Roots of Discontent

“Not since the battles over school desegregation has the debate about public education been so intense and polarized,” writes education reporter Michelle McNeil for Education Week.

Similarly, education journalist and author of The Teacher Wars Dana Goldstein notes that education matters that were once considered settled among policy wonks and Beltway think tanks are now points of strong contention. Her conclusion was that these differences represent a “deep divide” on school reform.

However, the comments from McNeil and Goldstein aren’t from this year. They’re from 2013.

Indeed, this year’s teacher actions arose from a deep well of long simmering discontent in the education community.

This was summed up best by North Carolina teacher Courtney Brown who told me teachers were out en masse because, “We hope people listen to us.”

It’s no secret that recent education policies from federal and state levels are generally mandated without the input of educators, especially rank and file teachers. Neither No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top had strong support of on-the-ground educators, and most policies in politically conservative states either disregard teachers or are downright hostile to them.

The latest example of the disconnect between education policy and the daily realities of teachers’ lives was made evident in reports of the failure of yet another “education reform.”

Recalling Barack Obama’s 2012 State of the Union declaring “bad teachers” as “the problem” behind stagnant learning outcomes, Matt Barnum reports that the idea of designing teacher evaluation systems to reward or penalize teachers based on how their students performed on standardized tests became all the rage after years of advocacy for these systems by rightwing think tanks and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Experienced educators warned this idea was completely unworkable and based on “junk science.” “Now,” Barnum reports, “new research … finds scant evidence that those changes accomplished what they were meant to: improve teacher quality or boost student learning.”

The billion dollar effort, with $575 million coming from Gates, was not only “wasteful” but “damaging,” Bloomberg reports.

Well, DUH, teachers everywhere are saying.

‘Stop. Help. I Can’t Deal with This.’

This disconnect between what a teacher’s-eye view of education sees and what policy makers decide is not new.

In 2015, during a hearing by the Committee on Health, Labor, Education and Pensions on the subject of “Fixing No Child Left Behind,” Rhode Island’s Senator Sheldon Whitehouse observed, “My experience in the education world is that there are really two worlds in it. One is the world of contracts and consultants and academics and experts and plenty of officials at the federal, state, and local level. And the other is a world of school principals and classroom teachers who are actually providing education to students. What I’m hearing from my principals’ and teachers’ world is that the footprint of that first world has become way too big in their lives to the point where it’s inhibiting their ability to do the jobs they’re entrusted to do.”

Whitehouse urged his colleagues, “We have to be very careful that the people who we really trust to do education – the people who are in the classroom – are not looking back at us and saying, ‘Stop. Help. I can’t deal with this.’”

In calling attention to their lousy pay and lack of job security; the aging, dilapidated buildings they work in; the crumbling, the outdated textbooks they give to students; the lack of basic supplies they must buy with their own money; the scarcity of school support staff including counselors, nurses, and librarians; the competition from charter schools and vouchers that siphon funding out of the system, and an education agenda that values testing students over educating them, teachers are pointing to the overwhelming reality on the ground that public schools and the basic right to an education are increasingly imperiled.

If political leaders don’t care about that, then it looks like there are teachers who will run against them and maybe kick their butts out of office.

#Blog

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aefindc-blog · 6 years

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The Art of the Deal

Some background, I have zero negotiation experience.... no.. let me take that back... I have zero successful negotiation experience. Well, mostly because I haven’t had to. When you’re a teacher, you don’t have to negotiate your salary (your wonderful union does that for you). I once bought a car by myself... that negotiation did not end well. They told me a price, I asked if they could do better, they said they would throw in floor mats, I bought the car :/

So you can imagine that with UCI coming at me with such a low number that I was so nervous they would say no to what I asked. And then.... is what you ask so outrageous that they deem you unworthy and move on?

I basically had to wait 5 weeks for them to come back with a number. So I had asked them to match my high school salary. In my mind, I was willing to accept that minus $5K, because I would have more time to pick up consulting jobs through the year. Wouldn’t you know, but they offered me $5,400 less. Well... close enough.... but then I asked them to get me into on campus housing and they would have a deal.

So the ball is in their court, but it looks pretty good that I’ll get on campus housing. Obviously it’s not 100% official, but I feel good about where we are that I can finally breathe a sigh of relief, and finally call my school and figure out my schedule.

So much more to figure out before I move back..... But one decision/step at a time.

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dragnews · 6 years

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Understaffing,

KABUL (Reuters) – Infighting, a lack of expertise and unfilled vacancies within Afghanistan’s election body raise doubts about whether polls planned this year can be held on time, according to Afghan and international agency officials, with one likening planning meetings to “a fish market”.

Gula Jan Abdul Badi Sayad chairman of Independent Elections Commission (IEC) of Afghanistan speaks during an interview in Kabul, Afghanistan June 11, 2018. REUTERS/Omar Sobhani

October’s vote, already much-delayed, is seen as a crucial test for democracy in a country at war for four decades, and comes amid increasing attacks by Taliban and Islamic State insurgents who have threatened to target the electoral process.

But in the last six months, the chairman and CEO of the Independent Election Commission (IEC), have been sacked, and an acting CEO quit. The head of human resources was also sacked this month, having failed to hire hundreds of provincial electoral officers.

“Four months before the polls, they are still at the planning stage,” a high-ranking international aid worker told Reuters. “You cannot play a football match with half of your team missing. There are times when we have witnessed shouting matches in the IEC office. It’s like a fish market.”

Seven of the 10 top positions at the secretariat in Kabul, which oversees commission offices across 34 provinces, have yet to be filled.

The parliamentary and district council elections have already been put back from 2014 due to a lack of political consensus on electoral reforms and a shortage of funds.

The polls are seen as a dry run for next year’s presidential election and a key test of the credibility of President Ashraf Ghani’s government, which has been under pressure from its international backers to ensure the vote takes place since the last, fraud-tainted presidential election in 2014.

JOBS FOR THE BOYS

The United Nations, overseeing the election process, and the United States, leading international military efforts to force the Taliban to the negotiating table, are hoping for elections that at least appear to be mostly free and fair.

“Elections in Afghanistan are never going to be perfect, but there has to be a semblance of credibility,” a senior official working with a leading donor said. He added that he thought the country would “muddle through” and hold the polls as scheduled.

Many other observers said a delay was possible.

Former and serving IEC officials said Ghani’s over-involvement and micro-management have created multiple power centers within the supposedly apolitical IEC.

Last year, Ghani appointed seven commissioners to represent different ethnic groups to draft policy, help officials at the IEC’s secretariat and register millions of voters across the country.

Gula Jan Abdul Badi Sayad chairman of Independent Elections Commission (IEC) of Afghanistan speaks during an interview in Kabul, Afghanistan June 11, 2018. REUTERS/Omar Sobhani

“Instead of drafting a policy framework, the commissioners have been busy deciding appointments of drivers, cleaners and bringing in their friends to do some of the technical jobs,” a senior member at the IEC’s secretariat told Reuters.

Shahla Haq was appointed acting IEC secretariat CEO after her predecessor was sacked amid differences over biometric voting cards. She quit after four months.

“I just couldn’t take it anymore,” she told Reuters. “The commissioners have little understanding of electoral reforms and they were seeking guidance from politicians.”

“GRANULAR DETAILS”

Two officials in Ghani’s office said they were not allowed to comment on the workings of the IEC as it was an independent institution.

International donors, who want to see a “palatable process”, according to one senior diplomat, are also questioning the IEC’s numbers on voter registration.

Diplomats tracking voter registration data from 34 provinces since April said they had noted inconsistencies and expected the IEC to share its information to ensure transparency and accuracy.

“It is important for us to seek granular details as we are pouring millions of dollars into the elections,” said a senior European Union diplomat.

Last month, the EU pledged 15.5 million euros towards paying for election-related materials and salaries of temporary electoral staff.

Najibullah Ahmadzai, the former chairman of the IEC commission who was sacked earlier this year, said he was the only officer in the commission who had worked extensively on electoral reform. The others were academics, he said.

“You cannot expect teachers and professors to plan elections,” he said. “It requires expertise, but nobody accepted my views.”

Current commission chairman Abdul Badi Sayad, who is also a professor of Islamic law, has to ensure 14 million Afghans are able to cast their vote. He still has to find a CEO, a deputy CEO, five directors and hundreds of electoral officers.

“I am determined to conduct elections this year,” Sayad told Reuters in his heavily guarded office. “But I need the manpower to do it.”

Additional reporting by Hamid Shalizi; Editing by Nick Macfie and Alex Richardson

The post Understaffing, appeared first on World The News.

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newestbalance · 6 years