July 26th, 2010 by admin

On page six of "The Week" July 30th 2010 issue, in the "Controversy of the Week" you’ll find the title “Why Aren’t Company’s Hiring?”

There is a VERY simple answer to this question.

Medium and large size companies are not hiring back their company morons and do-nothings. And they never will. The recent economic downturn gave every company that wanted it the opportunity to let go of persons who did absolutely nothing for them.

If you could go into most offices with a truth serum and forcibly inject everyone in the room, and then ask them to point at the person who did no work all day every day, they would all do it. Or at least they would have done it in the past. The people those “forcibly truthful” employees would have pointed out are now gone. They are not coming back.

Every company above a certain size used to have within it at least a few employees who had mastered the art of doing everything-but-work. In the company I used to work for, one of those people was Cubicle Oprah. This person managed to spend seven of every eight hours talking to her fellow employees in the office or to her children over the phone. If one had put a camera next to her desk and reviewed the tape of any given work day, the compilation of her actual working time would have been shorter than a typical American situation comedy television show.

I’ve been told by former workmates that the second the economy turned sour, Cubicle Oprah was laid off. And that is no surprise. The managers of the office knew just as well as the employees that Cubicle Oprah did no work every day. Of course, with labor laws the likes of which are common in America, no one in the company had the balls to just walk up and tell Cubicle Oprah to get to work. But when the economy tanked and everyone else started to do it, the managers gladly let Cubicle Oprah go.

Another person who had mastered this incredible “no-work” talent was Mr. Phone. Again, almost every medium or large working group will have a person like Mr. Phone. Of any given eight hour day, Mr. Phone manages to spend 6 to 7 hours talking on his cell. Everyone in the office knows this. Mr. Phone does not actually work for the company or with the group, he spends time in the company’s space and talks on the phone. When the economy provided the company with an opportunity, they let Mr. Phone go. And he is not coming back.

NPR Economics correspondent Paul Solman, quoted in Newshour, Sep. 2009:

"No wonder productivity soared in the second quarter of the year, fewer workers, more output, higher productivity."

Oh, you bet, Mr. Solman. Those people who actually have jobs, and actually work while they are at their jobs, are being more productive than ever. For two decades (or more) no one worried too much about being perceived as the office’s Cubicle Oprah or Mr. Phone. Not so with the present time and most likely not in the future.

The age of getting paid to do nothing is over, and it may never come again.

Now get back to work – before you get laid off.

July 20th, 2010 by admin

This past weekend I took my family to a nice restaurant downtown.  Having had a wonderful dinner, it soon came time to pay the check.  It was then that I discovered I had left my wallet on the dresser, back at home.  This was not really a big deal, I was not trying to buy alcoholic drinks and my wife had a credit card in her purse.  I had not even done the driving!

I had nothing to worry about my current situation.  I did, however, start thinking about what might have happened to me if I were resident of the state of Arizona.

Fortunately for me, I am as white as a white gets.  No one who looks at me for even a moment will doubt whether or not I am a white person.  But what if that were not so?  What if I were a second or third generation American citizen, who just happened to be of Hispanic descent?  Who just happen to leave his wallet home that day?

And what if, on the day I forgot my wallet, it had not been the arrival of a dinner bill but a regular traffic stop that had alerted me to the fact that my wallet was left behind along with my ID?  Would I and my family have been sent to a bus and carted off to a FEMA camp to rot in obscurity beneath the burning Arizona Sun until we died (or someone of some importance noticed that we were missing)?

One can readily see that it will be all too easy for this very situation to occur, if it has not already occurred or is not already occurring, in Arizona today, tomorrow, and sporadically for the foreseeable future. Sometimes people forget their wallets and purses.  Placing the entire populace of America under the threat of incarceration simply for the fact of being forgetful and not white is a ridiculous situation.

Let there be no doubt that the pending "papers please" law in Arizona is an invitation to disaster for everyone living in that state, be they black, white, brown or yellow.  The paranoid state of "them vs. us" inevitably leads to fear, and fear leads to hatred, and hatred inevitably leads to violence.

I was able to leave the restaurant without my wallet and without fear.

I do not live in Arizona.

I am not brown.

If you live in Arizona, no matter what your skin tone, I suggest you change your surroundings.

Soon.