Sexism in the media

One of the things I occasionally do is watch the start of the Sydney-Hobart yacht race - which I used to do on telly, and now - if I do - I use the YouTube live cast. In recent years, I'm not finding this as interesting as it used to be: the broadcast has less of the pre-race manoeuvring, and tends to focus on the rich end of an often rich fleet - the maxis that are fast and spectacular, and compete for line honours - which is NOT winning the race, as the race is a handicap race to give smaller boats a chance as well.

There was a little coverage of the smallest boat in this year's fleet, which has an annual budget of $4,000, which was good, but there wasn't enough of that tail end and middle of the fleet human interest, in my opinion.

The commentary was a bit of a mixed bag, from the sailing point of view (I think Iain Murray commentated one year, and I think that year the explanation and graphics were the best they'd ever had), but what really got my goat was the sexism of one of the presenters - their camerawoman was reduced to being a cameragirl, women on the all-female crew boat were "girls", not women, and there was an obvious pause in the middle when he tried to say helms ... woman.

It's the 21st Century. I know sailing has and probably still has problems with women being participants rather than running the canteen - and the media still clearly has problems, but can you not find someone who can pronounce helmswoman correctly (and why, Blogger, do I have to add that the dictionary)?

Worse than the elites/ oligarchs are ...

Worse than the elites/ oligarchs are those human remora (also known as sucker fish) - the kapos of the middle class - who do the bidding and the dirty work of the elites and oligarchs - often trying to outdo the elites and oligarchs in excesses of abuse and manipulation - in the misbegotten fallacy that this somehow makes them one of the elites / oligarchs, or at least somehow "part of" the elites / oligarchs social circle, rather than the puppets that they really are . . .

A 40 year cycle on unpaid overtime

This is a post in my Ethics, Lazy Management, and Flawed Thinking series - see https://politicalmusingsofkayleen.blogspot.com/2019/11/ethics-lazy-management-and-flawed.html.

When I started in engineering, I was sent out bush for long periods of time - weeks or, in one case, months, time spent living in construction camps, cut off from friends and the things that made life worthwhile (no internet or even mobile phones back then). I made a lot of money, but it was so soul-destroying that after I had served the time of my bond (which also gave me the benefit of being paid enough to survive while I went to uni, although now, I think I would have been better off pursuing my hobbies and becoming a chippie [carpenter]), I quit, determined to leave engineering. As it turned out, I wound up having a year off, and then found myself back in engineering, in a city-based design office, fighting over overtime expectations.

The union I am in recently did a survey on unpaid overtime, and one of the options they were exploring was, effectively, peer pressure. I've always been a bit contrary, and thus I tend to resist peer pressure - more so, if the peer pressure is applied harder. And that was what happened.

The managers I was enduring at that time had obviously never come across anyone who questioned what they had taken as a given, and they floundered initially and then pushed back harder, including formalising expectations in a memo which set out the extra hours of unpaid overtime we would be expected to work. I pointed out that their expectations meant that the true hourly rate went down, which showed that they valued the increased experience and effectiveness that comes with being experienced less than simply working longer hours. (I had also declined to get into the normal expectations of doing more management, insisting on staying in a technical role: that is fairly widely accepted now, but 40 years ago it was another cause of being flummoxed.)

Most - not all - of these managers who were expecting this all had problems with their relationships, including kids. They seemed to be of the view that company profits (which, for much of this time, had no direct benefit for them - there was an end of year bonus, but it was nothing like the amount of unpaid salary/wages) were more important than their quality of life. The most insistent of these people also seemed flummoxed by anything outside of engineering - things like the move towards a more caring and inclusive society. I also saw one engineer being totally unresponsive when he saw reports that the First Gulf War had started - despite seeing some footage of pipes he had designed being blown up.

There was a similar dismissiveness when the twin towers fell on 9/11 - an attitude of "oh, yes, that's bad, but it's nothing to do with us, get back to work".

Now, as I go through another cycle of peer pressure to work unpaid overtime (which, at my current age and with my health issues is physically harmful [making it easier to get through to people that I am not available], in addition to the emotional damage), there are a few points I would like to make.

Firstly, I have profound doubts about the emotional competence of some of the people I have worked with in engineering. There are some very unseemly jokes about this, but it is a problem I saw when I was at Uni, and I consider it something that the engineering profession needs to address.

Next (second), it is time the non-physical costs of overtime - whether paid or unpaid - were addressed. It was pleasing that my union has finally started on this, but they're several decades late, really. The damage includes the obvious damage to relationships with family and friends, but also to the person doing the overtime themselves -they become emotionally crippled, withdrawn, less able to interact in a normal human fashion, in some ways damaged as people who have experienced a war - not on the frontline, perhaps, but the sacrifices made on "the home front", or in support areas of the military.

They're almost like martyrs - which brings me to the last (third) point: people want to be part of something bigger than the individual. Where that "something bigger" is something that is constructive, perhaps a charity or a progressive political party, that is good for society, and for the individual. It is likely to be something that allows the person to feel "good" about themselves, and is likely to lead to them interact more healthily with other people.

But when it is something like the profit margin of a company, or it involves coercing people to adopt a lower quality of life, it is not - it has all the human problems I mentioned above, and it also gives a false image of the company's state of being.

A few years ago, I looked at this and noticed that the average profit margins of Australian companies seemed to match the amount of unpaid overtime . . .

I suspect that a similar effect, or possibly even more pronounced effect, applies to overseas companies - especially in the economically often vaunted USA, which has a  long history of bashing and abusing workers and unions.

What is needed is for those who are able to resist this pressure to do so - politely, but persistently, and for those who have the power to influence such matters to start also addressing the second and third points I listed above.

And now it is time to get ready and go work my paid time at work :)

Postscript: 
I found some notes I had put together a few years ago, before my current manager had started and improved life very much, on "a 40 year cycle on the "utilisation rate". It overlaps the above a fair bit, but I've decided to post it as a supplement anyway.

After four decades in a professional career in an industrialised, Western nation, I have become used to a certain cycle, which I refer to as the “utilisation rate cycle”.

The utilisation rate is a simplistic measure of how much work one has done that leads directly to money coming in. So:

• time that can be directly billed to projects counts;
• time spent on things like marketing, developing workface tools and systems, preparing tenders, etc doesn’t count – being presumably of no particular value.

The justification given for this is generally along the lines that such a measure is necessary to prevent workers losing focus on the need to make money, and stay working at a high rate.

To some extent, there is merit in that: workers tend to be focused on what is directly in front of them, and, whilst they can see the immediate benefits of, say, spending three days on improving, perhaps, a computer programme, there can be a challenge to that which, in the eyes of management, is about matching the effort and quality to the minimum that the will client pay for, termed “efficiency” by the managers and termed “doing things of lesser quality and satisfaction” by the workers involved.

The inherent problem with that, certainly as I have experienced it (comments made by colleagues who have worked elsewhere suggest some companies may be more flexible on this), is that it undervalues other work that is also essential. When managers and administration staff are carrying on about doing more project work, they forget that things like marketing and submitting bids have to be done in order to have the project work in the first place.

To invent an analogy, it’s a little like focusing on making sure a car has petrol, but ignoring that it also needs oil.

In the case of utilisation rates, it leads to a cycle – which I’ve now been through, depending on how I count it, four to six times:

• there is a focus on utilisation rate, leading to increased income and worker dissatisfaction;
• suddenly work isn’t there, because of an inadequate focus on winning work, and/or profitability is down, because things like fixing or improving workplace systems aren’t done and worker morale has plummeted;
• a more reasoned and balanced approach is adopted – until someone, often a new person, with limited perspective and understanding kicks the whole cycle off again.

There is another problem with this focus, which is what is, in effect, a push to have workers do work on an unpaid basis – such as attending lectures in lunch breaks (which is the workers time, and needs to be spent on doing something other than their normal duties [not necessarily physical exercise, as some advocate] in order to refresh then to maintain productivity through the afternoon), or – to use the example given above - fix computer systems in their own time.

I once - about three decades ago, now - had a company formalise their expectations of unpaid overtime as workers gained seniority, and it worked out to keeping exactly the same, or slightly lower at some levels, hourly rate – meaning pay increases weren’t about the improved skill that comes from experience, but about simply working longer.

They were surprised and unimpressed when I declined to take part in such a fiasco, and I suspect that led to false assumptions about my motivations leading to me being shut out of opportunities later.

That particular problem has become far worse with the imported US expectation of being on call at all times.

(Incidentally, I often feel that managers are fixated on a premise that their measure is in how they handle being touch / delivering bad news – to the extent that they are utterly inept at being effective in more pleasant or “normal” conditions.)

The consequences of maintaining an elevated work intensity for decades can be substantial – in my case, it has led to me becoming “more efficient” with eating (i.e., more junk food, as I don’t have time to cook) and not exercising as I am left without the energy to do so as a result of work. On top of that, in addition to the normal results of aging, I have developed a chronic illness (diabetes) that only two managers have ever come close to understanding – one because his wife also has that disease, and the other because he asked questions.

It is important to keep in mind that this elevated intensity of work is not for a few weeks or months: it is throughout a career, which is now longer than it used to be. And along the way, the notion of having leave has – for workers at the coal face – often gone out the window. It has been two decades since I had a break longer two weeks, and the better part of one decade since I had any leave that wasn’t to suit managers (in response to a turndown in work) or taken to give me a chance to catch my breath.

There are other consequences of this approach: I’m one of those workers who has cut back on spending, yes, but I also have nothing to do with getting more people into STEM “careers”, I have second thoughts about my membership of professional associations, and, if I had my time over again, I would choose a trade, rather than a professional career – not because trades are somehow easier, but because they are slightly more honest about their harsh treatment of workers.

Not all managers are like this: I’ve had the pleasure of working for some who are both human and humane.

One doesn’t motivate workers by forcing them into mental and emotional thraldom: one motivates workers by presenting matters in a way that makes it clear their aspirations and humanity will also be respected. It is an indictment on management when that is not done – and worse if the managers in question are unable to do so.

Project Managers have a particular problem (apart from declining technical literacy), which is that they do not understand that they are one of many making demands on technical specialists, and glib comments about technical specialists having to manage their time better are not only unhelpful, but wrong when they assume that unreasonable and extreme workload expectations can be managed that way, and thus offensive and possibly defamatory.

Looking at these problems from the point of view of professionalism (which is about standards of service and accountability, NOT profitability), I consider many of these problems evidence of a major problem with groupthink.

After four decades of this, I am wondering whether we need better, more human-focused teaching of mid-level managers and Project Managers – and the latter need technical literacy, competency and experience in their field.

Cross-posting: The Workhouse Howl

This first appeared on my main blog in this post.

*****

Some time ago, after watching an episode of the UK TV series "Call the Midwife" which dealt with - in part - one of the aftereffects of the appalling workhouses that existed in the UK for centuries known as the "workhouse howl", a terrible howl that inmates and former inmates would make, seemingly involuntarily I wrote a poem about that, which is copied in below. Oddly (well, it seems odd to me), that has been the most viewed poem on my creativity blog.

However, I am increasingly of the view that our societies are increasingly doing more and more the same to people - aided and abetted by managers and supervisors who keep saying "we have to make sacrifices, we have to be competitive, we have to work unpaid overtime, etc" - all of which is, on the larger scale, a self fulfilling prophecy. Workers have taken a first step on the hamster wheel of selling their souls to the profits of a few, and keep doing so in order to avoid falling on the ever-faster wheel. (Managers even make it worse by perverting spiritual techniques such as mindfulness, and ignoring evidence.) As a result, many are psychologically screaming their own "workhouse howl".


There is an antidote to this: slow down, simplify, and think before you act (including thinking before trying this suggested antidotes - for instance, if you have dependents, as I do, you may have to defer these actions for a few years).

Now, my poem, The Workhouse Howl.

Man’s inhumanity

to mankind

is well known

in war

and strife

and bloody dictatorship:

but what are we

to make of

a place

a time

a culture

that thinks the poor

or unemployed

are merely lazy

- there’s jobs out there

if they really want them

and then

to prove its point

compounds

the error

future tho’ it be to them

of concentration camps
for women and children
in places and climes
far to the south

by building prisons

for the poor

and

in backward echo

of "work will make you free"

calls them

workhouses.

Copyright © Kayleen White, 2012 I undertake these writings – and the sharing of them – for the sake of my self expression. I am under no particular illusions as to their literary merit, and ask only that any readers do not have any undue expectations. If you consider me wrong, then publish me – with full credit, of course :)

Humans, humanity and human rights - a speculation

I consider it a truism that groups are “better” when their component units are also “better”. To illustrate that:

• a family functions more healthily if its members are all well-adjusted people;
• a group, perhaps a community volunteer group, functions well when its members are in a comfortable situation in life where they have spare time and energy to devote to the group; and
• the world of nations functions to the benefit of all when its constituent nations are all well-adjusted (which I consider includes democracy and a few other characteristics) and “in a comfortable situation in life”.

On the other hand:

• a family in the grip of domestic violence or child abuse is harming all involved;
• a larger group with a toxic culture (there has been one such volunteer group in my local news lately, and the problems inside Australia’s banks are being exposed by the Royal Commission) harms both its members, those it nominally serves, and others; and
• the world is at risk when nations are at war within themselves or with each other.

I also consider that this introduces the notion of reciprocity – in this context, the concept that contributing to something will result in one being better off, which also comes with the “equal and opposite notion” that if one’s contribution is not making one better off, something is wrong.

As an illustration of the good aspects of this:

• a family where its members can communicate comfortably and effectively will be capable of supporting its members during the hard times in life;
• a well-run community volunteer group gives its volunteers a sense of reward and purpose, and aid to those it seeks to help; and
• fair international trade can be mutually beneficial.

On the other hand:

• a family that is focused on the acquisition of wealth, or on the ambitions of one or a few people, will leave some of its members crushed, resentful, and with unrealised potential that may have been far greater than what was focused on (and the family that snarks together doesn’t stay together emotionally);
• a community group that insists on its members donating time or money beyond what is comfortable (especially when the level of expectation was not openly and honestly communicated when people were considering joining) breeds resentment (if a contribution to a group becomes a chore, something may be wrong . . . ), and is likely to find itself lacking in members; and
• nations that impose themselves on others by creating an occupied empire, or an empire of coercive influences, cause massive harm (including within the imperial nation, particularly in the form of harm to the psychology of its citizens) that far outweighs the sense of gladness of the unhealthy individuals driving those imperial aspirations.

As another example of this, taxes are the prices individuals pay for living in a civil society, and enable the provision of roads, schools, hospitals, help when needed, defence when needed, and so on.

When taxes “go bad” is a subject for considerable debate :)

There is, however, a point here that sometimes the “mutual benefit aspect” of these interrelationships goes wrong. Whether it is the abuser within a family, unhealthy values in a group, or a tyrant suppressing a nation’s citizens or more broadly the citizens of the world, the reasonable expectation that being part of a group will be mutually beneficial has been betrayed.

Some of that is unquestionably the fault of the members, whether individuals who fail to address their flaws and take it out on others, leaders of groups who place their personal quest for power ahead of the wellbeing of those they have not truly appreciated as volunteers, or tyrants who quest after adulation at any price (or who wrongly think they are providing a benefit when it is not that at all) or nations who fail (because of a lack of Will to Intervene [W2I]) to act on the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a failure has happened.

There are many aspects to that failure, but an important one is a failure to recognise that a failure of the obligation of mutual benefit has occurred. Correcting that failure - especially by improving awareness - is a key part of the quest for human rights.

The quest for human rights, which I consider likely goes further back in history than people think (even beyond the ban on slavery by Ashoka of the Maurya Empire, over two millennia ago), also includes creating effective mechanisms for ensuring human rights – which includes respecting human dignity – are respected and realised.

As the great Dr Marin Luther King, Jr., said:

“It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless.”

Actually, it should also be noted that the mechanism which are most effective for enforcing human rights and dignity will vary:

• in a small tribe millennia ago, ostracism was a powerful, but also very damaging, and thus counter-productive in the long term, so a healthier version of that would be peer disapproval;
• thinking ahead to classical antiquity and the Middle Ages and up to now (when having and/or flaunting individual wealth became “a thing”), for people who are focused on wealth, financial strictures are more important than anything emotionally based; and
• for people who are focused on the physical aspects of life, the equivalent of a sports player being banned from activity for a time – which, a few decades and centuries ago manifested as corporal punishment (centuries ago, including physically damaging measures such as whipping) – may be more effective than fines or disapproval.

Legal mechanisms have been a particular speciality of the human rights and dignity quest ever since the Paris Pact of 1928 and the more widely known Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Unfortunately, the fight back by elites, oligarchs, and misguided conservatives has led to a symptomatic focus, rather than addressing the fear, hate, ignorance (social bubbles have, in some ways, become more entrenched in recent decades), and other human failings which underlie the bigotry and other causes of disrespect for human dignity and rights – and, as indicate by Dr King’s quote, there are better mechanisms for addressing causative human failings than proscription.

Conservatives actually do have a rightful place: they ensure - or should - that introducing something new is not done by throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as was the case with many changes under conservative governments in my home state in the 90s, and that no-one is left behind, which is a notable failure of the current craze for flashy electronic gizmos and “devices”.

They’re not always a better mousetrap, you know . . . :)

Care and thought always need to go into working for human rights and dignity. Circumstances have changed over the millennia – in many ways for the better (e.g., more widespread education in many parts of the world, and recognition that it should be universal), but not always, and there is much work yet to be done. Simple lack of awareness of others’ experience, of personal biases and other failings, and of procedural inadequacies needs to be countered by education (enlightenment, in a sense), the quest to be better human beings, rather than richer economic cogs, needs to be embraced by all of humanity, the lessons and inspirations of history need to be heeded, and we need to recognise that individual and group should exist in a state of true and genuine mutual benefit. 

*****

PS - I'd also like to commend the post "Never Sell Them Your Soul", by the always excellent John Beckett.