Tag Archives: jobs

Rationale for ban against future fast-food restaurants in South LA

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Earlier this week, Los Angeles developed some new restrictions for new fast-food restaurants:

New fast-food restaurants in South Los Angeles will be banned within a half mile of existing ones under an ordinance approved Wednesday by the City Council.

The law includes other restrictions on stand-alone eateries, the Los Angeles Times reported. They include guidelines on landscaping, trash storage and other aesthetic issues.

Similar limits are in place in other LA neighborhoods. The council imposed a moratorium two years ago in southern Los Angeles.

Is this an example of the government telling people what they can or cannot eat? Is this example of a government limiting business or jobs opportunities? The rationale for these new regulations is interesting:

The goal of the restrictions is to encourage the development of stand-alone restaurants and grocery stores.

“For a community to thrive, it is important to have balance, a full variety of food, retail and service providers,” said Councilman Bernard C. Parks, one of the sponsors of the ordinance.

The ordinance includes exemptions for fast-food restaurants in mixed-use developments and shopping malls and for existing restaurants planning to expand.

These sorts of rules are not unusual in communities. How does this differ from a suburban community that decides it won’t allow any more banks in its downtown? Or communities that have restrictions against tattoo parlors? Both banks and tattoo parlors create jobs and bring in some sort of tax dollars. If the City of LA wants to promote other kinds of development, this seems like a reasonable rule that doesn’t force out already existing stores but limits their future growth.

At the same time, the issue of fast food seems to bring out passionate arguments from people. Do we have a “right” to fast food restaurants? A lot of critics of sprawl argue that fast food restaurants represent the worst of sprawl: they are completely dependent on the automobile, the food is cheap, mass-produced, and not healthy, and the restaurants and their signs are garish advertisements for multi-national corporations who couldn’t care less about local communities. Others argue that we should be able to eat what we want when we want.

In Los Angeles, they seem to have made a decision about promoting other kinds of development. Communities make decisions like this all the time, depending on factors like tax revenue and what goals or values they wish to promote.

Considering workplace flexibility

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Some jobs offer more flexibility than others where a worker has an opportunity to structure their own schedule or make it to other important events in life that are held during typical work hours. Sociologist Alfred Young has looked into the issue of workplace flexibility and recently made a report to a conference:

When an assembly-line worker at a Midwestern auto-parts plant studied by Alford A. Young Jr. , a sociology professor at the University of Michigan, left work without permission to coach his son’s football team in a championship game, he paid a high price, Young told about 200 researchers, government officials and employers Tuesday at a Washington, D.C. conference on flexibility.

The story sprang from a study of the means employees use to resolve work-family conflicts–collaborating with the boss vs. sneaking around. The worker, whom Dr. Young called James, had committed to coaching his son’s team, and when the team made the championship round he asked to take a Saturday afternoon off to be present. The boss said no.

When the day arrived, James left work for lunch and later called his boss to say that his car had broken down, saying “ ‘I called Triple-A but I don’t know if I can make it back,’ ” Young says. James got to coach the game, but he also got written up by his supervisor and busted to a lower seniority level.

Such disruptions can be avoided, Young says, if supervisors bend a little, perhaps even breaking a rule or two, to try to find a solution within the work team, perhaps by allowing a shift trade; this benefits employers by motivating employees to go the extra mile and remain loyal to the company.  While this happens routinely at many workplaces, about 80% of all workers still lack the workplace flexibility they want, according to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the conference sponsor. What doesn’t work, his study found, allowing to develop the kind of clash that encompassed James.

I feel like a lot of the talk about telecommuting and the changes that might come to the workplace due to changing technology might really be about increasing the flexibility of workers. If the main concern is that a job gets done, perhaps it doesn’t matter as much whether an employee keeps certain office hours. Younger workers also seem to like the idea of flexibility, to not be completely tied down because of a job. But perhaps even the American small business spirit could be tied to this issue – some people enjoy being able to set their own hours and agenda.  But this may not apply in the same way to areas like manufacturing.

If 80% of workers desire more flexibility, is this something more businesses and organizations should address? I would be interested in knowing what holds businesses back from being more flexible with workers. Profits? Appearances? A certain workplace culture? Directives from higher-ups?

When religious faith and unions come together

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Even though unions represent a relatively small percent of today’s American workers, they tend to draw a lot of attention. A story from the Chicago Tribune adds another dimension to the discussion: what happens when unions and faith mix?

Faith and work are inextricably linked for most of the working class, said Bob Bruno, director of the Labor Education Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“For a lot of these folks, if a business doesn’t provide health care, it could be characterized as not taking care of the stranger on the road. It’s a sin,” said Bruno, who interviewed hundreds of low-wage workers in Chicago for his 2008 book, “Justified by Work: Identity and the Meaning of Faith in Chicago’s Working-Class Churches.”

About 91 percent of union members believe in God, and 25 percent pray several times a day, Bruno found in a survey of union members he conducted from 2005 to 2006. Eighty percent believe God performs miracles in the world today…

Organizations like Interfaith Worker Justice work to close the gap between low-wage workers, who tend to have a more emotional connection to their faith, and corporate executives, who, he said, have been found to see religion more intellectually.

“They try to bring the argument to the modern-day pharaohs,” he said. “‘Hey, you claim to be Christian, you claim to be a Jew, you claim to be Muslim, why are you treating your people this way? You can’t hide behind your glass office.'”

This immediately brings several questions to mind:

1. What percentage of union actions or labor strikes are motivated by religious values? In other words, how often are unions motivated by religion versus other motivations?

2. What happens when a union makes a religious argument to corporate executives? Do the corporations just ignore this part of the argument? What happens when the executive or the company is also religious – does this lead to a different corporate response?

3. How would a typical evangelical, one that lives in the suburbs, works in a non-blue collar job, and is conservative, respond to these arguments? Can corporations sin? Should or can unions be making these arguments?

Why veterinary medicine is a female dominated field

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Sociologists have long been interested in why certain career fields are dominated by men or women. A recent article in Social Forces examines why veterinary medicine is dominated by women:

More women than men are applying for veterinary school—making up as much as 80 percent of applicants at some schools. That’s not because men are avoiding perceived lower wages in veterinary medicine, says one researcher. It’s because male applicants are avoiding fields filled with women.

That’s the conclusion of Anne Lincoln, an assistant sociology professor at Southern Methodist University, whose study of the changing face of veterinary medicine is the first to look at gender in college applications from 1975 to 1995. Lincoln used decades of surveys and application information shared by the American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges in her recently published study, “The Shifting Supply of Men and Women to Occupations: Feminization in Veterinary Education,” in the journal Social Forces.

In addition to men’s “preemptive flight” from female-dominated colleges, Lincoln also attributes veterinary medicine’s gender shift to women’s higher graduation rates from college as well as the landmark 1972 federal amendment that prohibited discrimination by gender in college applications. Women have been enrolling in college in greater numbers since 1972, according to Lincoln.

I would like to hear more about this argument and the idea of “preemptive flight”: so men who are interested in veterinary medicine go to class or the department, see it is dominated by women, and then choose another field. How did this happen in the first place in this particular field – was there an important tipping point? What fields do the men who wanted to go into this field then go into because of the surplus of women in veterinary medicine?

It is also interesting that Lincoln suggests the trends in this field are likely to occur several decades down the road in the fields of law and medicine. If this idea of “preemptive flight” is pervasive in any field dominated by women, what happens when there are fewer and fewer careers where men can flee to?

Happy employees = better workers

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Forbes has developed a list of the 10 companies in the United States that have the happiest employees. This happiness is not just a good thing for the personal well-being of the employees – it eventually helps improve the company’s quality and bottom line:

Studies show that positive employees outperform negative employees in terms of productivity, sales, energy levels, turnover rates and healthcare costs. According to Shawn Achor, Harvard researcher and author of “The Happiness Advantage,” optimistic sales people outperform their pessimistic counterparts by up to 37%. In fact, the benefits can be seen across industries and job functions. Doctors with a positive mindset are 50% more accurate when making diagnoses than those that are negative.

I’ve seen articles/studies like this before. If this is a consistent finding, why don’t more companies make this a priority? It might take some extra money and convincing up front, but if the payoff is harder-working yet more relaxed employees, who wouldn’t want that?

Still issues regarding welfare and poverty to be solved

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Even though the welfare debate in America has been limited recently (or perhaps people think it was a relic of the Clinton presidency), several new books have been published challenging the idea that there are not problems still to be solved. One of the books found that those who were once on welfare but then took jobs did not come out ahead:

But Stretched Thin challenges this supposed success story. Even in the prosperous economy of the late 1990s, it shows, finding a job was not usually a ticket out of poverty. Co-authors Sandra Morgen, an anthropologist, and Joan Acker, a sociologist, both at the University of Oregon, and Jill Weigt, a sociologist at California State University, San Marcos, surveyed more than 900 people, most of them white single mothers, who were taken off the rolls in Oregon or denied welfare benefits in early 1998. They found that more than half — 55 percent — wound up taking jobs that paid wages at or below the poverty line. Two years later, the authors found, nearly half still had family incomes below the poverty line.

If the goal of the welfare reform was to help people move permanently out of poverty, these books suggest there is a lot more work to do. And now with more Americans living in poverty, this could be the time to start working on the complex set of challenges.

Judges: a dying breed?

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According to the reporters over at CNBC, judges are “disappearing” from the workforce:

It seems counterintuitive that we’re increasingly becoming a lawsuit-happy nation and yet, the need for judges is shrinking. The reason is simple: Budget. From the federal government on down to states, cities and towns, cash-strapped governments are slashing their budgets.

This trend is having and will have profound effects on the U.S. legal environmental.  It is true that today most cases settle (civil) or plea bargain (criminal) long before they reach trial, but they do so under the so-called “shadow of the law.”  In other words, litigants choose not to waste time and money fully arguing their cases when the payoff (winning or losing) is not worth the transaction costs of trial (years of litigation, lawyer fees, etc.).

These settlements and plea bargainings are attractive alternatives to full trials, however, only if trials (1) are an actual possibility and (2) it is reasonably certain who will win.  If there are fewer judges, (1) is undermined.  Moreover, if there are fewer trials–resulting in fewer judicial opinions–(2) is undermined insofar as there are precedents to indicate how current controversies will resolve.  In a world with few judges, potential litigants are thus left with a less-attractive reason to settle/bargain:  uncertainty.

A potentially huge penalty for losing, combined with the cost of not knowing, results in a rational decision to resolve the problem quickly.  This is fine to the extent that it lessens legal combativeness.  It is problematic to the degree that it encourages wasteful payments of “go away money” (civil) or guilty pleas to lesser crimes by the innocent (criminal).

How much fun should one have at work?

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Schumpeter at The Economist takes a look at the idea of having fun at work:

ONE of the many pleasures of watching “Mad Men”, a television drama about the advertising industry in the early 1960s, is examining the ways in which office life has changed over the years. One obvious change makes people feel good about themselves: they no longer treat women as second-class citizens. But the other obvious change makes them feel a bit more uneasy: they have lost the art of enjoying themselves at work…

This cult of fun is driven by three of the most popular management fads of the moment: empowerment, engagement and creativity. Many companies pride themselves on devolving power to front-line workers. But surveys show that only 20% of workers are “fully engaged with their job”. Even fewer are creative. Managers hope that “fun” will magically make workers more engaged and creative. But the problem is that as soon as fun becomes part of a corporate strategy it ceases to be fun and becomes its opposite—at best an empty shell and at worst a tiresome imposition.

A good point: forced “fun” is hardly fun at all.

A question: what really makes work satisfying for people? Having fun? Collegial relationships? Meaningful tasks? Praise from bosses and higher-ups?

Another question: what can’t this “fun time” at work be left up to the employee’s discretion? One might prefer a half hour to quietly read a book while another might prefer a volleyball game. While this means managers may not be able to rave about how their group came together in an activity, it might provide even higher levels of productivity.

“Is the American Dream dead?”

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President Obama was at a town hall meeting earlier this week where he fielded questions about some difficult topics. One question came from a law school graduate who is struggling at age 30: “Is the American dream dead?”

This is an interesting question. One response to this guy, which I don’t think would really placate him or be charitable, would be to say that one personal case of difficulties does not mean the American Dream has disappeared. On the other hand, this question could lead to the question of whether the American Dream will be redefined in the future because of present economic and social realities.

One part of the American Dream that could complicate the future definition is that Americans tend to want better things for their children. It is fascinating to go back to community studies like Middletown and see in the 1920s how parents wanted their wanted their children to get ahead, primarily through education. What if this is no longer feasible for many? Perhaps the American Dream will simply level off for a while rather than continue to expand. But this would mean parents (and children) would need to change their expectations about what the future might hold.

The importance of having meaningful work

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Recent research suggests that the satisfaction individuals derive from work is not based just on a paycheck but rather on the meaning found in even doing menial tasks:

In several recent studies, social scientists have zeroed in on why paychecks alone can’t explain the link between work and well-being. The evidence shows that people can find meaning in seemingly insignificant jobs and that even trivial tasks make us far happier than no tasks at all.

“We become very dedicated to things it would be hard to be dedicated to if we were perfectly rational,” says behavioral scientist Dan Ariely, author of “The Upside of Irrationality,” published in June. “It turns out you can give people lots of meaning in lots of ways, even small ones.”…

The findings suggest that, although people often yield to idleness, deep down they seek excuses to stay busy, because busyness is happiness. However much Sisyphus rued his meaningless job, the authors conclude, he would have been even more miserable with no job at all.

Interesting findings that would have profound implications for the workplace.

Some quick questions:

1. Do these researchers argue that these benefits of working are linked to human nature or is it a conditioned response based on culture and other factors?

2. What are the long-term consequences of people having no work? If work is meaningful, what happens if people cannot work for different reasons (health, unemployment, other possibilities)?

3. How many workplaces (or what percentage) explicitly talk to employees about the meaningfulness of their individual work?