I crossed a picket line once. The Ontario Federation of Secondary School Teachers (OSSTF) in the Toronto area was on strike in 1983, and one of their demands was that union members be hired to fill night school and summer school teaching positions. They were concerned about quality of education: they didn’t want these courses …
Category: work
work
Sep 14 2012
Kept Women (and Men)
There is something objectionable about a perfectly-capable-of-working adult being ‘kept’ by another adult. It seems to me the epitome of laziness and immaturity to be supported by someone else, to have someone else pay your way through life. But, I suppose, if someone wants to pay someone else’s way, if a man wants to ‘keep’ …
Jun 04 2012
Combining Family and Career
People say that women can’t have, can’t combine, a family and a career, that it’s having family responsibilities that keeps them from advancement – the inability to work late or on weekends, the tendency to need time off to tend to kids… I’m not so sure. I’ve never had such competing obligations, and I don’t …
Apr 25 2012
Being There
I recently read a lament about work attitudes, about how more and more people seem to think that just being there is enough, that their paycheque is for putting in time rather than for actually doing anything, let alone for doing a good anything, that people feel no guilt about the mistakes they make, nor …
Nov 14 2011
King of the Castle
Octavia Butler got it right in Xenogenesis when the aliens identified one of our fatal flaws as that of being hierarchy-driven (they fixed us with a bit of genetic engineering) – but she failed to associate the flaw predominantly with males. And Steven Goldberg got it right in Why Men Rule when he explained that …
Oct 22 2011
Leadership?
Some time ago, I attended a “Women in Leadership” conference put on by one of Ontario’s larger unions. Wheat I learned there disillusioned two parts of me: the labour part and the feminist part.
Oct 14 2011
Useless Humanities
That a humanities degree is useless for the workforce says more about our workforce than the degree. It says that we value, that we’ll pay for, someone to provide cars, electric toothbrushes, and running shoes. But not beauty and insight. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Sep 19 2011
The Sexism Compensation Index (SCI)
I suspect that even with today’s rigorous interview and job performance appraisal techniques, which require that all applicants be asked and scored on the same questions, multiple standards still interfere with merit as the sole criterion for hiring and promotion. How? Well suppose
Aug 24 2011
Wedding Leave
I recently discovered that my workplace has ‘wedding leave’: apparently you can get up to three days off—with pay. What the fuck is going on here? I mean, what’s a wedding? It’s just a big party. Should employees be allowed to have personal parties on company time? I think not. Oh, but it’s a once-in-a-lifetime …
Jun 06 2011
My Job, My Self
I’m intrigued by the psychological devastation that seems to accompany layoffs, not to mention ordinary unemployment, as well as underemployment. It doesn’t seem to be just a matter of money – it seems to be a matter of self-worth, self-esteem; personal identity seems to be at stake. It’s an intriguing claim: one is what one …
fiction
