Category: General

Child-care workers are quitting rapidly, a red flag for the economy

South Shore Stars early childhood program in Weymouth, Mass., received zero applicants this summer for its preschool teacher positions. It was a big change…

www.post-gazette.com

In a new report this past week, President Joe Biden’s Treasury Department called the current child-care system “unworkable” with high costs for parents, low wages for workers and not enough spots for kids.

For years, there have been calls to pay child-care workers more, as the median pay in the industry – $25,460 a year, according to the Labor Department – is below the poverty line for a family of four.

Ms. Roberts, the former child care worker who quit in June, grew up dreaming of becoming a teacher. But she says it was disheartening to learn that day care workers with 20 years more experience than her still made less than $15 an hour. During the pandemic when she had to get toddlers to keep their masks on and not touch each other, she was given a raise of 15 cents per hour.

“Our country needs to look at what we really value. We should value our youngest learners,” Ms. Cover said. “Our youngest kids should be cared for and educated in settings that are no less than what they receive in K-12 school districts.”

Housing is a human right, not a commodity

Canada is now seeing the consequences of governments placing the interests of investors ahead of citizens

www.theglobeandmail.com

Housing is now predominantly valued as a commodity, traded and sold on markets, promoted and invested in as a secure place to park unprecedented amounts of excess capital. The view of housing as a human dwelling, a place to raise families and thrive within a community, has largely been eroded. Despite its firm place in international human rights law, housing has lost its currency as a human right.

Housing prices have increased at three times the rate of income. No longer commensurate with household income levels, housing prices are driven instead by demand for high-end assets among global investors.

In other countries, the result has been devastating. In the U.S., in the five years after the 2008 mortgage crisis, nine million households were evicted due to foreclosure; in Spain during the same period, 300,000 were evicted. Legendary Wall Street short-seller Marc Cohodes has predicted that this is the direction in which Canada is now headed.

Wondering why society went off-kilter during the pandemic? It was all predicted in this book

A year and a half into the pandemic, a group of citizens still refuse to acknowledge that a major health event is even happening. Why? A prophetic book by a psychologist in Vancouver, B.C., predicted this, as well as most…

www.seattletimes.com

Taylor would know because he predicted it. He wrote a remarkable little book back in 2019 called “The Psychology of Pandemics.” Its premise is that pandemics are “not simply events in which some harmful microbe ‘goes viral,’” but rather are mass psychological phenomena about the behaviors, attitudes and emotions of people.

The denialists and refuseniks today are engaging in what the psychology field calls “psychological reactance.” It’s “a motivational response to rules, regulations, or attempts at persuasion that are perceived as threatening one’s autonomy and freedom of choice,” the book describes.

“Pandemics bring out all these extremes in behavior,” Taylor told me. “Anxiety, fear, denial, racism, conspiracy theories, the popularity of quack cures, the ‘you’re not the boss of me’ backlash to health directives — these things have all been seen dating back to the medieval plagues.”

7 ways men live without working in America

Almost one third of all working age men in America aren’t doing diddly-squat. They don’t have a job and they aren’t looking for one either. How do they live? What are they doing for money? To me, this is one of the great mysteries of our time.

finance.yahoo.com

Almost one-third of all working-age men in America aren’t doing diddly-squat. They don’t have a job, and they aren’t looking for one either. One-third of all working-age men. That’s almost 30 million people!

But the fact that millions of American males have not been working precedes COVID-19 by decades.

It’s also the case that some men in this group may be unemployed and not seeking work because they’ve given up looking just for now — perhaps waiting for COVID to abate — and will start the search again soon. Here too, society needs to help.

Opinion | The Limits of My Empathy for Covid Deniers

We are all grieving. But some of us are rushing into a collective denial of death and loss.

www.nytimes.com

She suggests that the anti-science, narcissistic, antisocial Covid deniers are displaying a collective grief response. We are all grieving the loss of big things and small things.

I am thinking about the big losses but also about the small losses, like our professional identities as we lost jobs or our work changed dramatically and the loss of our daily rituals.

A third of former hospitality workers won’t return to the industry during the labor shortage because they want higher pay, better benefits, and a new work environment

Many workers who were either laid off or quit hospitality jobs are reluctant to go back, even as wages rise in the labor shortage, a survey suggests.

www.businessinsider.com

Low pay, bad benefits, and a stressful workplace are putting off former restaurant and hotel staff from returning to the industry, according to a survey by job site Joblist.

Massive lay-offs, remote working, and caring responsibilities have forced thousands of Americans to consider switching their careers during the pandemic. Some were forced out of their roles because their employers downsized or even shut down during the pandemic. Others have been “rage quitting” in search of better pay and conditions.

Understanding the Working Class | Demos

The working class today is much more complex and diverse than the white, male, manufacturing archetype often evoked in popular narratives.

www.demos.org

As the manufacturing footprint in the working class has shrunk, so has the white male archetype that has historically defined the working class. And as the share of private-sector workers in unions shrank along with those jobs, and working-class jobs became more diffuse and spread across numerous sectors, the idea of a coherent working class has lost its force.

Put simply, the working class shifted from “making stuff” to “serving and caring for people”—a change that carried significant sociological baggage. The long-standing “others” in our society—women and people of color—became a much larger share of the non-collegeeducated workforce. And their marginalized status in our society carried over into the working class, making it easier to overlook and devalue their work.

Women and people of color have made great strides in the past 50 years, but there’s no turning away from the reality that our society is still organized along relatively rigid gender and racial hierarchies. As the quality of the new jobs being created in America continues to deteriorate, the inequities by race and gender are further exacerbated.

Nearly twice as many women as men work in jobs paying wages below the poverty line.

Undark, a non-profit digital magazine focusing on the intersection between science and society, has an interesting article entitled The Science That Explains Trump’s Grip on White Males. It reinforces what I mentioned the other day about how people with Socialized Minds will defend any threat to their perceived reality (through the “lens” of their worldview), thus avoiding change at any cost, as noted in the first quote below.

Different groups can perceive the same risk through vastly different lenses. And in the case of White men, it is often a lens that seeks to preserve institutionalized cultural identity and societal status.

What the science seems to clearly suggest — and what people like Paul Slovic have observed for decades — is that society’s multiple overlapping crises can’t be solved when governing bodies composed primarily of White men, who are outliers in terms of risk perception, are tasked with making decisions about risks for the entire population. The individuals who hold power over decisions about what’s risky and what’s not should be representative of the community at large, and those individuals should have the agency and authority to be part of the final decision-making.

Now the second quote from the article above really encapsulates what’s wrong with our society on so many levels because I’m sure everyone has experienced this frustration in their work at one time or another. For example, I know my wife, as a teacher, experiences this at least a few times each year, when people making decisions regarding educational policy have zero actual experience teaching or, at the very least, have recent teaching experience.

This has to change. Leadership needs to be about bringing people together which means leaders need to have broader lenses and perspectives that help them empathize and understand the needs of the people they are supposedly trying to help because they have the wisdom of actually experiencing the same frustrations themselves. Yet continually we see so many leaders failing and people not trusting them because they are often completely detached from the same realities as the people they’re supposed to be leading.

Yet how can these so called “leaders” actually embrace change and initiate transformative action, if they are detached from the same reality as those they’re supposed to be leading and thus they can’t even perceive the same issues as them?