Humanities and Work

On the myth of the "English major Starbucks barista." From 2016, but in my feed last night and I missed this the first time around.

What are we to make of this new old joke about the English major? Why did barista replace fast food worker? The fact is that English majors are not particularly likely to end up as baristas or as workers in the food service industry in general. Plenty of data is available to disprove this idea, so what does its persistence mean? The English major barista is a myth in the sense of being untrue. It is also a myth in the deeper sense of that word: a story that a culture tells itself to explain wishes or fears. In this case, fears.

I think about this with history a lot, too. We know that historians in fact go on to do great work in myriad fields and generally feel pretty good about their history majors. But no one believes it coming into my office as a student. Their parents, moreover, don't believe it either. And data (SEE THIS WONDERFUL DATA) isn't persuading the story.

In my scholarly work, I often turn back to the anthropological definition of a myth as a "story with a purpose or function." The function of the barista myth is:

[it] reflects negative attitudes about the English major itself rather than the realities of an English major’s likely employment. Since coffeehouses are places for reading, writing and talking, spending time in a coffeehouse is a lot like spending time in the study of English. Naturally enough, English majors like to hang out in them. STEM majors have their labs; English majors have their Starbucks. The joke about the English major barista implies, however, that unlike the science done in a lab, the study of English, whether pursued in coffeehouse or classroom, is without value. What better punishment for wasting this time than being sentenced to work at a coffeehouse rather than enjoying its pleasures, serving those who presumably chose some more valuable and lucrative major?

More on this to come.

Diversity and Job Requirements

I've been tracking job requirement issues over the past few months, so I was pleased to see this from Hennepin County (Minneapolis, more or less, where I used to live):

Say you have been tinkering with computer brains your whole life, but your college degree isn't in computer science or a related field. Chances are you won’t be considered for an IT job interview in many public and private companies.
Same goes if you are trying to secure a general maintenance position in Minnesota without a valid driver’s license — even though you may not be required to drive for work-related duties.
It’s common for employers to place a list of qualifications on their job applications, including narrowly defined degrees, years of experience and driver’s licenses. In many cases, said Hennepin County Workforce Development Director John Thorson, some of those qualifications tend to discourage applicants from applying for positions.
Now, he’s changing that.

The article cites a number of changes. It doesn't specifically talk about physical requirements and disability. If one of the local people wanted to reach out and let me know what they say about that, I'd be interested to know what he says.

 See previous coverage here:

• How Disabled Academics Work (Chronicle Vitae, 3/21/16)
• Job Discrimination in Plain Print (Al Jazeera America, 2/10/16)
• Disabled People Need Not Apply (Al Jazeera America, 2/5/16)

Annals of Patriarchal Equilibrium: The Alewife and the Park Director

In the book History Matters, as well as the focused studies on which the book is based, Judith Bennett discusses the curious history of the medieval village alewife. She tracked the way that the internal ale-based economy worked, then, as ale shifted to beer, suddenly men took over the field. It turns out that beer, which kept better, could be made as a high value commercial product. With more money and status involved, women were gradually squeezed out. They lacked the capital to parlay their expertise in ale into commercial beer production. Moreover, the arrival of beer closed off some of the benefits of the less formal ale-economy that local women enjoyed.

Bennett used this case study as one of her examples of what she defined as the patriarchal equilibrium. Her argument is that sure, women's experiences of work and wages have changes over time, but that the relative status of their work has remained flat. The great work transformations - women heading into the factories in the early industrial period - may look different in kind, but in status, nothing has really changed. When a field's status rises, men take it over. When women enter a field, the status/remuneration drops. That's the patriarchal equilibrium.

Yesterday, New York Times reporter Claire Cain Miller wrote a piece on the same phenomenon:

Once women start doing a job, “It just doesn’t look like it’s as important to the bottom line or requires as much skill,” said Paula England, a sociology professor at New York University. “Gender bias sneaks into those decisions.”

She is a co-author of one of the most comprehensive studies of the phenomenon, using United States census data from 1950 to 2000, when the share of women increased in many jobs. The study, which she conducted with Asaf Levanon, of the University of Haifa in Israel, and Paul Allison of the University of Pennsylvania, found that when women moved into occupations in large numbers, those jobs began paying less even after controlling for education, work experience, skills, race and geography...

A striking example is to be found in the field of recreation — working in parks or leading camps — which went from predominantly male to female from 1950 to 2000. Median hourly wages in this field declined 57 percentage points, accounting for the change in the value of the dollar, according to a complex formula used by Professor Levanon. The job of ticket agent also went from mainly male to female during this period, and wages dropped 43 percentage points.

England seems more sure this is about intentional gender bias, whereas Bennett, working in a remote period, argues a little more abstractly about broader patriarchal forces. Still, the phenomenon tracks across time.

Inclusion Pays Off in Vermont / MN Series On Disability and Work

The Star Tribune has a great  five-part series about disability and work, focused on Minnesota, but looking more broadly - Failing the Disabled.

Here's one I like, because it's a positive outcome.

With her zest and ambition, Wollum personifies the remarkable strategy that has made Vermont a leader in the civil rights movement for adults with disabilities. If she lived in Minnesota, Wollum might have been steered into a sheltered workshop or mobile cleaning crew, where thousands of disabled adults perform mundane tasks and have little or no contact with the broader community.
But here, in this state of hardscrabble hillside farms and country roads lined with sugar maples, sheltered workshops are a thing of the past. Disabled adults are expected to take their place each day alongside other working people. In the 16 years since the U.S. Supreme Court ordered states to end the segregation of people with disabilities, few states have carried the flag as boldly as Vermont.

This is achievable everywhere.

Instead, even in Minnesota, a state that prides itself on its commitment to disability justice, we get this:

Though both have Down syndrome, Erin, 26, and Suzanne, 23, have been on starkly different career paths.

Erin makes as little as $2.75 an hour at MRCI, a sheltered workshop operator.
Suzanne makes $10.10 as a breakfast hostess at the Hampton Inn.

While Erin and her cleaning crew are largely hidden from public view, Suzanne’s is the first face that many visitors see each morning in this southern Minnesota town.
Just how Erin and Suzanne wound up on such different trajectories is a case study in the fickle nature of job opportunities for Minnesotans with disabilities.

Jobs have been the big quest for decades now. I'm glad Vermont is showing what's possible.

Work is Work!

On International May Day I wrote a little hymn. I wrote:

Teaching is work. Programming is work. Scholarship is work. Science is work. Grading is work. Committee service is work.

Today Chronicle Vitae published a column on academic work as labor, as work.

It's a linked column to this first piece on the language of adjunct labor. In that piece, I worked through a number of different ways in which adjunct advocates speak about their work, using the language of slave, sharecropper, or migrant laborer. I think this language is mistaken. But here's how I finished the piece.

The issue here is not that writers are loosely deploying hyperbolic metaphors. The real problem is that adjuncts and their advocates believe the rest of us aren’t on their side.

We tut-tut and say it’s too bad, but then throw up our hands, blame the budgets, and let the system continue. Civil rights, slavery, sharecropping, migrant laborers—these are terms that evoke sympathy and demand action within the neoliberal world of higher education in ways that just calling adjuncts “temps” does not.

So let’s not be too quick to blame adjunct advocates for invoking historical inequities when trying to change the system. Instead, let’s question why such metaphors seem necessary. I propose that the plight of the adjunct lies squarely alongside that of a long-recognized historically oppressed group: the working class. Why are faculty so resistant to seeing themselves as labor who need to act in solidarity with the exploited adjuncts?

In my next column, I’ll look at what happens when we put all these metaphors aside and just look at adjunctification as a basic labor issue, one in which we all have a stake.

In today's piece, I really just want to make a simple argument.

Work is work.

As academics, we know a lot about the nature of labor, the ebb and flow of power mostly up to management, but not always. We read about the changing nature of the workforce across the country, but for those enough of us lucky - and let's be clear that luck is a huge part of it, there is no meritocracy - to be on the tenure-stream side of things, it's hard to apply such lenses to ourselves.

I find it hard. Maybe you don't. But plenty of other people see little connection between the plight of the adjunct and their own labor situation.

Work is work.

You are paid for your work. You should be paid for your work. Let's apply the lens of "labor" to what we do in academia, to think of administration as management - maybe nice management, maybe trusted management, but management none the less.

I am very lucky in my job and my bosses. I trust them. But they are still my bosses (some of them read my blog! Hi there!). There's nothing wrong with having a boss, but we need to remember that there is a power dynamic here. And once you bring power into the equation, well, we're back to the labor movement.

I finish today's piece with the following:

We need to recognize that what’s happening to our universities is happening across the North American labor market (and beyond), and that we’re not special. Other highly-trained, specialized industries have turned to contingency work. Higher ed is no different. In fact, we could learn from the industries that increasingly argue that one must treat contingent workers as full members of the community.

Why not embrace the pressures that are falling on the university? Be proud of being laborers, identify with your fellow workers, and organize across the tenure-adjunct divide. Ultimately, it’s the only thing that’s going to improve the situation.

Best of all, it’s the right thing to do.

It really is the right thing to do.

Inclusion and Work: A mini-manifesto

Yesterday I wrote about ending the abuses of sheltered workshops and received push-back from a reader and online-friend. Her son is finding his pathway into employment through a Goodwill sheltered workshop. I really appreciate her voice. I want to see change, but would hate for that change to limit options for her son or for anyone.

That said, the abuses and exploitation of people with disabilities in the sheltered workshop environment have got to stop. The challenge is to craft new systems that preserve possibilities for all people of all ability levels.

Beyond the laws, I argue that the emphasis on sheltered workshops pushes segregation over inclusion. Segregation is easier. Inclusion is hard. Inclusion takes creativity, more resources, and the willingness to push at a culture that too often wants to isolate people with disabilities or render them mere objects of inspiration, rather than full-blown members of society.

There's no one pathway forward. The key is, as always, inclusion; not same-ness. For some people, a segregated controlled environment is absolutely essential for making progress in education or work or anything. My son is one of those people. In First Grade, he spends about half the day in a special needs room and half the day with his class. Although philosophically I am deeply committed to full inclusion, it's not the right thing for Nico right now. He needs the social interaction of a full class, but he also needs the quiet, controlled environment in order to work on his math, spelling, reading, and writing.

And it's working. Nico can read. The key to the Individualized Education Plan is that first word - individual. Frankly, all children of all abilities need IEPs, but we lack the resources. It's not a perfect model, but the approach can carry forward into the working world.

I dream of a day in which all people with disabilities can take advantage of well-supported infrastructure to guide them in transition from high-school into adulthood.

Where whatever degree of independence, inclusion, protection, isolation, etc. that is best for them is available and economically feasible.

Where the word "shelter" in "sheltered workshop" is not a euphemism but a true description of a gentle, educative, environment that helps people with disabilities find meaningful work, build skills, and move out of the shelter if and when they can handle the turbulence of a more inclusive environment.

All of this will take government money, and lots of it. 

It cannot be done by charities alone. It cannot be done by commerce (buying stuff at Goodwill, for example. Or a bake-sale). It cannot only be available for people with means and contacts (Nico is likely going to be fine assuming all goes well; he's 7 and my wife and I are already making plans). In many cases, we will need to pay two salaries or stipends to do one job - a job coach + compensation for work.

The costs are high; but oh, the potential payoffs. Right now, there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people currently cut off from the workforce, isolated in workshops, stuck at home watching TV, their hard-won skills deteriorating. They already impose costs on society, government, family, and themselves. Brought into a more inclusive working environment, some of those costs ease; more importantly, as with all inclusion, the whole society and culture benefits when we open the doors to difference.

So as I head into the world of work and disability, a topic on which I have much more to say, including revealing more about a pilot program that I helped start at my university - and which is scale-able to every university in the nation  - this is my trajectory.

End the laws that allow for abuses while maintaining choices and possibilities that take into account the full range of human ability and potential.

Inclusion; not same-ness. Shelter as a choice; not a default.

Ending the Abuses of Sheltered Workshops

This summer I hope to write several longer essays about social justice topics: police and disability, rape culture (men need to talk to men about rape), eugenics and Down syndrome, and adult-life with developmental disability. I know, sounds more fun than a barrel full of very squished and depressed monkeys, am I right?

Here's the first of many posts bringing out resources relevant to these essays.

Thanks to Section 14 of the Fair Labor Standards Act, people with disabilities can be paid below minimum wage, even down to pennies an hour, if they can't work up to an adequate "standard." Plenty of people with disabilities are exploited in the workplace, but this is legal exploitation, based on the sheltered workshop exception.

The National Council on Disability has a useful overview report on the practice.

In the last year, Goodwill has received some bad publicity for the practice (especially the high pressure testing they do to see how close to "normal" their workshop employees can work). It's pretty grim and just didn't hit at moments when I was ready to write about it. The stories are so painful though.

So it was with pleasure that I read about the Rhode Island reached an agreement with the Federal Government on ending this kind of work segregation. Here's the ADA fact sheet (.docx), here's the Providence Journal, and the NY Times.

Here's the Journal:

PROVIDENCE, R.I. –- The state and the federal government have reached a groundbreaking settlement that will move disabled Rhode Islanders from segregated settings that isolated them for decades into the work force and the community at large.
The Department of Justice announced the consent agreement and the 10-year plan that arises from it at a news conference this morning at the U.S. Attorney’s office. The plan borrows from other states, but, for the first time, lays the pieces out in a comprehensive manner, officials said.
“Today’s agreement will make Rhode Island a national leader in the movement to bring people with disabilities out of segregated work settings and into typical jobs in the community at a competitive pay,” said acting Assistant Attorney General Jocelyn Samuels for the Civil Rights Division.
The plan aims to gradually move the intellectually and developmentally disabled from meaningless tasks — unwrapping bars of soap and capping lotion bottles for $2.21 an hour — to jobs matched with their interests and abilities, even for the profoundly disabled.

It's not just the pay, though in many cases the pay really matters and is an issue. But the extent to which pay ALWAYS = valued / meaningful is debateable (later this summer I will write a Chronicle piece on a program that does not include minimum wage and another, I hope, on the ABLE act for another site). The real question for me is about whether the work is meaningful, developmental, builds skills, and so forth.

So I like that last line, I like the direction this is going, and I hope RI is a model for other states to follow.

Update: Karen, a reader with a son happily moving through a sheltered workshop system, has raised a powerful dissent (which I really appreciate) below, so here's a qualification.

I am NOT calling for sheltered workshops to be closed unilaterally and neither is Rhode Island. What I want to end is the easy slide into segregation over inclusion. Segregation is always easier - in schools, communities, and workplaces. Inclusion takes resources, creativity, and investment from many different parties. 

Moreover, some Goodwill stores have done a very good job paying fair wages, supporting growth, and building community. Others put their workers through punishing tests and chop wages when they don't succeed (the NBC report is worth watching, I think).

There will be a place for sheltered workshops in the constellation of pathways for people with disabilities to find employment.There are people with disabilities for whom the sheltered workshop is the best option, much as there are children who can learn best in a segregated environment. 

Overall, though, I will continue to push for inclusion, but not same-ness, to the extent appropriate for each individual. 

Thanks for commenting.