Wednesday, March 14, 2007

Life's Harder in Seattle

Life's Harder in Seattle

Book Review by Crawford Kilian in the on-line e-magazine TheTyee.ca

February 13, 2007

We like to pay lip service to our healthcare and social programs, without really knowing much about them. They distinguish us from our American cousins, and give us something to argue about.

But how much difference do those programs actually make in our lives? Middle-class American life looks a lot like ours. Our right wing tends to scorn our social safety net and the long wait times for medical care. Our left tends to defend them -- but in emotional and nationalist terms, not in the bottom-line terms that the right understands.

Now Dan Zuberi, a UBC sociology professor, has made a meticulous comparison of social policies in two similar cities -- Vancouver and Seattle. He's published his findings as Differences That Matter: Social Policy and the Working Poor in the United States and Canada. Those findings are astonishing: for the working poor, and for others, Vancouver is a far, far better place than its sister city.and they share a region. The hospitality industry is typical of the new service economy that's replaced manufacturing in the past 30 or 40 years. So he studied workers in four hotels run by the same two multi-national corporations in both countries. One hotel in each city has unionized workers; one does not.Similar cities, different conditions.

By interviewing management and staff in the four hotels, Zuberi learned a great deal about working and living conditions for the people who change the sheets and wipe the hairs off the toilets. If you think those conditions are pretty much the same everywhere in the global economy, you're wrong.

Unionization was surprisingly different. While union memberships in Canada and the U.S. were roughly the same in the 1970s, membership has fallen sharply in the U.S. while holding its own here in Canada. Zuberi traces that to Reagan's destruction of the air traffic controllers in the early '80s. American unions never recovered. Canadian unions, however, continued to flourish.
So relatively few hotel workers in Seattle work under collective agreements. The union there has to hammer out individual contracts with each hotel, in a long and awkward process. In Vancouver, most hotels operate under a single collective agreement. Choosing to unionize is much easier here.

This doesn't mean non-union hotel workers earn less. Zuberi found that non-union hotels must match union pay scales just to stay competitive. But unionized hotels hold on to their workers, while the non-unionized endure rapid employee turnover.

Vancouver hotels therefore have more experienced and professional employees, needing little training and inspection. Whether their workers are locals or recent immigrants, they settle in quickly and are rarely off the job. In the winter they can take their legally mandated paid vacation time instead of being laid off. If they do lose their jobs, they can get training while out of work. They like the neighbourhoods they live in, which have little crime, good access to transit, and plenty of amenities like parks and community centres.

A host of problems:

In Seattle, by contrast, hotel workers struggle with a host of problems. Public transit isn't as good, so they have to cluster in high-crime neighbourhoods that at least have some kind of bus service to their downtown workplaces. In the slow winter season they scramble for alternative jobs, or borrow from relatives. Seattle has far fewer community resources to help workers to ride out a spell of unemployment.

Health care is critical. Zuberi's Vancouver interviewees reported plenty of ailments, but routinely saw their doctors without worrying about financial consequences—even when they were laid off.

In Seattle, hotels offer health insurance plans once workers complete their probationary period. With so much turnover, many workers never get the insurance. Those who do may still face disaster: one worker kept changing credit cards to cover $2,500 in monthly medical payments on a $2,600 monthly wage. Few workers see their doctors until they absolutely have to, which may be too late for timely intervention.

In Vancouver, 100 per cent of the workers' children had regular doctors; in Seattle, only 56 per cent did. Workers' compensation scarcely exists in Seattle, while it saves injured Vancouver workers from disaster.

So life for the working poor in Seattle is strikingly harder and more stressful than for their neighbours here in Vancouver. It's not because folks in Seattle are lazier or dumber than folks in Vancouver. It's because laws have created wildly different environments in the two cities and the two nations.

Taken for granted?

Zuberi's well-written book offers plenty of food for thought. As one who rarely travels to the U.S., I take Vancouver for granted. Of course we've got parks and community centres and medicare. Of course our schools are good on both sides of town. Of course you go to your doctor, or a walk-in clinic, as soon as you feel bad. Doesn't everyone in the industrial world?

Evidently not. And having read Zuberi's account, I feel unexpected gratitude to our politicians. The NDP made unionization easy. Bill Bennett's Socreds equalized school funding. If Campbell's Liberals have made life tougher for the working poor, at least they haven't dragged us down to Seattle's level.


Differences That Matter deserves careful reading by everyone in the province. Business managers will realize how costly it would be to follow the American model. Young people will be grateful that their entry-level jobs aren't as crappy as those in the U.S. Even those who damn and blast government on general principles will see that political decisions really do make a difference, and a big one.

Zuberi teaches us that we've made a lot of good decisions. This is no time to start making bad ones just because the Americans have.and they share a region. The hospitality industry is typical of the new service economy that's replaced manufacturing in the past 30 or 40 years. So he studied workers in four hotels run by the same two multi-national corporations in both countries. One hotel in each city has unionized workers; one does not.

Similar cities, different conditions

By interviewing management and staff in the four hotels, Zuberi learned a great deal about working and living conditions for the people who change the sheets and wipe the hairs off the toilets. If you think those conditions are pretty much the same everywhere in the global economy, you're wrong.

Unionization was surprisingly different. While union memberships in Canada and the U.S. were roughly the same in the 1970s, membership has fallen sharply in the U.S. while holding its own here in Canada. Zuberi traces that to Reagan's destruction of the air traffic controllers in the early '80s. American unions never recovered. Canadian unions, however, continued to flourish.
So relatively few hotel workers in Seattle work under collective agreements. The union there has to hammer out individual contracts with each hotel, in a long and awkward process. In Vancouver, most hotels operate under a single collective agreement. Choosing to unionize is much easier here.

This doesn't mean non-union hotel workers earn less. Zuberi found that non-union hotels must match union pay scales just to stay competitive. But unionized hotels hold on to their workers, while the non-unionized endure rapid employee turnover.

Vancouver hotels therefore have more experienced and professional employees, needing little training and inspection. Whether their workers are locals or recent immigrants, they settle in quickly and are rarely off the job. In the winter they can take their legally mandated paid vacation time instead of being laid off. If they do lose their jobs, they can get training while out of work. They like the neighbourhoods they live in, which have little crime, good access to transit, and plenty of amenities like parks and community centres.


A host of problems

In Seattle, by contrast, hotel workers struggle with a host of problems. Public transit isn't as good, so they have to cluster in high-crime neighbourhoods that at least have some kind of bus service to their downtown workplaces. In the slow winter season they scramble for alternative jobs, or borrow from relatives. Seattle has far fewer community resources to help workers to ride out a spell of unemployment.

Health care is critical. Zuberi's Vancouver interviewees reported plenty of ailments, but routinely saw their doctors without worrying about financial consequences—even when they were laid off.

In Seattle, hotels offer health insurance plans once workers complete their probationary period. With so much turnover, many workers never get the insurance. Those who do may still face disaster: one worker kept changing credit cards to cover $2,500 in monthly medical payments on a $2,600 monthly wage. Few workers see their doctors until they absolutely have to, which may be too late for timely intervention.

In Vancouver, 100 per cent of the workers' children had regular doctors; in Seattle, only 56 per cent did. Workers' compensation scarcely exists in Seattle, while it saves injured Vancouver workers from disaster.

So life for the working poor in Seattle is strikingly harder and more stressful than for their neighbours here in Vancouver. It's not because folks in Seattle are lazier or dumber than folks in Vancouver. It's because laws have created wildly different environments in the two cities and the two nations.

Taken for granted?

Zuberi's well-written book offers plenty of food for thought. As one who rarely travels to the U.S., I take Vancouver for granted. Of course we've got parks and community centres and medicare. Of course our schools are good on both sides of town. Of course you go to your doctor, or a walk-in clinic, as soon as you feel bad. Doesn't everyone in the industrial world?
Evidently not. And having read Zuberi's account, I feel unexpected gratitude to our politicians. The NDP made unionization easy. Bill Bennett's Socreds equalized school funding. If Campbell's Liberals have made life tougher for the working poor, at least they haven't dragged us down to Seattle's level.

Differences That Matter deserves careful reading by everyone in the province. Business managers will realize how costly it would be to follow the American model. Young people will be grateful that their entry-level jobs aren't as crappy as those in the U.S. Even those who damn and blast government on general principles will see that political decisions really do make a difference, and a big one.

Zuberi teaches us that we've made a lot of good decisions. This is no time to start making bad ones just because the Americans have.

Monday, March 12, 2007

Gen X Will Change Work Culture

Baby Boomers will leave major gaps in job market.

RAY WILLIAMS, Financial Post

Published: Wednesday, February 21, 2007


A massive number of managers and executives, members of the Baby Boom generation, will retire in the next five years. This promises to leave a huge vacuum in leadership, particularly for companies without succession plans. Generation Xers are poised to take their place. A key question for senior executives to consider is whether the leadership style and values of Generation Xers are the same as those of the Baby Boomers.


Baby Boomers, born between 1945 and l960, grew up watching the Ed Sullivan show, ate TV dinners and gave the peace sign. The Baby Boom generation has dominated the economy, our lifestyles and leadership styles. Leadership for them has been characterized by workaholic tendencies and materialism. Baby Boomers have had a minimum number of careers or a single career path, are impressed by authority, are optimistic and are driven to achieve.


Generation X, born between l960 and l980, grew up with pet rocks, platform shoes and watched The Simpsons. They question authority, seek bigger meaning in life and work, are technologically savvy, live in the present, are skeptical, see career as a key to happiness, are open to multi-careers, consider challenge and variety as being more important than job security and constantly aim to achieve work-life balance.

Friday, March 02, 2007

Obamarama & the Regular folks.

by David Sirota

Obama asks regular folks to buy into his campaign; D.C. calls it a scandal.


The Hotline, the uber-insider journal of Beltway conventional thought, claims today to have a scandalous scoop of "opposition" research on Illinois Sen. Barack Obama (D). Are you ready for this? There's a YouTube video of Obama asking a working class crowd in Cleveland for - gasp! - small campaign contributions. Obama, the Hotline breathlessly recounts, dares to ask "everybody here to pony up five dollars, ten dollars for this campaign. I don't care how poor you are, you've got five dollars."

The real scandal, of course, is the shock that emanates from the Beltway when a major political candidate has the audacity to ask regular people to be a big part of a presidential campaign. Washington would like us to believe that there is only one way to run campaigns these days: by getting a bunch of corporate lobbyists from D.C. and a few super-rich people from New York and Hollywood into a few ballrooms to bundle tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions.

It's government of, by and for Big Money - a Smokybackroom-ocracy - and any other model is seen as a big scandal. If you are wondering why so many politicians sound like Halliburton press flacks or ExxonMobil PR representatives, and why the entire political debate could be dominated by the comments of a Hollywood billionaire to the New York Times' glorified gossip columnist, look no further: it's because of this innately corrupt model, and the media's glorification of it.

But there is another model that very few people talk about - the one where lots of working people give lots of small dollar contributions. People like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) have been doing this for years. Howard Dean did it in his presidential primary run. It's a much harder path, of course, because it's much harder to organize lots of people than it is to organize a few wealthy fat cats. But in the absence of public financing of elections, campaigns that try to rely on lots of little contributions are the next closest thing to a small-d democratic election system.

Let me excerpt from the end of my book Hostile Takeover to expand on this point:

"After getting through a book that details and decries the financial pressures ordinary Americans are under, you may be wondering: 'How am I now reading a call for ordinary Americans to shell out money to politicians?' The answer is pretty simple: until we get publicly financed elections, money will play a big role in politics, and that means ordinary Americans have one of two choices: we can continue to not contribute anything to political candidates, essentially walking off the field and forefeiting. Or, we can hold our nose and play in an albeit unfair game. The latter is clearly the better choice – at least then we have a chance to win a victory here and there, and make our presence felt, especially if we are smart about where we spend limited resources. There is no rule that says politics, even in our corrupt system, has to be so thoroughly dominated by a few very large contributors (though those large contributors will always be somewhat powerful). Groups like Moveon.org are flipping this smoky backroom model on its head, gathering a very large group of contributors who each give just a little bit. Such a model doesn't require regular folks to cough up hundreds of dollars. On the contrary, if millions of people kicked in $5 or $10 we might have a whole different country. Getting more people to contribute small sums of money to political causes will require a change in mindset. As political fundraiser Chris Gruwell says, we need to look at political giving in the same way we look at the basket that comes around at our place of worship. We chip in what we can, no matter how modest, because we believe in the charity work that our money funds. That is the way we need to think about supporting good people running for office, because government can have as big if not bigger effects on society than almost any other institution."

Let's be clear - big donors and philanthropists will always play a role in politics - and some of them play an extremely constructive role (personal example: the Progressive States Network could never have gotten off the ground without generous support from some visionary philanthropists). But the idea that its somehow scandalous for candidates or organizations to ask regular working stiffs to ALSO financially buy into a movement is a false construct designed to rationalize plutocracy.

Though Obama certainly has his share of Big Money interests funneling money to his operation, I'm thrilled to see that he's drawing on his community organizing roots to - at least in public appeals - try to bring working people into the part of presidential campaigns too often left exclusively to the fat cats. That folks in the Beltway see this as "controversial" is only a commentary on how many in the nation's capital truly believe politics should be the exclusive gated community of the rich and famous.

Thursday, March 01, 2007

News from Zentropolis (c)

News from Zentropolis (c)


This column is reserved for a make believe, but yet real place. A place where all things are possible. And contrary to the movie Sin City, where everything bad happens, this is Zentropolis where everything good happens.

This city has its own free speech television network, and rather than Sin City's version of CNN, where all reports are focused on lying, cheating, fraud, embezzlement, killing , wars, environmental crimes, and man'­s inhumanity towards man, GNN has it'­s has it's own reports of truth, integrity, honesty, peace, harmony, compassion , nurturing , and caring for all on GNN (The Good News Network).

I make reference a lot in my book, Zentrepreneurism www.zentrepreneurism.com to the good citizens of Zentropolis, and their good deeds. Here are some of the stories we are covering this month in Zentropolis.

Ervin Laszlo in an article in Ode Magazine writes about what Zentropolis might look like;

Let me offer one example of how such a breakthrough might look: Faced with growing problems and shared threats, citizens across the planet pull together to form associations and networks to pursue their dreams of peace and environmental sustainability.Business leaders and entrepreneurs recognize the importance of these aspirations and respond with new goods and services that help make them a reality. Soon, global news and entertainment media commit themselves to chronicling emerging social and cultural innovations.

On the Internet and through other grassroots communication networks, people everywhere begin exploring new visions of the natural world, the global community and human existence itself.Out of all this comes a new culture of solidarity and social responsibility across the planet.

Public support mounts for government policies that institute social and ecological repairs. Money is diverted from the military and defence industries to the needs of people. New measures are implemented to develop sustainable energy, transportation, industrial, technological and agricultural systems. Huge numbers of people around the world get better access to food, jobs, and education.

As a result of these developments, international mistrust, ethnic conflict, racial oppression, economic inequity, and gender inequality give way to new traditions of mutual respect. Rather than breaking down in conflict and war, humanity breaks through to a sustainable world of self-reliant butco-operating communities, enterprises, countries and regions.At this point in our history, human beings have accumulated unprecedented power hence responsibility to decide our destiny. Although the prospect of global breakdown stares us in the face, it is by no means inevitable.


We also have the unprecedented option of choosing a brighter tomorrow. Nothing prevents us from shifting our evolutionary path toward a peaceful and sustainable civilization, nothing except our own patterns of thinking and action. The leaders now in power and the mainstream society they represent have not yet glimpsed a different future for our civilization. Yet many other people are inspired by visions of a global breakthrough that are already emerging at the creative frontiers of our society.

Societies are seldom culturally monolithic in their thinking. This is especially true in eras of innovation and ferment. Those periods spawn a large number of subcultures, or alternative cultures, that spring up alongside the prevailing power structure.This is what we see happening today, with some of these alternative cultures devoting themselves to imaginatively rethinking the priorities, values, and behaviours of society, giving particular attention to how we can improve environmental sustainability and human ethics.

This sort of fundamental reassessment of how we live, even if overlooked or ignored by those in power, can spark rapid and revolutionary change. While barely visible in the major media, a number of grassroots movements, from global justice to holistic health to spiritual exploration, are already blazing the trail away from the usual assumptions of mainstream culture. Even the people involved with these movements underestimate their own numbers, in part because most of them go about their business without trying to convert others and because they lack social and political cohesion. Yet the more serious and sincere of these alternative cultures show promise as catalysts of a social breakthrough. Unlike many subcultures and sects, these people do not relish taking antisocial stances or want to hide away from everyone else. Rather, they are quietly but profoundly engaged in the world, as they challenge accepted beliefs and pursue new avenues of personal and social commitment.

This then is Zentropolis, the title of my new book.