Dichroic Reflections

radical ideas

I said that the speakers in the book I'm reading were on fire with new ideas.
Here, for a sampling, are some of the things they got me thinking -- either ideas
that shocked me or natural conclusions of what I read.

• The
  Immorality of Overtime: I have thought for a long time that forced continual
  overtime is an abuse of the individual worker. I'm not talking about occasional
  long hours, and I'm not talking about workers who choose it themselves; anyone who
  is on a project they think is important and who thinks they can do it well, will
  choose to put in long hours in the crunch times, when something vital needs to be
  finished. I'm talking about the sort of jobs that force people to work 60
  hours/week, every week, because it's cheaper than hiring more people. What I
  realized, reading, is that it's not only abusive to the individual, but a societal
  evil at any time when there is unemployment. That overtime work cuts down on the
  number of jobs available, and keeps the level of unemployment up. Incidentally,
  the idea of a thirty-hour work week sounds more practical when it's coming from
  someone who was part of the original fight for a 40-hour
  week.
• Lawyers can be freedom fighters: I swear to
  you, when I watched the movie Legally Blonde, the thought of lawyers
  working to keep innocent people out of jail shocked me; I had forgotten they could
  do that. My view of the field had contracted to include only corporate lawyers,
  out to make a buck; benign patent lawyers; and family lawyers, many of whom are
  good, idealistic people who want to help battered women and abused children, and
  who do some pro bono work (this is why this field has the least status in the
  world of law). Oh, and scholarly constitutional lawyers, who do their good work by
  protecting the Bill of Rights. I had completely forgotten about labor lawyers,
  fighting against exploitation of workers; civil rights lawyers fighting racism;
  environmental lawyers fighting big corporations who don't care if they poison
  water and air; and of course criminal lawyers defending clients they believe to be
  innocent.
• Things have gotten worse: Over and over
  people said this -- those who fought for equal rights for women, for civil rights,
  for worker's rights -- those who saw progress made and are seeing reaction to it.
  Also, police officers, doctors, lawyers, and people who are trying to build
  communities. Granted, most of this book was collected during or just after the
  Reagan-Bush years, but here we are again. We need to be careful not to get so
  complacent we don't even notice when hard-won freedoms and advances slip away. We
  also need to take care not to lose what we have when we progress to the next
  step.
• Professionals need to organize: I think the
  idea was always that software engineers, just for example, never needed any sort
  of union because we were professionals, who could talk to and maybe move into
  management. The problem is, when we get laid off, there is no notice and no
  protection. People I've chatted with in other countries were shocked to learn that
  I got only two weeks severance pay. (And in this state, unemployment is
  $200/week. Better build up a good nest egg if you live here.) My title
  actually said I was a manager, but that's meaningless when you have no influence
  over how the company is run, what the benefits are and who gets the axe and so on.
  There are a very few engineers' unions (Boeing, in Seattle, is unionized, I
  believe). I suspect that if the economy doesn't turn around soon, there may be a
  new labor movement, including professionals. If it does, of course, we'll all be
  well-fed and somnolent once again, too lazy to try anything radical or plan ahead
  for harder times.

Okay, enough ranting for one
Sunday morning.