Wednesday, February 17, 2016

How broken is the American labor market?

Joseph Scott:

My normal schedule is 6 A.M. to 6 P.M. — twelve hour shifts. I’m on seven days, but every other week, we take what’s called a “fatigue day.” The plant requires that every contractor have a fatigue day. I get two days off a month.

That is noted in passing in an interview about the guy's skateboarding (after his 12 hour shift doing heavy labor), not some socialist muckraking.

Wednesday, February 03, 2016

The textual form of yelling at the radio while preparing dinner

Me, at RI NPR:

It is not accurate to say the Mass Insight found inefficiencies in the Providence School Department. The report simply was not that detailed. They found that, on paper, Providence had a very lean staff compared to other districts, and seemed to have a lot of people listed as clerks. It ignored perhaps the most salient point, that many of those clerk positions had been unfilled for years, thus rendering any inefficiency purely hypothetical. They did not, for example, look at what each clerk was doing and determine if there actually were specific inefficiencies or redundancies, because Mass Insight are overstretched hacks, and as long as they say what people expect them to say, nobody questions it.