The US is the only country with no paid leave and paid public holidays.
Monday, May 27, 2013
Saturday, May 25, 2013
Monday, January 7, 2013
Religion and Mourning Rituals at Football Games
After tragedies like the mass shootings in Aurora, CO and at Sandy Hook elementary, you might think that a football stadium would be the last place you’d find a ritual to mourn the loss of life. However, it’s not uncommon at all. In this post, Stephanie Medley-Rath illuminates how sports are like religion by considering mourning rituals, which are present in both.
A social institution is an abstract concept used by sociologists to describe how certain things get done in a society. Social institutions include education, economy, politics, medicine, religion, and more.
Social institutions persist over time and perform various functions in society. Consider education. It seems to simply exist whether I am personally involved in it or not. My life is intertwined quite extensively with education. I spent many years as a student, now work as a college instructor, and will soon be the parent of a kindergartner. Education serves several functions: passing on skills and knowledge to the next generation, creating jobs, and providing childcare.
Now let’s turn to religion as a social institution, which many of you will also be familiar with. Like education, religion also serves several functions in society. Functions of religion include providing guidelines for everyday life. In Christianity, one of the ten Commandments is “thou shall not kill.” Isn’t that also a law? Of course, we make exceptions in the case of military service or policing. This, however, is not an analysis of what this Commandment ultimately means, it merely serves as an example of how religion seeps into everyday life even if you yourself are not particularly religious.
Another function of religion is to provide emotional comfort. Emotional comfort may take place through a mourning or death ritual. Think about it. What do you do when someone dies? A secular funeral home might be involved, but for many their religion serves as a guide as to what they should do. For example, some religions restrict the use of embalming, while for others this is a perfectly acceptable practice.
Mourning rituals, however, do not just take place within religious tradition. They also take place in a more public arena, that of sports. Some argue that sports are also a social institution. Some argue that sports are a religion. In particular, that Americans’ devotion to football is like their devotion to religion.
While sports might not be exactly like religion, they do provide at least one common function: emotional comfort surrounding death.
I witnessed this function at a Denver Broncos pre-season football game in August 2012. The victims and survivors of the Aurora theater shooting were recognized during the pre-game show. Survivors and their families (pictures above) came out onto the field to be recognized.
Months later, another horrific mass-shooting occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School. By chance, I caught a bit of the pre-game show for the New England Patriots v. New York Giants game that occurred shortly after the shooting. The victims of the Newtown, CT shooting were recognized with 26 flairs, one for each victim from the school.
I do not pay nearly enough attention to professional sports, especially football to draw any sort of conclusion as to whether or not these public mourning rituals in professional sports are increasing or not. What these examples do show is that sports do serve at least one function with religion.
What functions does religion serve? How many of these functions are also served by sports? Compare.
Why do sociologists think that sports teams are similar to religions? Think of 3 aspects of sports that are similar to religion (that were not discussed in this article).
Why are mourning rituals becoming a feature of professional sporting events? Does it suggest that religion is becoming less important in the United States?
Visit U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. Use the map on “Beliefs & Practices.” Select the topic “Belief in God or a Universal Spirit.” Record the information you find. Now, look at the other topics. After examining these maps, revisit question 2: Is religion becoming less important in the United States?
A social institution is an abstract concept used by sociologists to describe how certain things get done in a society. Social institutions include education, economy, politics, medicine, religion, and more.
Social institutions persist over time and perform various functions in society. Consider education. It seems to simply exist whether I am personally involved in it or not. My life is intertwined quite extensively with education. I spent many years as a student, now work as a college instructor, and will soon be the parent of a kindergartner. Education serves several functions: passing on skills and knowledge to the next generation, creating jobs, and providing childcare.
Now let’s turn to religion as a social institution, which many of you will also be familiar with. Like education, religion also serves several functions in society. Functions of religion include providing guidelines for everyday life. In Christianity, one of the ten Commandments is “thou shall not kill.” Isn’t that also a law? Of course, we make exceptions in the case of military service or policing. This, however, is not an analysis of what this Commandment ultimately means, it merely serves as an example of how religion seeps into everyday life even if you yourself are not particularly religious.
Another function of religion is to provide emotional comfort. Emotional comfort may take place through a mourning or death ritual. Think about it. What do you do when someone dies? A secular funeral home might be involved, but for many their religion serves as a guide as to what they should do. For example, some religions restrict the use of embalming, while for others this is a perfectly acceptable practice.
Mourning rituals, however, do not just take place within religious tradition. They also take place in a more public arena, that of sports. Some argue that sports are also a social institution. Some argue that sports are a religion. In particular, that Americans’ devotion to football is like their devotion to religion.
While sports might not be exactly like religion, they do provide at least one common function: emotional comfort surrounding death.
I witnessed this function at a Denver Broncos pre-season football game in August 2012. The victims and survivors of the Aurora theater shooting were recognized during the pre-game show. Survivors and their families (pictures above) came out onto the field to be recognized.
Months later, another horrific mass-shooting occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School. By chance, I caught a bit of the pre-game show for the New England Patriots v. New York Giants game that occurred shortly after the shooting. The victims of the Newtown, CT shooting were recognized with 26 flairs, one for each victim from the school.
I do not pay nearly enough attention to professional sports, especially football to draw any sort of conclusion as to whether or not these public mourning rituals in professional sports are increasing or not. What these examples do show is that sports do serve at least one function with religion.
What functions does religion serve? How many of these functions are also served by sports? Compare.
Why do sociologists think that sports teams are similar to religions? Think of 3 aspects of sports that are similar to religion (that were not discussed in this article).
Why are mourning rituals becoming a feature of professional sporting events? Does it suggest that religion is becoming less important in the United States?
Visit U.S. Religious Landscape Survey. Use the map on “Beliefs & Practices.” Select the topic “Belief in God or a Universal Spirit.” Record the information you find. Now, look at the other topics. After examining these maps, revisit question 2: Is religion becoming less important in the United States?
Saturday, January 5, 2013
Targeted Cable Advertisements as a Political Tool in 2012
By Marcus Stern and Tim McLaughlin
Jan 5 (Reuters) - As political experts assess Republican Mitt Romney's failed U.S. presidential bid, an analysis of how his campaign and President Barack Obama's winning team used cable TV to target ads at specific groups of voters may offer some valuable tips for the future.
During the final weeks before the Nov. 6 election, with polls showing a tight race, Obama's campaign exploited cable TV's diverse lineup to target women on channels such as Food Network and Lifetime and men on networks such as ESPN.
The Obama team used the fragmentation of cable TV's audience to its fullest advantage to target tailored messages to voters in battleground states.
Meanwhile, Romney's campaign relied on a more traditional mass saturation of broadcast TV. The Romney camp was entirely dark on cable TV for two of the campaign's last seven days.
"We don't know why. This was a week before the election and you're in the fight for your life," said Timothy Kay, political director for NCC Media, a cable TV industry consortium.
The race had narrowed to key counties in several battleground states, the kind of isolation ideally suited for cable's geographical targeting and niche-marketing capabilities.
Republican Party operatives dismayed by Romney's defeat continue to debate what went wrong in a campaign awash in cash and run by a candidate with a business background. The former Massachusetts governor's campaign, like Democrat Obama's, spent a record-setting amount of cash; in Romney's case, it was $580 million in 20 months.
Obama's campaign outspent Romney's campaign on advertising by as much as $200 million, according to a Reuters analysis. But when spending by pro-Romney and pro-Obama outside groups is considered, Romney had the edge in overall TV advertising spending.
Republican consultants and advertising experts said Romney had enough money to compete with Obama's final advertising effort. Yet Obama cruised to a commanding Electoral College victory after a final concentration on a small group of battleground states.
"In market after market, the Obama campaign ended up putting more ads on target than the Romney campaign did," said Ken Goldstein, president of Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group, a nonpartisan consulting firm that tracked political ads and worked with both campaigns.
Stephanie Kincaid, who managed Romney's advertising campaign, declined to answer questions and referred inquiries to top Romney campaign officials Stuart Stevens and Russell Schriefer, her bosses at The Stevens and Schriefer Group, a political consulting firm. They did not respond to phone calls.
OBAMA'S ADVANTAGE
Cable television political advertising jumped from $136 million in 2006 to $650 million in 2012, although broadcast TV still garnered 80 percent of the campaign advertising spending last year.
Even with major broadcast networks and their affiliates, the Obama campaign appeared to out-perform the Romney camp.
A campaign spending review shows the Obama camp frequently spent far less than Romney for ads aired by the same stations during the same shows.
For example, a review of TV station filings with the Federal Communications Commission showed Romney, on the Sunday before Election Day, paid $1,100 for an ad aired during CBS's "Face the Nation" program on WRAL in Raleigh, North Carolina. Obama paid $200 for a comparable ad on the same station during the same program.
Part of the reason for the Obama campaign's pricing advantage is that the president faced no Democratic primary challenge and was able to buy autumn TV time months in advance when the slots - like airline tickets - were discounted. Romney faced a tough battle for the Republican nomination.
The Romney campaign also simply did not have enough bodies to handle the labor-intensive business of planning, negotiating and placing ads on hundreds of TV stations simultaneously, according to several Republican consultants and media analysts who asked not to be identified.
Obama's campaign had 30 full-time media buyers. The Romney campaign relied heavily on a single person, Kincaid, with help from one or two others from time to time, according to sources close to the campaign. Senior officials with the campaign declined to discuss its advertising staffing.
"It's the equivalent of having a budget the size of a Coca- Cola commercial campaign and having two people managing it, where a Madison Avenue agency might have 50 people," said NCC's Kay. Kincaid and her small staff were overwhelmed, according to numerous political vendors who dealt with them.
Jim Margolis, an Obama campaign senior adviser whose firm GMMB handled its advertising, said the campaign also took advantage of information provided by companies like Rentrak Corp, a Portland, Oregon-based company that monitors the digital boxes attached to TVs in households using satellite dishes.
EXPLOITING FRAGMENTATION
In the past, political advertisers relied on the major networks rather than cable TV in a quest to reach the most television viewers.
But cable TV's increasing popularity has brought dramatic fragmentation to television viewership. In many markets, cable offers a hundred or more channels, giving advertisers a chance to target specific demographics.
For instance, the Obama campaign identified zip codes surrounding Ohio tire-manufacturing plants and purchased cable ads touting Obama's efforts to block tire imports from China.
Obama ran 600,000 cable ads to the Romney's 300,000 around the nation during the campaign, said NCC's Kay. Obama's cable TV push started in April. Romney's began in September.
Obama's team also mixed and matched its messages to sharpen the appeal in key counties.
"My impression was there was much more examination and analytics done with the Obama campaign," Kay said. "The Romney campaign had the same rigid schedule in every state." (Reporting by Marcus Stern in Washington and Tim McLaughlin in Boston; Editing by Claudia Parsons, Marilyn W. Thompson and Will Dunham)
Jan 5 (Reuters) - As political experts assess Republican Mitt Romney's failed U.S. presidential bid, an analysis of how his campaign and President Barack Obama's winning team used cable TV to target ads at specific groups of voters may offer some valuable tips for the future.
During the final weeks before the Nov. 6 election, with polls showing a tight race, Obama's campaign exploited cable TV's diverse lineup to target women on channels such as Food Network and Lifetime and men on networks such as ESPN.
The Obama team used the fragmentation of cable TV's audience to its fullest advantage to target tailored messages to voters in battleground states.
Meanwhile, Romney's campaign relied on a more traditional mass saturation of broadcast TV. The Romney camp was entirely dark on cable TV for two of the campaign's last seven days.
"We don't know why. This was a week before the election and you're in the fight for your life," said Timothy Kay, political director for NCC Media, a cable TV industry consortium.
The race had narrowed to key counties in several battleground states, the kind of isolation ideally suited for cable's geographical targeting and niche-marketing capabilities.
Republican Party operatives dismayed by Romney's defeat continue to debate what went wrong in a campaign awash in cash and run by a candidate with a business background. The former Massachusetts governor's campaign, like Democrat Obama's, spent a record-setting amount of cash; in Romney's case, it was $580 million in 20 months.
Obama's campaign outspent Romney's campaign on advertising by as much as $200 million, according to a Reuters analysis. But when spending by pro-Romney and pro-Obama outside groups is considered, Romney had the edge in overall TV advertising spending.
Republican consultants and advertising experts said Romney had enough money to compete with Obama's final advertising effort. Yet Obama cruised to a commanding Electoral College victory after a final concentration on a small group of battleground states.
"In market after market, the Obama campaign ended up putting more ads on target than the Romney campaign did," said Ken Goldstein, president of Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group, a nonpartisan consulting firm that tracked political ads and worked with both campaigns.
Stephanie Kincaid, who managed Romney's advertising campaign, declined to answer questions and referred inquiries to top Romney campaign officials Stuart Stevens and Russell Schriefer, her bosses at The Stevens and Schriefer Group, a political consulting firm. They did not respond to phone calls.
OBAMA'S ADVANTAGE
Cable television political advertising jumped from $136 million in 2006 to $650 million in 2012, although broadcast TV still garnered 80 percent of the campaign advertising spending last year.
Even with major broadcast networks and their affiliates, the Obama campaign appeared to out-perform the Romney camp.
A campaign spending review shows the Obama camp frequently spent far less than Romney for ads aired by the same stations during the same shows.
For example, a review of TV station filings with the Federal Communications Commission showed Romney, on the Sunday before Election Day, paid $1,100 for an ad aired during CBS's "Face the Nation" program on WRAL in Raleigh, North Carolina. Obama paid $200 for a comparable ad on the same station during the same program.
Part of the reason for the Obama campaign's pricing advantage is that the president faced no Democratic primary challenge and was able to buy autumn TV time months in advance when the slots - like airline tickets - were discounted. Romney faced a tough battle for the Republican nomination.
The Romney campaign also simply did not have enough bodies to handle the labor-intensive business of planning, negotiating and placing ads on hundreds of TV stations simultaneously, according to several Republican consultants and media analysts who asked not to be identified.
Obama's campaign had 30 full-time media buyers. The Romney campaign relied heavily on a single person, Kincaid, with help from one or two others from time to time, according to sources close to the campaign. Senior officials with the campaign declined to discuss its advertising staffing.
"It's the equivalent of having a budget the size of a Coca- Cola commercial campaign and having two people managing it, where a Madison Avenue agency might have 50 people," said NCC's Kay. Kincaid and her small staff were overwhelmed, according to numerous political vendors who dealt with them.
Jim Margolis, an Obama campaign senior adviser whose firm GMMB handled its advertising, said the campaign also took advantage of information provided by companies like Rentrak Corp, a Portland, Oregon-based company that monitors the digital boxes attached to TVs in households using satellite dishes.
EXPLOITING FRAGMENTATION
In the past, political advertisers relied on the major networks rather than cable TV in a quest to reach the most television viewers.
But cable TV's increasing popularity has brought dramatic fragmentation to television viewership. In many markets, cable offers a hundred or more channels, giving advertisers a chance to target specific demographics.
For instance, the Obama campaign identified zip codes surrounding Ohio tire-manufacturing plants and purchased cable ads touting Obama's efforts to block tire imports from China.
Obama ran 600,000 cable ads to the Romney's 300,000 around the nation during the campaign, said NCC's Kay. Obama's cable TV push started in April. Romney's began in September.
Obama's team also mixed and matched its messages to sharpen the appeal in key counties.
"My impression was there was much more examination and analytics done with the Obama campaign," Kay said. "The Romney campaign had the same rigid schedule in every state." (Reporting by Marcus Stern in Washington and Tim McLaughlin in Boston; Editing by Claudia Parsons, Marilyn W. Thompson and Will Dunham)
Where Did Our Debt Really Come From
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=LcvLHHMC4iI&feature=player_embedded&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DLcvLHHMC4iI%26feature%3Dplayer_embedded
Right To Work and Social Inequality
The following chart outlines the "Right to Work" impact on the middle class.
How Social Networks Can Save Lives
http://www.npr.org/2013/01/03/168509385/neighborhood-connections-key-to-surving-a-crisis
Court Declares Raping an Unmarried Woman Isn't Rape
Taken from
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/01/04/court-declares-that-raping-an-unmarried-woman-isnt-rape/
Remember that scene in Revenge of the Nerds when one of the nerds pretends to be a cheerleader’s boyfriend and has sex with her? In the movie world of Hollywood, this is supercool and awesome. She even falls in love with the nerd because…I don’t know. Sex? Here in the real world, however, that’s considered rape.
Or at least it used to be.
A panel of California judges overturned the conviction of Julio Morales because the woman he raped thought that he was her boyfriend. The woman had been drinking and she and her boyfriend had gone to sleep after consciously deciding not to have sex for lack of a condom. At some point in the night, the boyfriend left without the woman’s knowledge. Morales sneaked into the room and, pretending to be the boyfriend in the dark room, had sex with the inebriated and half-asleep woman. She realized during the intercourse that she was having sex with someone who was not her boyfriend.
Had she been married, this would be an open and shut case (no tacky pun intended). But, due to a law passed in 1872 (yes, Eighteen Seventy Two), an unmarried woman is not protected. In other words, if an unmarried woman has sex with a stranger without her consent, then too bad for her. The misogyny and rape culture is so obvious that it simply defies description. This is the kind of parsing of rape that leads to “legitimate rape” and “forcible rape” and allows rapists to, in all seriousness, argue that it was “consensual sex.” That’s not so bad, right?
In this particular, the prosecutors put forth two arguments: one, that it was rape because she was sleeping, and, two, that it was rape because she was tricked. The panel wants to be sure that the conviction was based on the part of the law that defines sex with a sleeping victim as rape and not on the part where tricking an unmarried woman is not rape.
The decision handed down overturning Morales’ conviction and ordering a retrial also calls for an overhaul of the law to remove this egregious loophole. This will be scant comfort to the victim if her rapist goes free and, even if he is convicted for a second time, the trauma of reliving the rape hardly seems to be what we would call justice.
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/01/04/court-declares-that-raping-an-unmarried-woman-isnt-rape/
Remember that scene in Revenge of the Nerds when one of the nerds pretends to be a cheerleader’s boyfriend and has sex with her? In the movie world of Hollywood, this is supercool and awesome. She even falls in love with the nerd because…I don’t know. Sex? Here in the real world, however, that’s considered rape.
Or at least it used to be.
A panel of California judges overturned the conviction of Julio Morales because the woman he raped thought that he was her boyfriend. The woman had been drinking and she and her boyfriend had gone to sleep after consciously deciding not to have sex for lack of a condom. At some point in the night, the boyfriend left without the woman’s knowledge. Morales sneaked into the room and, pretending to be the boyfriend in the dark room, had sex with the inebriated and half-asleep woman. She realized during the intercourse that she was having sex with someone who was not her boyfriend.
Had she been married, this would be an open and shut case (no tacky pun intended). But, due to a law passed in 1872 (yes, Eighteen Seventy Two), an unmarried woman is not protected. In other words, if an unmarried woman has sex with a stranger without her consent, then too bad for her. The misogyny and rape culture is so obvious that it simply defies description. This is the kind of parsing of rape that leads to “legitimate rape” and “forcible rape” and allows rapists to, in all seriousness, argue that it was “consensual sex.” That’s not so bad, right?
In this particular, the prosecutors put forth two arguments: one, that it was rape because she was sleeping, and, two, that it was rape because she was tricked. The panel wants to be sure that the conviction was based on the part of the law that defines sex with a sleeping victim as rape and not on the part where tricking an unmarried woman is not rape.
The decision handed down overturning Morales’ conviction and ordering a retrial also calls for an overhaul of the law to remove this egregious loophole. This will be scant comfort to the victim if her rapist goes free and, even if he is convicted for a second time, the trauma of reliving the rape hardly seems to be what we would call justice.
Anti-Union Push Leaves Workers Voiceless
Taken from Columbus Dispatch http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/editorials/2013/01/02/anti-union-push-leaves-workers-voiceless.html
Wednesday January 2, 2013 5:32 AM
America lost one of its iconic brands last month when Hostess, maker of Twinkies, Ding Dongs, Wonder Bread and other staples of postwar Middle America, closed up shop.
The announcement was an occasion for wags to litter the Internet with jokes about the Twinkie, a pathetic industrial confection that couldn’t be more out of step with our artisanal, gourmet tastes. But there was another curious aspect to the story: Hostess workers still were represented by several labor unions, and one of them, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, had gone on strike. The failure of management and the bakers union to reach an agreement, it appears, precipitated the closing of the company and the loss of 18,000 jobs.
The Twinkie and the labor union, going down together — the story fitted perfectly into a pat journalistic narrative in which unions have done their work (thanks for the eight-hour day, folks!) but now must exit the historical stage.
Unfortunately, reality is not quite so simple. Recently, we learned — from The Wall Street Journal, no less — that the company had diverted payments it was supposed to make to the employee pension fund into other operating accounts. This at a time when finances were tight and management nevertheless decided to give itself more bonuses and salary raises.
Genius.
This is the new America: Bonuses and stock options for the top brass, pink slips and blame for the working class. Most Hostess employees had taken steep pay cuts over the past few years. One of the major reasons the bakers union went on strike was that the company was not honoring prior pension agreements.
The version we got from the headlines was a little different: Union refuses to negotiate, forces 80-plus-year old company to shut down.
Don’t be mistaken. What happened at Hostess is part of a long, protracted shift in the American workplace. Companies use any means at their disposal, including bankruptcy reoganization, to get rid of unions. Meanwhile, right-wing think tanks and pundits demonize union members as freeloaders and thugs. It has been a decades-long project, and it’s been incredibly successful.
Look at Michigan. With a law signed recently by Gov. Rick Snyder, it became the 24th state in the nation where a person can accept a job, along with the benefits negotiated by union contracts, and opt out of paying union dues. In time, this will undercut the unions — and their ability to negotiate with employers.
That Michigan could become a “right to work” state is a testament to the power of the anti-union narrative. This is the very state where the once-powerful United Auto Workers was birthed. But notice how this event is covered. Some in the media present this as a sad event — it’s always sad when Middle Americans lose out. Others tout it as a victory for freedom. But nobody in the media is permitted to register this in outrage, to decry this as systematic rigging of the system in favor of employers at the expense of employees.
The only outrage permitted is Fox News’ incessant coverage of the “thug” angle.
We also saw this in the coverage of the Chicago teachers strike — indeed, in any discussion of education reform. We are to understand that all blame for the problems of public education in this country can be hung around the necks of the teachers unions. They protect bad teachers, undercut efforts at reform and fight all measures to hold them accountable for performance.
The troubles of public education are legion. Yet other factors that also affect educational quality receive far less reflection. Matters such as how districts are funded, and the additional difficulties that come with educating impoverished children in high-crime neighborhoods.
Then there is the issue of public employee compensation, which is said to be bankrupting states. Of course, union scolds never pause to ask why legislatures love to underfund pension funds — that is, to fail to live up to the contracts the states have negotiated with public employees in the first place.
The National Labor Relations Board has determined that Hostess didn’t play fair in the negotiations with the bakers union. This news was no doubt met with smirks by those who regard the board as just another government entity standing in the way of big business.
Yet for all the bluster about makers and takers, job creators and moochers off of society, one group is habitually left voiceless. They are the blue-collar employees. They operate forklifts, stand on assembly lines, drive trucks and, yes, put sugary cream into yellow cakes.
Mary Sanchez is a columnist for The Kansas City Star.
msanchez@kcstar.com
Wednesday January 2, 2013 5:32 AM
America lost one of its iconic brands last month when Hostess, maker of Twinkies, Ding Dongs, Wonder Bread and other staples of postwar Middle America, closed up shop.
The announcement was an occasion for wags to litter the Internet with jokes about the Twinkie, a pathetic industrial confection that couldn’t be more out of step with our artisanal, gourmet tastes. But there was another curious aspect to the story: Hostess workers still were represented by several labor unions, and one of them, the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, had gone on strike. The failure of management and the bakers union to reach an agreement, it appears, precipitated the closing of the company and the loss of 18,000 jobs.
The Twinkie and the labor union, going down together — the story fitted perfectly into a pat journalistic narrative in which unions have done their work (thanks for the eight-hour day, folks!) but now must exit the historical stage.
Unfortunately, reality is not quite so simple. Recently, we learned — from The Wall Street Journal, no less — that the company had diverted payments it was supposed to make to the employee pension fund into other operating accounts. This at a time when finances were tight and management nevertheless decided to give itself more bonuses and salary raises.
Genius.
This is the new America: Bonuses and stock options for the top brass, pink slips and blame for the working class. Most Hostess employees had taken steep pay cuts over the past few years. One of the major reasons the bakers union went on strike was that the company was not honoring prior pension agreements.
The version we got from the headlines was a little different: Union refuses to negotiate, forces 80-plus-year old company to shut down.
Don’t be mistaken. What happened at Hostess is part of a long, protracted shift in the American workplace. Companies use any means at their disposal, including bankruptcy reoganization, to get rid of unions. Meanwhile, right-wing think tanks and pundits demonize union members as freeloaders and thugs. It has been a decades-long project, and it’s been incredibly successful.
Look at Michigan. With a law signed recently by Gov. Rick Snyder, it became the 24th state in the nation where a person can accept a job, along with the benefits negotiated by union contracts, and opt out of paying union dues. In time, this will undercut the unions — and their ability to negotiate with employers.
That Michigan could become a “right to work” state is a testament to the power of the anti-union narrative. This is the very state where the once-powerful United Auto Workers was birthed. But notice how this event is covered. Some in the media present this as a sad event — it’s always sad when Middle Americans lose out. Others tout it as a victory for freedom. But nobody in the media is permitted to register this in outrage, to decry this as systematic rigging of the system in favor of employers at the expense of employees.
The only outrage permitted is Fox News’ incessant coverage of the “thug” angle.
We also saw this in the coverage of the Chicago teachers strike — indeed, in any discussion of education reform. We are to understand that all blame for the problems of public education in this country can be hung around the necks of the teachers unions. They protect bad teachers, undercut efforts at reform and fight all measures to hold them accountable for performance.
The troubles of public education are legion. Yet other factors that also affect educational quality receive far less reflection. Matters such as how districts are funded, and the additional difficulties that come with educating impoverished children in high-crime neighborhoods.
Then there is the issue of public employee compensation, which is said to be bankrupting states. Of course, union scolds never pause to ask why legislatures love to underfund pension funds — that is, to fail to live up to the contracts the states have negotiated with public employees in the first place.
The National Labor Relations Board has determined that Hostess didn’t play fair in the negotiations with the bakers union. This news was no doubt met with smirks by those who regard the board as just another government entity standing in the way of big business.
Yet for all the bluster about makers and takers, job creators and moochers off of society, one group is habitually left voiceless. They are the blue-collar employees. They operate forklifts, stand on assembly lines, drive trucks and, yes, put sugary cream into yellow cakes.
Mary Sanchez is a columnist for The Kansas City Star.
msanchez@kcstar.com
Inequality is Costing Americans Their Happiness
Taken from http://www.livescience.com/14638-income-inequality-costing-americans-happiness.html
CREDIT: © Alexander Makarov | Dreamstime.com
Americans are happier in times when the gap between rich and poor is smaller, a new study finds.
The reason, according to research to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, is that when the income gap is large, lower- and middle-income people feel less trusting of others and expect people to treat them less fairly.
The study also provides a potential explanation for why American happiness hasn't risen along with national wealth in the last 50 years.
"Income disparity has grown a lot in the U.S., especially since the 1980s," study researcher Shigehiro Oishi of the University of Virginia said in a statement. "With that, we've seen a marked drop in life satisfaction and happiness." [Read: Does Big Government Make People Happier?]
Unequal income
The results apply to about 60 percent of Americans, or those in the low- and middle-income brackets. For wealthier Americans, the size of the income gap had no effect on happiness.
Economics researchers have long documented growing income inequality in the United States, which they measure using an index called the Gini coefficient; the larger the number the greater the gap between rich and poor. During the 1960s and '70s, the researchers wrote, the U.S. Gini coefficient was on par with many European countries and lower than France's. According to the United Nations Development Program, the U.S. Gini coefficient between 1992 and 2007 was 40.8, higher than France's 32.7. Traditionally happy Scandinavian countries, such as Finland, have Gini coefficients in the mid to high 20s.
But it's tough to compare happiness between countries, since Argentina (a country with a large income gap) differs from Finland in many ways other than economics. To get rid of some of those variables, Oishi and his colleagues used the U.S.-only General Social Survey, which questioned 1,500 to 2,000 randomly selected Americans every year or every other year between 1972 and 2008. More than 48,000 people answered questions on how happy they were, how much they trusted others, and how fair they thought other people were.
Explaining unhappiness
The results showed that during times when the income gap was large, Americans in the low- and middle-income groups were less happy than during times of lower income gaps. (For wealthier people, the income gap made no difference either way — though another study has found that giving away money, which would seem to lessen that gap, can be very rewarding.) Changes in total household income weren't related to the happiness ups and downs.
The results are correlational, so researchers can't be sure that the income gap directly caused unhappiness, but a little more digging turned up a possible explanation. When the income gap grew, low- and middle-class people became increasingly distrustful of their fellow Americans. They were also less likely to believe that fair treatment from others was the norm. This social fracturing could explain the drop in happiness during these times, the researchers wrote.
If the results hold, the authors wrote, they explain why countries with lower income gaps, including Denmark, France and Germany, have become happier as their wealth has grown, while Americans have not.
"The implications are clear," Oishi said. "If we care about the happiness of most people, we need to do something about income inequality."
CREDIT: © Alexander Makarov | Dreamstime.com
Americans are happier in times when the gap between rich and poor is smaller, a new study finds.
The reason, according to research to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science, is that when the income gap is large, lower- and middle-income people feel less trusting of others and expect people to treat them less fairly.
The study also provides a potential explanation for why American happiness hasn't risen along with national wealth in the last 50 years.
"Income disparity has grown a lot in the U.S., especially since the 1980s," study researcher Shigehiro Oishi of the University of Virginia said in a statement. "With that, we've seen a marked drop in life satisfaction and happiness." [Read: Does Big Government Make People Happier?]
Unequal income
The results apply to about 60 percent of Americans, or those in the low- and middle-income brackets. For wealthier Americans, the size of the income gap had no effect on happiness.
Economics researchers have long documented growing income inequality in the United States, which they measure using an index called the Gini coefficient; the larger the number the greater the gap between rich and poor. During the 1960s and '70s, the researchers wrote, the U.S. Gini coefficient was on par with many European countries and lower than France's. According to the United Nations Development Program, the U.S. Gini coefficient between 1992 and 2007 was 40.8, higher than France's 32.7. Traditionally happy Scandinavian countries, such as Finland, have Gini coefficients in the mid to high 20s.
But it's tough to compare happiness between countries, since Argentina (a country with a large income gap) differs from Finland in many ways other than economics. To get rid of some of those variables, Oishi and his colleagues used the U.S.-only General Social Survey, which questioned 1,500 to 2,000 randomly selected Americans every year or every other year between 1972 and 2008. More than 48,000 people answered questions on how happy they were, how much they trusted others, and how fair they thought other people were.
Explaining unhappiness
The results showed that during times when the income gap was large, Americans in the low- and middle-income groups were less happy than during times of lower income gaps. (For wealthier people, the income gap made no difference either way — though another study has found that giving away money, which would seem to lessen that gap, can be very rewarding.) Changes in total household income weren't related to the happiness ups and downs.
The results are correlational, so researchers can't be sure that the income gap directly caused unhappiness, but a little more digging turned up a possible explanation. When the income gap grew, low- and middle-class people became increasingly distrustful of their fellow Americans. They were also less likely to believe that fair treatment from others was the norm. This social fracturing could explain the drop in happiness during these times, the researchers wrote.
If the results hold, the authors wrote, they explain why countries with lower income gaps, including Denmark, France and Germany, have become happier as their wealth has grown, while Americans have not.
"The implications are clear," Oishi said. "If we care about the happiness of most people, we need to do something about income inequality."
Friday, January 4, 2013
Homeless LGBT Youth Represent Up To 40 Percent Of Those On The Streets
Homeless lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) youth may represent a disproportionate number of people living on the streets and in shelters –- but despite this fact, they are not alone.
A number of advocates and young LGBT people who’ve experienced homelessness firsthand appeared on HuffPostLive to talk about the unique problems facing that segment of the community in particular.
“You have the classic situation where a young person comes out and gets kicked out,” said Kate Barnhart, director of New Alternatives, a homeless LGBT youth advocacy organization in New York. “But then you also have a fair number of young people who become homeless for socioeconomic reasons.”
View the video at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/04/homeless-lgbt-youth_n_2411884.html
Course Syllabus
Attached is the Sociology course syllabus. Please reference it for a better understanding of course expectations.
Sociology Course Syllabus
Welcome to the Introduction to Sociology Course Website
Welcome to the Sociology course website. This is a redesigned site that will allow more flexibility in posting options and content.
You will be able to find posts based on different sociological concepts by clicking on the Course Topics links.
You will be able to find class lectures, bonus homework assignments, and much more. Please feel free to explore.
You will be able to find posts based on different sociological concepts by clicking on the Course Topics links.
You will be able to find class lectures, bonus homework assignments, and much more. Please feel free to explore.
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