Month: September 2016

SUBCONTRACTING THE AMERICAN DREAM

Just when we thought this whole craze of farming out good American jobs to third world countries couldn’t get any worse, the Air Force is now giving uniformed pilot work to Afghan and Iraqi subcontractors. The New York Times reported yesterday that the reconnaissance missions against the Islamic State and other terrorist groups are largely piloted by local drone contractors. And I thought it was bad when newspapers shipped out the copy editing function to people in India for $4.95 a day, even though they didn’t know if Snelling was a street, an avenue or a nail salon.

At least the defense department has some internal limits on subcontracting, a seemingly foreign concept in the private sector. According to the Times, the contracted drone pilots can’t be used to kill someone. They can go on spying missions and locate the target to be killed, but the button that actually obliterates the enemy – and any civilians who get in the way – must be pushed by a real, live Air Force employee. Still, it seems that we are perilously close to being able to completely contract out the next war.

Of course, that would be a real bummer for the economy. World War II was one of the country’s biggest economic booms. It created so many jobs, even women were allowed to work, at least until the guys came home. But, whether in war or peace, nobody in charge is really giving much thought to what happens when all the real jobs are gone.

The University of Michigan’s Gerald Davis has a new book (“The Vanishing American Corporation”) addressing what might well be the most urgent and perplexing problem facing our economy: the permanent disintegration of employment. Gone are the days, Davis says, when employees were the lifeblood of a corporation. Instead, they are anathema to the new corporate goal of serving only the economic interests of shareholders. And that, Davis notes, is much better done with contractors, collaborators and any other source that can be kept off a permanent payroll and benefit schedule. Following the lead of Nike, Apple, Sara Lee and others, the dominant industry trend right now is for companies to focus on design and brand management with a drastically scaled down employee force, and then contact out all manufacturing and other work to east Asia or a similar venue.

To make matters worse, according to Davis, the new digital startups all follow the same personnel architecture: a very limited number of employees and a gazillion-and-a-half freelancers and contractors. He offers a staggering illustration: the combined workforces of Google, Facebook, Yelp, Zynga, LinkedIn, Zillow, Tableau, Zulily and Box is less than the number of employees who worked for Blockbuster in 2005. In other words, millions of jobs have gone and are not coming back. The growing trend is quickly moving from stable employment to serial and multiple contracting gigs. Think Uber and Airbnb mixed with, say, freelance landscaping. For many, the American Dream has become a struggle to meet basic security needs.

The most frightening thing in this election year – well, one of them anyway – is the total silence on how to overcome this toxic structural employment problem. Hillary Clinton has proposed massive retraining programs for people needing a job, but has said nothing about where those jobs may come from in this employment-adverse economy. Bernie Sanders pushed for a major jobs program through infrastructure repair, a meaningful but incomplete and temporary fix. Donald Trump says he will create “really, really great, jobs, I mean totally terrific jobs” without offering a hint as to the how or what.

Meanwhile, the “sharing economy,” with its low-pay-as-you-go contracting and no retirement plan in sight, keeps right on growing and, by default, rewriting and rewiring the new American Way of Life. Surely there must be someone on Capitol Hill or in the White House who can stop this train long enough to figure out how to build an economy that serves us all. If there isn’t, maybe we can contract someone to do it for us.

QUARTERBACK SNEAK CAUSES RENEWED FOCUS ON POLICE BIAS

Fueled by a life-long anti-sports bias that is difficult to explain, even to myself, I ignored initial news reports about a football player refusing to stand up for the national anthem. I caught only the headline, so I knew this was a protest over recent police shootings of young black men. That’s an issue I’ve tried to follow, but I wasn’t all that interested in whatever it was that a professional jock had to say about it. A few days later, the headlines changed. The guy was now kneeling for the national anthem out of respect for veterans. I immediately read the story and then caught up on the earlier reports. I don’t care much for football, but I’m a sucker for shrewd political strategy.

Colin Kaepernick, I learned, is a San Francisco 49er quarterback. That may explain why he seems unusually adept at distinguishing a strategy from a tactic. If I get the game right, a pass is a tactic. Standing alone, all that does is put the ball in the air for a small period of time. A strategy is a detailed way of executing the pass so that the ball eventually ends up in the desired destination. I have no idea what kind of a quarterback Kaepernick is, but off the field, I have to say I like his moves.

Politically, this player’s goal was to crank up the heat on what he and many others see as police racism: the profiling, the brutality, the shootings. That strikes me as a noble objective. Now, wait a minute! Before you slam your electronic device against the wall and delete me from your address book, hear me out. Most cops are decent, hard working public servants who have no racial animosity and are highly skilled in defusing tense situations with minimal force. People who say that all police officers are racist are as wrong as those who say none are. That we have a significant community policing problem in desperate need of being addressed is beyond dispute. Most political figures throughout the spectrum – Donald Trump included – acknowledge that.

Yet, this country is in the throes of serious attention deficit disorder when it comes to acting on this matter. The push for reform was on after Michael Brown was killed by a Ferguson police officer two years ago. The momentum quickly died. Then Tamir Rice was killed by Cleveland police. Talk of change started again and then faded. And the pattern continued through the deaths of Tony Robinson in Madison, Eric Harris in Tulsa, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, and on and on and on. These countless deaths should have had a cumulative effect on our national psyche, pushing us into action, just as the AIDS death toll eventually did in the early 1990s. Instead, it has numbed us into the same kind of ritualized pattern response of shock-and-move-on that we have applied to mass shootings and gun control.

Then into the game comes Quarterback Kaepernick with his Star Spangled Banner sit-in. And the world goes crazy. Everyone is taking shots at him, calling him a traitor and much worse. Google “Kaepernick News” and you will get 23 million entries from media outlets throughout the world. Each piece focuses on the issue of racial police bias. Days later, the quarterback decided to drop to one knee during the anthem out of respect for veterans. A fellow teammate, a veteran, joined the protest, creating a whole new round of media coverage. Yesterday, the Santa Clara, CA police union threatened a to stop patrolling the stadium, giving rise to even more exposure for Kaepernick’s cause. Same thing happened today when the city’s police chief reminded his force of the quarterback’s free speech rights.

The bottom line is that there has been more sustained public discussion of race and police policies these last couple of weeks than there has been since Ferguson. And it didn’t take another death to do it. To be sure, Colin Kaepernick is not winning any popularity contests with his antics; neither did the civil rights activists who took to the streets in the 1960s. The fact of the matter is that there has never been a racial wrong righted in this country without sufficient turbulence to nudge the issue to resolution. Right now, love him or hate him, this quarterback is moving the ball down the field.

PUBLIC RESTROOMS: PHONES, NO; TRANS, YES

I’ve had it with cell phones in public restrooms.  I nearly lost control at the urinal the other day when a ringtone version of the Marines’ Hymn started blaring next to me. Frantically searching for his phone, my urinal neighbor’s hands were flailing all over the place at a very inopportune moment, another reminder that men were not built to multitask. Then comes the Busy Executive who commandeers a stall as a second office.  I encountered one recently who sat on the throne, barking commands into his phone and punctuating them with intestinal sounds only a gastroenterologist could appreciate.  The kicker of the month, however, was a young male millennial shooting a selfie in the mirror above a communal sink.  There’s a chance I may have accidentally photobombed him.  If so, it may be my unauthorized debut on Tinder.

This is all so annoying.  Can’t we make public restrooms a cell-phone-free zone?  How about having a separate facility for people with electronic devices?  It will never happen.  It’s just not in the cards.  Instead, there is a full court press to bar Gavin Grimm from using the boys’ bathroom at his high school in Gloucester, VA.  Gavin never caused the slightest restroom disruption.  He just did his business and went back to class, like everyone else.

Yet, there are those in Gloucester who insist that Gavin is not at all like everyone else.  You wouldn’t know that from his pictures in the Washington Post.  He looks pretty much like a central casting version of a high school boy: short curly hair, chubby cheeks, wire rimmed glasses and a slightly bored expression.  All of the commotion is over the fact that Gavin was identified as a girl at birth, an identity that has been forever foreign to him.

According to the Post, Gavin never thought of himself as anything but a boy.  He refused to wear dresses and didn’t understand why he couldn’t join his twin brother on the football field.  He started transitioning in middle school with the full support of his parents who helped him obtain a legal name change.  As a sophomore in 2014, Gavin used the boys’ bathroom at Gloucester High School without incident and with the full blessing of the principal.

Unfortunately, the kid ran smack into the last gasp of a bruised, beaten and frustrated religious right.  Adults who don’t know Gavin have taken out after him with a fevered pitch as part of their campaign against transgender rights.  As a result, he is spending his senior year banned from the boys’ restroom while the U.S. Supreme Court decides which bathroom he can use.

Sadly, we seem incapable in this county of having a meaningful conversation about human rights without inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on the children forced to serve as pawns in a battle they never asked for.  Kids Gavin’s age just want to be who they are; they yearn to fit in and belong.  Unfortunately, the historical path to securing a more just and equitable country is one of making unwitting trailblazers out of youngsters like Gavin.

That’s why many schools looked like war zones in the 1960s. Armed federal troops held back segregationists determined to keep black children from entering all-white schools. Ruby Bridges was all of six when she became the first black student in a New Orleans elementary school.  I was in the fifth grade then and dealing with my own angst of having just transferred to a new school where I didn’t know anybody.  That’s one reason the pictures of little Ruby, school bag in hand, walking up the steps of an all-white school while surrounded by federal marshals, was forever seared into my memory.  I can’t begin to imagine the trauma, the fear, the trepidation she must have felt.  No child should have to face that kind of abuse.  But because Ruby and countless others did, – The Little Rock Nine at Little Rock’s Central High School, Autherine Lucy at the University of Alabama, James Meredith at the University of Mississippi, to name but a few – the Jim Crow notion of “separate but equal” was finally laid to rest.

Or was it?  Gavin Grimm was offered a small, single-user toilet, along with the stigma of being the only student in his school prohibited from using a regular bathroom. Separate, we learned more than 50 years ago, is inherently unequal.  I totally get that the LGBT movement is moving too fast for some people who aren’t gay or transgender.  Folks were just starting to accept the notion that same sex marriage is the law of the land when along came the T’s insisting that they, too are entitled to equal rights under the law. And so, in this volatile summer of 2016, we are fighting over the use of a bathroom, the last stand in the culture wars being waged by those who would like life to go back to the way it was during the days of “Father Knows Best”.

There are those in Gloucester who say it is not natural to change your gender.  Of course, the people in New Orleans who tried to keep Ruby out of the whites-only school said it was not natural for the races to mix.  There are an estimated 1.4 million people in America who identify with a gender that is opposite of their birth sex.  To them, the most unnatural thing in the world is being forced to be something they aren’t.

If your cousin Henry suddenly transitions to Helen, you don’t have to understand everything about her metamorphic journey.  It’s okay not to get it right away; change is hard for everyone.  Yet, you can still accept Helen’s decision on the basis that it is something she needs to do, something that is essential to her well-being, because that’s exactly what it is.  One recent study showed that 41 percent of the transgender population has attempted  suicide, compared to 4.6 percent of the general populace.  This is about so much more than bathroom use.  It’s about each of us having the right to authentically own our identity.  It’s also about supporting people in our lives who had the courage to break away from a gender assignment that never fit.

Just in case the Supreme Court is reading this, I would, without the slightest hesitation, share a men’s room with Gavin Grimm any time, as long as he turns his cell phone off at the door.