The Zero Room

Good buried lede here. Given the tendency of Coffs employers to combine what they are legally allowed with whatever they think they can get away with, I'm sure it would be surprising news to many Coffs employees that employers are not currently permitted to force the taking of annual leave over Christmas/New Year.

Add to this common practice the new ability to cash out the remaining two weeks leave per year, and you have the effective end of paid leave at a time chosen by the employee. I'm sure that this ugly period now passing has indeed seen many a headache for employers, who have longed to transfer all, rather than just most, of the cost of demand fluctuations and their own incompetence onto their serfs.

Thanks, Fair Work Commission!

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Tie Day: R.I.P. Professor Gusfield - Doug Hartmann at the Society Pages: 'His primary accomplishment is to show how our usual focus on drinking-driving as the moral failing of individual citizens distracts from  the institutional and structural problems of traffic and transportation, leisure-time use, urban design, ambiguities in the law, the power of corporate marketing, and the inherent dangers of driving itself are so very much a part of the “problem” as well.'
• What’s the Point of a Professor? - Mark Bauerlein in the New York Times: "You can’t become a moral authority if you rarely challenge students in class and engage them beyond it. If we professors do not do that, the course is not an induction of eager minds into an enlarging vision. It is a requirement to fulfill. Only our assistance with assignments matters"
• Australia's Own Version Of Islamic State Destruction Of Sacred Objects And People - William Scates Frances at New Matilda: "According to the New South Wales office of the Environment and Heritage, in a single year between June of 2012 and June 2013, over 99 applications for destruction of sites of Aboriginal heritage were considered. All were approved."
• The University after Conservative Victory - Chris Newfield at Remaking the University: "Trivializing society has of course been a highly successful core project of the political Right. That doesn't change the possibility of showing  that most of the total value of education is collective, based on network effects (I'm smarter because my neighbor is smarter and also because an unknown Scottish villager became smarter 30 years ago, with endless ripples outward and everywhere). All these spillovers, externalities and indirect effects through multiple variables, though they seem beyond the grasp of current political rationality, are the deep sources of real progress." Or, as Brendan Behan would say, "I never went to school, but I met the scholars coming back."
• For-Profit Colleges Face a Loan Revolt by Thousands Claiming Trickery - Tamar Lewin, NYT: "'So the department first makes the loans that lets students go to these fraudulent for-profit colleges […] and then when the students can’t pay back the loans, the department goes after them.'"
• Life in the Accelerated Academy: anxiety thrives, demands intensify and metrics hold the tangled web together - Mark Carrigan at the LSE: "As David Cameron put it recently, “if you’re not good or outstanding, you have to change … if you can’t do it yourself, you have to let experts come in and help you”. He was talking about secondary education rather than higher education but I’ve yet to encounter a more succinct statement of what the political theorist Will Davies memorably describes as heating up the floor to see who can keep hopping the longest."
• What Tony Abbott talks about when he talks about ‘welfare’ - Gabrielle Meagher and David P. Wilkins in the Australian Review of Public Affairs: "The most significant way that Mr Abbott’s talk expresses his politics is through the direction of the relationship between ‘having a go’ and ‘a fair go’. As we showed above, a fair go is dependent on having a go in Mr Abbott’s framing. The Prime Minister presents this as a causal argument: generous social support (‘welfare’) can come only after the economy produces the necessary resources. The point has a certain (trivial) force—it is desirable to fund social security from a surplus in total economic output in any particular period. However, the causal relationship between the extent of economic success and the level social support has been much debated. And there is at least some good evidence that the direction of causation goes the other way—from generous social supports to economic prosperity . In day-to-day party politics, debate about the direction of causation is played out in an ideological conflict, in which Mr Abbott comes down on the side of economic growth before social support."
• The New York Times’ Secret Rule Forbidding Its EU Writers from Reading Krugman - Bill Black at NEP carries out an autopsy on New Labour and finds death by mediamacro: 'New Labour has had “no clear guiding philosophy” from the beginning because its strategy of becoming Red Tories and joining the Conservative Party’s assaults on the working class and regulation and its championing of the most corrupt elite bank officers in the world is not a “philosophy.” At best, it is a craven political tactic that depends for its (temporary) electoral success on spectacularly unpopular Tory leadership.'
• Cameron rebooted: five more years of a shiny computerised toe in a prime-ministerial suit - Charlie Brooker playing Charlie Brooker at the Guardian: "The glaring disparity between the weeks of pre-election polling and the actual result is surely useful scientific data: perhaps the most comprehensive investigation into the difference between what people claim to think and what they actually think ever undertaken. Clearly, voting Tory is a guilty pleasure some people won’t readily admit to – like masturbating or listening to Gary Barlow. Or masturbating while listening to Gary Barlow. In the voting booth. Using your free hand to vote Conservative. Cameron’s Britain."
• The last gasp of (US) neoliberalism - John Quiggin
• The Secret Corporate Takeover - Joe Stiglitz provides Project Syndicate with the if-you-only-read-one-article-on-the-TPP article

This week, I have been mostly frantically writing essays, with a bit of reading:

• Basic Income and the Anti-Slavery Movement - Neil Howard at openDemocracy cross-posted to Truthout: "No advocate of basic income wants it set high enough to discourage work. Rather, the goal is to give people the "real freedom" to sayNo! to bad jobs and Yes! to good ones. Remember that in the West, it is the punitive social security system which itself creates unemployment traps. If instead of tax-breaks or top-ups we gave people UBI, then nobody would ever face the choice of losing money by accepting work."
• The media’s reaction to Seymour Hersh’s bin Laden scoop has been disgraceful - Trevor Timm in Columbia Journalism Review: "All this brings to mind a story from earlier in Hersh’s career, when, as a relatively unknown reporter in Vietnam, he put together the pieces of his My Lai scoop."
• Corinthian Colleges Secretly Funded D.C. Think Tanks, Dark Money Election Efforts - Lee Fang, the Intercept: …and then declared bankruptcy. But sure, Australia should model its higher education system on the US one!
• Student Organisations Must Be 'Compliant' And 'Cooperative' Says University, As It Tries To Shut One Down - Max Chalmers at New Matilda: A "Student Advisory Board" isn't a union. "No individual or organisation that is beholden to or answers to the University can advocate fully and openly without fear of reprisal."
• Struggle Street is poverty porn with an extra dose of class racism - Steven Threadgold in the Conversation
• The Wars Come Home A Five-Step Guide to the Police Repression of Protest from Ferguson to Baltimore and Beyond - Michael Gould-Wartofsky at TomDispatch: "The point of all of this: to keep an eye on our posts and tweets, intimidate protesters before they hit the streets, pen them in on those streets, and ensure that they pay a heavy price for exercising their right to assemble and speak. The message is loud and clear in twenty-first-century America: protest at your peril."
• Economists: Drop the Signaling Fad - Noah Smith at Bloomberg View: "Employers want employees who are smart, conscientious, hard-working and team-oriented. But they can’t tell most of those things from an interview or two. So prospective employees might prove themselves by getting some credential -- completing some difficult educational program -- to prove they have what it takes. Thus was born the signaling theory of education."
• Stop-Go Austerity and Self-Defeating Recoveries - Paul Krugman, NYT: "Cameron and company imposed austerity for a couple of years, then paused, and the economy picked up enough during the lull to give them a chance to make the same mistakes all over again."
• Transportation Emerges as Crucial to Escaping Poverty - Mikayla Bouchard, NYT: "The relationship between transportation and social mobility is stronger than that between mobility and several other factors, like crime, elementary-school test scores or the percentage of two-parent families in a community, said Nathaniel Hendren, a Harvard economist and one of the researchers on the study."
• The future of work in the second machine age is up to us - Marshall Steinbaum, Washington Center for Equitable Growth: "Summers’ co-panelist David Autor added that since 2000, the education wage premium has reached a plateau and the rate of over-education has increased, both of which are hard to square with the argument that the reason for rising inequality is the advance of technology. Summers added that the idea that more education solves the problem of displaced labor is “fundamentally an evasion.”"

This week, I have been riddled with angst, hopelessness, and despair, and have been mostly reading:

• The early bird gets the worm - Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weiner
• Anzacs behaving badly: Scott McIntyre and contested history - Philip Dwyer at The Conversation: "There is an obvious disconnect between what historians know and what the popular perception of our past is. It is this disconnect that has jarred with some in the public and led to McIntyre’s sacking. […] It is difficult if not impossible for historians to overturn popular myths. Myths are popular because they represent stories we want to hear; they feed into the collective psyche. Anzacs behaving badly is not something we want to acknowledge."
• Give 'Em Hell, Bernie - Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone: "Sanders genuinely, sincerely, does not care about optics. He is the rarest of Washington animals, a completely honest person. If he's motivated by anything other than a desire to use his influence to protect people who can't protect themselves, I've never seen it."
• Hillary Clinton Condemns Criminal Justice System Her Husband Helped Build - Andrew Jerrell Jones at The Intercept: "During Bill Clinton’s eight years in the White House, the number of people imprisoned by the federal government nearly doubled, from 85,565 in 1993 to 156,572 in 2001."
• “I could be a father, but I could never be a mother”: Research on Childfree Women in Canada - Interview with Gillian Ayers: "For many of the women, if they couldn’t mother the “right” way, they weren’t going to do it at all. This belief became apparent to me when, for example, 20 of the 21 women I spoke with cited financial reasons for remaining voluntarily childless." That's the showstopper for our stereotypically cat-centric household. Precarity is incompatible with parenthood.
• Cowardly Firing of Australian State-Funded TV Journalist Highlights the West’s Real Religion - Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept: '“SBS supports our Anzacs” — and apparently bars any questioning or criticism of them. That mentality sounds like it came right from North Korea, which is to be expected when a media outlet is prohibited from saying anything that offends high government officials. Any society in which it’s a firing offense for journalists to criticize the military is a sickly and undemocratic one.'
• Signaling theory and credentialing theory in sociology - Fabio Rojas at orgtheory.net: "The theory asserts that the main reason that education correlates with income is that is a signal of intelligence and work ethic, not learned skills. I.e., employers like college graduates because they are good workers, not because they have useful skills."
• The problem with wanting 'peace' in Baltimore - Kazu Haga at openDemocracy: "[C]alls for people to be “peaceful” in the face of the most recent police killing infuriate me. The calls for “peace” that act as a euphemism for “stop protesting” sickens me. When law enforcement and politicians tell people to protest “peacefully” as a way of saying “stop being so mad,” it repulses me. The gross and dangerous misunderstanding that people have of the concept of “peace” disgusts me." (see also)
• The Treasury View of HE: Variable Human Capital Investment - Andrew McGettigan, who is so much smarter than me that reading him gives me vertigo, writing for Goldsmiths, which you're not allowed to call Goldsmiths' College any more, for very serious branding-related reasons: "I have no glib solution to which you might sign up. But when hard times find us, criticism must strike for the root: the root is undergraduate study as a stratified, unequal, positional good dominating future opportunities and outcomes. What might find broader public support is a vision of higher education institutions that are civic and open to lifelong participation, instead of places beholden to the three-year, full-time degree leveraged on loans and aiming to cream off ‘talent’."
• Survey Finds Only One House In Capital Cities Affordable For Single Person On Newstart - Max Chalmers, New Matilda: "A new survey by a top charity has revealed that during one weekend last month, just 10 homes in the entire country were available for lease at rates that wouldn’t create ‘rental stress’ for a single person living on the Newstart allowance while they look for work. Only one of those homes was in a capital city – the rest were in regional areas."
• How to Talk to Your Kids About Bernie Sanders - Kimberly Harrington nails it at Medium: "We’re used to being lied to. We like it. It’s soothing. So this situation is uncomfortable for us too. Just know this: you are not alone. We will get through Truthmageddon-Honestypocalypse-2016 together."