Decimation

decimation: historical -- the killing of one in every ten of a group of people as a punishment for the whole group (originally with reference to a mutinous Roman legion).

From NBC: 

CDC to lose one-tenth of workforce under Trump team probationary job cuts

With a $9.2 billion core budget, the CDC is charged with protecting Americans from outbreaks and other public health threats.

From the Washington Post:

Musk, whose U.S. DOGE Service is leading the drive to downsize government, over the weekend shared triumphant messages on X, the social media platform he owns.

Close to 2 a.m. Monday, he reposted a picture of himself in a gladiator outfit and declared he was destroying "the woke mind virus."

A few hours after the post, Downey, the U.S. Forest Service employee, climbed into her car. She drove a half-hour to her office and signed her name to a letter putting an

end to the income she relies on to support three children, an ailing mother and a husband who just lost his own job.

Before she walked out, she jotted five words above her signature: "Received and accepted under duress."

From USA Today:

Trump admin scrambles to rehire hundreds of nuclear weapons workers

The Trump administration rescinded firings of hundreds of employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration, which oversees the nation's arsenal of nuclear weapons, in a reversal that has fueled scrutiny over Elon Musk's efforts to cut the federal workforce.

A spokesman for the Department of Energy, which the semi-autonomous NNSA falls under, told USA TODAY less than 50 workers had their jobs terminated. About 325 NNSA workers initially received notices late last week that they had been laid off, according to Reuters.

The dismissals are part of Trump's wave of mass firings throughout the federal workforce, engineered by Musk's Department of Government Efficiency. The original notices prompted one senior NNSA staff member Friday to issue a public call to action before the terminations were halted.

From Politico:

Trump’s cuts hit red states, triggering GOP pushback

GOP lawmakers try to intervene with the Trump administration as local fallout grows.

Republican lawmakers are pushing back against sweeping cuts to the federal government launched by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, as their downsizing crusade begins to hit GOP constituents.

A growing number of GOP lawmakers are trying to intervene with the Trump administration and are weighing legislation to circumvent the changes. But with the Department of Government Efficiency and the Office of Management and Budget moving at a rapid clip and flouting federal law to carve up the government, the lawmakers face monumental challenges in getting the White House to spare their constituents from the ax.

 From The Louisiana Illuminator:

Trump administration fires 20 immigration judges, amid mass dismissals of federal workers

Despite a backlog of nearly 3.7 million cases in U.S. immigration court, the Trump administration has fired 20 immigration judges without an explanation, according to a union representing federal workers.

That included seven assistant chief immigration judges and a class of 13 immigration judges hired in December who had completed their training and had yet to be sworn in, according to the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, the union that also represents immigration judges.

Additionally, two immigration judges and five senior managers have been dismissed since President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, bringing the total removed from the U.S. Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review to 27, the union said. Some heard cases as well as scheduling deportation hearings.

From Jefferson Public Radio:

Thousands of employees with the U.S. Forest Service were fired over the weekend, including some in Southern Oregon and Northern California.

Up until this weekend, Tanya Torst thought it was safe to say she was a stellar employee of the U.S. Forest Service. In just shy of two years working as the North Zone Partnership Coordinator, she won a handful of awards for pulling together projects to protect rural communities from wildfires across California's North State.

She said she had a panic attack when a termination letter from the Forest Service arrived.

“The Agency finds, based on your performance, that you have not demonstrated that your further employment at the Agency would be in the public interest,” the email read.

Similar notices were sent out to around 3,400 other Forest Service employees this weekend, part of President Trump’s efforts to cut the size of the federal government. The firings targeted relatively new hires still on their probationary period, which generally lasts up to a couple years.

From WTSP Tampa Bay 10:

'President Trump, please come': Tampa VA union president offers invite to show effect of layoffs

"Hundreds" of more employees also might take deferred resignation offers and leave by the end of the summer.

 From mass layoffs to deferred resignations, the federal workforce has been reduced by nearly 90,000 employees, since President Trump took office almost a month ago.

That includes at least three in Tampa Bay who were probationary employees for Veterans Affairs, including workers at James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital in Tampa, according to Christopher Young, the American Federation of Government Employees Local 547 acting president.

Oh my sweet summer child, whatever gave you the idea that Grandpa Syphilis gives a single, solitary fuck about veterans?

From The New York Times:

F.D.A.’s Food Safety Chief Resigns Over Trump Administration Layoffs

The chief said the loss of critical employees overseeing the nation’s food supply made his work impossible. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the nation’s new health secretary, has pledged to gut the division.

From NPR:

National Science Foundation fires roughly 10% of its workforce

From The Gander:

Anger, chaos and confusion take hold as federal workers face mass layoffs

...While much of the administration’s attention was focused on disrupting bureaucracy in Washington, the broad-based effort to slash the government workforce was impacting a far wider swath of workers. As layoff notices were sent out agency by agency, federal employees from Michigan to Florida were left reeling from being told that their services were no longer needed.

In a sign of how chaotic the firings have been, some who received layoff notices had already accepted the administration’s deferred resignation offer, under which they were supposed to be paid until Sept. 30 if they agreed to quit, raising questions about whether others who signed the deal would nonetheless be fired. On Friday evening, the Office of Personnel Management, which serves as a human resources department for the federal government, acknowledged that some employees may have received termination notices in error and said the buyouts agreements would be honored.

“This has been slash and burn,” said Nicholas Detter, who had been working in Kansas as a natural resource specialist, helping farmers reduce soil and water erosion, until he was fired by email late Thursday night. He said there seemed to be little thought about how employees and the farmers and ranchers he helped would be impacted.

“None of this has been done thoughtfully or carefully,” he said.

The Vandals were more judicious during the Sack of Rome.

On the other hand, burning it all down is so much easier once you've sacked the fire department and scrapped all the emergency equipment.  

No Half Measures

Autodidactic Asphyxiation

Every now and then, wingnut protocol 'droid David Brooks forgets that his entire career hinges on his capacity to hide the lyrics of his native Republican contempt for working people beneath the somnolent monotone music of Reasonable Centrism (in case you are unsure of the difference, a "Republican" is someone who want to dismantle all protection for working people at once. A "Centrist" wants to dismantle half of all protection for working people today...half of the half that it left tomorrow...and half of the remainder the day after that.)

Today was one of those every-now-and-thens.

And when David Brooks has one of these lapses (such as when he famously slopped whitewash all over St. Ronald Reagan's use of the racist Southern Strategy with such flagrant disregard for the facts that had to be brought to book by his fellow New York Times op-ed columnists --

Bob Herbert Slams David Brooks' Revisionism of Reagan's Racist Legacy
This post, written by Amanda Marcotte, originally appeared on Pandagon

Bob Herbert joins in the spanking of David Brooks for trying to whitewash over Ronald Reagan's racist legacy, particularly his non-subtle signaling of support for the murders of 3 civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi in 1964. Reagan opened his campaign for President there in 1980 with a lot of loaded language about "states' rights", the rallying cry for the Confederacy to paper over the fact that they were separating in an attempt to escape an impending ban on slavery. "States' rights" then became the battle cry for those who didn't appreciate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and were casting around for code language to oppose it without making directly racist statements. Sayeth Herbert:

The murders were among the most notorious in American history. They constituted Neshoba County's primary claim to fame when Reagan won the Republican Party's nomination for president in 1980. The case was still a festering sore at that time. Some of the conspirators were still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was still the order of the day.

That was the atmosphere and that was the place that Reagan chose as the first stop in his general election campaign. The campaign debuted at the Neshoba County Fair in front of a white and, at times, raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000, chanting: "We want Reagan! We want Reagan!"

Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, "I believe in states' rights."

Emphasis mine. Brooks is playing off the fact that, from our vantage point, those murders happened a long time ago, and don't loom so large. In 1980, however, the murders had only happened 16 years before. The cases were still open. (No action was taken against the murderers until 2005, 41 years after the murders and 25 years after Reagan gave his nod of approval.) To put that into perspective, it would be like Rudy Giuliani kicking off his campaign in Jasper, TX with a speech about how he wants to "clean up" the nation like he cleaned up New York. No one would be under any illusions that barely concealed racist messages were being sent out.

-- an internal beat-down which the Gray Lady's starched-skirt rules of in-house decorum virtually never permits) the results come across like some sort of Randite thought-experiment:

What happens when you take America's Leading Conservative Intellectual, lock him in a dirty clothes hamper full of the Koch Brother's soiled underpants, remove all those pesky "facts" and "context" surrounding the Wisconsin Labor Uprising and insist that he write his column using only cliches from Dick Armey's Big Book of Anti-Labor Bumper Stickers...

...while still mortaring it all together with just enough meaningless, nonspecific drivel to meet the his contractual obligation to the New York Times to never take a position on anything clearly enough that he cannot weasel and equivocate his way out of later?

It's an art: one that for some reason pays phenomenally well.

Some choice bits from today's column, unfairly cut from their ooey-gooey Centrist marinade:

Make Everybody Hurt
By DAVID BROOKS

...
The public sector unions and their allies immediately flew into a rage, comparing Walker to Hitler, Mussolini and Mubarak.

Walker’s critics are amusingly Orwellian.

...
It’s the left that has suddenly embraced extralegal obstructionism.

Still, let’s try to put aside the hyperventilation.
...

Even if you acknowledge the importance of unions in representing middle-class interests, there are strong arguments on Walker’s side. In Wisconsin and elsewhere, state-union relations are structurally out of whack.

...
Private sector union members know that their employers could go out of business, so they have an incentive to mitigate their demands; public sector union members work for state monopolies and have no such interest.
...

Private sector unions confront managers who have an incentive to push back against their demands. Public sector unions face managers who have an incentive to give into them for the sake of their own survival.
...

As a result of these imbalanced incentive structures, states with public sector unions tend to run into fiscal crises.

...
There is little relationship between excellence and reward, which leads to resentment among taxpayers who don’t have that luxury.

...
It’s really important that we establish an unwritten austerity constitution: a set of practices that will help us cut effectively now and in the future.

The foundation of this unwritten constitution has to be this principle: make everybody hurt.
...

So I’d invite Governor Walker and the debt fighters everywhere to think of themselves as founding fathers of austerity.
...

So, stripped of its fancy ribbons, Mr Brooks' advice on the matter of labor unions is -- surprise! -- exactly the same as his advice on every other issue since the beginning of time, regardless of fact or context: play it right down the middle...but only after stop long enough to blame Cadillac-driving welfare queens...illegal immigrants... mouthy women...Liberals...gays...working people for the illegal war...foreign policy debacle...constitutional crisis...economic catastrophe your ideology has visited upon us.

And kick 'em in the balls one more time for good luck.

Over in the Better Universe, a column this bad could be a career-ender, but of course here there will be no such consequence.

Here is does not matter how often Mr. Brooks' ideology proves itself a catastrophic failure, or how many falsehoods, half-truths and lies-by-omission he Brietbarts into his columns to prop up that failed ideology (from reading this column you would hardly know, for example, that the most prominent person making Wisconsin-to-Egypt comparisons was not some anonymous shouter in the cheerful and well-mannered sea of tens of thousands of "public sector unions and their allies", but was instead Mr. Brook's own Conservative American Idol and and a militant advocate of massive social-program gutting, Republican Representative Paul Ryan.)

Tomorrow, next month, next year Ellsworth Monkton Bobo will still be there collecting princely sums for filling the world with his soft, mealy, razor-concealing road-apples of common wisdom.

And just how is that possible?

Because Bobo is a very senior member of a very special, very selective union -- Pundits Local 183.

A union whose chief innovation was boldly and irrevocably severing all "relationship between excellence and reward" years and years ago.

"Peter, you’ve heard all this. You’ve seen me practising it for ten years. You see it being practised all over the world. Why are you disgusted ? You have no right to sit there and stare at me with the virtuous superiority of being shocked. You’re in on it. You’ve taken your share and you’ve got to go along. You’re afraid to see where it’s leading. I’m not. I’ll tell you.
...

Judgement, Peter ! Not judgement, but public polls. An average drawn upon zeroes – since no individuality will be permitted. A world with its motor cut off and a single heart, pumped by hand. My hand – and the hands of a few, a very few other men like me. Those who know what makes you tick – you great, wonderful average, you who have not risen in fury when we called you the average, the little, the common, you who’ve liked and accepted these names. You’ll sit enthroned and enshrined, you, the little people, the absolute ruler to make all past rulers squirm with envy, the absolute, the unlimited, God and Prophet and King combined. Vox populi. The average, the common, the general.

A union whose members haven't missed a meal since.

Breaking: Gambling Discovered!

Shock expressed!

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

84% of workers planning to look for new job: poll

BY FRANCINE KNOWLES Business Reporter Jan 5, 2011 12:48AM

Workers can’t wait to dump their employers: 84 percent of respondents to a survey say they plan to actively look for a new job this year.

That’s up from 60 percent who said they planned to do so last year. Only 5 percent said they intend to stay in their current position.

The survey was done by Manpower subsidiary Right Management. “It’s staggering,” said Joanne Stroud of Right Management.

Senior leadership within organizations is largely to blame, Stroud said. While many workers have gone without salary increases for two to three years and are now doing the job of one to two people, they see and hear less from senior leadership about the vision for the future and how they see the company evolving and reshaping themselves, she explained.
...

Wouldn't it be just awesome if we could run our governments more like businesses?

I'd bet they'd run a lot better if only they had the Invisible Fist of the Marketplace jammed to the elbow up their collective asses.

Ah, but of course they already do.

Never mind.

About Those Federal Pay Freezes...

From Talking Points Memo:

Everyone Hates Obama's Pay Freeze Plan... Except Republicans

The early reviews of President Obama's plan to freeze federal worker pay are in -- and it gets a resounding "F" from just about everybody outside of GOP leadership.

Michael Linden, a budget expert at the liberal Center for American Progress, said the plan is small potatoes that risks driving away valuable civil servants with little budgetary upside.

"Bluntly doing it this way, we risk cutting off our nose to spite our face," Linden said in a phone interview. "We risk not hiring good people, we risk not giving a raise to people who deserve a raise, and we miss not cutting the pay of those who deserve a pay cut."

Linden recalled similarities between the plan Obama announced today and his previous call at an earlier political low point for a discretionary spending freeze.

"Both are sort of blunt instruments for reducing the deficit that don't reduce the deficit very much," Linden said. "The pay freeze is actually much smaller than the discretionary spending freeze," in budget terms.

If enacted, the proposal will disproportionately impact middle-income earners.
...

Honestly, it's hard for me to get very worked up over them.

In theory, of course, they are bad idea for a lot of reasons:

• The amount of dough you save is minuscule relative to the deficit you are trying to pay down.


• Using it as a bargaining chip makes sense only if you get something in return.


• Asking middle class workers -- which most federal employees emphatically are -- to take one for the team while at the same time Wall Street banksters are back to doing wheelbarrows of coke paid for with the Bailout Bonuses which those same middle class workers are underwriting with their tax dollars is, well, I don't have a font big enough to spell out "Amazingly Stupid" and "Gratuitously Insulting" large enough to do it justice.


• Every time you offhandedly screw over government workers to make some trivial political point, you reinforce the ugly wingnut meme that government workers are lazy, featherbedding, SEIU thugs so fuck 'em!


• Solidarity!
  

Yeah, I get it.

However that is theory.

In practice, most government workers I know do not work for the Fed.

They work for other units of government -- the state, the city, the county, school systems, one transit authority or another, etc. -- all of which (like the Fed) have large deficits relative to their annual budgets.

They work very hard.

And for about the last three years, the various units of government for which they work have been a whiplashing blizzard of layoffs:

Chicago Community College Budget Calls for Hundreds of Layoffs
Alex Keefe Jul. 29, 2010

Hundreds of non-teaching staff members could be laid off under the new budget proposal for Chicago's community college system.

Next year's budget for City Colleges of Chicago could fund 311 fewer positions, some through attrition.

But that could include 225 non-teacher layoffs.

Chancellor Cheryl Hyman they would affect administrators, as the district tries to consolidate some workers from its seven colleges.

And...

New Chicago Public Schools Budget: Layoffs, Furlough Days, And Larger Class Sizes To Make Ends Meet

Chicago Sun-Times | Fran Spielman | 04/16/09

About 1,200 city school workers will receive layoff notices this week, and principals will begin sharing the budget pain via pay freezes and six furlough days, as Chicago Public Schools officials move today to plug their remaining $370 million deficit.

pay freezes...

"As outlined in the preliminary budget, the City will continue to generate $70 million in savings next year through union agreements and the extension of unpaid holidays and furloughs for non-union employees. Additionally, non-union employees will not receive a cost-of-living increase in 2010 for a savings of $6 million."

hiring freezes...

"Among many steps to balance the budget Daley said the City will...continue the freeze on non-safety hiring, which has been in effect since 2008, saving an estimated $20 million in 2011."

benefit cuts and unpaid furlough days.

Daley plans new round of furlough days, wage freeze
October 19, 2009

In an effort to save money next year, Mayor Richard Daley today said he will order non-union employees to take off 24 days without pay next year and won't give them cost-of-living raises, saving $26 million.

Also, to make up for these massive loses in productive capacity, the workloads of those who survive the periodic decimations have effectively doubled. No one will say it out loud of course, and the City, at least, has very strict public policies about working on furlough days, but everyone knows (wink/wink) what is expected of them, and everyone knows what the consequences are if the ever-rising tide of work does not get done to the Hall's satisfaction.

In better times, budget gnomes can play lots of complex games with various funding sources and accounting tricks to meet legal requirements while insulating management from taking any real hits by make positions appear and disappear like virtual particles. But these are not better time, and at least at the City, everyone from Fifth Floor down to the shoeshine guys in the lobby knows the situation is Very Fucking Bad -- worse than it has ever been -- and is only going to go sharply downhill from here.

(Except of course if you are in The Club --

From the Sun-Times:

Connected city worker spared in merger, layoffs
Never knew she had clout, Special Events director says

October 22, 2010

BY FRAN SPIELMAN City Hall Reporter

Clout apparently still counts in City Hall jobs -- despite Mayor Daley's promise to implement a personnel system free of politics in the wake of a hiring scandal that cost taxpayers $12 million to compensate victims of the city's rigged hiring system.

The wife of a former Democratic ward boss -- who also happens to be the daughter-in-law of a former alderman -- has survived a departmental merger that will eliminate 13 jobs and force nine layoffs.

Maureen Volini was a $73,752 administrative services officer for the Mayor's Office of Special Events.

Now that Daley's final budget is merging Special Events with the Department of Cultural Affairs, Volini has avoided the ax with a transfer to the Department of Procurement Services.
...

-- in which case you are still fucking golden.)

All of which is to say that, while I get that freezing federal salaries sucks, if you're expecting a lot of tears of betrayal to be shed over it, I suggest you take it up with some sleep-deprived, stress-sickened city worker who is in their third year of having their financial security cut out from underneath them...while doing twice the work they were hired to do...for a boss who has made it clear that more layoffs are on the way...and consider themselves one of the lucky ones.

Unemployed.

Again.

A year and a half ago, I was kicked to the curb after almost 10 years from a job I was doing spectacularly well -- and into which I was pouring 80-100 hours a week -- so that others who were in greater political favor could be spared.

I was let go a few weeks before my tiny pension was vested. A fight ensued over that. My small "victory" was bitterly Pyrrhic. I'll tell you about it someday.

I remember stopping at a Radio Shack on the way home to watch the impeachment of Governor Rod Blagojevich live.

Turned out, Blago and I lost our jobs on the same day.

This time around I have been remaindered from an organization that I was hired to help turn around. Which I did. Ferocious economy and all, I brought it back from deep in the weeds where it had gotten lost. Got its key numbers back up into the range of respectability. Rebuilt damaged relationships and internal discipline. Restored its good name in places where it had gotten tarnished. Hacked the kudzu off of the web site and got it looking sweet again.

In general, I made organizationally straight what had once been crooked, and while it never paid enough to cover my nut, it did slow the slide into penury while I tried to stitch together enough such gigs to keep the wolf from the castle door.

But others were in charge of the budgets, and they were not paying such careful attention, and so what was going to be a tough, lean, belt-tightening year next anyway turned into a catastrophe. It did not have to be so, but now it is, and so once more into the teeth of the Great Recession I go.

And this time around it is General Stanley McChrystal with whom I share a termination-date.

I know the ins and outs of the issues facing the labor force very well. Better than most -- from the for-public-consumption bad news delivered via Yahoo News to the heartbreaking personal accounts that show up everywhere these days (One selection from Andrew Sullivan's "The View From Your Recession" feature):

...I am a 58 year-old male, and my white hair proves it. I was laid off an executive position in a real estate company in January 2009. I directed international marketing programs and was responsible for over $200 million in transactions. But I have been unable to find work, even well below my former position. I am told that I appear too smart, too qualified. I have applied for many, many jobs - jobs I could do in my sleep.


Playing by the rules, I post and scour Monster and Career Builder to no avail, not even an interview. When I see a job that particularly fits my skills, I break the "rules" and contact the employer directly and consistently. Still, no job. The State of Florida has a service to help the unemployed. When I met with my counselor, she was shocked that with my resume I didn't have a job. As we pursued opportunities, she finally suggested that I dumb down my resume. That proved a bit difficult. I was in charge of a large development marketing operation. My former company was extremely successful (until the financial world changed and mortgages disappeared).


How do I feel? I cry. From there it is anger, then depression. As I like to say, I lost my job that January, and lost my pride by June. I have now lost hope...

to the technical and policy literature on the subject -- I am well-versed and I know that in so many ways I am a lucky guy: my situation is not in any way unique, and I am blessed to have more tools at my command and more supportive people in my corner than many millions of my fellow unemployed Americans.

I have no idea what comes next. Probably going to have to start over and re-invent my career for (Pauses to count. Shakes head in disbelief. Counts again.) the eighth time, which, to be frank, is starting to lose its charm.

Three things I am pretty sure of.

First, the topics I cover on this site are going to change a little in terms of emphasis. I have always covered  the subjects of work, organizational behavior and the root causes of (and possible cures for) middle class anomie, so expect more of that.

Second, based on my own, exhaustive-if-exotic research it is clear that absent a patron, a spouse who can carry more than their share of the weight for a long time, a clean, well-lighted place at a profitable publication, a Wingnut Welfare gig, a call from "The Daily Show" begging me to help hang onto The Funny, or a sinecure in academe, in these parlous times there is no chance that writing will ever pay the bills. Not even close.

Third, I'm done working in a strategic or planning role for people in the thrall of the latest management fad, or hustlebuck consultant, or political fantasy that -- when you strip away all the knowing winks and aromatically bovine byproduct buzzwords -- means they're making one ruinous decision after another based on magical thinking and the notion that 2+2 does not equal 4. It doesn't work in politics, government, education or business and following the Pied Pipers who tell you it does only ever leads to tears.

I'll hire on to do any of the many things I do very well, up to and including helping to mop up up the mess left over from their last, disastrous assignation with snake oil salesmen.  I'll even help chart courses out of dangerous waters and into better futures, but to do that I have to seek, speak and act on the truth, and if you don't want the truth, quit pretending that you do, and quit penalizing people who hand it to you on a silver platter.

Because 2 + 2 does equal 4.

Every single time.


UPDATE:  In a feat of pitch-perfect timing, I just returned from some intense oral surgery which I had scheduled before I knew I was going to be "at liberty".  And I'll tell you, if you ever want to take your mind off of looming disaster, may I recommend having a nice man pound away at a tooth for an hour with what strongly resembled tin snips and a coal chisel. 

Sometimes there is nothing to do but laugh.

Hydrocodone take me away... :-)

Your pal,

driftglass

Must Hate Unions

Wanted: Cheap, pliable, particle-board copy of what an executive used to be for junior-assistant management cannon fodder.

Applicant must be minimally-competent-but-not-scary-smart, gullible enough to work themselves to death for scraps and promises,

be willing to do unspeakably cruel things to others in ways that keep the boss' skirts clean, and not even realize they've been screwed when they finally find themselves kicked to the curb, used up, with two weeks pay and a hollow 401K.

Degree and five years experience a plus; more than that and you'd never put up with the crap we're going to put you through.

From Yahoo News:

Older Jobseekers Face An Uphill Climb
Laura Bassett Laura Bassett Tue Apr 27, 5:26 pm ET

Since Eamonn Coughlan, 57, was laid off from his job managing a Jaguar dealership over two years ago, he has sent out over 2,000 resumés but still hasn't landed a job. He is convinced that his age is to blame for his inability to get back into the workforce.

"I had one head-hunter tell me that I will never again find a full-time job," Coughlan said. "She was very pleasant about it. She said they're looking for someone 30 or 35 that they think will work for another 20 years. They look at you and think you'll work for another 7 or 8 years, and that's it. Depressing is hardly the word."

Coughlan, who has over 25 years of management experience, said he rarely gets called for an interview but when he does, he is immediately written off because of his age.

"One guy that was supposed to interview me saw me in the waiting area through the window of his office. Minutes later, his secretary came out and told me he needed to cancel the interview but didn't specify the reason. He must have been expecting someone a bit younger."
...

Meanwhile, in Totally Unrelated News...

All the Obama 20-Somethings


By ASHLEY PARKER

“This party,” Herbie Ziskend announced, “is in honor of John Quincy Adams.” The dirty-blond, blue-eyed 24-year-old, who once handled luggage for Barack Obama’s campaign and now works in the vice president’s office as a staff assistant, stood in the living room of a red-brick row house in Washington and flung his arms in the air as if to pay tribute to America’s sixth president. Then he paused, deflated: “But the police are here.”

Blue lights flashed through a window as Ziskend and a housemate, Jake Levine, went onto the porch to talk with the cops and promise to quiet things down. Levine, who is now 26, is a policy analyst in the energy-and-climate-change office of the White House. He and Ziskend, along with their other two housemates — Eric Lesser, 25, and Josh Lipsky, 24, who were then both White House staff assistants — were giving a party last July in their group house in Logan Circle, a neighborhood just east of Dupont Circle. People shifted nervously as they checked their BlackBerries and cellphones and talked about heading out. Ziskend reappeared. “Everybody, it’s O.K.,” he said, grinning. “Party is on.”
...

There is a Club.
You are not in it.

And I would be willing to bet all the money in my PayPal account that at least some of the very volatile, very destructive "Take my county back!" rage abroad in the land has something to do with the day-to-day professional histories of a lot of capable, experienced, hard-working, middle-class Americans of a certain age who were forced to eat a lot of this kind of shit for a lot of years

on the promise that, in exchange for being humiliated a little more every day, they'd at least be able to salvage some kind of future for themselves and their families.

Americans for whom that last, fragile economic compact has been brutally and unilaterally revoked, and who are now staring straight into the very abyss they crawled -- smiling -- through so much dung for so long to avoid.

And now they are looking for someone to blame.


So happy International Workers' Day, citizen:

The ‘Labour Day’ begins with the United States labour movement in 19th century. The labour movement was started on May 1, 1886 in United States. Some labour organizations in the country called on strike because they wanted 8-hour working days. There was carnage in Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 4th. A rebel threw a bomb into that area. Nearly 12 people including a few police officers died. About 100 people were wounded.

The rebels did not find an urgent result. But they gained a successful result slowly. When 8-hour working days became a reality, it became a standard in many countries around the world. ‘Labour Day’ was therefore selected as a day for rallies, processions and speeches. ‘Labour Day’ is a most important holiday in United States, Russia and other socialist nations.

‘Labour Day’ is an event observed on May 1 in many countries around the globe. ‘Labour Day’ is now frequently a day for processions and parades. Nevertheless, in current years, the commemoration of this day has obtained a new roll, where the workers and trade organizations claim for safety and give the financial growth a humane countenance.

Break out the soapbox, crack a beer and sing, sing, sing!

Maggie's Farm. Written by Bob Dylan. Covered here by "Rage Against the Machine".


Also too, Susie Bright reminds us that...

You can't start your Derby Day right without reading Louisville Son Hunter Thompson's seminal essay on the subject, first published in 1970 in Scanlan's Monthly.

Do take a sip— don't stop until you get to the bottom of the glass.

I sure miss my old comrade— who the fuck writes like this anymore?

The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved

by Hunter S. Thompson

"I got off the plane around midnight and no one spoke as I crossed the dark runway to the terminal. The air was thick and hot, like wandering into a steam bath. Inside, people hugged each other and shook hands...big grins and a whoop here and there: "By God! You old bastard! Good to see you, boy! Damn good...and I mean it!"

In the air-conditioned lounge I met a man from Houston who said his name was something or other— "but just call me Jimbo"— and he was here to get it on. "I'm ready for anything, by God! Anything at all. Yeah, what are you drinkin?"

I ordered a Margarita with ice, but he wouldn't hear of it: "Naw, naw... what the hell kind of drink is that for Kentucky Derby time? What's wrong with you, boy?" He grinned and winked at the bartender. "Goddam, we gotta educate this boy. Get him some good whiskey..."

I shrugged. "Okay, a double Old Fitz on ice."

Jimbo nodded his approval.

"Look." He tapped me on the arm to make sure I was listening. "I know this Derby crowd, I come here every year, and let me tell you one thing I've learned--this is no town to be giving people the impression you're some kind of faggot. Not in public, anyway. Shit, they'll roll you in a minute, knock you in the head and take every goddam cent you have."

I thanked him and fitted a Marlboro into my cigarette holder. "Say," he said, "you look like you might be in the horse business...am I right?"

"No," I said. "I'm a photographer."

"Oh yeah?" He eyed my ragged leather bag with new interest. "Is that what you got there— cameras? Who you work for?"

"Playboy," I said.

He laughed. "Well, goddam! What are you gonna take pictures of—necked horses? Haw! I guess you'll be workin' pretty hard when they run the Kentucky Oaks. That's a race just for fillies." He was laughing wildly. "Hell yes! And they'll all be nekkid too!"

I shook my head and said nothing; just stared at him for a moment, trying to look grim. "There's going to be trouble," I said. "My assignment is to take pictures of the riot."

"What riot?"

I hesitated, twirling the ice in my drink. "At the track. On Derby Day. The Black Panthers." I stared at him again. "Don't you read the newspapers?"
...

The remainder of the Good Doctor's Derby Day goodness is to be found here.

Thanks Susie!

Maybe He Wasn't "Happy" Enough?

When I see this story (From "Toke of the Town")...

WalMart Fires Associate Of Year, Cancer Patient For Medical Marijuana

Despite medical marijuana being legal in Michigan, WalMart has fired a cancer patient and former employee of the year who tested positive for the drug, which was recommended by his doctor.

"I was terminated because I failed a drug screening," ex-WalMart employee Joseph Casias told WZZM-13.

In 2008, Casias was Associate of the Year at the WalMart store in Battle Creek, Mich., despite suffering from sinus cancer and an inoperable brain tumor.

​At his doctor's recommendation, Casias legally uses medical marijuana to ease his pain.

"It helps tremendously," Casias said. "I only use it to stop the pain. To make me feel more comfortable and active as a person."

Casias said he went to work every day during his five years at WalMart. "I gave them everything," he said. "One hundred and ten percent every day. Anything they asked me to do, I did. More than they asked me to do. Twelve to 14 hours a day."

Then Casias sprained his knee at work last November. During the routine drug screening that follows all workplace injuries, marijuana was detected in his system.

Casias showed WalMart managers his Michigan medical marijuana card, but was fired anyway.
...

Juxtaposed with this story (From the NYT "You're The Boss" Blog)...

The Secret to Having Happy Employees
By JAY GOLTZ

About 10 years ago I was having my annual holiday party, and my niece had come with her newly minted M.B.A. boyfriend. As he looked around the room, he noted that my employees seemed happy. I told him that I thought they were.

Then, figuring I would take his new degree for a test drive, I asked him how he thought I did that. “I’m sure you treat them well,” he replied.

“That’s half of it,” I said. “Do you know what the other half is?”

He didn’t have the answer, and neither have the many other people that I have told this story. So what is the answer? I fired the unhappy people. People usually laugh at this point. I wish I were kidding.

I’m not. I have learned the long, hard and frustrating way that as a manager you cannot make everyone happy. You can try, you can listen, you can solve some problems, you can try some more. Good management requires training, counseling and patience, but there comes a point when you are robbing the business of precious time and energy.

Don’t get me wrong. This doesn’t happen a lot. There’s no joy in the act of firing someone. And it’s not always the employee’s fault — there are many bad bosses out there. Bad management can make a good employee dysfunctional. On the other hand, good management will not always make a dysfunctional employee good. And sometimes people who would be great employees somewhere else just don’t fit your company, whether it is the type of business or the company culture.
...

I don't have to wonder why sometimes we seem barely capable of talking to each other about very basic things like "work", even though we technically use the same language.

Yeah, chronically unhappy people are toxic. No doubt about it. And like viruses, most of the chronically unhappy people (as opposed to, say, the clinically depressed, or grieving, which are vastly different situations) I've ever known have been driven by an indomitable compulsion to replicate their toxicity: to spread their misery as far and as wide as possible.

Over the years, I have even had my share of (well, frankly, more than my share of) chronically unhappy people working for me. If I told you about some of them -- told you half of what a few of them had done -- you wouldn't believe me.

Basically this guy

repeating endless variations of his Misery Mantra all day, every day, while doing the absolute minimum necessary to avoid getting fired.

In the Real World, you can escape such people; in the workplace -- whether on the shop floor or in the cubicle next door -- you can't. And they fucking wear on you.

Believe me, I get it.

However it is also true that, time after time, as I tried to figure out ways to quarantine the toxically miserable, or just generally boost morale that had been obviously flagging for one reason or another, I often found the entire organization working against me.

Whether it was the supervisor who was, himself, a burned out sack of bile.

Or the managers who had made it to the top of their particular shit pile by studying long and hard

under Nurse Ratched.

Or the junior executives who clawed their way out of the cubical farm

by making sure you never forgot who holds the whip.

Or the omnipresent consultants, which belt-tightening, budget-slashing, mass-layoffing organizations still somehow mysteriously manage to scrape together enough dough to grotesquely overpay in exchange for telling management a spellbinding tale of What They Wanted To Hear spiced up with crap that every minimum-wage earner in the place already knew

all dressed up in toney Buzzword Du Jour designer threads.

Or the senior executives who kept their corner offices

by means that have long since stopped being funny.

And don't even get me started on the red-tape vomiting zombies who have been purposefully installed in the law and HR departments to make absolutely sure that any hint of creativity or constructive criticism is snuffed out the moment it is detected.

Now I have no reason to think that Mr. Goltz isn't a decent guy who, by trial and error and hard work, has found a way to make his workplace a joyful place to be.

But as Joan Crawford was famously alleged to have said:

This ain't my first time at the rodeo.

And having come close enough to peek in on the inner workings of many organizations large and small (and having read the hair-raising reports from my far-flung network of snitches and minions) there is no doubt in my mind that orders of magnitude more workplace misery is meted out to the great mass of working Americans by the menagerie of vicious, weasel-cunning, half-bright fuckers who are often in charge of those organizations, than is caused by any line worker, no matter how sullen or bitter.

Because no matter how hard some cubicle drones may try to breed discontent, their efforts pale into invisibility compared to the gut-heaving, millstone-wearing torment that can be inflicted in bulk by a management which believes that a harmonious workplace is a slave galley, with everyone breaking their backs rowing until they are permitted to stop. And any flash of color or cheer or happiness is seen as a threat to the order and discipline of the place and is stomped flat.

By the martinets of America's strip mall and city hall autarchies, where managers rise based on how successfully they can subsume every lesson they learned in kindergarten --

Share everything.
Play fair.
Don't hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don't take things that aren't yours.
Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody.
...

-- and throw themselves with grim enthusiasm into the task of squeezing another erg of work out of their exhausted, dispirited fellow human beings.

So if by his firing patterns, the Boss lets it be known that if you want to keep your job your had Better By God Be Happy, then you can bet'cher ass the survivors will quickly learn to hang a Happy Face on the front of their heads every time the Boss Proximity Detector goes off.

Just as surely as millions have already learned in the most Darwinian way possible the value of Dockers and Hawaiian shirts on Casual (But hey, let's not get Too Casual) Thursdays.

Of smiling and small talking through Mandatory Social Drinking Fridays.

And of the ability to spontaneously regurgitate passages from "Who Moved My Cheese?" on command.

The View From My Recession

Q: What’s the difference between a consultant and a succubus?

A: The succubus doesn’t charge by the hour.

Disclaimer: I know many fine, capable consultants and freelancers who are of inestimable value to their clients. I myself have occasionally been such a one. This is not pointed at them.

Now, having gotten that out of the way, I must say that I could not help smiling a grim little smile when I read this by Romenesko:

Now we know where NPR's "burger money" went

The hed on a 2006 Alex Beam column asked, "Where did NPR's burger money go?"; it was, of course, referring to Joan Kroc's $200 million gift. Former NPR arts editor Bill Wyman helps answer the question:

I worked for a nonprofit media company that was in a tough financial spot. An angel swept in and made all the troubles go away. That afternoon, the top newsman at the company got up to address us. "This doesn't mean you're all going to get Blackberry's," he said.

Instead, we hired consultants to tell us what to do with our windfall, and we managers spent with them many hours -- many painful hours, days upon days, all of them in rooms filled with people being paid huge sums per hour -- we could have better spent doing journalism.
…

Months later, the consultants gave us our results at a company meeting. Suggestion number one: The staff should get Blackberry's. That's a true story.
…

The reason for my smile?

The first time I observed consultants fucking a company into the ground at close quarters was at an IT shop, years ago, just as I was trying to get my First Career off the ground.

It took them about eight months to metastasize from a desk in the corner to running the joint, which they accomplished by cutting a deal with a clique of the most incompetent managers I have ever met: the consultants would write a glowing report of those managers' brilliance and importance to the company, and recommend their promotion. In return, these newly-minted executives would let the consultants (White Evangelicals Good Ol’ Boys from Texas) effectively loot the place.

And even though they crippled my budding IT career, gelded the survivors and eventually destroyed the company, I could appreciate the morbid humor in the fact that their final report came with a perky "Dilbert" cartoon on the cover

(which I could not find online) about consultants who make money advising the Pointy-Haired Boss that his company is in trouble because he has too many consultants.


I had landed a tough but rewarding training gig and begun my Second Career when consultants ruined my life for a second time.

This batch was, oddly enough, also a pack of White, Evangelical testosterone-drunk faux-cowboys from Texas.

They began their reign by firing most of the women and minorities, and announcing to the rest of us that we were all lazy, godless scum who would now be offered the "opportunity" to work twice as hard for about half of what we were then being paid. (I seem to remember that the initial "Fuck you Yankee heathens, we have you now!" meeting ended with semi-compulsory prayer, but I might be wrong about that.) I believe they were eventually sued from ten different directions, but not before they made life so fucking miserable that virtually everyone with any talent was either fired or driven out of the company into unemployment.

There were other examples from my own past and from the experiences of friends and family -- all drearily similar, plus-or-minus any specifics of gender or faith -- from which I learned Many Important Lessons about life in the Real World of work.

I learned that a depressingly large number of organizations are run by vain and mind-blow-ing-ly stupid, incompetent people. You know these people. They are, as Unca Harlan so eloquently put it here, "...the guy on your job who has ascended to his position by Heaven knows what arcane ritual, but all he does all day long is fuck up your job."

I learned that with enough barrels of raw, ass-flavored flattery, consultants can con stupid people into believing the most Craptacularly Ridiculous management fads imaginable.

I learned that the irresistible impulse on the part of low-wattage management to bring consultants into their dysfunctional organizations stems from exactly the same witchbag of ignorance, superstition and magical-thinking that once led primitive physicians to apply leeches to the bodies of the sick.

And I learned that once that dynamic is locked into place, being smart becomes a fatal liability, and whoever bows the lowest to the New Absurd Religion shall rise the highest.

Time passed. I found a new job -- my Sixth or maybe Seventh Career. Consultants came and went, reorganizations came and went, executives came and went, and I learned to how to avoid saying things like --

“While I respect the evil capitalist genius of making millions by stitching together a handful of hackneyed, fortune-cookie aphorisms into a tiny book and selling it like snake oil, as anyone with half a brain can see, ‘Who Moved My Cheese?’ is absolutely nothing but mass-marketed, pre-layoff, conscience-balming drivel”

-- to the woman who just spent a mint ordering the complete “Who Moved My Cheese?” "experience"; the video tape, the management “exercises”, the coffee mugs, the novelty condoms, the key-chains, the tea cozies, the scented stationery, the dessert topping, the bath toys, the cast album, the perfume based on the cast album, the vitamin supplements and, of course, a pallet-truck of those odious books.

And then one sunny day at the organization from which my Sixth or Seventh Career was most recently amputated, the umpteenth a consultant appeared to Save Us All.

Yay!

However, unlike the “nonprofit media company” in the article above, ours was not a case of hiring a consultant because an angel had swept in during our darkest hour to shower money on us which we were too stupid to figure out how to spend on our own. In fact, quite the opposite; the executives decided that in a time of radically shrinking revenues, the Smartest Move Evah would be to hire an Awesomeness Consultant at an hourly rate somewhere between "But aren't we broke?" and "Are you fucking kidding me?!"

We, too, spent "...many hours -- many painful hours, days upon days, all of them in rooms filled with people being paid huge sums per hour" and after many months of slow agony what we had to show for it was a large cardboard sign that explained little, solved nothing and was widely considered to be a waste of time and carbon...and many photocopies of articles on Awesomeness from journals with Very Impressive Names.

To be fair, there were other, procedural improvements put in place that executives were assured would pay Big Dividends -- in four or five or seven or ten years -- but nothing came out of this consultant's Magic Bag that any one of a dozen other people who were already on the payroll could not have done just as well or better.

That is, if they weren’t already exhausted and distracted by executives who were already working them like rented mules doing the work of five people.

Because, y’know, budget cuts. And stuff.

I will say that while we were running out of just about everything from patience to revenue, the consultant always kept us well-stocked with gallows comic relief.

The consultant -- who told us one of the benefit to our organization was that they would "model good behavior" – regularly showed up late, and/or with a computer that didn't work, and/or without their materials, and/or booked into the wrong room… which may or may not have been set up to handle a group and a presentation.

The consultant -- who explained they were there to impart to us rubes their own famously meticulous attention to detail and excellence – regularly handed out reports and presentations that were shot through with absolutely hilarious errors – sometimes in 60-point Times Roman font and right in the title -- that any spell check program would have caught.

(Unless words like “Orgazanation” have recently been added to the English language and I just wasn’t told about it. Curse you, Stephen Colbert!)

Anyway, the punch line to this little parable is that, time and again, I was one of the people the consultant routinely pulled away from one of the dozen or so other Urgent! jobs I was already saddled with so I could fix their silly mistakes and pull their well-remunerated ass out of the fire.

Of course I was. Because I was "soooo smart".

And then, many months later during yet another one of our many, pointless, demoralizing, deck-chair-reshuffling rounds of reorganizing and belt-tightening, I was one of those selected to be kicked to the curb and into the Great Recession.

Because, y’know, budget cuts. And stuff. So very sorry. So very sad.

Thus my Sixth or Seventh career ended, one month short of my being vested.

The consultant, on the other hand, kept their sweet gig, and long after I was a ghost they were still billing my former employer at an hourly rate somewhere between "But didn’t we just lay a bunch of people off?" and "Are you fucking kidding me?!"

For all that I lost and will never get back – and I lost a lot – I was able to retain the many articles on Awesomeness from the journals with Very Impressive Names.

I find they are perfect for plugging the holes in my job interview shoes.

And that's a mostly true story.