The Future Of Tipping - Every Solution Has Unintended Consequences

But that doesn't mean we should just stop and take things as they are.

I started thinking seriously about tipping when we had breakfast in Talkeetna last May.  I read this sign and as we left, without leaving a tip, I mentioned the policy to the person taking our payment.  Who then started talking about some of the side effects.  For one thing, I asked about the legal obstacles to tipping mentioned in the sign.  (I think that was part of what held up this post - I didn't have much internet access when we were at Denali and didn't want to spend on legal research.)

Basically he said that they went to this policy - abolishing tips and raising prices - because only the wait staff could legally benefit from tips, and they didn't think that was fair.  Some of the issues he brought up included:

1. The serious loss of income for the best servers.  People here on vacation or for climbing often have a lot of money and will tip a good server quite a bit, so when the policy was announced - after discussing it with everyone, if I recall right - some went to other restaurants were they could earn a lot more money through tips.  
2. They had to raise prices to pay everyone minimum wage without tips.  I get that, but I also figured the difference wasn't that great and was probably what I would have paid in a tip anyway.  
3.  Not everyone left tips and those people don't feel the way I do about the raised prices.  

This was last May and I can't find the notes I wrote down so I'll stop there.  I know I did want to look into the law, but I'm guessing that after several days at Denali, this slipped from my conscious todo list.

But Sunday, two things brought tipping back to my attention.  First, I got a thank you note for a tip I put into my check for a year of the Anchorage Daily News.  Our news carrier leaves our paper right  at our doorstep every day.  She doesn't throw it into the bushes or two steps from our door.  It's right there.  I can open the door barefoot and lean down and pick it up.  This is particularly appreciated in the winter.  How much should one tip a mail carrier?  My decision wasn't so much thinking about what she is paid, but more about saying, "Even though I've never seen you, I want you to know that I appreciate your great service."  Apparently I tipped her more than most others because she wrote the thank you.  Maybe it's just her route isn't full of fancy homes with high income earners.

She also noted in her thank you  - which was taped to the orange plastic bag the paper comes in - her appreciation that I was the only one of her customers who recycles the plastic bags.  I called the ADN once and asked about that, and they said to leave them outside and the carrier will pick them up.  Since then, I've been stuffing the new bag each day into one of the bags until the bag is
full.  Then I leave it out on the front steps - secured so it doesn't blow away - and in the morning it's gone.  I mention this so others who think about recycling plastic bags know you can do it this way.  (And the Assembly recently passed a law banning plastic bags at stores, but not for newspaper delivery.)  I'm not sure how they reuse the bags - since I'm sure it's easier to pull one off a role than to try to retrieve them out of a used bag, but knowing she thought that was a good thing and not a pain in the neck, was also positive.

Finally,  a Washington Post article reprinted  in the ADN Sunday about tipping and getting rid of tipping by requiring restaurants and hotels to pay the minimum wage not counting the tips.  It doesn't deal with the issue of losing servers (which wouldn't happen if a law were passed instead of one restaurant voluntarily making that decision).  Here's one snippet that I wanted to push back on a bit:

"Customers shouldn’t have to subsidize an employee’s wages through their tips, whether they’re ordering a pizza or taking a white-water rafting trip. And now, finally, it looks like we’re slowly reaching the point where we agree: This can’t go on."

My quibble here is the phrase "subsidize an employee's wages."  I'd argue we're subsidizing the owner's profit.  After all, the owner should be paying a fair wage.  And our tips, as important as they are, don't pay for health care or retirement.  And I want to acknowledge I know there are differences between small family owned restaurants and large corporate chain restaurants.

Of course, this is should all be in the larger context of the laws and customs that favor the educated and wealthy in ways that increase the gap between the very wealthy and everyone else, and our continued clinging to the morality of the Protestant work ethic to blame the poor for their poverty and assuage any guilt the wealthy have (since they deserve it for their assumed hard work.)

And I'll try to check on the Alaska laws about tipping to see how that fits in.

Bullshit Jobs

As I gather my thoughts - which I've done a couple of times here - on the problems with our economy, I sometimes run into articles that are of interest, but maybe not directly related  to my thesis.

[There's a fairly long introduction here before you get to bullshit jobs.  For the impatient, just skip down to the quotations below.]

Basic Thesis:  Underlying everything, the Protestant Work Ethic is no longer applicable and probably never was all that good a model for an economy.  Basically, the Protestant work ethic made work an intrinsically 'good' thing.  Work became a religious 'calling' from God.  Your worth in society is based on your work.  On keeping busy.  If you aren't working, you are a parasite.  Idle hands, you know.   That may have seemed useful at a time before steam engines and electricity and food and housing and the basics of life from dishes to clothing required as many hands as there were.  Yet even then, the wealthy didn't have to work.  But  children did.  (And I'd point out that all that work may not have been necessary.  In fertile lands, lots of cultures had times for art and music and elaborate festivals.)

The work ethic may not be a good economic model, but it's a great moral model to keep workers working and  to help the rich  justify why they have so much more than they need while others are barely scraping by.   And so  the rich folks really have no obligation to the poor.  Quite simply, the rich worked and 'earned' their wealth, and the poor were simply lazy. We still hear a lot of this from Republican politicians.  Even many liberals believe this.  It's fed to us with fairy tales and television and movies.  Our whole society is based on this notion.

In the US in the 1950s there were lots of articles about what Americans were going to do with all their spare time when automation cut jobs to 30 hours a week or less.  The 50s were a rare time in the US when the gap between rich and poor was fairly low.  Income taxes (at least before deductions)  were near 90% for the wealthiest.  (I don't think that's part of Trump's vision of making America great again.)  Unions were strong, blue collar workers could make a lot of money.  There were decent wages and benefits for people without a college degree, even a high school degree.  So the economists maybe saw things going along at the same pace, with robots taking over some jobs, allowing workers to work less for the same income.

But they forgot this is a capitalist society.  As the owners brought in more automation, instead of cutting back the work week, they cut back jobs.  People got full time leisure (also known as unemployment).  Those who kept their jobs often ended up working well over 40 hours a week, often without an increase in pay.   The financial profit of automation went, not to the workers, but to the owners of the businesses and their shareholders. And politicians acknowledged these realities - that not all unemployed folks were deadbeats - enough to set up various welfare program for some of them.

And so as this trend continued - more automation replacing workers who can no longer find good paying jobs with pensions and health care - we've ended up with a huge gap between rich and poor and lots of unemployed (not just those officially 'unemployed')  and a growing homeless problem.   Building houses for the homeless isn't the solution, because if the economy continues in this trend, there will be an endless stream of people who become superfluous and who can't earn enough to pay for housing.

We need to change the economy so it doesn't bleed workers, or so that work doesn't become the only way to morally redistribute wealth.

So we need a new model for the economy, one not based on a 16th Century religious revolt against the excesses of the Catholic church, but one based on the reality that not everyone needs to work to support the economy any more.  Jobs should no longer be the only morally acceptable means of distributing income.  Paid work shouldn't be mandatory for a decent basic lifestyle.  A practical alternative model is what I'm looking for.

But in the meantime, here are some thoughts from a book about bullshit jobs by David Graeber.  First a quick definition and second a simplified list of examples of bullshit jobs.

"How does Graeber define a “bullshit job”? Essentially it’s a job devoid of purpose and meaning. It’s different to a “shit job”, which is a job that can be degrading, arduous and poorly compensated but which actually plays a useful role in society. Rather a bullshit job can be prestigious, comfortable and well-paid, but if it vanished tomorrow, the world would not only fail to notice, it may actually become a better place. Bullshit jobs ‘take’, more than they ‘give’ to society. 

Graeber refines his definition by providing his own hilarious typology of bullshit jobs. There are “flunkies”, also known as “feudal retainers”, who are specifically hired by directors to make them appear more important. “Goons” are the aggressive, hired-muscle frequently found in telemarketing teams and PR agencies, employed solely to cajole people into do something that contradicts their common sense. “Duct tapers” who are employees hired only to fix a problem that ought not to exist. “Box tickers”, which we need no introduction to and “task masters”, whose sole function is to create whole new ecosystems of bullshit (the latter can also be described as “bullshit generators”). And there are various combinations of the above, which Graeber describes as 'complex multiform bullshit jobs'”.

But Graeber doesn't blame capitalism ( I need to read more on this to be sure  that's accurate).  Rather he says capitalism has been perverted by "Managerial Feudalism."  And this results in the creation of bullshit jobs.

"One of the most compelling arguments in Graeber’s book is the simple observation that the creation of meaningless jobs is exactly what capitalism is not supposed to do. Governed by the need to maximise profits and minimise costs, companies subject to “pure” capitalism would gain no advantage in hiring unnecessary staff. However, Graeber points out that many industries no longer operate on this dynamic of profit and loss. Instead some industries like accountancy, consultancy and corporate law, are rewarded through huge, open contracts, where the incentive is to maximise the length, cost and duration of the project.
One testimony from a former consultant helping a bank resolve claims from the PPI scandal described how they, 'purposefully mistrained and disorganized staff so that the jobs were repeatedly and consistently done wrong… This meant that cases had to be redone and contracts extended'”.

Bullshit jobs really isn't what I'm talking about.  Though it shows the hollowness of the Protestant work ethic - since these jobs aren't needed, yet they are there.  People work at these jobs that are not only unnecessary, but at times harmful, and probably not mentally healthy for the workers.

So, consider this post as notes.  As I run across interesting things like this, I'll post them as more notes.     Is Managerial Feudalism just a disease that capitalism caught, or is it a natural outcome of competition leading to power and greed that sets up perverse incentives for corporations to make money?  (Think about the housing crisis where banks made loans they knew wouldn't be repaid, but everybody was making big profits on.  Think about Wells Fargo setting up false bank accounts to bleed their customers who had set up real accounts.

Enough for now.  But also note, if we move to fewer and fewer real jobs, then the Supreme Courts' regular cutting back of union powers may not matter.  Unions too need to refocus so they can help define the new economic and moral model for wealth distribution to go along with or even replace work.

One Reason Some Alaska Airlines Flights Are Priced Well Is Jet Blue - Whose Flight Attendants Began Voting On a Union This Week

Alaskans have benefited from Jet Blue flights to Anchorage, because Alaska Airlines responds with lower (than their normal) fares.  One reason, people say, Jet Blue can fly for less is that their employees don't get paid as much because they aren't unionized.

But the flight attendants vote to unionize began Monday this week and goes through April 17.

Forbes seems to have the most coverage.  Here's their latest.

And the pilots unionized four years ago.  And Alaska seems to be able to match Jet Blue fares when they have to.  So maybe unions aren't the problem.

 My personal experience is that some union officials can be as stubborn and power hungry as some management officials.  But just as there are decent managers, there are plenty of decent union folks and their job is to work for the workers.  It's not just about wages, it's also about benefits, and having people on your side when management treats you badly.

But it doesn't always work - Jeff Graham's union didn't help him.

Graham v. MOA #3: Following The Merit Principles In The MOA Charter Could Have Prevented All This

[This is post #3 of a series on Graham v MOA.  You can get an overview and index of all the posts here. Or just go to the Graham v. Municipality of Anchorage tab up above.]

Understanding the merit system and how to measure people's skills for a job are important to understanding why this case is important.  So I beg your indulgence here.  I've tried to make this pretty easy to digest.

Briefly, before the Merit System (and principles) governments were run on the spoils system - you got a government job if you helped get a candidate elected.  Loyalty, not skill and public spirit, were the key job qualification.  Merit principles don't guarantee fair hiring and promotion, but they go a long way in that direction.

Below is excerpted from the expert witness report I wrote up October 2016.  The judge did not allow the plaintiff to use the MOA (Municipality of Anchorage) charter because he said the promotion process is part of the collective bargaining agreement.  Collective bargaining agreements are approved (on the MOA side) by the Assembly.  But the Charter can only be amended by a vote of the people of Anchorage.  So I still don't understand how the contract would trump the Charter.  But I'm not a lawyer.

Here's from my report:

Background and Purpose of Merit Principles and Systems  

Race and age bias, in the context of promotion of a public employee, is an important issue. But the bigger issue is merit system principles.  Modern human resources departments in reasonably sized organizations both public and private use what is known as a merit system.  The system stems from the 19th Century when governmental structures were evolving from feudal systems based on loyalty to the ruler, to more modern ones, based on rationality.  Scholar Max Weber noted that a new form of organization was emerging which he called a bureaucracy, that was based on rational rules rather than the arbitrary decisions of a ruler.
The point was that organizations that hired people based on their ability to do specific jobs and not on their relationship and loyalty to the ruler were more effective, more efficient, and more permanent.
These ideas of selecting the best person for the job were also promoted in the factory in the early 20th Century by Frederick Taylor and his idea of Scientific Management became widely adopted.  Over time, the ideas underlying Weber and Taylor - the idea that rational, scientific analysis can be applied to management - took hold in private companies.  Applicants would be evaluated by their qualifications to hold their jobs, though personal connections and other biases still were a factor.
In government the change took place both on the federal level  and state and local levels.  In 1883, the Pendleton Act established the US Civil Service after President Garfield was shot by a disgruntled job seeker.  It only applied to a small percentage of jobs at first, but over the years, it has come to cover most federal positions in the career civil service.
On the local level, reformists pushed for merit systems as a way to combat the big city political machines like Tammany Hall that recruited immigrants into their political party with promises of government jobs, as they arrived in the US from Europe.
So, both in government and in the private sector these ideas of rational rules to develop a competent workforce took hold.  But the biases of the times often got written into the rules.  Job tests were written so that new immigrants wouldn’t pass.  Women were assumed ineligible for most jobs and fired from those they could take - like teacher - if they got married.  The societal structure which kept people of color in segregated housing, deficient schools, in poverty, prevented most people of color from getting the needed qualifications, or even from knowing about job openings.  And overt racism prevented those who could qualify from being hired in most cases.
The civil rights movement changed that.  Brown v. Board of Education struck down segregated schools.  This was supposed to lead to African-Americans (particularly) getting better high school educations, then into universities, and then into good jobs.  But many communities opposed busing and set up all-white private schools, leaving the public schools for African-Americans and the poor.
The Voting Rights Act was intended to prevent laws that kept Blacks from voting.  Griggs v. Duke Power was a groundbreaking case in terms of job discrimination.  Black workers traditionally got the lowest level jobs and got paid less than white workers.  When they were required to put in tests for employees seeking supervisory positions, Duke Power created tests that were unrelated to the position and intended to keep blacks from passing. The Supreme Court struck this down saying that the tests for the jobs had to be related to the work that would be done.  They also said that the plaintiffs didn’t have to prove intentional discrimination, only that the test had a disparate impact on the minority candidates.
The merit system was an outgrowth of science being applied to management to ensure more qualified employees got hired.  Businesses developed measures that focused on someone’s ability to successfully do the job.  The civil rights movement fit perfectly into this theoretical ideal.  Job requirements should focus on qualifications, not race or gender.  Griggs v. Duke Power drew back the curtain on the hidden biases that were blocking access to better employment for women and minorities.
Today we’ve come a long way, but we are still a society that sees minority actors in movie roles as criminals or maids or chauffeurs much more than as doctors or lawyers or accountants.  Many people still cringe at the idea of their daughter marrying someone of a different race or religion.  When those feelings spill over into the workplace, into hiring, it’s illegal discrimination.
Unconscious racial bias perpetuates discrimination through assumptions about people based on their race or other characteristics.  Conscious bias attempts to set up barriers that seem legitimate, but are actually intended to keep out undesired applicants.
The merit system is one of the best ways to thwart discrimination so that the most qualified candidates, not the most ‘like us’ candidates, get hired.  It’s the best antidote we have to cronyism, racism, and other forms of discrimination in hiring and promoting employees.

Merit Principles and Systems at Municipality of Anchorage 

The MOA Charter at Section 5.06(c) mandates the Anchorage Assembly to adopt “Personnel policy and rules preserving the merit principle of employment.”   AMC 3.30.041 and 3.30.044 explain examination types, content, and procedures consistent with these merit principles.
Âs defined in the Anchorage Municipal Code Personnel Policies and Rules, “Examination means objective evaluation of skills, experience, education and other characteristics demonstrating the ability of a person to perform the duties required of a class or position.” (AMC 3.30.005)
According to the Firefighters collective bargaining agreement, the conduct and administration of the Anchorage Fire Department, including selection and promotion of employees, are retained by the Municipality. (IAFF-MOA CBA Section 3.1)

Application of Merit Principles to Making And Evaluating Objective Examinations 

In practice, the term merit principles means using procedures that ensure that decisions are made rationally to select and promote those people who are most suited for a job.  They mean that organizations do their best to identify the factors that best predict which applicant is most likely to succeed in the position.  Factors that are irrelevant to someone’s success on the job should not be part of the process.
A test (or examination as used by the MOA) is any process used to evaluate an applicant’s suitability for a position.  An application form can be thought of as a test to the extent that information is used to distinguish between applicants who qualify and those who do not.  A written exam, a practical exam, an interview are all tests when it comes to activities like selection and promotion.
Two basic factors are important when evaluating tests used in personnel decisions.  First, is the test valid?  Second, is the test reliable?
Validity means that the test, in fact, tests what it is supposed to test.  In employment that generally means it is useful in separating those applicants most likely to do well in the position from those less likely to do well.  For example, if a college degree is required for a position, but those without college degrees do was well as those with a degree, then that is not a valid factor to consider, because it doesn’t predict success on the job.  It is common to give applicants a written or practical test or an interview.  These are scored and applicants with higher scores are selected over people with lower scores.
Such tests are valid only if it is true that people with higher scores are more likely to be successful in the position than those with lower scores.  That is, people with higher scores are more likely to do well AND people with lower scores are more likely to do poorly.  If that is not the case, the test is not valid.

Employment tests can be validated by checking scores against actual performance of employees, though this does require selecting employees with low scores as well as with high scores to determine if the lower scoring employees really do perform poorly compared to the higher scoring employees.  This can be expensive and many organizations use ‘common sense.’  But common sense may not be accurate and if an employer is accused of discrimination, they will have to defend the validity of the test.
For rare, specialized positions, validation is difficult to do.  For common positions that are similar across the nation, such as fire fighters, there are often companies that prepare, validate, and sell, and even administer employment tests.
Reliability means that the way a test is administered is consistent.  The same applicant, taking the test at different times or locations or with different testers, would have basically the same result every time.  When people take the college entrance exams, for instance, the conditions are standardized.  No matter where someone takes the test, they get exactly the same instructions, the physical conditions of the test room are within certain parameters (desk size, temperature, noise level, etc.) and they all have exactly the same amount of time to complete the exam.  The scoring of the exams is also the same for everyone.
To ensure reliability of the test taking, all conditions that could affect the outcome must be the same.  To ensure reliability of scoring, the way points are calculated must be as objective and measurable as possible.  Often tests are designed with scales that help a rater know how to give points or how to put applicants in the correct category.
At the most basic level you might just have a scale of 1 - 5 for instance, with ‘good’ at one end and ‘poor’ at the other end.  But how does the rater determine what’s good or bad?
Better would be to have a more objective descriptor such as “successfully completed task with no errors” on one end and “failed to complete the task” at the other end.  Even better would be to have descriptors for each point on the scale.  The more that the descriptor describes an actual objectively testable level of achievement, the more likely it is that different raters would come up with the same score.  For example, ‘meets expectations’ is not as objective as “accomplished the task within 2 minutes with no errors that compromised the outcome.”
Basically, the greater the objectivity of the scoring system, the greater the likelihood of reliability, because there is a clear standard attached to each number in the scale. And with a more objective system, discrepancies can be more easily spotted.  A biased evaluator has a harder job to select favored applicants or disqualify disfavored candidates.  Also, a candidate who was graded unfairly has a better chance of challenging the score.
Another way to increase reliability is to train evaluators on how to use the scoring system.  It is also helpful to have raters who do not have personal relationships with the applicants.
Given the need for validity and reliability, interviews, while frequently used, have been found to be prone to many biases unrelated to the job. There are ways to improve the validity and reliability of interviews.  The questions asked must be clearly tied to ability to be successful in the position, recognizing that being able to perform a task is not the same as being able to describe how one would perform a task.  If personality and speaking ability are not being tested, then interviews can become treacherous employment tests for the applicant and for the employer.  The more subjective a test and the rating system, the easier it is to bias the outcome, whether unintentionally or intentionally.
Since proving intent to discriminate requires overhearing private conversations or emails, this is an impossible hurdle for most applicants.  The courts have recognized this and have allowed ‘impact’ to be used in lieu of intent.  But employment tests can often give us evidence of intent if they are subjective and there is little or no validity or reliability.

Conclusion 

I have seen no materials that offer any information on the validity or reliability of the tests used in the engineer promotional examinations which Jeff Graham has taken.  The exam score sheets I have seen lack rigorous descriptors for raters (or proctors) to calculate scores for applicants and appear extremely subjective.  The materials I’ve seen that were used to train the raters were lacking in detail and substance.
Without evidence to show the exams are valid and reliable, one must assume that the exams do not comply with the Municipality’s mandate to follow merit principles. [Such proof of validation had been requested from but not provide by the MOA.] The point of merit systems is to identify the most qualified candidates for each position and to prevent the introduction of personal biases into their scoring of candidates.  The tests themselves may or may not be discriminatory.  But when they are subjective as the oral board/peer reviews are, biases of the raters are easily introduced into the scoring of candidates. The type of bias could be racial, sexual, age based, or personal depending on the rater.
It is my understanding that MOA has not produced all requested materials and that depositions still remain to be done in this case.  I therefore reserve the right, should additional materials and information become available, to modify or supplement this report.  

Because merit principles were ruled out as the measure the jury would use to evaluate the case, this report was not introduced in court or given to the jury.  However, I was allowed to testify on merit principles in general, but not allowed to relate them to the facts of the case, or even to the MOA.

I was also not allowed to refer to the Fire Safety Instructor Training Manual that the MOA uses which talks about validity in some detail and also talks about 'high stakes' tests - like a promotion test - needing to be professionally prepared and validated.

I was allowed to talk about, again in general terms and not relating what I said to the AFD exams, subjectivity and objectivity.  I acknowledged there is no such thing as 100% objective or subjective, but that there is a continuum from some theoretical total subjectivity to theoretical total objectivity.  The goal of test makers is to have tests as far to the objective side of the continuum as possible.  The more subjective a test, the easier it is to introduce bias, conscious or unconscious.

Gramping at Academy of Sciences Museum San Francisco

Friday morning was at the museum, a big glitzy, pricey place to visit with lots of things to keep the attention of anyone from 6 months to nearly dead.

Many of the exhibits are truly spectacular, like this replicated banyan swamp with big rays floating by.

Animals have been a big attraction since I was a little kid.  I spent a lot of time studying the dioramas at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History as a kid.  And as good as these dioramas were, I've since seen Zebras in the national parks in East Africa and these just aren't the same.  But there were lots of kids on school trips getting the magic.



A pair of oryx.

And we didn't even see this leopard until a museum volunteer waved his hand over a sensor sending a load roar down to us.

So, yeah, these animals were all stuffed.  (Though there were live penguins.)  But the fish were real.

This is looking down into a living coral reef.


I had to wonder how much harder it is for humans to recreate and maintain the conditions for reefs and keep them going, than for nature.

This one was in a large tank full of many kinds of fish and I didn't get its business card.




These anemone like critters were in the tank too.

This jelly fish was about a foot in diameter.

And I thought this was a good sign of the times as machines replace humans.  They used to publish these futuristic articles with titles like "What will people do with all their leisure time?"  They thought that when we went down to 30 hour weeks because of automation, that people would make the same money with fewer hours.  They forgot that in a capitalistic system, the owners take the savings as profits,  layoff workers they don't need, and keep the others at 40 and 50 hour jobs with no retirement and fewer and fewer benefits.

Oil Jobs Down. Parnell, What About All Those Jobs SB 21 Was Supposed To Create?

Let's see.  If I recall right, Governor Parnell's every other words were Jobs and SB 21. and the oil and gas industry was plastering the state of Alaska with ads saying how jobs would be lost if people voted for repealing the tax credits the legislature had given them in SB 21.    Despite all the money they spent, the initiative lost by only by a small margin.

And now the ADN has this article about lost jobs.

Oil, gas industry jobless claims up 7th month in a row
Jeannette Lee Falsey Alaska Dispatch News

 Jobless benefits claims are down in Alaska and across the country, but the same cannot be said for the state’s oil and gas sector. The lack of available work has boosted the number of former workers in the extraction and support industries who have filed for unemployment, according to the state labor department. Year-on-year increases in existing unemployment insurance claims by laid-off oil and gas workers began in May 2015, about one year after oil prices began falling. In November, 895 former workers in the sector were receiving jobless benefits, up from 463 for the same month in 2014. . .

Can you imagine how they would be blaming the lost jobs on the repeal of the tax credits if the initiative had passed?   But, I have to acknowledge, the oil companies never promised anything, it was their lackeys in the governor's seat and in the legislature who made claims about increasing jobs.   It's just like Shell blamed government regulation when it was pretty clear that the main reason they  pulled out of the Chukchi this fall was because their drilling produced nothing and the price of oil had tanked.

Now, I understand that government regulation can be quite an obstacle.  I just did another phone round with the IRS today and I feel anyone's pain who has to deal with people like Ms. Rutherford.  And I'm all for simplifying regulations whenever possible.

But it's my observation that the voluminous regulations are due to company lawyers finding loopholes and exploiting them, resulting in more and more regulations.

But we also know that without the government looking out for environmental risks, the oil companies would do in the Arctic what they've done around the world where there aren't good regulations.  Where the oil companies' bottom line is greater than the treasuries of the countries they're working in.  And where it is easy to bribe governmental officials for the permits they need.

And we're always hearing about the great private sector and how entrepreneurs take risks, but they also create LLC's (Limited Liability Corporations) to limit their liability.  They know going in that government regulations have to be met.  It's part of their business plan.  So moaning about it after the fact (well, also during the process) is just so much spin to avoid the responsibility for failing to find oil, or for an environmental catastrophe, or firing employees.

I've got tons of other stuff to do besides this post, but let me give you a few links to show that I'm not making this all up.

The Price of Oil: Human Rights Violations  

Myanmar's Oil and Gas 

McSpotlight on the Oil Industry

Effects of Oil Drilling (on Indigenous People)

And for those who remember the Exxon Valdez spill and the Deepwater issues, you'll note these things happen in the US too, but not quite as egregiously.

Rehab And Job Training: 1896 Style

'There's only one reason you're here, and it's got nothing to do with Skeantlebury or Billy Maitland.  You're here because you're a drunk. . . Well, Carmack, for the next four or five months you're going to be stone sober for the first time in years."

Voyage, by Sterling Hayden, takes place in the year 1896.  By page 172, the Neptune's Car,  "the first steel sailing vessel ever built down East" is finally ready to take off.  Up till then, the author was introducing a long cast of characters.

But now everyone's onboard, and nearly all the seamen were recruited through Gus Skeantlebury's Parlor.  He got paid their first two months wages of $18 a month.  They've now been dragged and prodded on board in various stages of consciousness and Captain Pendleton is speaking to them:

"Now, men, the name of this vessel is Neptune's Car, and she's flying the black anvil of the House of Blanchard.  And once't this voyage is done with there's none of you need to ever be on the beach again.  Because you - those of you who survive - will be able to say you made a Cape Horn voyage in a Blanchard ship under Captain Irons S. Pendleton.   . . 

"This may just be the finest square-rigged ship on the face of the globe.  She can be a floating home.  Or she can be a floating flaming hell. 

It's all of it up to you.  The mates and me have nothin' a-tall to do with it.  We're here to give the orders.  And see to it that they're carried out.  And carried out fast--- 

So let me make it clear right here and now.  When we speak, you jump.   And you jump fast. . . 

"There's some amongst you look like pretty good men.  And there's some amongst you don't look none too frisky.  And there's one or two I noticed looks like scum.
But let me tell you, boys, it's all of a piece to me and th' mates.  You'll be sailormen before'n we reach fifty south or my name ain't Irons Paul Pendleton. 

"Mr. Ruhl right now is going through both them fo'c's'les searching for weapons and liquor.  What he finds goes over the side.  What he don't find better dan good and well go over the side before morning."

These were jobs that were hard to fill.  The captain seems to have been head of a rehab clinic and apprentice ship program as well as captain of a ship.

But not all these men were drunks, though they all had been at Skeantelbury's.  One of the 'scum,'  Kindred,  was sixty-six and overweight.

"Everything had happened so swiftly.  Less than twenty-four hours ago he and his partner Bragdon had been drinking beer in a place below the Bowery.  They were bound down south to escape from the cold, with the Monk [Bragdon] extolling the languorous delights of an island called Grenada, where, with luck and a contact he had, Bragdon would find work as port captain and Kindred would work in a library."

And the first mate, we know from earlier in the book, is accused of killing three seaman in a recent voyage as well as gouging out the eye of another young seaman.

But jobs for alcoholics, let alone, the uneducated, are pretty scarce these days.  I've got over 500 pages still to go to find out how successful this floating rehab center will be.


How accurate is this description in the book?  I'm not sure at all.

The first steel sailing ships in the US were apparently built at the Bath Iron Works in Maine in 1896, which is the year the voyage in the book took place.

But apparently the most famous ship called Neptune's Car  sailed in 1856.  It's actually quite a story because the young captain's 19 year old wife, Mary Patten, went along and put down a mutiny when her husband fell ill rounding Cape Horn, and managed to bring the limping ship into San Francisco with its cargo intact.  You can learn more about that journey at the San Francisco Maritime National Historic Park website.

And on another note, it seems I'm going to have to turn off the spell check in my new computer's software - there were a number of changes it made in this post I had to go back and redo - for example sailormen got changed to salesmen.

Gov Cited Jobs in Oil Tax Relief, Now Cuts Job Preference For Alaskans

From the Anchorage Daily News:

The Parnell administration, in an unprecedented move, has ruled that Alaska hire requirements for state and local public works contracts won't apply to the entire state but only to limited, mainly rural areas.
No longer covered as of Friday: Anchorage, Fairbanks, the Mat-Su, Juneau and the Kenai Peninsula.

The Juneau Empire reported a Parnell speech in June where he defended HB 21 which cut oil taxes drastically:

“If we can garner more investment from the tax changes we made with the More Alaska Production Act,” Parnell said, “Alaskans will benefit immensely from the jobs and opportunities that are created.”

But with this new policy change it's clear that the Governor doesn't care all that much if those jobs go to Alaskans.  And anyone who has flown to Anchorage regularly notices the planes have a lot of folks flying in from Outside for their shift on the North Slope.

Parnell talks about jobs and benefits to Alaskans, but the record seems to indicate that his true purpose is benefit to large corporations such as the oil company he lobbied for before becoming Lt. Governor and then Governor when Palin resigned. 

While his administration argues that DC doesn't understand Alaska's problems and thus shouldn't have power over the state, they see no reason why local governments and communities or the general Alaska public should have any say over what the State does.  They overturned the guts of the people's initiative to regulate the cruise industry and they destroyed the state's Coastal Zone Management structure making Alaska the only coastal state in the country without a Coastal Zone Management program.  Despite the fact that our coast is larger than all the others.

The purpose of all this?  The pattern we see would appear to give large corporations (as well as smaller businesses) free run in the state of Alaska with little or no interference from the Federal government, from the State government, from local governments, or from Alaskan people in general.  People's rights to protect their own communities have been cut drastically by Parnell's administration in moves like the gutting of the Coastal Zone Management program. 

Federal Overreach is a buzz ward in the Parnell Administration.  But not State Overreach. 

The language may be about "Alaska's economy" and "jobs"  but behind the facade is the real purpose:  making life easier for large corporations and business in general.  No one should hold up their projects for any reason, whether it destroys local neighborhoods and communities, pollutes, or threatens endangered species, or salmon streams.  Business gets an automatic green light at all intersections between their interests and the people's interests. 

I'm sure people like the governor and his supporters also believe that making life easier for large corporations makes life better for everyone.  Fundamentalist capitalism is just as blind and intolerant as fundamentalism in any other religion.  They forget that the reasons they dislike government - its potential power over others - is the same reason that many people dislike multinational corporations.  And as those corporations have gained increased power over government through election contributions and lobbyists, they have gotten larger and larger.  In most industries - media, airlines, food,  mining, oil, defense,  fishing, cruise lines, etc. -  consolidation has decreased the number of competing companies, giving fewer companies more control over people's lives.  Many corporations have larger budgets than many countries.  Government is the only viable counterbalance to their power. 

Of course the governor's new policy raises the question about whether local hire is even legal in the first place.  Back in the late 70s or early 80s Alaska local hire laws were ruled unconstitutional, so I did some checking to see if things had changed.  There are localities - like San Francisco - that have local hire laws.  For now, I'm just raising the point, and saying it appears that there are circumstances when local hire appears to be legal.  Here's a place to start reading about the law on this.