Clear It with Sidney | Hillman Foundation

Clear It With Sidney

The best of the week’s news by Lindsay Beyerstein

Clear It with Sidney

Introverts-R-Us: A Quiet Revolution

In 2003, Johnathan Rauch’s essay “Caring for Your Introvert” became a surprise smash hit for the Atlantic Montly. This short piece may have been the first journalistic attempt to grapple with the rights of introverts in a culture that glorifies extraversion.

Rauch’s case for understanding of introvert-Americans may have been the reasonable, low-key clarion call that sparked the introverts’ rights movement. As of 2006 the essay had drawn more traffic than anything else the Atlantic had ever published.

Rauch defined introverts as people who find social interactions tiring, as opposed to stimulating. Extraverts are energized by companionship. Introverts may enjoy company, but like exercise, social interaction is work for them and they need time alone to recover.

Susan Cain is the author of the new book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking. She talks about the work in a recent interview with with Scientific American Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.

Cain defines introverts as people who prefer lower levels of stimulation, social and otherwise. That translates into a preference for solitude, or small group interactions, over loud, raucous gatherings. Introversion is distinct from shyness, which is defined as the fear of negative social judgement.

About one half to one third of the population is introverted, according to the latest research. “But you’d never guess that, right?” Cain says, “That’s because introverts learn from an early age to act like pretend-extroverts.”

The author traveled around the U.S., documenting our extraversion-loving society, from motivational seminars to mega-churches where introverted congregants fear the wrath of God for needing their alone time. Which made me wonder if the church is really concerned about solitude, per se… Then again, religions have good reasons to worry about people with too much time to think.

Cain notes that introversion is associated with creativity and independent thought. She argues that American schools and workplaces have become obsessed with groupwork, which is draining for introverts, and which can foster groupthink for all concerned. She would like to see a society where creative people are given space to think and not simply herded into endless, shallow, rapid-fire brainstorming sessions. Research suggests that brainstorming, for all its popularity, is not a particularly efficient way to generate creative ideas.

The author challenges myths about introverts, such as the notion that introversion is incompatible with leadership ability. “Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Rosa Parks were all introverts, and so are many of today’s business leaders, from Douglas Conant of Campbell Soup to Larry Page at Google,” she tells Cook.

Quiet is going on this introvert’s reading list.

[Image credit: nyoin, Creative Commons.]

Celebrity Maternity: The Jay-Z/Beyonce NICU Scandal in Context

The first couple of hip hop made headlines when Beyonce gave birth to a baby girl, Blue Ivy Carter, at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan earlier this month. The couple reportedly paid $1.3 million to renovate a birthing suite.

A new father complained that Jay-Z and Beyonce’s private security guards barred him from seeing his twin girls in the neonatal intensive care unit. Mothers in a breastfeeding group also complained that private security guards had been rude to them. The dad just wants an apology, but the mothers were reportedly mulling a lawsuit.

Amanda Marcotte argues in the American Prospect this episode has no larger implications because it comes down to the parents’ word against Lenox Hill’s denial and the Carters’ silence. Sure, if we assume that the father is lying about being denied access to his critically ill children, then his story can be written off.

We could also write off these stories if we assume that all the security was absolutely necessary and appropriate to protect the Carter family and other patients from maurading paparazzis. But since when is it safe to make that assumption about any private security force? Private security is highly suspect because it wields authority without transparency on behalf of narrow moneyed interests.

Parents also claimed that security cameras were covered to thwart picture-hungry tabloids at bay. If that’s true, that’s inexcusable. The cameras are there to protect all patients and staff members. You never know when a violent ex is going to show up and cause a scene. Furthermore, the cameras might document an overreach by private security, if one occurred.

Regardless of the merits of the parents’ complaints, reporting by Hillman Prize-winner Nina Bernstein raises the possibility that the Jay-Z/Beyonce brouhaha is a symptom of a disturbing trend. Hospitals are competing to attract the carriage trade. In an era of declining reimbursements, many institutions are becoming increasingly dependent on an elite cash-paying clientele. Hospitals lure these well-heeled patrons with butlers, concierges, marble bathrooms, personal chefs, and other luxurious amenities.

Hospitals are supposed to be in the business of providing quality care to all. If celebrities and CEOs are just paying for high threadcount sheets and lobster tails, that’s one thing. However, this competition raises questions about whether hospitals might be willing to compromise the convenience or even the care of other patients in order to attract a much more lucrative celebrity clientele.

I’m perfectly at home here — totally private, totally catered,” Nancy Hemenway, a senior financial services executive boasted to the Times about her luxury care at Mount Sinai. “I have a primary-care physician who also acts as ringmaster for all my other doctors. And I see no people in training — only the best of the best.”

VIPs expect to be catered to. Some will have outsized needs for security and privacy that will affect other patients. The celebrities are shopping around and the hospitals are open for business. Lenox Hill is a private hospital, but it accepts public funds to provide health care. If the hospital wants to compete in the celebrity maternity market, what say does a Medicaid patient, or the taxpayer, have in the matter?

[Photo credit: Drew Allen, Creative Commons.]

Why Aren't iPhones Made in the USA?

Last February, at a dinner for Silicone Valley luminaries, President Obama asked Steve Jobs what it would take for iPhones to be made in the USA. Jobs essentially told the president that was never going to happen.

Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher of the New York Times set out to explain why not. They interviewed “more than three dozen current and former Apple employees and contractors” as well as “economists, manufacturing experts, international trade specialists, technology analysts, academic researchers, employees at Apple’s suppliers, competitors and corporate partners, and government officials.”:

Apple’s an example of why it’s so hard to create middle-class jobs in the U.S. now,” said Jared Bernstein, who until last year was an economic adviser to the White House.

If it’s the pinnacle of capitalism, we should be worried.”

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Similar stories could be told about almost any electronics company — and outsourcing has also become common in hundreds of industries, including accounting, legal services, banking, auto manufacturing and pharmaceuticals.

Experts say cheap labor is only part of the reason Apple assembles iPhones in Asia. Even more appealing to Apple is the fact that the supply chains that sustain an iPhone factory are also based on Asia. In other words, if you want to make iPhones, it’s cheaper to be near the factories that make the iPhone screws, the iPhone gaskets, and so on. China has most of those subcomponent factories, and the infrastructure to get the screws to the iPhone factory on short notice. The U.S. doesn’t have that infrastructure anymore.

So, why are all these component factories in China? The three main reasons seem to be economies of scale, Chinese economic policy, and cheap, readily exploitable labor. Of course, Chinese labor is artificially cheap and “flexible” because the totalitarian government squelches workers’ attempts to organize.

The least convincing argument is the purported skill gap between Chinese and U.S. workers. “We shouldn’t be criticized for using Chinese workers,” a current Apple executive was quoted as saying. “The U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need.”

Duhigg and Bradsher make a convincing case that the U.S. isn’t training enough engineers. But does the skills argument work when it comes to lower-level assembly line employees at FoxConn, a company that is notorious for recruiting huge numbers of young workers from the countryside? Nobody is born knowing how to solder an iPhone component. FoxConn must provide on-the-job training to much of its workforce. Granted, the marginal cost of training additional workers is much smaller for a company that already has a workforce of 1 million.

After reading the story, it’s hard to muster much enthusiasm for retooling the U.S. economy to create jobs like those of iPhone-makers at FoxConn. The reporters focus on skilled workers, but the reality is that most of the work of making an iPhone has been broken down to its most menial elements and outsourced to low-paid, low-skill employees. This model is sustainable, for corporations if not for humans, because there is a huge pool of desperate workers who will happily take a FoxConn worker’s job. Relatively speaking, the U.S. has a population gap and a misery gap.

Maybe the solution for the U.S. is automation coupled with progressive taxation and income redistribution. Let the machines do the work while the people share more equally in the profits.

[Photo credit: JaredEarle, Creative Commons.]

#Sidney's Picks: The Best of the Week's News

  • Labor leaders are debating whether to take their protest over Indiana’s proposed “right to work law” to the biggest stage in the country, Indianapolis during the Super Bowl, the Associated Press reports.
  • With over one million signatures submitted a recall election for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is all but assured. However, as Roger Bybee reports at Working In These Times, a strict state voter ID law passed in 2011 may disenfranchise many Wisconsin voters on election day. A lawsuit to seeking to overturn the law gets underway this week. 
  • GOP candidates in South Carolina are fulminating about the National Labor Relations Board, Josh Eidelson of AlterNet reports. Mitt Romney assailed the NLRB as an  “unaccountable and out-of-control agency” and Newt Gingrich promised the Chamber of Commerce that he’d look into eliminating the board if he became president.
  • Amanda Marcotte of Slate explains why the Obama administration’s decision to stand up to the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops and refuse to expand religious exemptions for birth control coverage is a big deal for women’s health.

[Photo credit: Wander Mule, Creative Commons.]

 

Recall Recap: The Latest From Wisconsin

Sidney-winner John Nichols of The Nation went on Democracy Now! yesterday to talk about the ongoing campaign to recall Republican Governor Scott Walker for stripping public employees of their collective bargaining rights. The pro-recall contingent needed 540,000 signatures, and they obtained over a million, making the campaign to unseat Walker the largest recall effort in U.S. history.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And John, most people don’t realize that those million signatures represent about almost a half of the electorate in Wisconsin. Could you—when you say the proportion that the signatures represent.

JOHN NICHOLS: Well—yes, they represent almost half of the electorate in the last election, in 2010, and what you might reasonably presume to be the electorate that would participate in a recall election. It’s not all the electorate. There—Wisconsin, up until very recently, didn’t require you to be registered to vote before you went to vote. So, you know, we don’t know. A recall election could actually pull in hundreds of thousands of additional voters. This is a very exciting and very charged thing. But what is important to remember is that the size of that proportion of the existing electorate has never been achieved before.

A state board must now review the signatures to ensure that they are valid. If the pro-recall faction has gathered enough signatures, Walker will face a new election, and possibly a primary challenge within his own party.

Walker didn’t campaign on an anti-collective bargaining platform, instead he foisted the controversial and unpopular law on the electorate as one of his first acts of office. The voters of Wisconsin may finally have their say on collective bargaining rights.

Nichols’ forthcoming book is entitled, Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street.

Girl Talk: Irin Carmon vs. Caitlin Flanagan

Sidney-winner Irin Carmon went head-to-head on NPR with noted anti-feminist crank and author of the new book “Girl Land,” Caitlin Flanagan.

Read Carmon’s review of “Girl Land” in Salon.

[Photo credit: mag3737, Creative Commons.]

Indiana: House Dems Occupy Rotunda Over "Right To Work" Bill

Democratic members of the Indiana State House caucused in the rotunda on Wednesday morning to demand a referendum on proposed “right to work” legislation that would cripple organized labor:

The Indiana House remained at a standstill this morning, with most Democrats refusing to come to the floor as they protest the controversial “right to work” bill and demand to offer an amendment seeking a public referendum on it.

Democrats met in the Statehouse Rotunda, with labor protesters surrounding them and more watching from the balconies above, cheering as Democrats promised to fight this issue.

As their chants of “Power to the People” rang in the Statehouse, Republicans attempted to come into session on the 3rd floor, but again did not have the necessary quorum of 67 legislators to do business. There are 60 Republicans, and this morning four Democrats joined them on the floor while the remainder of the Democrats were in the Rotunda.

The Democrats are staying off the State House floor to postpone a vote on the bill, which would otherwise pass the GOP-controlled body. The Dems say they can’t vote because they’re busy working on an amendment to hold a right-to-work referendum.

Proponents of the bill say that “right to work” legislation would create jobs by attracting manufacturers from non right-to-work states. However, as Prof. Gordon Lafer argues in The Nation, right-to-work legislation is an outdated tactic for attracting manufacturing jobs. These days, companies looking for cheap labor aren’t shopping between states, they’re taking their work overseas.

[Photo credit: The Indiana State House Rotunda, by Jim Bowen, Creative Commons.]

Pulitzer Prize: Two Sidney Winners on Romenesko's List of Contenders

Media critic Jim Romenesko’s list of Pulitzer Prize contenders is out, just ahead of next week’s application deadline.

Romenesko checked in with Spencer Soper to make sure he’d submitted his exposé of brutal working conditions of Amazon.com’s warehouse in Lehigh Valley, PA. That outstanding story won Soper the October Sidney Award.

Romenesko also asked his friends and colleagues to submit their picks for this year’s Pulitzers. The first name on the list was none other than Sidney Award Winner Sara Ganim for her agenda-setting coverage of the Jerry Sandusky rape scandal at Penn State.

[Photo credit: Chris Drumm, Creative Commons.]

The Daily Show Sends Up Foxconn's "Fear Factory" (Video)

 

New York Times labor reporter Steven Greenhouse tweeted, “Jon Stewart is doing devastating takedown of FoxConn factory giant w/horrid conditons that produces for Apple & Microsoft.” Indeed, the Daily Show host pulls no punches.

Stewart satirizes the notion that the U.S. factories should emulate the Chinese electronics giant FoxConn, which employs 800,000 workers assembling everything from iPhones to Xboxes. FoxConn has found ingenious ways to save money. Workers live in the FoxConn compound, housed eight to a room in dormitories where roommates may not know each other’s names. They are paid 31 cents an hour, and work up to 35 hours per shift.

Workers who try to unionize will be imprioned. Stewart wonders if incarceration might be more pleasant than life on the FoxConn line.

After a spate of suicides, FoxConn installed nets to catch would-be jumpers.

“In Western medicine, we call that ‘treating the symptom,’” Stewart quips.

Jay Smooth: Ten Other Things Martin Luther King Said

In honor or the holiday, video artist Jay Smooth presents ten less-quoted passages from Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Pages