Two nice articles illustrating the madness of health and safety… both concerning coffee….

In Bournemouth, a bus driver ordered passengers off a bus after a woman spilled some coffee. One woman spilt a third of her cup of coffee while getting on the bus, and then a further ten people were told they couldn’t get on because specialist cleaners were needed to clear up the ‘dangerous liquid’. The bus was pulled to one side and a replacement vehicle ordered, leaving the ten passengers to wait in the rain.

Secondly, according to and item I found in The Week, “health and safety officials in Warwickshire have banned hot drinks at a mothers’ coffee morning. ‘Coffee and play’ sessions at the Children’s Centre in Stratford-upon-Avon have been renamed ’baby play’ and parents now catch up over a (plastic) cup of squash or water. The council said its ‘hot drinks policy’ was to minimise the risk of scalding children. ”

These two cases together are a wonderful illustration of the far reaching effects of  ’individualisation’ and ‘litigation culture’ working together to result in collective lunacy – Both cases involve local councils who are no doubt very aware of the potential of being sued for any ‘preventable accidents’ on their property – a situation which can only happen when the populace at large are highly individualised – feeling little sense of obligation to wider society, while feeling they have the right (in this goaded by claims lawyers) to cream as much out of society as they can when the opportunity arises.

Going a little deeper – I’d blame neoliberalism for this – a political economy that allows individuals the freedom to exploit and enrich themselves at the expense of others – this is the kind of logic that has lead to the emergence of ‘Fortress Cities’ – in which the rich defend themselves in gated communities and SUVs against the increasing numbers of urban poor.

I think its appropriate to view the above two cases as local councils adopting a ‘fortress city’ mentality – setting up rules that protect themselves against any selfish individual who might try to make money out of them by holding them responsible and suing them for those unfortunate accidents (slipping/ scalding) that are, in reality, just an unfortunate and it has to be said extremely rare part of modern life.

Although, the optimist in me sees an opportunity for collective action in this – On reflection I’m wondering if the first case isn’t part of a surreptitious ’work to rule’ campaign on the part of a unionised bus driver, whose just had a pay freeze? – Maybe this raises the possibility of using health and safety as part of a campaign against public sector cuts….

So in the interests of health and safety I think all unionised teachers should cease doing all of the following – Any curricular activities involving physical activities, especially school trips; any teaching that involves teaching to tests, in fact we should drop all testing and examinations altogether, this causes way to much stress to our delicate children; and all marking and preparation outside of class – associated with numerous health problems such as RSI, eye strain, back pain and stress in general.

In fact, perhaps we could go further, in the interests of health and safety, maybe we should just stop doing anything, and just….. sit there, over coffee of course.

Research from Income Data Services showed that directors of companies on Britain’s FTSE 100 index enjoyed a 49 percent rise in total salaries last year compared to 3 percent rise for the FTSE 100 in the last business year.The total annual pay for the directors now averages 2.7 million pounds

This compares to a recent drop in annual average salaries – according the Mail, a drop of £2500 in the average in a recent 6 month period

For some reason, radio 4 gave air time to one such CEO justifying the inreases due to the fact that these companies are global in scope – and if we didn’t offer such huge salaries in the UK, the ‘talent’ at the top would go.

It’s unusual for radio 4 to give airtime to such nonsense! Nonsense according to Toybe and Walker’s book – unjust rewards – Chapter 3 of which investigates why Britain’s chief executives get paid so much money – and finds those at the top are not especially talented people – and there is no correlation between company performance and executive pay – for every Alan Sugar there are dozens of bureaucratic pen pushers who just go with the flow. Worryingly old boy’s networks restrict access to the boards of the FTSE 100 companies – how else could it be that, in the age of globalization, 85% of CEOs of the FTSE 100 companies are British?

Also, If there was true competition for these jobs the field would be much more international, and if there was genuine competition for these jobs, wages and bonuses would be driven down!

Instead CEOs get paid as much as they do because they demand it – and they base their demands on what other CEOs are demanding – and their demands for ever increasing wages get pushed through at board meetings because of recommendations by consultants who make their recommendations for wage and bonus increases by looking at other CEOs salaries.

Of course the government is on the side of the Corporations and it won’t do anything to combat inflated and unjust corporate pay levels- which yet another reason to protest, strike etc - It’s up to us to, after all, to control these Corporate leaches….

Related posts -

 Disparities between top pay packets need better explanation

Socialist review – unjust rewards

My review of ‘unjust rewards’

FDR said that – in 1936! Sound relevant to today? The obvious difference being that FDR is talking about his government standing up to the business and financial elite during their first term in office – we haven’t quite got there yet.

an extract from the speach -

“For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to Government but the Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair!…

(NB he’s talking here after he’d been in power for a term…) We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace‹business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me‹and I welcome their hatred.”

——

Excellent  recent post from Alternet with the above title – very useful updates on the continued relevance of what the A2 syllabus broadly calls ‘Marxist Theory’ – It basically argues that there are 8 ways in which the system socialises youth into being passive and unconcerned so there is no belief among the young that they can (even if they believe they should, which is rare) change anything… even with the increasingly obvious social injustices in the West - the most obvious being the fact that the rich are getting richer while the poor suffer.

The article has a U.S. focus – below I outline the ’8 reasons why people don’t fight back’ andconsider the extent to which these ’8 ways are true in modern Britain, adding in a few further pieces of evidence, drawn from a few books I’ve read and my experiences of students I’ve taught. So are there eight reasons Young Britains don’t fight back include -

One – Debt – University graduates starting out in life with thousands of pounds of debt are too concerned about losing their jobs to get involved in protest.

Impossible to tell at the moment how this will play out in the future in the UK – the government only recently introduced hefty tuition fees. I’m not convinced that debt will act as a passifying force in the future. To be honest, I’m broadly optimistic about the future of protest in the UK and its possible beneficial effects on our democracy, although, the biggest challenge is to actually translate critque into alternatives – and broader economic alternatives for everyone rather than just focussing on the student debt issue. Something I’ve yet to look into is mass debt-default/ not-paying movement as a possible strategy to bring down the elite - kind of like is occuring in Greece.

Two – Psychopathologising and medicalising non-compliance

This is where any behaviour that is critical of the system is deemed to be a sympton of psychiatric disorder. To be honest I don’t think this is happening in the UK to the extent it is in the US -  I only heard of ‘opposotional defiant disorder’ through this blog for example. What is happening though is increasing police powers have lead to people being arrested for ‘suspected’ anti-social behaviour, and the now near-ubiquitous use of kettling could turn people off protest, although there are some encouraging signs of students at the recent fees protests who witnessed kettling and have been turned against the government and very much onto protest. 

Three – Schools educating for compliance rather than democracy. Drawing on Jonathon Kozol, the author argues that ‘School teaches us that we are “moral and mature” if we politely assert our concerns, but the essence of school—its demand for compliance—teaches us not to act in a friction-causing manner.’ (This seems to a timely return to Ivan Illich’s ideas in deschooling society NB- I think blogging etc. could well be quite close to the ’learning webs’ at least as far as humanities are concerned that Ivan suggested as part of his education-altertative)

I’m in basic agreement with this. While the the citizenship agenda widely taught in UK schools offers critically minded teachers the opportunity to teach about direct action etc, more often than not citizenship is a lame excercise in getting students to accept their client-role in UK politics.

I am also frequently dismayed at the gaps in students’ knowledge know when they start A levels at 16 – I remember last year that only about four students out of forty (this was in the A2 year!) had a basic understanding of the process of global warming – I really don’t think it should be my job to teach this stuff!

Four – No child left behind/ Race to the Top – The title here isn’t overly clear – this is a critique of ‘testing culture’ in education. The author says ‘standardized-testing tyranny that creates fear, which is antithetical to education for a democratic society. Fear forces students and teachers to constantly focus on the demands of test creators; it crushes curiosity, critical thinking, questioning authority, and challenging and resisting illegitimate authority’

This is most definately happening in the UK – a number of my colleagues (I teach 16-19) have complained of students turning up to revision lessons with a ‘revise me’ attitude. As if spending time on revision classes rather than actual teaching wasn’t bad enough, students now expect to be guided through revision step by step – . The deeper cause of this is of course an education system dominated by league tables in which teachers are encouraged to ‘teach the test’ -  Students have learnt that what matters is their exam performance (their relative exam performance even!) rather than the subject matter itself.

I’d also say that schools are increasingly undermining students’ ability to think critically by pandering to short attention spans and pushing what I call ‘edutainment’ (See Frank Furedi’s Wasted) - teaching through popular game activities – which further reinforces the passive-consumer identity –  although I might er be guilty of this myself!

Five – Shaming Young People Who Take Education—But Not Their Schooling—Seriously. This is where the government equates just being at school and completing school with a minimum standard of qualifications as an indicator that you are a ‘valued member of society’ who is ‘heading for success’ – the other side of this equation is to damn and even criminalise those people who are not in school or who do not finish school.

In the UK the gradual expansion of the ‘education life-cycle’ – children now start younger and within three years will have to stay in some kind of education or training until 18 – suggests a similar trend towards the state pushing the value of education, as does the state’s right to imprison parents of truanting children.

AS to demonising those who fail – the term NEETS – 16-24 year olds Not in Education, Employment or Training has also appeared in the last decade – the term being pretty much synomous with the roughly million strong young underlcass who have failed everything in school. These are seen as such a threat to society that government task forces have been commissioned to figure out what to do with them. (On this note there is a book I’m looking forward to reading that covers the demonisation of the working class more generally – ) 

Six – The Normalisation of Surveillance – Once again – yes yes yes – one of the most obvious trends in the UK – the most surveilled society on earth – just in college we have the crystal registration system, then a seperate attendance monitoring system, 4 interim reports, and parents evenings. These processes are all found in primary and secondary schools as well of course, all required for effective monitoring of progress. There is also a system in place which alerts authorities to ‘potential problem students’ before they start school so that they can be put into special measures when they start.

This excellent podcast looks at what students think of surveillance – it includes some pretty grim material of the inreasing use of cameras in toilets.

Seven – Television - well at least we don’t have Fox News! Not that it would matter because students aren’t interested in news. Here the author notes the pacifying effects of TV on students – well intuitively I agree that TV has a negative effect, very difficult to prove this of course, this reminds me of some nice research from 2006 - apparantly 1 in 6 young people think they have a realistic chance of becoming famous like someone off Big Brother – suggesting TV does matter.

I’m also convinced that, and Darren Brown had better watch out, that I can pick which students’ parents read the Daily Mail Comic after a month of listing to their views.

Finally, it is worrying how much students love watching videos in class – OK there are a lot of good documentaries for Sociology thanks mainly to C4, the Beeb and especially indepednents, but sometimes I think I could stick on any old nonsense and the students’s be happy. Getting them to disuss even the most basic points from a 20 minute vid is, however, much more difficult.

Eight – Fundamentalist Consumerism – the arguement here is that consumer culture undermines the ability of people to form solidaristic movements

Are students affected by consumerism? Well many of them are – interested in Fashion and expressing their identities through the stuff that they buy – but a number are also more than just consumers – I’m not so pessimistic about this – perhaps things are genuninly worse in the US?

Overall I’d say similar trends are occuring in the UK, but I’m not convinced that UK youth are as passive and consumerist as Americans – I think there’s hope for the future – especially when our elites are making such arses of themselves and such a bloody mess of our society.

Nicola Roberts - naturally skinny?

Even though she’s a lesbian? Well look, actually I don’t know if she’s a lesbian or bisexual or what and frankly I don’t care – whatever – and I mean ‘whatever’ – her sexuality is – she is obviously obsessed with her looks and judging by the photos below it appears that she actually wants wants to be a seen as a mannequin, and so her sexuality, whatever way she swings, is obviously very tightly woven into her body image – hence why I think we can call her a female eunuch… It’s all about the display and apparently not much else.

If you listen to the lyrics of her latest song ‘beat of my drum’ – which seems to be about how she’s going to tempt girls away from men – there is no content whatsoever, and I mean none at al,l other than ‘I’m sexy, I’ll have you eventually’ -the chorus…

girl imma make you march to the beat of my drum
want to put it on ya baby you’ll be in love
if you got a man i’ll make you forget him
playin hard to get , i aint even gon sweat it
girl make you march to the beat of my drum
i will have your heart the second we touch .
if you got a man ill make you forget him
right here on the floor, imma tell you how to march to the beat of my drum’

Nicola Roberts - no just kidding I found this mannequin in a local skip

Nicola Roberts – if you want to be seen as a mannequin, congratulations, you’ve won me over – you are truly, madly, deeply vacuous beyond compare.

Nice article by Polly Toynbe outlining how banks are failing to lend to small businesses and when they do how they charge huge interest rates – of around 15% – while at the same time inflating their profits and continuing to pay out huge bonuses to their chief executives. Well worth a read, although it will depress you.

Toynbe mentions that part of the problem is that, even though we own RBS, there are no hard and fast rules or targets on how much it has to lend to small businesses – just loose promises, which is so unlike the strict conditions you have to sign up to when you take out a loan or a mortgage. Yet more evidence of the Transnational Capitalist Class (Bob Diamond is very much definitely part of this) having too much of the wrong kind of freedom -

• Implied only violent rapes were serious
• Blamed Feminism for the lack of jobs for men
• Told Angela Eagle M.P. to ‘calm down dear’ in the house of commons’

DC - prime minister

Ken Clarke - Lord Chancellor

David Willets - University Minister - and kinda funny looking bloke

Very interesting double page spread in The Guardian this Saturday outlining how the coalition government has a poor track record on gender equality. Some of the key points include

• Ken Clarke’s proposal that the CJS should  offer anonymity to alleged rapists and Ken Clarke implying that only violent rapes are serious
• Women will be hit harder by the public sector job cuts compared to men – the number of unemployed women rose for the 10th consecutive month to 474000 last month – the highest figure in 15 years – although still half that of men.
• The pay gap stands at 20% in the private sector and 12% in the public sector
• Cuts to child care and social care benefits will cost women £30m, compared with just under £12m for men – given that they are more involved with these roles
• Finally, there is evidence of a culture of sexism in Westminster – even though there are a record number of women in parliament – 143, only 4 out of the 23 cabinet members are women. The following made the comments mentioned above
• Ken Clarke – implied only violent rapes were serious
• David Willets – blamed Feminism for the lack of jobs for men
• David Cameron told Angela Eagle to ‘Calm Down’

This coming Monday – Adam Curtis’ latest documentary exploring the increasing influence of computers in modern life   this coming Monday on BBC2 – 9 PM – with the above title.

If past form is anything to go by – The Trap and The Power of Nightmares – this should be the best thing on TV this year! In fact The Trap should be compulsory viewing for anyone studying Sociology – it’s way beyond the A level spec, but fascinating. On youtube here

The Trap – Whatever Happened to Our Dreams of Freedom – below – is easiest to watch on Google videos – the general gist being that governments since world war two have changed our world in the name of freedom but what we have ended up with at home is a world of reduced opportunity and class privilege, while abroad the wars America fights in the name of democracy inspire anti-democratic movements and terrorism.

Part 1 – Fuck You Buddy

Part 2 – The Lonely Robot

Part 3 – We Will Force U 2 Be Free

My favourite quote – in the first two minutes of episode one – by an American soldier in what must be Iraq or Afghanistan ‘we are here for your fucking freedom, now back up right now’.

Unjust Rewards – An Exploration of the extent of inequality in Modern Britain that looks at the contrasting lives of the rich and the poor is yet another book I should’ve read when I bought it over 2 years ago! Still it serves as an interesting basis for researching the differences between the rich and the poor, and their values and attitudes towards their situation.

Chapter one outlines some well touted stats on inequality in contemporary Britain – I won’t go into details, but one thing that stood out (actually from chapter 2) Looking at executive pay – between 2000 – 2007 average earnings in the UK grew by 30%, while chief executive pay among the FTSE 100 companies rose by 150%; in the United States, by 2007, the average chief executive was earning 600 times the average manual worker, I will update these at some point!

Chapter two, based around interviews with those in the top 0.1% of earners who work for city law and finance firms and earn between 500 000 and 1 million, outlines what the wealthy know about wages in modern Britain and how they justify their own worth.  NB – Toynbee found it difficult to gain access to this group – and they would only speak on the basis of anonymity.

These people, who have massive economic power and speak with authority on economic issues, have no idea about average incomes in the UK – firstly, they tend to underestimate just how wealthy they are – putting themselves closer to the average than they actually are – they thought that you would have to earn 162 000 to get into the top ten percent of earners, and that the poverty line stood at 22 000 – in reality the official figures stand at 40 000 and 11 000 respectively . They then offered the following justifications for their huge earnings –

• They are the economic benefactors of the country
• They are paid so much because they are competing with a global elite, so are top of the game globally rather than just nationally
• If they weren’t paid so much they would take their huge talents elsewhere
• They have worked hard for it – citing examples of pulling heroic all nighters to finish off contracts
• On taxation – they believed they shouldn’t be taxed more because government can’t be trusted to spend money efficiently, and that their cash shouldn’t go to those on benefits because they are essentially feckless – basically citing the daily mail line.
• They also believe they need their money to maintain a lifestyle equivalent to that of other people they mix with. This of course is a result of wealth and status inequality, Danny Dorling’s Injustice is good on this.

Of course, in reality, the above are myths – these people are not competing globally – most of them are British born, and have networked their way into their jobs via elite schools and universities – they are not interested in competition – they and their firms make their money by creating an image that they are the best at what they do and then selling their services for a huge profit, and they maintain their wages by blocking the majority of people from competing for their positions.

Chapter three investigates why Britain’s chief executives get paid so much money – basically those at the top are not especially talented people – and there is no correlation between company performance and executive pay – for every Alan Sugar there are dozens of bureaucratic pen pushers who just go with the flow. Worryingly old boy’s networks restrict access to the boards of the FTSE 100 companies – how else could it be that, in the age of globalization, 85% of CEOs of the FTSE 100 companies are British? Also, If there was true competition for these jobs the field would be much more international, and if there was genuine competition for these jobs, wages and bonuses would be driven down! Instead CEOs get paid as much as they do because they demand it – and they base their demands on what other CEOs are demanding – and their demands for ever increasing wages get pushed through at board meetings because of recommendations by consultants who make their recommendations for wage and bonus increases by looking at other CEOs salaries. Toynbee doesn’t analyse where the wage increases started from, which is an omission.

Chapter three…  ‘the discrete anxieties of the Bourgeoisie’ doesn’t hold together that well – it starts off by outlining how wealth differences within the top 0.1% of earners make those at the bottom of these 30 000 or so individuals feel relatively deprived compared to those at the top – the super rich – and it is these super rich who have pushed up property prices in London by being able to pay millions of pounds for the most exclusive properties. This sense of relative deprivation then filters down to ‘middle England’ who compare themselves to the richest 0.1% and some of whom may really struggle to have what they regard as a good quality of life (holidays etc.) on their 40 000 wage packets – especially if they live in the south east and if this is per household and they have family to support.

The next section of chapter three outlines a piece of research by the Fabian Society in which middle income earners were interviewed about the attitudes to taxation and poverty – initially they didn’t think anyone was really poor, but that those at the bottom were poor because of their own fecklessness – again, classic daily mail stuff – but once they were informed about the real situation, their attitudes softened and the groups agreed that an increase in income tax of 2 pence in the pound would be worth it to alleviate this poverty.

The next sections of the book look at the lives of the poor, and then policies that might help resolve inequality in modern Britain – will be forthcoming!

Would you like to add me as a friend?

I haven’t posted a music link in ages – well except for the one in the last post – there’s really little room for misinterpreting what Chumabawamba think of lives lead through social networking sites in this one!