When patient care be under attack? What do you do? Stand up, fight back!

God knows, there are plenty of problems with health care in this country - access, outcomes, etc. When my much beloved primary care physician bailed to practice concierge medicine, it was difficult to find a primary in the MGH-Brigham system who wasn't located a train, two buses, and a walk uphill (both ways) away from where I live. To stay in walking distance of my medical care (admittedly a luxury) I had to settle for having a resident as my PCP. Which is fine in some respects. She's quite good, very responsive, and I like her a lot. But in another year or so, she'll be moving on. I'm trying to convince her to specialize in geriatric primary care, but she seems hell bent on urology. When Dr. O goes, I'll probably get another resident. There are, at present, no PCP's in Boston in the MGH-Brigham system who are accepting patients.

And this is within the non-profit world of medicine.

Everything, it seems to me, is far worse in the for-profit health care systems, which (most? all?) studies seem to suggest have worse outcomes. 

The pressure to spend less on actually delivering care to individual patients, while seeing more and more of those patients in rushed-through, truncated visits is bad enough in the non-profits, let alone in the systems owned by private equity and/or by doctors focused more on profit maximization than on becoming latter-day Dr. Welbys. 

Case in point is Steward Health Care, which was founded in Massachusetts but, post-bankruptcy, is no longer operating here. Among other choice details of their operation: the system didn't pay the bill on a piece of critical equipment, so it got repossessed. Too bad a woman who'd just given birth needed it to save her life. By the time the Steward hospital transferred her to a hospital (non-profit, of course) that had the key device, it was too late. She bled to death, leaving her devastated husband and perfectly healthy baby girl behind. That and a picture of the glowing new mom holding her beautiful infant a short while before she died. 

This woman is not the only one to alleged to have died due to staffing and/or equipment shortages at Steward hospitals. 

Another nifty feature of Steward was its CEO, Dr. Ralph de la Torre, who used the system to fund an extravagent private jet, swanky yacht(s) lifestyle. 

So, while I'm more than happy to see healthcare professionals make a good living, I'm a believer that healthcare institutions shouldn't be run on a for-profit basis.

Apparently, the doctors at Eugene (Oregon) Emergency Physicians (EEP) agree. This is a smallish (40 doctors and PA's), local, doctor-owned practice that runs the emergency department for some local medical centers. They were about to be replaced by Apollo MD, a national corporate for-profit entity. 

EEP pushed back, arguing that bringing in Apollo would violate a 2025 Oregon law that "bans corporations from taking control of a medical practice's operations and finances."

The case garnered national interest because Oregon's new law targets the loopholes large staffing firms have been employing to circumvent state corporate medicine laws.

Most states have laws requiring that doctors own medical practices, not corporations. These rules aim to put patient interests ahead of profit motives. Over the last several years, companies have used a model where a doctor technically owns the local practice, but as Erin Fuse Brown, a professor at Brown University, explains, those physician owners are often not involved in care and cede hiring, firing and other operational functions to the corporation.

Fuse Brown said these arrangements are attractive to hospitals because these companies often promise more revenue and take over the responsibilities that come with running an ER.

"There's worry that these investors or these corporate management companies should not be totally controlling the operations and the clinical decisions of those who are trained to deliver patient care," Fuse Brown said. (Source: NPR)

These rules aim to put patient interests ahead of profit motives which seems to be the heart of the matter for the doctors at EEP, which feared that patient care would be compromised. They also feared that if Apollo started meddling in the delivery of care and they pushed back, they would lose their hours. Which seems like a reasonable double whammy fear: potentially worse care for the patients, potentially worse income for the doctors. 

The EEP pushback was successful. 

The medical center that had been considering going with Apollo decided to stick with EEP. 

Questions are still whirling around about the long-term viability of physician-owned practices. 

Do they need the investment in business expertise and systems that a corporation can provide?

And, as noted in the NPR article, some practices may be nominally physican owned, but those doctor's are owners, not actually delivering any care. So it's not as if Dr. Doug Ross (George Clooney on ER, which I never watched for some reason when he was on it) and Dr. Robby (Noah Wyle on The Pitt, which is pretty much my favorite TV thang) may be owners, but they're hip deep in gore. 

Anyway, happy to see that the little guys at Eugene Emergency Physicians, when they saw that their livelihoods and maybe their patients' lives were under attack, decided to stand up and fight back. 

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Image Source: Vecteezy

Spies are everywhere. (So glad I'm out of the fray.)

A few weeks ago, my sister Trish retired. A week before her big day, she turned 67. Since she always had a part-time job in high school, and throughout college, she figures she'd been working pretty much steadily for 50+ years. She'd spent 30 of those years with the company she retired from, and might have been convinced to stay on a while longer if it had not been for the company's mean-spirited decision to totally do away with work from home a few days a week and return to a full five-days in the office mandate.

Interestingly, a number of her colleagues of similar age and tenure with the company are retiring for much the same reason - even though most employees worked fully from home without any productivity issues. 

You won't get any argument here - or from my sister Trish - that being in the office at least some of the time is important for a lot of reasons - including, for many, the desire to have the in-person camaraderie and social-life-at-work aspects. (A positive for both me and my sister during our careers.) But Trish had an onerous commute and once she got to the office (which had even done away with cubicles - let alone offices - for the masses - for a fully open concept approach) none of the members of her team were there. The people she worked most closely with were in NY, London, Atlanta...

The pay, bonus plan, and benefits were pretty good at Trish's company (where, as it happens, I had worked many years ago when it was pretty much the same entity, but as part of a much smaller corporation and with different ownership). And Trish's work over the decades had been reasonably interesting and challenging, and she had some terrific colleagues. But there were reasons beyond the WFH fatwa to want out of this company, of course. The pressure to deploy AI. The Trumpian senior management. (A former executive, who is also the spouse of the company's CEO, holds a senior position in the Trump administration.) And the creepy electronic surveillance. Badge swipe to use the bathroom, anyone?

But as far as I know, Trish's former place of employ was not using emotion AI (alternate term, affective computing) to analyze the personality types of its employees:

Some products analyze video of meetings or job interviews or focus groups; others listen to audio for pitch, tone, and word choice; still others can scan chat transcripts or emails and spit out a report about worker sentiment. Sometimes, the emotion AI is baked in as a feature in multiuse software, or sold as part of an expensive analytics package marketed to businesses. But it’s also available as a stand-alone product, and the barrier to entry is shin-high. (Source: The Atlantic)

There is nothing new about using software to monitor employees. For a long while, there have been apps that measure how many keystrokes someone sitting at a computer is making to assess whether they're working. Or at least pecking at the keys. On the emotion tracking side, call centers have long (notoriously) "listened in" on customer service reps to track tone of voice and word choice. 

What's changing is who's being monitored.

In 2022, the writer Cory Doctorow theorized about what he called the “Shitty Technology Adoption Curve”: Extractive technologies, he wrote, come first to people in precarious circumstances—like, say, low-wage jobs—before they are refined and normalized and brought to people in greater positions of power. “Each disciplinary technology,” he later wrote, “starts with people way down on the ladder, then ascends the ladder, rung by rung.”

And so emotion AI is working it's way to the top, and has stepped onto the white-collar rung.  

Shitty Technlogy galore!

The Slack integration Aware advertises its ability to continuously monitor messages for “sentiment and toxicity”; Azure, Microsoft’s cloud-computing software, also allows employers to, theoretically, use AI to batch-analyze workers’ chat messages. MorphCast’s Zoom extension tracks, in real time, meeting participants’ attention, excitement, and positivity. The emotion-AI company Imentiv advises clients on applying emotional analysis to the job-interview process, promising employers detailed analysis of candidates’ emotional engagement, intensity, and valence, as well as personality type. A number of HR companies are turning toward AI that applies sentiment analysis to employee surveys. Framery, which makes soundproof phone pods and sells them to companies such as Microsoft and L’Oreal, has tested outfitting its chairs with biosensors capable of measuring heart rate, breathing rate, and nervousness.

Years ago, I had a colleague who was criticized by his (jerk of a) boss for his terrible body language at a meeting. What he had been doing was leaning in, nodding when he agreed with something, and offering positive input. Trouble was, the meeting was with his boss's enemy, who was presenting the plan for a new product, and she felt he should have been leaning back and glowering with his arms crossed. (Although I've had a few exchanges and, early on, a couple of lunches, with my former colleague over the years - make that decades - since we last worked together, I hadn't thought about this incident, or this idiotic boss, in years. She's still out there, only now she's out West selling insurance.) 

Of course, there's nothing new about personality typing in the workplace, either. Forty years ago, when I was working at Wang Labs - of all awful places - my team had an offsite in which we all took the Myers-Briggs assessment. (INTJ, baby.) It was supposed to help us figure out how to get along with folks with different personality types. Turns out most of us were brainy, analytical introverts, and we all got along just fine, thank you.

This was by no means the only personality-typing test I took part in over the years. It must have been a big corporate off-site dealio in the 1980's and 1990's. 

So people have been reading employee emotions for eons. But the software spying is something new.

But, blessedly, none of it was emotion AI. 

When it comes to emotion AI, there are plenty of skeptics. Unless there are safety or health reasons for it, the EU has banned workplace use of emotion AI. 

Good for the EU!

Needless to say, we won't see any similar pushback in the States anytime soon. That said, I can see some states trying to regulate it.

But it's gut wrenching to see the dignity, privacy, and autonomy of workers so eroded by the masters of the universe buying into whatever the tech bros are selling.

Spies are indeed everywhere. I'm so glad I'm out of the fray, and delighted for my sister Trish that she is, too. Who wants AI capturing every grimace and eye-roll. 

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Image Source: MadIsMadFunny

Data Labelers Unite! (LFG!)

It will come as no surprise to anyone that AI, along with its tremendous potential to (along with the occasional good thing) wreck the environment, break all and every social compact, destroy the economy, and out and out kill people (e.g., encouraging young people to kill themselves; identifying deadly mushrooms as edible (oops!); mistakenly targeting schools for bombing (collateral damage, anyone?) is also responsible for worker exploitation in Africa.

AI work is a major part of the Kenyan economy, where many Kenyans labor as content moderators and data labelers. 

Data labelers train, refine, and moderate the outputs of AI tools made by the largest companies in the world, yet they are wildly underpaid and haven’t benefitted from the runaway valuations of AI companies.  (Souroce: 404 Media)

A lot of this data labeling involves "annotating what [is] happening in every frame" of a porn video. Kenyan workers are also helping train up AI sexbots, providing the human element in raunchy and just-plain-sad talk sessions with all the lonely people who rely on the Internet for sex and companionship. The actual human workers are, of course, putting themselves out of business, given that the goal is to improve the verisimilitude of sexbots, obviating the need for any human involvement. More money for the AI tech bro masters of the universe! Yay!

It will come as no surprise that the work that the data labelers and other AI-adjacent workers are ill-paid and work under dreadful conditions. Given the content of their work, which involves "horrific content," many end up suffering from insomnia, PTSD, and sexual dysfunction in their actual human-to-human, skin-to-skin, honest-to-god real human lives. 

But those Kenyan workers now have an organization behind them, the Data Labelers Association, which works:

...to organize workers to fight for better pay, better mental health services, an end to draconian non-disclosure agreements, and better benefits for a workforce that often earns just a few dollars a day. Data labelers train, refine, and moderate the outputs of AI tools made by the largest companies in the world, yet they are wildly underpaid and haven’t benefitted from the runaway valuations of AI companies.

It will come as no surprise that the treatment of Kenyan workers is seen as an updated, teched-up version of the exploitation of African laborers by the imperialist companies that pillaged (and continue to pillage) the continent for its wealth of natural resources. Move over DeBeers and Exxon-Mobil. Today they've got company: "it's Apple, it's Meta, it's Gemini." It's Sam Altman. It's Elon Musk. 

All part of the AI hype cycle:

...the promotional messaging and institutional ideology that casts artificial intelligence—particularly so-called “superintelligence”—as “inevitable” and destined to bring historic “transformation.”...

AI hype is the next chapter in the colonial playbook. It reframes the exploitation of African digital workers as “innovation” and is a tool of power wielded by profiteers of colonial extractivism in the digital age. It functions as a carefully crafted cover story by disguising appropriation in the language of “progress.” (Source: Tech Policy)

The Tech Policy article linked above is worth a full read. Sure it's lefty-ish, but it raises important issues around AI.

Declaring AI inevitable is how hype becomes colonial power. The rhetoric of inevitability, in particular, stages hype as a manifest destiny, stripping away the possibility of refusal or alternative futures. 

All the hype about AI's transformative capabilities and its inevitability, with some occasional kneejerk BS thrown in on how AI is going to benefit everybody, is creating an environment where AI will be seen as inevitable and not worth resisting. We'll passively just sit here and let the tsunami wash over us and only then will we realize that it didn't exactly benefit everybody.

Will our coin-operated polity ever be able to hit the pause button, take a deep breath, and figure out how to get our hands around the AI beast? 

I pinball around between 'God help us!,' 'Glad I'll be dead," and 'LFG.'

Today I'm feeling pretty Let's Fucking Go. Don't exactly know what this will entail, but it's got to be before it's too late. 

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Image Source: Tech Policy

Yes, chef? Maybe not for much longer

When I was young, I logged a lot of hours as a waitress.

None of those hours were logged in any place fancy: no executive chefs, no sous chefs, no tall white toques. 

My first waitressing gig was at the neighborhood Big Boy, where at any given time there were two or three guys manning the line, grilling up the burgers, frying up the onion rings. John. Danny. Timmy. Bob. Don. Mel. The other John, who worked in the basement prepping items for the line. I seem to remember him breading the onion rings.

I don't remember all the fellows - and they were all men (or boys-to-men) - who I met during my two summers and one Christmas vacation working there, but they were a combo of blue collar, hardworking guys and hippies, who weren't quite as hardworking as the blue collars, but tended to be pretty interesting. John (upstairs John), Danny, and Timmy were brothers, and genuinely nice men. (And cute.) Bob was a nasty a-hole. Don was okay, but a bit rough around the edges. (I think he'd just gotten out of jail.) Mel talked about writing a novel called 86 that Dream. John (downstairs John) was a very handsome Jamaican guy who loved Tom Jones, and blared his music.

Sometimes the cooks fought with each other. Sometimes they yelled at the waitresses. But the only violence I ever witnessed at Big Boy was when a busboy had a bit of a breakdown and started beating his head against the cement block wall in the basement.

Union Oyster House, my next waitressing stop, was far fancier and more upscale than Big Boy. It was a big tourist destination, had a full bar, some fancy - or what counted for fancy 50+ years ago - menu items (Oysters Rockefeller, Lobster Thermidor), and had supposedly been a haunt of pre-Jackie JFK when he was a young Congressman representing Boston. (Amazing to think of it now, but when I waitressed at Union Oyster, JFK had been dead less than 10 years.) All that, but no head chef toque-wearing nonsense.

We had cooks, mostly Jamaicans, a couple of Greeks who mostly handled the raw shelfish and steamers, and a salad maker named Willie who made salads and shrimp cocktails with a perpetual stogie hanging out of his mouth. His big line to all the waitresses, which he must have repeated dozens of times each day was, "I had a dream about you last night. We was making love." The Greek guys spoke very little English, but were always inviting the young waitresses out to the Club Plaka. (One night we actually went and had fun slurping down retsina shots and doing some sort of circle dance with a scarf.) 

The Jamaican guys were riotously funny, if you consider occasionally frying up cockroaches in the Fisherman's Platter mix riotously funny. The funniest thing they did happened on a night the power went out. They had a small generator that could keep some lights on, but the AC was gone, and this was a hot August night, and for some reason the busiest night of the summer. The managers put candles out in the dining room and we carried on. The kitchen - as you can imagine - became unbearable, and the Jamaican fellows running the giant gas stoves and fryolators were bearing the brunt of it. 

Their complaints fell on deaf management ears - The house was full! The show must go on! - until the cooks figured out how to shut the place down. They took off all their clothing, and the half of the waitressing staff composed of little old first gen Irish ladies from South Boston weren't going to go into any kitchen where there were a bunch of naked men. Bonus points that these men were all Black.

At the Oyster House, everyone yelled at each other all the time, but most of it was wisecracking, bitching, trashtalking. The only time I saw anyone berated was when I forgot to leave a chit in at the bar for a drink called a Golden Dream. Louie, the bartender, hunted me down in the dining room, grabbed my arm, and screamed at me, "Give me the dupe for that Golden Dream."

To finance a cross-country wander and a four month hitchhiking trek through Europe, I worked after I dropped out of grad school at Durgin Park for a year. Durgin, now closed, was - along with the still-surviving Oyster House - a venerable Boston tourist trap. 

The owner during my time there was a temperamental maniac who put on a daily screaming and yelling performance, with the waitresses being his favorite targets. (His second favorite target: the customers.) It would take a book - or at least a long chapter - to describe just what an insane environment Durgin was. But I don't remember insanity among the cooks. There was Billy B. (Billy B. couldn't read, so couldn't tell what was on the order slips we submitted. But we had to call out the order when we hung the slips, and Billy B. flawlessly took care of everything from memory.) Henry-the-Elder. (Short and rugged, and a truly nice and kind man.) Henry-the-Younger. (Who looked like Ichabod Crane and was a good kid.) Glenn, the maniac owner's son-in-law who sometimes worked the line, was an object of our sympathy and pity. 

Durgin was hectic and loud, and the owner was as nasty as they get. But he was so over the top, and the old gal waitresses, which Durgin was famous for, so knew how to play him like a fiddle (which they regularly did on behalf of the young gal waitresses he went after), that the craziness was pretty much a laughing matter. And I never saw abuse to or from the cooks.

My waitressing career ended over a half century ago, and wasn't at any high-end restaurants to begin with, but things seemed to have changed. The advent of the celebrity chef, the emergence of the international culinary scene, the world of the "must be seen there scene" restaurant, the extreme and extremely fussy food innovations. All this has turned many of the big deal restaurants into wildly intensive environments that are brutal to work in. 

I read all about it in a NY Times article from March that focused on René Redzepi, a world renowned chef I had never heard of, who stepped down from Noma, a world renowned restaurant I had never heard of. Days before Redzepi had announced his down-steping:

The New York Times [had] reported allegations that Mr. Redzepi had punched, slammed and inflicted other physical punishments on cooks from 2009 to 2017. (Source: NY Times)

Yikes!

Okay, yikes!, but something that's a lot more widespread than one chef at Noma.  

The situation at Noma has apparently:

...lent new urgency to a conversation in the global restaurant industry about how to fix professional kitchens once and for all. Although past scandals and the #MeToo movement have resulted in better conditions at many restaurants, chefs said bullying and abuse still persist at too many others.

Dominique Crenn, the first woman in the United States to head a restaurant with three Michelin stars, said it is well past time to change the notion that performing at the highest level in the world’s top kitchens requires humiliation, intimidation or violence.

“We have been talking about this forever,” she said.

The up and coming chefs, it seems, just aren't going to take it any longer. 

A growing cohort of chefs — people who are young, who are not men and who are very online — say they want to hold the industry to account for the abuse and discrimination that have persisted in restaurant kitchens.

...Tiffani Faison, a chef in Boston, said that public awareness of abuse in restaurants has risen since 2017, when celebrity chefs like Mario Batali were accused of sexual misconduct and dethroned, but the reckoning didn’t go far enough.

“We changed the curtains, but we didn’t remodel the house,” she said. “And we still haven’t cleaned out the basement where we hid the skeletons.”

Whether you're working in the unglamorous sorts of restaurants I worked in, or some $1,000 a plate glam spot with an eleven month waiting list to sup on the likes of vaporized truffle gnat eye, restaurant kitchens are going to be hot, tense, noisy, and hectic. Plus dangerous: boiling oil, hot stoves, knives. Comes with the territory. But they don't need to be toxic and abusive. No workplace does. 

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Image Source: Etsy

WeStillWork

Last December I turned 75 and finally decided to pack it in, workwise. 

For the prior few years, I hadn't been doing all that much work, and was down to just one client that I wrote a bi-weekly blogpost for. Not exactly heavy lifting. I loved the client. I'd been working with this small electronics engineering outfit for years, and had always said that, if I were ever going to return to work full time, it would have been for them.

Still, I was done with coming up with embedded systems topics and pretending I was an EE. (I wrote the posts in the name of one of the company's founders.) So I quit.

It's not as if I don't work at all.

I volunteer Monday, Thursday, and every other Friday at a homeless shelter, and on any given day, depending on what the needs are, I'm there for four to six hours. Although I do occasionally have to schlepp boxes full of shampoo or razors for short distances, this job doesn't require a lot of heavy lifting either. What I'm doing is handing out shampoo, razors, and other stuff, or serving lunch. 

But it's tiring being on my feet for four to six hours at a whack, and it can be emotionally exhausting, as well. 

The people we serve have had hard lives. Bad childhoods, bad educations, bad health, bad marriages, bad choices, and - and this is the universal - bad luck. It's not an official part of my volunteer work, but a lot of the guests talk to me. Sometimes the talk is just baseball or 'hey, you sound like you're from Chicago." Sometimes it's hearing their stories. Gulp.

Plus, there's often a level of tension. Folks complain. They yell. They blow off steam. They fight. They OD. (Blessedly, that's rare.) 

When I get home, I'm exhausted. On many days, I take an official nap. On many other days, I drift off for mini-cat-naps with a book in my hand. 

I'm a healthy and vigorous 75. I'm no exercise queen, but I average 5 miles a day walking. (Used to do 7 miles, but I have way too many joints where the arthritis started kicking in.) If I had to, I could keep working. I'm just happy I don't have to.

Still, there are many folks my age who do remain happily working. And many more who are working because they unhappily have to. 

McSweeney's, the humor site, recently had a little satirical piece by Emily Kapp and Daniel Stillman on the mythical WeStillWork, the Nursing Home for People Who Can’t Afford to Retire.

Painfully funny, painfully true. Or at least painfully true-ish. 

Looking forward to your golden years, but afraid you’ll never be able to afford it? Our state-of-the-art facility offers elderly corporate drones the comfort of a living space with the same lack of character as an office cubicle. Be surrounded by like-minded residents like yourself, who will be working on their laptops to pay off their bills until the day they die.

Lots of amenities at WeStillWork. Like day-to-day leases in case you get fired or die. (These are for touch-and-go members. You can opt for a longer lease if you like.) A play area so you can take your grandkids to work with you. The Fun Room features "wooden blocks, one singular Barbie with its head ripped off, and a TV from 2002 that doesn’t work." IT support provided by techies in hospice. (Now that's grim.)

And:

On-the-Clock Job Coaches for When You’re Fired for Being Too Old. At WeStillWork, we know ageism is real. But as we say here, “You still gotta pay the bills.” That’s why we have on-site job coaches to help you find your next gig when you get canned from your current one for hugging the vice president of HR uncomfortably long.

There are testimonials from "happy" westillworkers. A terminally ill ninety-six year old graphic designer. An eighty-five year old digital marketing manager who always loved working six days a week because he hated his wife and kids. 

Then there's Gus, an eighty-one year old social media influencer:

“WeStillWork makes it easy to both live and work. I just got off my yearly performance review call, while Stephanie, my night nurse, bathed me. Flexibility at its finest.”

I know plenty of people who are working at volunteer or work-work well into their 70's and 80's. Most of the work-workers who come to mind are people who worked for themselves in some capacity. If I didn't have my volunteer work, I might have hung on to my work-work for a little longer, as it was completely flexible in terms of  where, when, and for whom I worked. My fellow volunteers - roughly my age, mid to late 70's - include a retired Delta pilot and a retired judge. 

I also know plenty of people who are completely retired and enjoy having time to do whatever they damned well please: golf, travel, hang with the grandkids, join a book club, take courses.

Whether we're working as volunteers, work-working at something we enjoy, or just plain kicking it, we are the lucky ones. 

The ones working at crappy jobs they hate are the elders I feel bad for.

WeStillWork may be satirical, but like all good satire, there's a goodly element of truth in there. 

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Image Source: Carrier Chronicles

Tech work just ain't what it used to be

I never worked for one of those perk-laden tech companies. Oh, some of them were perky enough to have video games in the kitchen and beer bash Fridays, but none of the goodies that today's tech behemoths offered when they were in their early years. 

Rachel Grey joined Google in 2007:

At a two-week orientation at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., Ms. Grey discovered a utopia of perks. The company’s cafeterias served steak and shrimp, kitchens were stocked with fresh juices and gyms offered free workout classes. Workers received stock grants on top of their salaries, a 50 percent match on their retirement contributions and a Christmas bonus that came in the form of $1,000 tucked in an envelope. (Source: NY Times)

Google was also pretty transparent about sharing information with employees. 

Over time, the benefits and transparency dwindled.

For years, Google famously went by an informal motto: Don't be evil. But not being evil can sometimes be at odds with a corporate desire to make profits, whatever the cost to lives, limbs, hearts, and souls. And, thus, Google did what companies do and:

.. abandoned a pledge that its artificial intelligence would not be used for weapons. 

Employees at Google and the other mega techs that have defined the 21st century tech-dominated era - Apple, Meta, Twitter - were once encouraged to speak up. Not so much these days, when it's more speak up? get out!

It’s the shut up and grind era, workers said.

Many tech companies still provide free lunch. But there's really no such thing as a free lunch:

“Tech could still be best in terms of free lunch and a high salary,” Ms. Grey said, but “the level of fear has gone way up.”

“I suppose it’s better to have lunch and be scared to death than to not have lunch and be scared to death, but I don’t know if it’s good for you to be there,” she added.

Not surprisingly, Ms. Grey is no longer a Googler. And tens of thousands of others have lost their jobs at the behemoths, in the name of greater efficiency (and the greater desire of the already unfathomably rich to get even more unfathomably richer). But also due to shifts in corporate policies that are increasingly aligned with Trump-era dictates to end anything that smacks of DEI and to promote "free speech" (especially as it applies to white nationalism and anti-science) by curtailing fact checking. Not to mention decency checking. (Racist? Sexist? Homophobic? Come on down!)

But the shift in tech was compounded by the rise of generative artificial intelligence, which executives say has already made some jobs redundant. In January, Mr. [Mark] Zuckerberg said he believed A.I. would replace some midlevel engineers this year. Mr. [Elon] Musk went further, predicting last year that A.I. would eventually eliminate all jobs.

“The tide has definitely turned against tech workers,” said Catherine Bracy, the founder and chief executive of TechEquity, a nonprofit that pushes for economic inclusion in the industry. “Companies have even more leverage to use against workers, and A.I. is supercharging that.”

From what I've seen from AI search results, AI is not yet ready for primetime. Which is not to say that it won't be at some point. Which is not to say that the Musks, Bezoses, and Zuckerbergs of the world could give two shits if AI ends up replacing 99% of tech and other white-collar workers - as long as they can become unfathomably richer and can fully protect themselves from the pitchfork-wielding masses who might well rise up if we reach Depression-era and beyond levels of unemployment. 

Even though we didn't get free lunches and swank offices, I mostly enjoyed working in the tech industry of yore. There were always layoffs, so tech of my era was never about lifetime tenure. We all knew that we were replaceable and/or expendable. But we never had to worry about being replaced by an AI.

I just hate to see the balance shift so rapidly against the workers, and in favor of the upper-ups who revel in having the upperhand. Tech workers may not be risking their lives shoveling coal into a blast furnace for twenty cents an hour, and no one's guaranteed a free lunch, but what's happening in tech (and elsewhere) is not good at all for the common good. 

Sigh...

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Image Source: PBS

Worst team-building ever

Offsites were one thing. A day away from the usual office whatever. So what if all anyone came away with was a slew of rolled up flipchart pages full of items that everyone was going to "execute" to turn the company around? It was still a day out. 

But the teambuilding events? Oh, no. 

Mostly, anyway. 

I didn't so much hate the ones where we took personality tests and walked away with tips on how to get along with our psycho-dynamic opposites. (INTJ, by the way.) But even these could gang a bit agley. At one company, we took a poor man's version of Myers-Briggs where we fell into Blue-Green-Red-Orange color groups. I was a Blue: corporate analytic nerds. All the sales guys were Reds, mostly Flaming Reds. At one point, the Flamers, who were hooting, screaming, and chanting in some weird impromptu bonding excercise, turned on us Blues and started hollering and gesturing about what pussies we were, and how they were thrilled they weren't Blue. (Fast forward, and I could understand how members of the press felt at MAGA rallies.)

There was another one where we all painted our own versions of a Van Gogh sunflower picture. That one was okay. It was actually very interesting to see who did what in terms of trying for exact replication vs. vague use of the same color palette.) 

But I didn't like the team building exercises where we had to write and perform a cheer, make a heliocopter out of Tinker Toys, sit back to back with a colleague and tell them something deeply personal about yourself. And the absolute worst: learn to build trust - hah -  by falling back into a colleague's arms. Ugh on ugh. That one I really despised. 

Team building has increasingly taken a philanthropic turn, with groups signing up to do something charitable or other. 

Like hike up a mountain to raise money for the entirely admirable José Andrés' World Central Kitchen, the outfit that shows up whenever and wherever there's a natural or manmade disaster.

Over the summer, a team from Beazley, an insurance firm, climbed Colorado's 14,230 foot Mt. Shavano. 

This was obviously a voluntary event, as 14,230 feet, while doable in a day, is a pretty strenuous hike. (The only mountain I've ever made it to the top of is Mt. Monadnock in NH, which is only a bit over 3,000 feet high. It only took a couple of hours, and that was plenty enough for me. I've climbed Mt. Washington, but only made it as far as Tuckerman's Ravine. And I've also climbed Mt. Katahdin in Maine, the most strenuous hike I've ever been on, but I don't remember whether we got to the top. We're talking over 50 years ago for all of these treks.)

Anyway, underwriter Steve Stephanides, age 46, was on his second Beazley charity hike, which the company has been holding for more than a decade.

As the team of 15 Beazley-ites neared the summit, Steve decided to take a breather. While he was breathing, his colleagues made it to the peak and started heading down. The 14 all made it to the bottom safely.  Steve forged on and got to the top after his colleagues had exited. On the way down, he realized that something was off.

[He] used his cellphone to pin-drop his location to his co-workers, who informed him that he was on the wrong route and instructed him to hike back up to the summit to get to the correct trail down, rescue officials said in a statement. "In his initial attempts to descend, he found himself in the steep boulder and scree field on the northeast slopes toward Shavano Lake," according to officials. 

Just before 4 p.m. local time on Friday, Stephanides sent another location pin-drop to his colleagues that he was near the correct trail. Shortly after that message, a strong storm passed through the area with freezing rain and high winds, rescue officials said in a statement. (Source: ABC News)

Nothing went right for Steve. He lost cellphone reception and took multiple spills - at least twenty falls. After the last one, he couldn't get up. 

Meanwhile, his safe and sound colleagues didn't report that Steve was missing until 9 p.m. "some eight-and-a-half hours after he started his descent, officials said." Eight-and-a-half hours, as it turns out, is roughly waht it takes most hikers to complete the round trip.

Rescue teams sprung into action and after Steve spent a chilly, wet, and solo night in a gully was found near a drainage ditch. He was carried down and taken to a hospital. 

Rescuers said Stephanides was "phenomenally lucky" that the weather cleared on Saturday and he regained enough cellphone service to call 911.

At least Steve was smart enough to finally call 911 and not those colleagues.  

We don't know the full story. Was Steve Stephanides a hiking pro, who waved off his colleagues when they offered to wait up for him? Was he a jerk that they wanted nothing to do with? Were they all from different locations, so weren't a team to begin with, just a bunch of individuals who had Beazley in common, but didn't really work together?  (Steve works in Florida...) 

Were they jerks to abandon their colleague? Shouldn't a cuople of them have stayed at the top to wait for him to arrive? Shouldn't someone have alerted the rescue squads when that storm passed through? And - in a pretty perplexing move - the colleagues, on their way down, had collected the trail markers they had set on the way up. Guess they didn't trust Steve to pick up after himself, and I'm sure one of the rules of the road is to not leave your trail markers behind. Still...

I suspect there'll be plenty of awkward moments if and when these colleagues run into each other. HR might want to intervene. These guys should use some team-building!

I couldn't have done this

When I was in college, I spent my summers waitressing. After college, but before "real life" clicked in, I waitressed for a couple of years to finance travel. Over the years, when frustrated by my "real life" career, I'd often joke that I could always go back to waitressing. But in "real life," I couldn't have. There was much I enjoyed about waiting on tables, but I don't think it would have aged very well. I wouldn't have wanted to be on my feet running around for ten hours. I wouldn't have wanted to come home every night with the smell of roast meat and fried fish in my hair. Sure, everyone has to put up with demanding customers, nasty bosses, and idiotic colleagues, but for me it was probably easier to deal with an idiotic, nasty VP of sales than it would have been to deal with an idiotic, nasty line cook. 

So although I sometimes still joke about waiting tables, I know that I couldn't have. The closest I come is working a lunch or breakfast shift dishing out food at "my" homeless shelter, which is more like being a lunch lady than it is like being a waitress. 

But not Elaine Gingras, a Worcester woman my age who's been working at the IHOP on Route 9 in Shrewsbury for 50 years. 

Over the course of her career, Gingras spent a number of years as the head waitress, but stepped down after a decade or so to leave the thankless managerial stuff, like scheduling, and back to what she loved doing: waiting on tables and mentoring newbies. 

Interacting with customers is what gives Gingras the most joy. For years, she has served individuals and families who are regulars at the IHOP, asking them about their day, where they are from, if they are traveling someplace and even helping them if they were working on a puzzle.

“Some of them have passed on,” Gingras said. “I see families come in with their kids in infancy, and now I see their kids with their kids. I’ve seen generations.” (Source: MassLive)

Mostly, Elaine waited on regular folks, but she did wait on Neil Diamond, who came in with a bodyguard. 

“He had bacon and eggs, toast and coffee,” she said. “Then he told me to be quiet about it.”

My only celebrity serve - other than local pols - was waiting on the members of Blood, Sweat and Tears while I was working at Durgin Park. I don't remember what they ate, but part of the tip was two tickets to their performance at Paul's Mall (the Boston club at the time). The seats were great - front row; the performance was okay.  

I don't know Elaine Gingras, but I bet within two minutes we'd figure out that there's only one or two degrees of separation between us. She trained as a teacher - early on, she waitressed while teaching - and I'm betting she went to Worcester State or Anna Maria. Which means I would have known plenty of girls in her class. In any case, she sounds like a very nice person, and I would have been delighted if I had learned that, at some point early on, our waitressing paths had crossed. Maybe they did. Maybe we worked together at Ted's Big Boy in Webster Square. Or maybe I waited on her. She had waitressing jobs prior to IHOP, so maybe between those gigs and her long tenure at IHOP, she waited on me way back in the day.

So congratulations, Elaine, on your Golden IHOP Anniversary. Fifty years a waitress? Much as I like to kid about it, I never could have done it. Good on ye, Elaine. What a Worcester girl!

And I thought driving to Lowell was a supercommute

My career in technology product marketing was split between companies in Cambridge, where I could commute via public transpo, and companies in the burbs. Where I - ugh - had to drive.

Commuting even to the near suburbs was a drag, especially to Burlington, where I worked on 128, where I got caught in the always-ugly Route 3 and Route 93 chokepoints. But pyschologically, commuting to Lexington (about 12 miles) and Burlington (roughly 18 miles) wasn't all that awful. Lexington? Piece of cake. Theoretically, I could have walked it. (Theoretically.)

But I also spent time further out. Andover (23 miles or so, for two-and-a-half miserable years). Lowell (30 miles or so, for two-and-a-half miserable years). 

These commutes were ghastly, and not just because of the drive. The truth was that, when I got to work, I was seldom happy to be there. Both were ghastly experiences, and how I lasted two-and-a-half years each at these companies now seems unfathomable to me. Although I did make good friends at both of these stops, which I guess is what made those tenures fathomable.)

When I commuted to Lowell, I had to get a dental guard, as I found that, as I neared the office, I started to grind my teeth in time to whatever was on the radio. 

And one night, when I was returning home from Andover, when I'd stayed a bit late and was heading out at 7:30 or so, I started driving the wrong way on the road that was going to put me on Route 93. Fortunately, there was no one coming my way, and I was able to course correct. I'm pretty sure this was a virtual teeth-grinding episode.

All of my suburban commutes were supposedly reverse one, going against the traffic that was heading into Boston. But while heading out to work was quasi-reverse, coming back into Boston was always a cluster. 

I pretty much learned every alternate route, every side trip, every back road. This may not have trimmed any time off the commute, but had the benefit that I was usually moving. As opposed to sitting in traffic on one main route waiting to merge into traffic on the next main route. 

But my commuting trials and tribulations were nothing compared to what Kaitlin Jorgenson goes through. Her commute is 544 miles, which is more than the combined mileage of all four of my suburban commuting stints.

For the past 12 months, Jorgenson has commuted by plane every other week to her job at the Scott J. Aveda Hair Salon in the Upper West Side neighborhood of New York City from her home in Charlotte, North Carolina. (Source: CNBC)

Jorgenson used to live in Brooklyn, but she moved to Charlotte to be with her BF after her landlord jumped her rent by $700 a month. Another compelling reason was that after the pandemic, she came to the realization that she "wanted to go somewhere [she] could be closer to nature and have more space...that didn't cost a fortune."

But after a long time in NYC, she'd forged a great career for herself and didn't want to have to start over, building a new client base. Not to mention that stylists in NYC make a lot more money than they do in Charlotte, NC.

For Jorgenson, commuting four-plus hours by plane twice a month was a much easier pill to swallow than spending more to rent the same 400-square-foot apartment she’d outgrown — and lose the clients she had spent a decade working with.

She was able to switch her schedule, which was only three days to begin with, to every other week. (She now works 12-hour days.) And fortunately, she has a friend with a spare room near her job that she rents. All in all, even with plane fare, etc., her expenses are $2,000 less per month than when she was living in Brooklyn. 

Jorgenson is a super-supercommuter, but there are a lot of folks out there with a daily commute of 90 minutes or more, and the numbers have grown since Covid-19, when:

Companies embraced flexible work models, and people fled major cities.

They may have fled the major cities, but that's where a lot of the jobs remain. So they spend a lot of time getting there and back.

“It isn’t a new concept, think about all the businessmen in suits who fly with a single briefcase for one-day meetings,” says Jorgenson. “I just think the younger generation is learning how to make supercommuting work for our lives and ambitions.”

And I had a hard-enough time un-supercommuting to Lowell and Andover. 

The heart is a lonely worker

There are plenty of reasons to envy the younger generation. Most of these reasons fall under the umbrella of "they have their entire lives ahead of them," and all the joys and heartbreaks, the ups and downs, that comes along with having your entire life ahead of you. (Others fall under the umbrella of fewer aches and pains to deal with.)

There are, of course, countervailing reasons to feel bad what the young folks are dealing with. Factors like the existential threat of climate change. The uncertainty about what AI is going to do to wreak havoc with the job market. The crushing educational debt so many carry. The affordable housing shortage in so many cities. (Looking at you, Boston.) Political divisiveness. 

Every generation has its challenges, but the younger generations have them in spades.

And then when you add on the plague of loneliness.

...thanks to a longstanding decline in social connection, and a pandemic that forced much of the world into isolation, employees today are lonelier than ever. Earlier this year, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy published a report that described “an epidemic of loneliness” that has taken root in America over the last several decades. Making matters more complicated is hybrid work, which has workers spending less time in the office than they did before the pandemic. While many employees enjoy more flexibility — and fewer days commuting — it also means that forming social connections with colleagues is more challenging than ever. (Source: Boston Globe)

And this difficulty forming social connections is worse when you're new to the workplace. You may have moved to a new city for work. You may have gone to college somewhere else, and your college buds are scattered all over the place. You may be living at home with dear old mom and dad.

Many of us meet lifelong friends, our significant others, at work. I know I did.

Work is where people connect in the kitchen making coffee, over an after-work beer, pre-meeting when we find commonality bitching about our boss, working together on a project team, sitting in the airport when our business trip flight's delayed. 

Even if the relationships we forge at work don't stand the test of  time, and even many that survive for years after you work together eventually peter out, they're still important while they last. Having work relationships can mean having someone to go to lunch with. Or hang with over the weekend. To go to a ballgame with, to go shopping. For most people, and even for many of those of us who are hard-core introverts, having folks to share life with is important for our emotional health.

I feel bad for the young people who don't have all the easy opportunities to socialize that my generation enjoyed. 

There's some good news:

Now employers are stepping in to do something about it, creating new initiatives that encourage workers to interact with each other outside of typical work meetings. One of the more common programs among Boston-area companies is a system that sets up randomized coffee chats for employees to get to know each other.

More or less good news, I suppose. A necessity given that normal social interactions no long come as naturally as once they did. 

Coffee chats aren't always in person at Blueprint. Some of them are over Zoom, which takes a little away from it - at least to me.

Blueprint, for example, has a program that pairs employees together for a coffee once a month. Workers can meet up in person, or sip coffee together over Zoom, and talk about life, hobbies, even work, if they so choose. “It’s been a game changer for me,” Durkin says. “I’ve met people at the company that I never would’ve met otherwise.”

The idea, says Debbie Durso-Bumpus, Blueprint’s chief people officer, is to more often stimulate the kind of water cooler discussions that once happened naturally. Those interactions, she says, can start friendships and help workers engage with the company at a deeper level. “We want people to feel connected to this company,” Durso-Bumpus says. “And we know people work better when they have relationships they look forward to at work.”

There isn’t one well-defined reason why Americans today are feeling lonelier than before, but office interactions are increasingly important. Constance Hadley, an organizational psychologist at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, says Americans simply aren’t as social as in decades past, are less involved in civic groups, and don’t attend religious services at the same rate. That puts additional pressure on interactions at work to fulfill our social needs, Hadley says. While it may seem unnecessary, that water cooler talk is key for office workers to have adequate social lives. So, hybrid work may be leaving something of a void for workers.

Recent studies have indicated that some 60 percent of US adults reported feelings of loneliness. That should be alarming to companies, Hadley says, because there is a direct link between loneliness and productivity — it’s in an employer’s best interest for employees to have their social needs met. “We really can’t understate how pervasive of an issue loneliness is for workers,” Hadley says. “It impacts every part of their lives, and that comes back to harm the companies they work for. It’s a bad cycle.”

Programs such as Blueprint’s coffee chats are trying to break that cycle.

Entrada Therapeutics, a Boston-based biotech, has a similar program called “Coffee Roulette” that follows the same idea, with employees getting paired together every two weeks to meet up and have a discussion. Entrada started the program back in 2020 as a means of connecting employees when the office was fully remote, and it has stuck around because of its popularity.

“One of our company’s core values is humanity,” says Kerry Robert, Entrada’s senior vice president of people. “We think quite often about how to cultivate a culture that makes people feel included and part of a team. Coffee Roulette is just one small way that we do that.”

Triverus Consulting, a Woburn-based IT consulting firm, which is still mostly remote, has taken a different approach, giving workers the option to participate in virtual events such as a baking class with a chef from Flour Bakery + Cafe, meditation sessions, or company-wide games.

“It is particularly challenging to get employees feeling connected when we’re still remote,” says Kim Kuzmeskas, the company’s vice president of marketing. “We get great participation in our programs, and I think that speaks to the fact that people really do want to feel connected with their co-workers.”

While these programs are a great start, there’s still some work to be done. Laura Putnam, a workplace well-being expert, said that with loneliness on such a stark rise, employers need to establish a broader culture that makes their workers feel comfortable. Wellness programs can be a part of that, but it also means workers shouldn’t have to hesitate to speak openly about mental health, and there should be abundant resources for struggling employees.

“Loneliness is pretty tricky, and it can be difficult to talk about,” Putnam says. “These wellness programs are great, but they’re designed outside of how the work gets done.” The next step is making sure they’re incorporated into the regular work routine, to keep the connections coming.

The man in the gray flannel suit

Over the course of my career, I saw the corporate dress code go from button-downed/buttoned up to pretty much anything goes. This was, of course, before work from home was much of a thing, so I never worked in a "pants-optional" environment. 

Still, there were standards of sorts, and certain things were frowned on. One colleague (not surprisingly, a techie) showed up one day in a pair of cut-offs that barely covered his junk. He completed his ensemble with a pale yellow shirt that looked suspiciously like a pajama top. His shirt/PJ top had a number of small holes in it, and the back was enhanced by what appeared to be flecks of blood. He was read the riot act by pretty much everyone whose path he crossed that day, and from that day on, pulled his socks up, metaphorically. 

My career was in high tech, which was notoriously leading- edge when it came to informal work garb. I worked at one place that had a "corporate tie," which the execs would put on if they were called in (unplanned) to a client meeting. 

Other places I worked were dressier. At Wang, the techies - as I recall - wore collared shirts and maybe a tie. But the folks in product management and marketing, as I was, wore suits every day. (This was in the day of the menswear suit for women, worn with a menswear shirt with floppy bowtie or a silk shirt with a pussy bow.)

All in all, as time wore on, dress codes at work because less and less that of the prior generation, when white collar men wore suits, and pink collar women wore suits or dresses. 

Even as dressing down became more common, I was never much of a jeans-at-work person. Over the years, I eventually gravitated towards pants or skirt worn with a sweater or shirt and jacket. Men (other than techies) wore khakis and a polo or collared shirts, maybe with a navy blue blazer. All of this came under what we thought of as the business casual category.

The work world is now a different place - even in the downtown precincts where suits were pretty much de rigueur. The man in the gray flannel suit? He's no more.

And downtown folks are apparently grappling with just what business casual means. As local stylist Tara West has observed.

It’s particularly confounding for clients who traditionally have operated in  a conservative suit-and-tie business environment, West says.

“It’s: What do I do? How do I dress? And how do I feel comfortable and show up in the right way?” says West, who runs an eponymous fashion styling company. “People get stumped, especially now, on what is too casual and what is right.” (Source: Boston Globe)

It doesn't sound like any formerly-formal places are moving to "anything goes." If jeans are okay, it's non-ripped jeans. If sneakers are okay, they're Allbirds. 

The relaxation of the corporate dress code is largely happening because the rising generations in the workforce expect it. The ability to dress down is seen as a means to recruit and retain employees. 

Beyond wanting to remain an attractive place to work, however, the shift toward a less-formal dress code allows employers to be more inclusive of gender-fluid workers, those with disabilities, and a multigenerational workforce.

And as UNLV history professor Deirdre Clemente has observed:

“Dress is now a variable in workplace culture in ways they couldn’t have imagined a century ago,” Clemente says. “It’s individuality, personal expression, ethnicity, sexual identity. . . . Those are protected spaces.”

All this is bad news for the likes of retailers like Jos. Banks and Brooks Brothers. And folks can no longer fall back on the old get-Dad-another-tie-for-Father's Day habit. Plus it's not good news for dry cleaners, either. Dockers and jeans go in the washing machine. But informal dress at work is good news for the athleisure market, which is growing crazily. 

The bottom line is flexibility, self-expression, accommodation, use your judgement, un-relax as needed. For CarGurus, a local tech company, they have "explicitly...'no dress code dress code.'

I'm all for it. As long as no one shows up with a junk-revealing cut-offs and blood-flecked PJ tops...

If the Commonwealth of Massachusetts thinks it's a good idea...

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is exploring a bill that would "give a tax credit to businesses in the state that join a pilot program to explore the possible benefits of a shorter work week."

The closest I ever got to a four-day work week was at my last  full-time corporate gig, before I took up the freelance lance nearly twenty years ago.

My deal was that I would come into the office Monday through Thursday, work from home on Friday morning, and (metaphorically) punch out at noon.

IT. WAS. GREAT.

I always managed to get my work done, and to be relieved, one day a week, from my onerous commute was a tremendous benefit. 

"Research indicates that four-day work week models have the potential to reduce burnout and boost performance among workers without affecting employer productivity," bill sponsor Rep. Josh Cutler said in a statement. "There has not been a meaningful reduction in working hours since the 40-hour workweek became the standard 84 years ago." (Source: CBS Boston)

The legislators behind this effort are proposing a trial program - the "Massachusetts Smart Work Week Pilot" - that would extend over a two year period. When time's up, the program would be evaluated to determine its economic and "quality of life" impacts.

Everyone's so immensely stressed out these days, the four-day work week can't help but provide a boost to "quality of life." 

No word on the rationale behind the tax incentive, but even if it's "just" reducing the environmental costs of commuting, it would be enough. That is, if people didn't take their day off to tootle around all day in the cars...

But the people benefit would be enormous. How much better for everybody - especially working parents - it they had a day to take care of the business of life (think grocery shopping) on their off-day, leaving weekends for absolute free time. 

There's not a ton of research on shifting to a shorter work week, but a recent UK study on companies that moved to a 32 hour (vs. 40 hour) work week showed generally favorable results. Nearly half of the companies reported either a slight or significant increase in productivity. As for the employees, what's not to like?

In this state, a couple of towns have piloted a four-day work week program that compresses 40 hours into four days. (I.e., no reduction in hours.) They seem to be working out - at least for the employees. What about citizens who want to transact business on an employee's day off?

Of course, some professions have had fewer-days work weeks for years. Many nurses work four, or even three, days a week, with longer shifts. Fire fighters often work lengthy shifts, a couple days on/a couple days off. (I grew up in a neighborhood that had a number of firefighters in it, and most firemen - and they were all men - had side jobs like painting and wallpapering.)

I don't think companies in Massachusetts would be looking to go 32 hours, but I can definitely see a 40 hour model taking hold - at least for some professions. But for others?

If teachers went to a four-day work week, there'd be a little problem if most parents weren't able to. Of course, schools could run a day-long afterschool-style program on the off-day. (Nationwide, nearly a thousand districts have adopted a four-day school schedule, so I guess it's feasible enough.) 

And how, overall, would it work out if everyone took Friday off? You may want to take care of things like your dentist appointments on Friday, but so would everyone else. And your dentist might want to have Fridays off, too. So four days may not translate into three day weekends for everyone.

All sorts of things TBD, that's for sure.

Massachusetts isn't alone, as there are other states considering new approaches to the work week. NY and California are entertaining the idea of requiring overtime pay for any hours over 32 per week. (Ah, good luck with that one - at least for now.)

But I've got to believe that the four-day work week is coming. If not in my lifetime, then not all that far into the future. 

After all, won't AI and robotics free us all up to work less and enjoy more leisure? That is, if there are any jobs left, other than designing and building AI applications and robots. 

Anyway, in the spirit of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' exploring an embrace of the four-day work week, Pink Slip has decided to join the vanguard and become an early adopter. 

Pink Slip has been working five days a week four nearly twenty years now. (Yikes!)

Starting this week, we're adopting a four-day, four-post "workweek." From here on out, Friday's are off.

Back to the workplace

Remote work has been around for a good long time, and even prior to covid many companies were allowing working from home (WFH) for all of their employees some of the time, or some of their employees some of the time, or some of their employees all of the time. But all of their employees all of the time? It took covid to turn that into a reality.

WFH was never without controversy. It destroys morale. People don't actually work, they're just goldbricking from home. It destroys downtown areas, and kills convenience stores and sandwich shops. WFH is just not productive. 

For years, I did freelance work for a company which provided WFH technology. During my years working for them, I wrote white papers, blog posts, brochures, web copy, customer stories, webinar scripts, etc. touting the joys and benefits of remote work. (I haven't thought of this outfit in years, but just glanced at their website and saw that a customer story I wrote nearly eight years ago is still featured on their home page. Which kind of cracked me up. Too bad I didn't get paid for content longevity!)

The company, itself, frowned on working from own except on rare occasions, for rare exceptions. (I did check things out and it looks like they've changed their tune.)

Anyway, covid proved that, for many positions, in many companies, working remotely worked out just fine when it came to productivity and employee satisfaction. 

But just fine wasn't perfect.

The executives of corporate America are stepping up efforts to get workers back into the office, using a combination of threats and incentives to get employees to give up the work-from-home lifestyle they adopted in the first years of the covid-19 pandemic. (Source: Washington Post)

Some big names are getting in on the push to bring workers back into the office.

Martha Stewart has gotten in on the act, arguing for a return to the office. So is Kevin O'Leary, one of the business gang on Shark Tank. 

Then there are the big name companies. Google's one of them, and they sound suspiciously like that company I did freelance writing for in the wayback. 

Google has pitched its video conferencing and cloud services to other companies as ways to enable remote work, recreation and education. But it’s also been one of the biggest companies pushing for a return to the office.

They're requesting that employees start coming into the office three days a week. They're using a carrot and stick approach: lots of perks (like free food), and the stick of stating that noncompliance would be considered in performance reviews.  

Salesforce is wooing workers back, promising to make donations to local charities for "each day workers come in to the office."

Amazon. Disney. Farmer's Insurance. Starbucks. AT&T. All are among the ranks of companies segueing from fully remote to hybrid. 

Three days a week seems to be a magic number for many of the back-to-the-office schemes.

That's true for my sister Trish's company.

She's been working home 100% of the time since covid began - and loving it. Working from home, she's been able to avoid a rotten commute, and stay in bed later. But she's heading back to the office for three days a week.

Trish is the type of employee you can 100% trust to do her job remotely. 

But she's also the type of employee that a company might want to have around up close and personal. She's been with her company forever, knows all the ropes, the history of everything, who-does-what-to-whom. However much a drag it is for her, for the company to have her around in person so that younger and newer employees can tap her experience and wisdom is a good thing.

Fortunately, she'll still be able to avoid the two worst commuting days: Monday and Friday.

I'm a believer that there's a lot of good to be had when people work together. 

Some argue that it's better for collaboration and innovation. Maybe. Maybe not. 

Some flat out state their belief that working from home = not working at all. (If that's the case, it's a management problem.)

But part of a successful workplace is built on the relationships forged among employees. And that's just plain more likely (and easier) if employees get to see each other face to face at least some of the time.

In my last full time job, I had two colleagues I became good friends with.

The company was an agglomeration of a dozen of so smaller companies in like spaces. I worked at the official headquarters, but my friend Sean worked in Syracuse, while John worked in the DC-area. 

We stayed connected daily via phone and early versions of text, but what cemented our relationship was when Sean and John blew into HQ every month or so for a meeting. We'd have lunch together. Take breaks to meander around the parking lot. Go out to dinner. We got to really know each other. 

I don't believe that if our experiences had all been virtual they would have turned into true friendships. And making friendships is an important aspect of working in the office, from the employee  - as opposed to the employer - perspective.

I've made lifelong friendships in two places: school and work. Hell, I met my husband at work.

Not everyone wants to make friends or meet husbands or wives at work. By the time you're further along in your career, or even at the tail end (like my sister Trish), you've made your friends, met your spouse, etc. You'd be happier to work remotely full time. And maybe even more productive.

But I think that, especially for younger folks, just starting out, people should think twice before fully digging in their heels when it comes to going back to the office - as many are threatening to do.

I think I've heard all the arguments, pro and con. 

And, as much as I think my sister Trish has earned the right to work fully from home, I'm on the side of those arguing for a return to the office. Three days a week sounds about right to me. We'll see how it goes.