Indiana Senator Dan Coats’ minimum-wage views stem from biased source

Also originally published on Examiner.com--GF

 

On April 30, 2014, Indiana Republican Senator Dan Coats joined with 40 fellow Republicans to filibuster the increase in the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour by 2016, and index it to inflation thereafter.  So, though the legislation passed by a clear majority, it didn’t have enough votes to reach the magic 60 votes mark that would’ve prevented a filibuster—41 “Nay” votes from Republicans blocked that.  In his press statement that day, at http://www.coats.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/coats-statement-on-minimum-wage-vote-,

Coats cited concerns about job loss due to the higher wages that would occur—up to 27,800 fewer  jobs in Indiana alone, according to the Employment Policies Institute, and up to one million nationally, according to the assessment of the effects of the legislation prepared by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO).

 

 

But a fundamental flaw in Coats’ argument is, in relying on the Employment Policies Institute for part of his data on projected job loss, he is relying on a clearly biased source that is funded by the low-wage restaurant and hospitality industry, and is a creature of a pro-Republican public relations firm, not an independent economic think tank.  Wikipedia’s entry on the Employment Policies Institute, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employment_Policies_Institute, states the following: 

 

 

The Employment Policies Institute (EPI) is a fiscally conservative non-profit American think tank that conducts research on employment issues like minimum wage and health care. EPI was established in 1991 and has been described as "a nonprofit research group that studies issues of entry-level employment."  The Employment Policies Institute has no employees of its own. Instead, according to the New York Times, [the Washington D.C.-based public relations firm] Berman and Company charges the nonprofit institute for the services its employees provide to the institute.  The charity evaluator Charity Navigator has issued a donor fraud advisory concerning EPI.  EPI should not be confused with the older, similarly named Economic Policy Institute, which is a liberal think tank advocating for low to moderate-income families in the United States.  EPI has released a number of studies that look at the economic effects of policies (like the minimum wage, health care mandates, and employment tax credits) on low-wage labor markets. EPI also regularly analyzes job market data in the United States. Typically, studies are contracted by university economists and published under EPI's name.  The reliability of EPI's sponsored studies have been questioned….Berman and Company, a for-profit advertising firm, bills EPI for the services that Richard Berman and others provide to the institute. In 2012, Berman and Company was paid $1.1 million by EPI, according to its tax returns, 44 percent of its total budget. Other funds were used to buy advertisements. EPI's tax return shows that the $2.4 million in listed donations it received in 2012 came from only 11 contributors, who wrote checks for as much as $500,000 apiece.  [Edited, reformatted and condensed, word links and footnote references omitted.  Bold emphasis in original.]
 

SourceWatch.org, a publication of the Center for Media and Democracy, describes the Employment Policies Institute this way, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Employment_Policies_Institute:
 

The Employment Policies Institute (EPI) is one of several front groups created by Berman & Co., a Washington, DC public affairs firm owned by Rick [Richard] Berman, who lobbies for the restaurant, hotel, alcoholic beverage and tobacco industries. While most commonly referred to as EPI, it is registered as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization under the name of "Employment Policies Institute Foundation." In its annual Internal Revenue Service return, EPI states that it "shares office space with Berman & Company on a cost pass through basis".  In a February 2014 interview with NPR, New York Times reporter Eric Lipton detailed his visit to the EPI, saying "I didn't see any evidence at all that there was an Employment Policies Institute office. And in fact when I started to interview the people there, they explained that there are no employees at the Employment Policies Institute and that all the staff there works for Berman and Company, and then they sometimes are just detailed to the various think-tanks and various consumer groups that he operates out of his office."  [The Employment Policies Institute was among the five non-profits founded by Berman, who also lists himself as Executive Director of each, at the heart of a 2012 complaint by the IRS that was reported in the November 1, 2012 Bloomberg.]  The Employment Policies Institute was launched in 1991, around the time of the economic recession that led to the electoral defeat of then-president George Bush. EPI deliberately attempted to create confusion in the eyes of journalists and the general public by adopting a name which closely resembles the Economic Policy Institute, a much older, progressive think tank with ties to organized labor. In addition to imitating the name and acronym of the Economic Policy Institute, Berman's outfit even used the same typeface for its logo. In reality, the two groups have dramatically different public policy agendas. The Economic Policy [sic] supports a living wage and mandated health benefits for workers. Berman's organization opposes both and in fact opposes any minimum wage whatsoever.  In 1992, Los Angeles Times business columnist Harry Bernstein noted that EPI was using "misleading studies" to help put a positive spin on rising unemployment. "The conservative EPI, financed mostly by low-wage companies such as hotels and restaurants, is issuing reports the titles of which alone could help put a bright face on the miserable job scene," Bernstein wrote. "The latest one is 'The Value of Part-Time Workers to the American Economy.' It hails as a great thing the distressing growth of part-time jobs because they offer 'flexibility' in economic planning for both workers and companies, and say that flexibility is vital 'in the growing and increasingly competitive global economy.' Tell that nonsense to the more than 6.5 million workers forced to take part-time jobs because nothing else is available. That is an increase of more than 1.5 million involuntary part-timers since 1990, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says." EPI has been doing more or less the same thing ever since, sponsoring cooked studies and issuing tendentious sound bytes whenever attempts are made to establish healthcare or better wages for workers.  Then, as now, fast-food employees were the largest group of low-paid workers in the United States. One-quarter of the workers in the restaurant industry are estimated to earn the minimum wage--a higher proportion than in any other U.S. industry. This is the real reason why EPI appears on the scene whenever federal or local governments consider a proposal to increase the minimum wage. Its standard tactic is to trot out a study using contrived statistics designed to show that hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost if the wage is raised. (In reality, studies by labor economists show that the job-loss effect of increasing the minimum wage is either small or nonexistent and that its benefits to low-wage workers and their families far outweigh the costs. Even the Food Institute Report, an industry trade publication, admitted in 1995 that "the weight of the empirical evidence suggests that the effects [on the number of available jobs] of a moderate raise from its likely to be negligible.")  EPI has been widely quoted in news stories regarding minimum wage issues, and although a few of those stories have correctly described it as a "think tank financed by business," most stories fail to provide any identification that would enable readers to identify the vested interests behind its pronouncements. Instead, it is usually described exactly the way it describes itself, as a "non-profit research organization dedicated to studying public policy issues surrounding employment growth" that "focuses on issues that affect entry-level employment." In reality, EPI's mission is to keep the minimum wage low so Berman's clients can continue to pay their workers as little as possible.  [Edited, reformatted and condensed, word links and footnote references omitted.  Bold emphasis in original.]
 

On April 29, 2014, the day before the Senate’s vote on raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, the Employment Policies Institute did what any truly scholarly thank tank would do—it ran a media ad campaign against the legislation!  See its press release, http://www.epionline.org/release/new-epi-ad-campaign-highlights-consequences-of-10-10-wage-hike-ahead-of-senate-vote/.

 

Research on the effects of raising the minimum wage issued under the aegis of the Employment Policies Institute have been criticized in two reports on the subject by the Economic Policy Institute, which is a labor-backed liberal think tank, but is also highly regarded by the economics profession as one which puts out accurate and well-researched reports.  These reports, 1996’s “The Minimum Wage and Job Loss: Opponents of Wage Hike Find No Effect” by John Schmitt, http://www.epi.org/publication/epi_virlib_briefingpapers_1996_minimumw/; and 2004’s “Employment and the Minimum Wage: Evidence from Recent State Labor Market Trends” by Jeff Chapman, http://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp150/, both took the Employment Policies Institute to task.  Chapman’s report criticizes the Employment Policies Institute for “oversimplification” in its assertion through its research director, Craig Garthwaite, writing in three newspaper articles—not research papers!—that state-mandated high minimum wages in Alaska, Oregon and Washington were responsible for these states’ high unemployment.  Chapman further states that “some key facts about these states show that a number of factors unrelated to minimum wage increases are actually responsible for high unemployment rates[.]”  (Both references, p. 2)  Chapman finds, rather, that high unemployment rates resulted from losses in manufacturing jobs, where pay scales were unaffected by minimum wage rates.  (pp. 9-10)

 

Chapman’s report also discusses the noted studies on the impact of New Jersey’s raising its minimum wage in 1992, while neighboring Pennsylvania, whose eastern-region economy is heavily linked to New Jersey’s, did not.  An initial study based on a phone survey of over 400 fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, both before and after the raise, by Princeton economists David Card and Alan Krueger and published in the American Economic Review in 1964, which found no measurable impact on employment, was heavily criticized by the Employment Policies Institute as biased and based on faulty methodology.  The Employment Policies Institute then presented its own data set of 71 fast-food restaurants as proving that there was a significant decline in employment due to New Jersey’s raising its minimum wage, which Richard Berman wrote on in the Wall Street Journal of March 29, 1995. The Employment Policies Institute also turned its data over to two economists, Michigan State University’s David Neumark and the Federal Reserve Board’s William Waschler, who wrote a study using that data set in March 1995; then did an additional study in August 1995 using an 80-restaurant data set that incorporated the 71-restaruant set with 9 additional restaurants supplied by the Employment Policies Institute, but which also incorporated a 150-restaurant set which Neumark and Waschler gathered independently; then revised their paper again in November 1995.  Neumark and Waschler directly challenged Card and Krueger’s findings in 1995, asserting that there was a drop in employment; but in their final assessment in 2000, Neumark and Waschler hedged and said that while there was no measurable decline in employment, they could properly conclude, “New Jerseys’ minimum wage increase did not raise fast-food employment in that state.” [Emphasis in Neumark and Waschler’s final assessment, as quoted in Chapman, p. 16]  (The debate went on for six years, 1994-2000, with two papers and a book by Card and Krueger, and four papers by Neumark and Waschler.) Chapman discusses this controversy in pp. 13-16 of “Employment and the Minimum Wage,” while John Schmitt’s 1996 “The Minimum Wage and Job Loss” devotes its entire nine pages to the issue.

 

Card and Krueger later supplemented their original data set with ES-202 data collected by state governments for the unemployment compensation program, which are more accurate than phone surveys.  Card and Krueger were able to access ES-202 data for individual restaurants, and reached the same conclusion as their 1994 study, which they also published in the American Economic Review, in 2000.  They wrote there, “[The] increase in New Jersey’s minimum wage probably had no effect on total employment in New Jersey’s fast-food industry and possibly had a small positive effect.”  (Chapman, p. 15)

 

Both Chapman and Schmitt write that only the Employment Policies Institute’s initial analysis of its 71-restaruant data showed a statistically significant decrease in employment, but that there were major methodological flaws in its collection of data, something that also held for Neumark and Waschler’s, but not so for Card and Krueger’s.  Both of these Economic Policy Institute Briefing Papers also provide thorough documentation for their authors’ claims, as well as extensive lists of references.  Further, while Card and Krueger have made their data available to others, both the Employment Policies Institute and Neumark and Waschler have refused to release theirs. (Schmitt, p. 6, Footnote 22, p.8)

 

This writer could not find documentation for Senator Dan Coats’ assertion in his April 30, 2014 press release on why he voted against raising the minimum wage, “The Employment Policy [sic—Coats and his staff can’t even get the name of its source completely right!]  Institute recently estimated that in Indiana there could be up to 27,800 fewer jobs created if the Senate proposal is enacted.”  Of course, that’s different from asserting actual job loss—it’s merely stating that job growth in Indiana will be at a slower pace; but that assertion is very much disputed by economists, and the Employment Policies Institute is hardly an unbiased or even reliable source, both as shown above.  In April 2014, the latest month for which data is available as of this writing, Indiana had 2,970,700 persons employed, or 2,970,700 jobs filled, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/laus.pdf, Table E, p. 8.  That means that, of total present jobs filled, the Employment Policies Institute’s estimate of 27,800 future jobs absent represents a potential loss equal only to 0.9358% of present Indiana employment—not even a full 1%!  Hardly a catastrophic economic result if the minimum wage is raised, which would automatically benefit thousands of presently-employed Indiana workers!  As well as drive increased consumption among these and other workers—which would further stimulate the economy and create more jobs.

 

Senator Coats also quotes himself in his April 30 press release, “The true problem plaguing impoverished Americans is not low wage rates but a lack of good job opportunities. Raising the minimum wage will fail to alleviate poverty because it will fail to address unemployed or underemployed American workers.”  However, Senator Coats, along with his Republican colleagues, has not advanced any kind of job-creating proposal other than the discredited “trickle-down economics” of Republican-supported tax cuts for the already-wealthy; has opposed all job-creation proposals of President Obama; and refused to extend unemployment compensation benefits for the long-term unemployed, while also supporting cuts in SNAP, or food stamp, benefits.  Support of which would immediately “address unemployed or underemployed American workers,” and thus “alleviate poverty,” as would increasing the minimum wage, but all of which Senator Coats and the other Republican Senators and Representatives have volubly opposed.  Could it be that when Senator Coats so laments, he does so with guile in his voice and crocodile tears in his eyes? 

 

 

 

The real “welfare scum”

Also originally published on Examiner.com--GF

 

No, it’s not the clients, my fellow welfare recipients—for I’ve been eligible for welfare before, and, even though now steadily employed, may still be eligible for some continued welfare benefits such as limited Medicaid assistance.  No, the real “welfare scum” are the officious, frequently rude, case workers and their superiors I’ve encountered regularly in Indiana’s welfare system: whether in the centralized Family and Social Services (FSSA) bureaucracy I deal with by phone that’s located in Marion, Indiana; or the decentralized bureaucracy I have the misfortune to encounter in the offices and on the phone of FSSA sub-agency Department of Family Resources (DFR) in Marion County (which encompasses the whole of where I live, Indianapolis).

 

These “welfare scum” have, because of my need for welfare in the not-so-long-ago past, my present uncertain status, and my vulnerability when such benefits were denied, have created very real personal problems for me.  Problems, I suspect, not limited to me alone, but encountered by others denied benefits; but because of my education (university degree plus training as a paralegal), I was (and am) able to navigate through and overcome the frequently cumbersome and opaque appeals process when benefits have been wrongly denied.  In this way, I suspect, I’m quite unlike a very sizeable number of welfare clients and applicants turned down, who were simply too discouraged by the complexity of the process to even file an appeal (and part and parcel of the complexity is the difficulty in finding a pro bono lawyer, whether through overworked, understaffed, Legal Services or elsewhere). 

 

But welfare benefits have been wrongly denied me three times to date, early February, 2014; and as proof of their being wrongly denied, I adduce that, upon appeal for each and every time benefits were denied me up to the present, a total of three times, I won the appeal and had the benefits restored.  That’s a 100% success rate for me on appeal!

 

But, let me add, in two of the appeals my benefits weren’t restored until six months after the appellate hearing—that’s typically how long it takes for a ruling to be rendered.  In another case, it took well over a year:  a year just to get an initial hearing, then another three months waiting for the ruling.  But this is what’s typical—and just as typical is the long wait, usually at least a calendar month, from the time of filing the appeal till the actual scheduling of a hearing.  Meanwhile, while on appeal benefits are usually not continued, which in the case of food stamps, can be especially devastating.  Although once my appeal was won I did get all my back food stamps—often as much as $1,200 worth in one lump sum—it also meant I didn’t have them to contribute to my food budget for the prior six months, which, not surprisingly, was a major hardship.  After all, one has to eat in the here and now; one can’t postpone it for six months!

 

Obviously, then, the concept of “welfare scum” needs to be expanded to embrace not just the individual case workers and their supervisors, but the whole working process, the whole paraphernalia, of the FSSA and DFR, the whole operation of the system of wrongdoing from the decisions of the individual case worker all the way up to the directors of the system who put this onerous process in place.  A system that works much to the detriment of those who actually do qualify for welfare benefits, the successful first-time applicants and clients in the first place—whom the system makes implicitly “undeserving chiselers” who have to prove and continually re-prove their worthiness.  Unlike the real welfare chiselers, the corporate beneficiaries of government largess, from the granting of a no-bid contract to Haliburton for rebuilding the infrastructure of Iraq to the Wall Street firms who benefitted from the George W. Bush/Barack Obama bailout, to the continued subsidies for the behemoth oil companies, corporate agriculture, and myriad other private firms who get Uncle Sugar to provide them with public assistance for growing their profit margins!

 

A vivid illustration of how this works in practice is given by my exchange on the socialist New Politics website with Barry Finger, Managing Editor of the New Politics hard-copy journal, and himself a retired employee with the Social Security Administration—where he himself knew, had to deal with, his fellow employees who were themselves “welfare scum” gatekeepers “protecting” Social Security disability payments from the alleged “undeserving.” 

 

As for the particulars of my experiences with the FSSA/DFR, I relate below the details of the three times I had been wrongly denied benefits.   The first case, after waiting a year for the appellate hearing, the appellate judge herself couldn’t see any justifiable reason why I had been initially been denied benefits, period.  In the second and third, which are related in my comments to Barry Finger, I had been denied benefits because the case worker who had taken my pay stubs documenting work earnings for the past 30 days used the total amount earned for the year (some four months) as the alleged amount of my monthly earnings, thus not only overstating my monthly income by $2,000 per months, but also attributing to me an annual income of $42,000—which would make anyone wonder why I had applied for welfare in the first place!  The third was an even more wretched farce, where I had been denied benefits because I was allegedly in England going to school, all of which happened because a hacker got into my address book and sent out a spurious e-mail stating I was stranded in England, please send money, and my case worker e-mailed back the allegedly “stranded” me, “When are you coming back?” which is incredible in itself; but then when the allegedly “stranded” me e-mailed back that I was in school (which, of course, directly contradicts my being stranded!), I was denied benefits for allegedly not being an Indiana resident—all of which was related with an absolutely straight face at my appeals hearing by the FSSA/DFR representative!  (I wonder if the FSSA/DFR representative had any second thoughts whatsoever when I showed up in person at the hearing with a witness who could testify that I was indeed living in Indiana, and had been—when, instead, I was “supposed” to be in school studying in England!)

 

But Barry Finger wrote a most appreciative reply to my relating of the above, a reply informed by his own experience with the Social Security Administration gatekeepers he himself encountered in his 32 years as a federal employee there.  My comment and his reply are here:  http://newpol.org/content/public-sector-workers-and-crisis#comment-151691. A very enlightening exchange indeed on how the system works, which I urge all to access, read thoroughly.

 

Several commentators on the left have written in response to my welfare tales of woe that it is not the case workers at the bottom of the welfare agency feeding chain who are responsible for the malfunctions of the system, and that, ideally, there needs to be an alliance between the welfare clients and the lower-level welfare agency workers themselves against the supervisors and those who make welfare eligibility policy, the top administrators, political appointees at the very top, and the politicians who put the welfare system and its workings in place in the first place. 

 

While all of this would be very nice, would, perhaps, even come about in an ideal world, in practice this works against itself to the detriment not only of the workers, but more crucially, of the clients (and new applicant potential clients) themselves.  For the workings and setup of this very system of welfare “assistance” ends up directly pitting the clients and applicants against the case workers—for they are the first tier of gatekeepers designed to keep clients and applicants out, and not let them in.  First, because the case workers themselves often see themselves as guardians of the system’s integrity against the automatically-assumed “chiselers” who apply for welfare in the first place—and case workers who are pro-client, who fight for the rights of the clients against the system, usually burn out or are dismissed, so they don’t normally last long in the system, period!  Such persons simply aren’t congenial to bureaucratic survival, so don’t usually survive—unless they manage, somehow, to keep themselves low-profile.  Second, the very way the system is set up, it’s the case worker him/herself who makes the initial decision to deny benefits, with this initial decision almost automatically upheld, given the stamp of approval, all the way up the supervisory pipeline.  So, when a welfare client appeals an adverse decision, the first thing that has to be appealed is the case worker’s initial decision, with the client (or his/her lawyer or other representative) arguing before the administrative judge why this was wrong; while the welfare system representative usually defends the initial decision, or rarely, admits that mistakes were made, which will usually only remand the matter back into the system for reconsideration.

 

Currently I have another appeal coming up for a hearing in mid-February, resulting from an officious case manager who got angry and arbitrarily cut off my initial interview to re-determine eligibility, and concurrent with that, an adverse decision rendered because I didn’t give my current IRS filing status—which I wasn’t asked to provide in the first place!  Any resemblances to my actual experiences and the ordeal of protagonist Joseph K. in Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial only demonstrates that Kafka was depicting actual reality, not nightmarish surreal fantasy!

 

Last, and I really must mention this, as I’ve directly experienced this with Marion County DFR, is that jobs there are seeming sinecures for African American employment from the receptionist on up, and added onto the usual rudeness clients face when dealing with the FSSA/DFR is the attitude of far too many of these African American Marion County DFR employees toward white clients and applicants:  they are looked upon as having personally owned their great-great-great grandmother as a slave!  This may be due primarily to Indiana social backwardness, but it is something I’ve personally encountered.  (Self-disclosure:  I am white racially, though I do try vigorously to manifest a color-blind attitude; and have never actually been accused of racism by any African American, though I have by certain whites of the political left.)

 

Thus my portrait of the real individual and social “welfare scum” as I have directly, unfortunately, encountered such in Indiana.

Work, fatigue, frustration, and—finally!—creativity again

Also originally published on Examiner.com--GF

 

Exhaustion from my previous long-term job at Amazon.com essentially killed my creativity and desire to write the first few months of 2014, from January into early April, when I lost that job.  I was too busy fighting work fatigue to do much of anything else—my life had essentially reduced itself to work, sleep, eat, recover from work on my days off, and then work again.  The few days I had off I mostly just lay around inert.  A real creativity-killer indeed, and also a real killer of desire to do anything but loll around, letting the fatigue and muscle soreness heal itself before I returned to work again.

 

Indiana itself is a killer as well of creativity and the urge to write.  The tsunami wave of Indiana’s hidebound mediocrity overwhelms even the talented and creative one, drowns that person literally body and soul, chokes off the creative urge as it chokes off the better part of one’s personality and talent.  It so overwhelms that the simple urge to create and write is no longer there, that all desire to write and create now becomes totally submerged.

 

That was especially so in my case those prior four months, those months where, even at age 67, I was financially forced to hold down a physically exhausting full-time job at the Amazon.com warehouse in Whitestown, Indiana.  (On which I’ve written before for examiner.com, having previously worked for Amazon at Whitestown, and at another Amazon warehouse in Central Indiana; see George Fish, “Amazon.com’s Whitestown, Indiana warehouse is a hell of a place to work,” January 20, 2013; this article will be subsequently re-posted on this blog.)  My most recent job at Amazon as an order picker required me to walk 10-15 miles each 10-hour shift four days in a row.  It’s a job that pushes one physically to the limit, especially for an older worker such as myself, as it would severely challenge the physical capabilities of even a twentysomething, and makes each shift worked the equivalent of an Army boot camp hike, or several strenuous gym workouts done back-to-back.  But in addition to just the demands put on the body by all that walking is the demanding quota system of orders to be picked in an hour, an exacting computer-determined and computer-monitored system that makes the picker but an appendage to the order-processing machine, with every motion, every order picked, every order bundle placed on the conveyor belt, rigidly calibrated and monitored down to fractions of a second. 

 

A New Yorker article earlier this year pithily summarized this well:

 

Amazon employs or subcontracts tens of thousands of warehouse workers, with seasonal variation, often building its fulfillment centers in areas with high unemployment and low wages.  Accounts from inside the centers describe the work of picking, boxing, and shipping books and dog food and beard trimmers as a high-tech version of the dehumanized factory floor satirized in Chaplin’s “Modern Times.”  Pickers holding computerized handsets are perpetually timed and measured as they fast-walk up to eleven miles per shift around a million-square-foot warehouse, expected to collect orders in as little as thirty-three seconds.  After watching footage taken by an undercover BBC reporter, a stress expert said, “The evidence shows increased risk of mental illness and physical illness.”  The company says that its warehouse jobs are “similar to jobs in many other industries.”

 

(George Packer, “Cheap Words: Amazon is good for customers. But is it good for books?”  A Reporter At Large, The New Yorker, February 17, 2014, http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/02/17/140217fa_fact_packer?currentPage=all.)  Indeed, a co-worker of mine at Whitestown told me that a fellow picker who’d worked during the Christmas rush brought an odometer to work, and calibrated that, during this busiest, most demanding, of peak seasons, a picker actually walked 20 miles during a 10-hour shift.  Ironically, warehouse jobs at Amazon are among the better-paying jobs in Central Indiana, and are sought after; after losing my Amazon job in April, I got another warehouse job through a temp agency, same as with Amazon, but had to take a $2.00 an hour pay cut.  While the work at my new job is not much easier or less demanding that at Whitestown, it only pays $9.50 an hour compared to the $11.50 an hour I was making.  In Central Indiana, Amazon’s pay is on the high end of what’s paid warehouse workers; unskilled temp jobs at other warehouses only pay within the $9.00-$10.00 an hour range.

 

Moreover, although a college graduate, I have found myself for the past few years, same as many other college graduates, having to work unskilled physical labor because those are the only jobs available in Brain Drain, low-education, low-skill, low-wage, job-hemorrhaging Indiana.  Documentation of these crucial Hoosier lacks is extensive, and below I will list a substantial part of that documentation. 

 

On the Brain Drain and its impact on the college graduate population, there are, for example, two articles of mine: George Fish, “Indiana’s Brain Drain: The problem that won’t go away,” examiner.com, August 3, 2009, which will be re-posted on this blog; and George Fish, “Add another Frustration to Being Unemployed: A Case in Point from Indiana’s WorkOne State Employment Agency,” New Politics, December 12, 2011, http://newpol.org/content/add-another-frustration-being-unemployed-case-point-indiana%E2%80%99s-workone-state-employment-agenc. See generally George Fish and Dave Fey, “Mediocrity—a Hoosier affliction,” Bloomington Alternative, July 12, 2009, http://bloomingtonalternative.com/articles/2009/07/12/10039.  According to the Status of Working Families in Indiana, 2011 report, issued in April 2012 by the Indiana Institute for Working Families, http://www.incap.org/statusworkingfamilies.html, p. 20, 60% of Indiana’s college graduates leave the state, a key reason being lack of jobs.  Further, in the “Hoosier Mediocrity Fact Sheet” contained in Fish and Fey, op. cit., http://bloomingtonalternative.com/f/Hoosier%20Mediocrity.pdf, 46.6% of Indiana’s college graduates leave the state within one year of graduation (citing data that originally appeared in the Indianapolis Star).

 

On Indiana’s per capita income, although it has increased 9.8% from 2006 to 2011, according to Hoosier Data webpage provided by Indiana’s Department of Workforce Development, going from $33,087 in 2006 to $36,342 in 2011, Indiana’s per capita income in this time has actually dropped as a percentage of the national per capita income, from 86.8% in 2006 to 85.9% in 2011. (http://www.hoosierdata.in.gov/dpage.asp?id=2&view_number=1&menu_level=&panel_number=2.) Standing at $38,812, or 87.1% of the national per capita income, in 2013, Indiana’s per capita income ranked only 39^th among the states.  But Indiana ranked 34^th  in 1983, 28^th in 1993, 36^th in 2003, so while per capita income has grown, it has declined compared to growth at the national level—Indiana continues to fall behind due to job loss and low wages.  (STATS Indiana, compiled by the Kelly School of Business, Indiana University, http://www.stats.indiana.edu/sip/inc/inc2_18.html.) As the Indianapolis Star reported, “Income for Indiana residents last year was $38,812 per person, a 2.3 percent increase. That compares with $44,543 for the nation, a 2.6 percent increase.  Indiana’s income ranking has dropped in recent decades, down from 30th in 1980, and 21st in 1950. The drop has been tied largely to the decline in high-paying manufacturing jobs.” (Maureen Groppe, Star Washington bureau, “Indiana’s per capita income ranks 38^th among states,” Indianapolis Star, March 26, 2014, http://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2014/03/26/indianas-per-capita-income-ranks-th-among-states/6934411/.) Even in recovery, Indiana still continues to lose jobs.  For example, while Indiana gained 144,007 jobs in the three months September-December 2010, during this same period it lost 131,387 jobs, for a net gain of only 12,620 jobs. (http://www.bls.gov/cew/ew10table14.pdf.)  And even though Indiana’s unemployment rate continues to drop, and in April 2014 stood below the national average at 5.7%, that still leaves 182,900 Hoosiers without jobs. (http://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.in.htm.) [Jobs, unemployment data from the Bureau of Economic Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor.]

So statistically one could say I’ve been one of the lucky unlucky ones, having generally secured unskilled labor employment through temp agencies since 2003, even though, as a college-degree holder, not the work I would desire by any means.  But, as indicated, this “luck in unluck” employment took its toll on me creatively and as an active writer, and that certainly generated frustration and chagrin.  However, and felicitously, since April Fool’s Day that creativity and urge to write has actively returned, and I’ve been on a somewhat consistent writing jag since then, having written several poems which I’ve shared in fellowship at the Tuesday afternoon gatherings of poet colleagues here in Indianapolis.  And despite the economic hardships involved with my new employment, I have gained in not being so overwhelmed with fatigue I could not create, only sleep and loll around in utter exhaustion after a grueling workday and workweek.  A mixed yet palpable gain for this poet/economist/laborer/journalist.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dispatch from the work shift from hell

 

Also originally published on Examiner.com--GF

 

The job I lost June 20, 2014, which I’m about to detail below, was truly like herpes, a “gift that keeps on giving.”  For five weeks now after the loss of that job I still continue to have the leg pains that job engendered, requiring me to take 1600 mg. of ibuprofen daily just to be able to walk and stand without pain; but as of now the only thing that’s substantially changed is that while the pain has attenuated, it only reduced my need for ibuprofen from 1600 mg. daily to a “mere” 800!  Ah, such a lasting “gift” from a job that was a lived descent into the lower rungs of Dante’s hell!

 

As was typical of the “employment opportunities” in Central Indiana, the job I worked was yet another unskilled warehouse temp job through a temp agency, another in a seemingly endless cycle of only temporary employment—where, as usual, the “opportunity” of “temp to hire,” i.e., the job turning into a permanent, full-time position as, if one’s considered “good” enough, the company hiring one through the temp agency will take the temp on as one of its own.  But reality is, though the dangling of “temp to hire” is ubiquitous, it actually occurs only 27% of the time, according to statistics.  It’s bait dangled, and as such, is a lot like bait-and-switch, where, at the end of the assignment, one still lacks permanent, reliable employment and must instead scrounge around for more strictly temporary “temp work opportunities” through the various temp agencies.

 

Yet I was grateful for this job when it first occurred, coming as it did after a month unemployed and not qualifying for unemployment compensation. That followed my loss of employment at the Amazon.com warehouse in Whitestown on April 5 where I had been for nearly six months—which was long as such jobs usually go.  The new job was at another warehouse run by a major national corporation, this one the book publisher and distributor RR Donnelley in Plainfield, another significant commute from my residence in Indianapolis.  Both jobs shared the trait that they were physically demanding; and I’ve written notably before on examiner.com on just how difficult work is at Amazon. (See “Amazon.com’s Whitestown, Indiana warehouse is a hell of a place to work,” January 20, 2013, and “Work, fatigue, frustration, and—finally!—creativity again,” May 28, 2014, which will subsequently be re-posted on this blog.)  However, while Amazon is a horrendously demanding place to work, at least it pays a fairly decent wage as far as temp warehouse employment in Central Indiana goes, $11.50 an hour for the day shift, and $12.50 an hour for the night shift.  Further, the temp agency that hires for Amazon, Integrity Staffing Solutions, has perks available for its employees at Amazon that are unheard-of with other temp agencies, perks such as the ability to acquire penalty-free time off work. 

 

 

The temp agency that employed me at RR Donnelley, Employment Plus, provided no perks; instead it had, and enforced, a penalty point system for being absent or late for one’s work shift no matter what the reason. In fact, I had been burned twice by Employment Plus before, in late 2011 and late 2012, but had no place else to go when it offered me employment again in May 2014.  Employment Plus does like to brag on its website, http://www.employmentplus.com, how well it services its industry clients and how many awards it’s received from employer organizations, but that’s because it’s quite willing to cater to whatever the employer demands, even (or especially?) at the expense of the employees it provides!  But I don’t write this out of any invidious desire to single out Employment Plus: as a temp employee ever since September 2001 who’s worked for several temp agencies, I can honestly say that there are no “good” temp agencies to work for, only a Hobson’s choice between more tolerable and less tolerable, which is either exacerbated or mitigated by the type of work actually available at any given time.   Or in other words, only what amounts to a practical choice between what’s bad and what’s worse!

 

I worked at RR Donnelley from May 7 until about an hour-and-a-half before my shift was scheduled to end on June 20, being summarily fired and escorted from the building by the officious manager who, due to his goatee and shaved head, reminded me of a bearded version of Saturday Night Live’s Coneheads in appearance, and Godzilla in temperament. 

 

 

Central Indiana warehouses tend to be rather badly managed, and in this RR Donnelley was the worst I’ve encountered.  A morass of dysfunction, equipment malfunctions and breakdowns, a conveyer belt system for feeding products that was frequently overloaded with more product pulled and ready to ship than it could handle, and a management that, when it was on the floor and not in the office, simply strutted around and barked orders, despite not having any real idea of what was going on—but lack of knowledge was never allowed to interfere with barking orders and rendering summary judgment, no matter what!  Such was integral to my being summarily fired for being upset and having shouted out my anger and frustration at almost having my fingers crushed due to an equipment malfunction that was a regular occurrence on the particular task I worked, but of which the big boss, the Conehead, was previously oblivious.  So, yes, I was partially responsible for blurting out an angry obscenity, but who wouldn’t do such under such conditions?  I was in an edgy and vulnerable emotional state of exhaustion at having worked over six hours virtually without respite, handling a nearly-impossible shift dealing with an extremely overloaded conveyor belt system.  Just this hapless worker trying desperately to keep pace with a tyrannous ever-flowing conveyor belt!  Then the taping machine, which taped the boxes in which I packed stuffing so that they were ready to ship, developed the regularly-recurring malfunction that prevented it from taping, and though I had never repaired the malfunction before, I did know what to do, having watched others do it repeatedly.  And so I fixed the malfunction, no help whatsoever from my more experienced co-worker, who stood there staring at me, dumb and silent as a rock.  But the machine started before I had expected it to, and only my quick reflexes prevented my fingers from being caught between two pieces of metal moving together to make a vise for holding the box—while my co-worker, who had contributed to the problem, stood there Sphinx-like; staring at me absolutely wordlessly as though she didn’t know how to talk or react!  And so I blurted out an epithet that my immediate supervisor saw as “upsetting” to the other employees, and she escorted me to Mr. Conehead, who couldn’t have cared less about what I was upset about, and cared even less that I’d almost crushed the fingers of my left hand.  All he knew was I was upset, and so he blurted out demands that I cease being upset.  And when I couldn’t, the combination of ruefulness, anger at both my co-worker and at my near miss, plus extreme fatigue for being terribly overworked for a measly $9.50 an hour, $2.00 an hour less than what I’d received at Amazon despite actually working harder,  he escorted me out the building; but before he completed the task of escorting, he reprimanded me once more as I stopped to put on my watch (we weren’t allowed to wear watches while on the job, as they were considered hazardous,  something that could get caught in the rollers of the conveyor).  One simple solution to my anguish does come to mind, and I’m sure the reader catches it—just let me sit down and become calm again after my trauma.  Ah, but such is not allowed in the workplace of today.  No, you aren’t allowed to simply sit down when the unexpected happens, you must either be working when it’s not scheduled break time, or be out of the building.  No rest for the “wicked,” which means us, the very employees who make the business operate in the first place!

 

Truth is, up until that incident, my immediate supervisor had regarded me as an able employee, someone who actually did my job better than my two regular co-workers.  But “upsetting the work environment” for any reason whatsoever, even a good one, is simply a Big No-No which is to be dealt with harshly.  Production must flow, even in the case of a conveyor system that itself was inadequate to handle the volume placed on it, which was constantly breaking down, and where the ancillary equipment frequently malfunctioned—but with no actually certified maintenance person on duty to fix it, just supervisors who jerry-rigged as best they could, even when they didn’t really know what they were doing.  Another reason why RR Donnelley gets an F for its management.

 

While I was rueful over having the paychecks stop so abruptly, I also regarded this loss as a mixed blessing.  I had felt terribly used on this job, working my butt off for $9.50 an hour; and the day I was fired, Friday, was also a payday with my quarterly auto insurance bill due, leaving me essentially with nothing.  $9.50 an hour is actually poverty wage, no way around it—a far cry from economic sustainability, which my job at Amazon had at least provided.

 

I’d been walking or standing on hard concrete since November 2013, something quite hard on one’s legs, especially for an older worker like me—one past his mid-sixties but with no choice but to work anyway.  My legs had been consistently sore for a good half-year, and the leg cramping had actually been exacerbated by the statin for cholesterol my doctor had put me on at the end of May.  But even when off the job for the next month, and also having been taken off the statin, which can cause muscle aches, the leg pain had only subsided, not disappeared; and I still needed ibuprofen to make it through.  But on July 22 I started a new job with a different temp agency, one in which I get to sit down while working, and in which I am not subjected to the tyranny either of a computer-monitored quota system or the speed of a conveyor belt.  So I actually have a job now I like, where the work pace is not ruthlessly demanding, and where I feel comfortable.  And though I didn’t qualify for unemployment compensation this last time I was off, the combination of paychecks once again flowing and working at a job I actually like makes me optimistic for at least the near future; this even though my new job pays only the poverty-level $9.50 an hour, but which is supplemented by a monthly Social Security check.  And my total time unemployed in 2014 has only been 65 days, so I’ve had it much worse.  Simply put, I finally lucked out and am living a Life of Riley, with the proviso that my Riley has only modest expectations needing fulfillment.

 

But in the workplace of today, employees are regarded as expendable inputs and not persons; the notion of workers’ rights is nonexistent and considered a quaint throwback to an earlier time; and managerial fascism is the norm, not the exception.  A far cry for the work environment I knew in the 1960s and 1970s.  But that was back in a time when unions were strong, active, and even tolerated by management; so even if one worked in a non-union workplace, the norms of the union workplace still set the general work norm.  No more.  In our “leaner and meaner” business environment, work norms harkening back to the 19^th Century have become the rule now in the 21^st.  Older workers like myself can still remember when it wasn’t this way, but virtually any worker under the age of 40 only knows workplaces in which managerial fascism is the norm, and is not only ubiquitous but seemingly unchangeable.  Managerial fascism and low pay is now the new “normal,” and while some places can be far worse than others, there is now virtually no “good” job any more than there is a really “good” temp agency.  Of course there is at least a theoretical solution to this problem, and it’s spelled U-N-I-O-N, but in this age of a much diminished union movement and the widespread use of temps instead of regular workers, more a theoretical than a practical solution for most workers, unfortunately.  And that is why for so many of us the best that can come our way is a move from the lowest rungs of Dante’s hell to higher, less oppressive and onerous, rungs.  We’ve lost the capacity to attain the good, and most of us can only hope to attain a lesser evil we can at least live with.

 

 

Mediocrity in the State of Indiana, 2014: an update

This article was also originally posted on Examiner.com.  I'm re-posting many of my old Examiner.com articles here on this blog, because they are still highly relevant and informative--GF

 

I’ve been writing regularly on Indiana’s overweening mediocrity ever since my associate David Fey and I did a workshop on Hoosier Mediocrity at an event in Indianapolis in May 2009 and wrote our presentation up in an article, “Mediocrity—A Hoosier affliction,” that was published in the alternative newspaper Bloomington Alternative on July 12, 2009, http://bloomingtonalternative.com/articles/2009/07/12/10039.  (The presently on-hold Bloomington Alternative was published/posted online in Bloomington Indiana, which is home to the main campus of Indiana University, from which both Fey and I graduated.)  And much of this later writing was posted on examiner.com since then, notably August 3, 2009’s “Indiana’s Brain Drain: The problem that won’t go away;”; April 24, 2012’s “Indianapolis: Super Bowl city not so super;” the highly-regarded, extensively-praised article of March 12, 2013, “Indiana’s FSSA and the shredded Hoosier safety net;”  its follow-up, April 20, 2013’s “Indiana mediocrity extends to government services;”  July 25, 2013’s nationally re-posted “Work in Indiana and make less than in 1967;” and another article on the ill-functioning FSSA, the Family and Social Services Administration, umbrella agency for all welfare, child protective, vocational rehabilitation and mental health/addiction services,  and its horribly malfeasant provision of vital social safety net provisions to the poor, nastily (but deservedly) titled, “The real ‘welfare scum.’”  That title was chosen for two telling reasons:  first of all, it is how most Hoosiers actually view the recipients of welfare; and also, because the FSSA’s delivery of welfare, vocational rehabilitation and mental health/addiction services themselves to those who really need them is as poverty-stricken as its recipients.

 

In this I often wrote first-hand, about what I as a Hoosier worker, welfare recipient, and taxpayer had actually experienced.  Indiana, unfortunately, is a bastion of mediocrity, and few Hoosiers care—which is the pity stemming from both its aggressively hidebound, active right-wing organized by the Republican, Tea and Libertarian Parties, and its soft, queasy, frequently well-meaning but milquetoast “progressives,” who are content to act in ways that symbolically (in their eyes) “Speak truth to power,” but actually only “Beg ‘Pretty please’ from power.”

 

A good part of this mediocrity arises from the low educational attainment of the Hoosier State.  Indiana ranks only 31^st among the 50 states plus the District of Columbia in percentage of its population with at least a high school diploma; and those states with lower high school graduation rates are mostly confined to the traditionally poor, low-wage and low-education Old Confederacy, plus those states (California, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona) which have had a large influx of Mexican and other Latin American immigrants without a high school education.

 

And among the 12 states comprising the Midwest—Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Kansas, Ohio, Nebraska, and North and South Dakota—Indiana ranks 11^th  out of the 12, with only Illinois, with 86.4% of its population graduated from high school compared to Indiana’s 86.6%, ranking lower.

 

Indiana’s ranking is even more dismal when it comes to higher education, that percentage of the population holding a Bachelor’s degree or higher.  Its rank here is 44^th out of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia, with only 22.5% of its population 25 or older having attained at this level; this compares to the national average of 27.9% of the U.S. population 25 or older having attained at least a Bachelor’s degree.  Among the 12 states of the Midwest, Indiana’s ranking is dead last.  It’s a little more mixed among those with advanced degrees, which comprise not only Master’s degrees and Ph.D.’s, but also professional medical and law degrees—here Indiana ranks 38^th among the 50 states plus the District of Columbia at 8.1%, and 9^th out of the 12 states comprising the Midwest.  The national average is considerably higher—10.3%.  And because this category includes holders of professional medical and law degrees, rankings here include doctors and lawyers as well as those who’ve attained advanced academic degrees.  Of course, it is a sobering fact that the vast majority of legislators at both the state and federal levels have law degrees—even as public disgust at legislators is at an all-time low!  (Figures extrapolated from U.S. Census, “Table 233.  Educational Attainment by State: 1990 to 2009,”

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0233.pdf.)

 

Clearly, Indiana has a crisis in educational attainment, a major cause of its overwhelming across-the-board mediocrity.  Yet the Indiana government’s own Commission for Higher Education is oblivious when it comes to the crucial question of “What’s to be done about it?” stating baldly on its “Overview” page on its website, http://www.in.gov/che/3142.htm,

 

According to 2012 Census data, only 34.4 percent of working-age Hoosiers (25-64 years old) hold a two- or four-year college degree; the national average is 39.4 percent. Indiana has made the Big Goal of 60 percent higher education attainment by 2025 a centerpiece of its higher education policy, and data suggest that if Indiana does nothing, only 41 percent of Hoosiers will have a degree by 2025.  It is vital to address this issue, as data from the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University suggests that by 2020 over 60 percent of the expected job vacancies in Indiana will require a postsecondary credential. 

 

Yet this goal of 60% by 2025 is palpably unrealistic, given that as of present, 60% of Indiana’s college graduates leave the state due to poor employment prospects, (Indiana Institute of Working Families, “Status of Working Families in Indiana, 2011” [released April 2012], http://www.incap.org/documents/iiwf/2012/Final%20Draft-Status%20of%20Working%20Families%20in%20Indiana,%202011.pdf, p.20; in 2011, 41.3% of Indiana’s workers with a Bachelor’s degree or higher suffered long-term unemployment, ibid., p. 14.); and with the Indianapolis Star stating in 2009 that 46.6% of Hoosier college graduates leave the state within one year of graduation. (“Hoosier Mediocrity Fact Sheet,” http://bloomingtonalternative.com/f/Hoosier%20Mediocrity.pdf, p.4, contained in Fish and Fey, “Mediocrity—A Hoosier Affliction.”) Furthermore, according to the Institute’s “Status of Working Families, 2012” report, released July 2013, 82% of Indiana’s college enrollees are only attending part-time, due to work and family obligations. (http://www.incap.org/documents/iiwf/2013/Status%202012%20Final.pdf, p.28) 

 

Moreover, according to the same report, “a majority (54 percent) of all jobs are still middle‐skill jobs—requiring more than a high school diploma, but less than a four‐year degree, while only 47 percent of Hoosier workers have the appropriate skills and credentials.” (p. 26) Given all this, how is it even conceivable that Indiana will achieve the Commission for Higher Education’s goal of increasing by nearly ¾ (i.e., raising by 174.2% the percentage of college graduates who must also stay and work in Indiana to meet the Commission’s goal!) the percentage of Hoosier college graduates, especially in light of Indiana’s notorious and still-continuing Brain Drain?

 

This is but one example of how Indiana’s continuing mediocrity feeds upon itself and paves the way for future mediocrity; while the Hoosier agencies supposedly dealing with the problem continue to only dream, setting palpably unrealistic higher education attainment goals that can’t, and surely won’t, be met.   And against the economic backdrop of Indiana’s per capita income continuing to drop due to job loss and replacement of manufacturing jobs with considerably lower-paying retail, warehouse and service jobs.  With all this occurring while Hoosier income inequality vastly increases—very noticeably in Indianapolis, but also in other cities in the state. (Brian Eason, Indianapolis Star, August 11, 2014, “Report: Wage gap growing rapidly in Indy area,” http://www.indystar.com/story/news/local/hamilton-county/2014/08/11/report-wage-gap-growing-rapidly-indy-area/13900371/.)  

 

Yet, it’s clear from the article that Indiana’s own state Economic Development Corporation and Secretary of Commerce are only “whistling in the proverbial dark” and painting overly optimistic pictures of resurgent growth in manufacturing, the mainstay of Indiana’s industrial economy, but a mainstay that has massively hemorrhaged jobs since 1999, leading to the continuing long-term drop in both wages and per capita income in the state.  This traditional mainstay is being rapidly replaced, however, by low-paying warehouse jobs, filled in the great majority by temp workers contracted through temp agencies.  (See on this Gregory Travis, “CIVITAS: Indiana’s warehouse economy—revisited,” Bloomington Alternative, October 19, 2008, http://bloomingtonalternative.com/articles/2008/10/19/9782; also, George Fish, examiner.com, “Extreme heat and uncertain employment—realities of Central Indiana’s job market,” November 15, 2012; “Amazon.com’s Whitestown, Indiana warehouse is a hell of a place to work,” January 20, 2013; “Work, fatigue, frustration, and—finally!—creativity again,” May 28, 2014; and “Dispatch from the work shift from hell,” July 27, 2014.)  

 

Mediocrity in education, mediocrity in employment, mediocrity at the top levels of Indiana’s own state government executive—such is the true State of the State, 2014.  But what is to be done about it?  What will my fellow Hoosiers do about it?

 

I addressed this question precisely in an examiner.com article I posted on October 30, 2013, “Why do we take it?” where I wrote:

 

The short answer is, because we’re sheep. Most notably here in Indiana, where sheepishness and passivity are widespread cultural traits that Hoosierdom demands conformance to, along with the demand of not expressing “negativity.” Passivity, provincialism, smugness, complacency, conformity, cliquishness—these common Hoosier cultural traits make acceptance even of the most outrageous and injustice a “way of life” to be responded to with unbridled optimism that “things are bound to get better,” and a direct silencing of the “negative” critic who just won’t shut up—and thus disturbs everyone else!

 

The sentiment I expressed above was also echoed in a quote that came across on Facebook from the late distinguished radical historian Howard Zinn, 1922-2010, who wrote:

Civil disobedience is not our problem.  Our problem is civil obedience.  Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience…Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty.  Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country.  That’s our problem.

 

Which puts strictly Hoosier mediocrity and its sheepish acceptance into a broader context, one that relates the FSSA to war, that relates war on the Hoosier poor to war on poor people worldwide, and that notes the crisis of blind obedience everywhere to such blind obedience here in Indianapolis, in Evansville, Fort Wayne and elsewhere, even in the bucolic college-town islands of Bloomington and West Lafayette.  And Howard Zinn himself, who lived and taught in Boston, has a notable Indiana mediocrity connection:  he was singled out by name by former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels as an “anti-American academic,” writer and thinker whose work should be specifically banned from Indiana’s public secondary schools and universities!  Even as today he is President of Indiana’s Purdue University, and claims to defend academic freedom!  (Fortunately, this received extensive national press coverage.  See, e.g., Gawker, July 17, 2013, “Mitch Daniels, President of Purdue, Tried to Ban Howard Zinn’s Books,” http://gawker.com/mitch-daniels-president-of-purdue-tried-to-ban-howard-813676742; Joseph A. Palermo, Huffington Post,  September 29, 2013, “Mitch Daniels, Howard Zinn, and the Politics of History,” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/mitch-daniels-howard-zinn_b_3677477.html, and Mitch Daniels’ speaking in defense of himself also in the Huffington Post: Jon Ward, “Mitch Daniels: I’m ‘More Devoted to Academic Freedom’ Than Critics in Howard Zinn Controversy,” October 30, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/30/mitch-daniels-howard-zinn_n_4178180.html.) 

Interestingly enough, in the above article, and despite Daniels’ claim that he wanted Zinn’s popular, widely-read (2 million copies sold) A People’s History of the United States to be banned from secondary schools only, not universities, it was the use of the book in an Indiana University humanities class that first drew it to Daniels’ attention—and ire—as Governor!  This class, which could be taken by teachers for professional development credit, drew specific memos for action from Daniels himself as Governor, in direct e-mails to aides:  “This crap should not be accepted for any credit by the state” and “Sounds like we need a cleanup of what is credit-worthy in 'professional development' and what is not."       

 

But also in 2014, both the Indiana Pacers NBA basketball team and the Indianapolis Colts NFL football team lost in the playoffs.  Something far more distressing to my fellow Hoosiers than statewide mediocrity, screwing over poor people, horrible lack of educated people in the state, and inability to garner truly skilled, decent-paying employment—that in itself being confirmation of continuing Indiana  mediocrity!