Class meets in SH 107 today
A reminder that we will meet with guest speaker Kim Wales in SH 107 today.
NWNY Questions
1. What steps did you need to take in the process of establishing this sustainable nonprofit organization?
2. Did you always know that you wanted to work in the nonprofit sector, even before attending law school?
3. How successful do you think the organization has been so far in aiding immigrant and refugee women unlock their true potential?
Questions for Arielle Kandel
1. Do you find the language barrier a difficult obstacle to pass when trying to educate and empower immigrant women?
2. Is there a population of immigrant women that simply can’t be propelled toward bigger and better things for a particular reason?
Questions for Arielle Kandel
1. What are the greatest challenges you face with immigrant women in the LEAD Program and in the Hear Me! Project?
2. When did you realize that you wanted to dedicate your life to bettering the lives of young immigrant women?
Future of Work Solutions
In my previous post, the two problems I posed were the unethical business practices of corporations due to flawed corporate structure and the growing trend toward hiring adjunct professors that are underpaid and overworked.
To address the first problem, I will not suggest a whole new corporate structure or substructure. In my previous post, I explained that it was the priority of maintaining shareholder value that led to unethical business practices such as trashing of the environment and underpaying of workers. Shareholder value is the “sum of all strategic decisions that affect the firm’s ability to efficiently increase the amount of free cash flow over time.” In other words, shareholder value is value assigned to a shareholder on the basis of wise investments and good returns of investments. The idea is that if a company builds value, the stock price will eventually reflect that value. In order to stay competitive and to generate a profit, companies must take shareholder value into account.
A good way to address the problem I posed is to find a way to make being environmentally responsible a means by which one can increase shareholder value by a substantial degree. This is already in the works with budding innovative corporations that are developing environmentally and socially responsible solutions to various issues people are facing throughout the world. I have been reading about an idea, which is already being applied in certain sectors by certain corporations, called Circular Economy, which involves examining the designs of how things are made and to minimize waste. Ideally, the materials that construct our goods will be perpetually reusable. But, this requires that research be done to investigate the designs of things to make them more efficient and renewable. So, I suggest that a subcommittee be formed that deals with examination of the designs and processes that construct the goods corporations seek to sell to reduce the amount of wasted energy in such systems.
Another problem I seek to address is the adjunct phenomenon. According to the American Association for University Professors, adjunct professors make up more than half of all faculties and 76% of instructional positions are filled on a temporary basis. Adjunct professors are underpaid, overworked, have no benefits, and have no job security. Just last month, February 25, was National Adjunct Walkout Day, in which many adjunct professors walked out of work to protest horrible working conditions.
The reason that adjunct professors are being oppressed is that universities are pressured to keep tuition low, keep enough teachers to run their classes, and there is overwhelming competition for faculty positions that are few in number relative to the people who want to fill these positions. Due to all of these factors, adjunct professors are not being paid enough, have to teach multiple classes that can sometimes be large distances from one another, and are trapped waiting for tenure-track positions to open up and accept them.
To address this problem, I suggest conducting a bake sale to raise money for struggling adjuncts and advertising to demonstrate to the government that this is a problem that the public finds important to address. The hope is that this will lead to greater government funding for higher education.
References:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/making-sense/one-professors-american-dream-teaching-turned-american-nightmare/
https://chroniclevitae.com/news/762-the-adjunct-crisis-is-everyone-s-problem
http://www.online-phd-programs.org/adjunct/
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/the-adjunct-professor-crisis/361336/
http://adjunctcrisis.com/
http://www.newappsblog.com/adjunct-faculty-and-hyper-exploitation/
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cocktail-party-physics/2014/07/18/guest-post-adjunct-instructors-petition-for-change/
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/02/19/research-aaas-meeting-notes-difficult-job-market-academic-science
http://education.cu-portland.edu/blog/reference-material/what-is-an-adjunct-professor-and-why-do-colleges-hire-them/
http://www.toxicsaction.org/problems-and-solutions/waste
http://www.occupy.com/article/trash-tpp-why-its-time-revolt-against-worst-trade-agreement-history
http://www.globalissues.org/article/55/corporations-and-the-environment
http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/faq_shareholder_stakeholder_perspective.html
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/shareholder-value.asp
https://hbr.org/2011/10/ceos-must-understand-what-crea/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-kennell/recycling-opens-the-door-_b_6164314.html
https://www.google.com/search?q=february+25+adjuncts&oq=february+25+adjuncts&aqs=chrome..69i57.5511j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8
Future of Work Problems
Work takes up such a huge chunk of our lives: the average person spends about a third of their adult life at work. A topic that has been controversial in the past few years is the efficiency of the traditional workplace environment. Most people need long stretches of uninterrupted time to truly focus and get substantial work done. However, company employees often face a great number of distractions in the one place where they are expected be the most productive – the office. Jason Fried proposes that the main problems are the M&Ms, or meetings and managers [1]. While managers are there to ensure that everything is running smoothly, they more often than not disturb their employees’ productivity. Meetings, although important in keeping employees up-to-date, usually do not need to last as long as they do. They are traditionally held in 15-minute intervals and have a set formal structure, when really only several minutes are necessary to convey the desired information. Thus, it is time to rethink the traditional office workspace into a more flexible system where individuals take personal responsibility for their workload. Managers shouldn’t have to provide that sense of constant security and babysitting if workers are trusted to manage themselves [2].
We as college students would like to think that there is a job lined up for us after we graduate. This is simply not the reality, as showcased by the myriad graduates who didn’t have much luck finding work [5]. In a society where competition for internships and jobs only gets fiercer with passing time, many college graduates are having an extremely hard time securing a job after they graduate. The increasing trend is that supply exceeds demand in the labor market. A saddening 20% of graduates eventually give up pursuing a position in their desired career and are forced to settle for a job outside of their chosen field of study in order to pay off their college debt [4]. This is a huge problem. Why go through the process of obtaining a degree if, at the end of it all, you will be stuck at a job that is outside of your major and for which you are overqualified?
It has been predicted that robots, software, and smart machines will replace a third of human workers by the year 2025 [6]. Artificial intelligence and automation are quickly entering a great range of different professions, such as lawyers, doctors, pharmacists, and scientists [9]. Although this is fascinating news, there is evidence that these technologies will have a negative impact on the job market. Machines are capable of doing more work than the average human, for a longer period of time, come at less of a cost, and don’t require care benefits. Although initially not incredibly knowledgable, they learn and recognize patterns quickly and, as a result, become more “intelligent”. Hence, businesses are more inclined to opt for a robot workforce instead of a human one. Middle-skilled jobs – those that only require some training – are in the most danger of being replaced entirely by machines, since they consist of repetitive, organizational tasks [9]. Many labor economists, however, believe the data doesn’t necessarily point to the lack of job growth in the past decade [8]. Nonetheless, it is undoubtable that automation and artificial intelligence will continue having a huge impact on the job market.
References:
[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/jason_fried_why_work_doesn_t_happen_at_work
[2] http://qz.com/297041/the-three-essential-skills-youll-need-to-survive-the-future-of-work/
[3] http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2014/05/18/job-outlook-2014-graduates/8809801/
[4] http://www.forbes.com/sites/thecollegebubble/2014/08/15/overqualified-and-underemployed-the-job-market-waiting-for-graduates/
[5] http://www.theguardian.com/money/2013/dec/27/graduating-debt-no-job-lost-generation
[6] http://www.computerworld.com/article/2691607/one-in-three-jobs-will-be-taken-by-software-or-robots-by-2025.html
[7] https://hbr.org/2014/12/what-happens-to-society-when-robots-replace-workers
[8] http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/
[9] http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/robot_invasion/2011/09/will_robots_steal_your_job.html
Problems 2 Future of Work
In class, we have been discussing contemporary issues with the current workplace and we have been examining how working conditions in the future may be impacted with current trends in working.
One contemporary issue is that there are many corporations today that trash the environment. According to a United Nations study on the activities of the world’s 3,000 biggest companies, firms would lose over one third of their profits if they were forced to pay for use, loss, and damage of environment. The first speaker, Oliver Libby, revealed to us that the reason for this is that, in the United States, stakeholder value is the highest priority. To protect this, corporations will engage in unethical behaviors. Such unethical behaviors include underpaying workers and trashing the environment. However, that speaker had also revealed that this situation will fail to last because with the coming of new businesses that are environmentally responsible and a new generation of environmentally-aware people, businesses cannot afford to be environmentally irresponsible or unethical in any way. Otherwise, people may not be willing to invest in such companies. As that speaker had said, “Would you rather invest in a company that makes lots of money but trashes the environment or in a company that makes a little less money but is environmentally responsible?” This question was directed at the future of New York and it is clear that the answer leans overwhelmingly toward the latter option. Our last speaker, Debera Johnson, echoed the comments of the first speaker during her talk.
Another issue that needs to be addressed in the topic of work is the growing trend towards temporary jobs, especially with regard to adjunct professors. Today, part-time instructors account for over half of all faculty at the nation’s public and private institutions for higher education. My current differential equations (a 300 level course) professor is an adjunct professor making about $3,000 per semester. This is a horrible financial situation because it is questionable as to whether or not he will even be able to sustain himself and it is clear that he is being paid below minimum wage. This is a horrendous problem that needs to be addressed. According to Prof. Binz Scharf, the reason for this rising trend in hiring adjunct professors is that universities recognize that a tenured professor is a multimillion dollar investment. A tenured professor cannot be removed from office and is consistently paid, with increasing pay with seniority. It is no question, then, that some form of social innovation is needed to address this problem. Something needs to change in the current structure of academic employment to improve this dismal situation. This is also of personal interest to me because I have plans for working in the university setting someday.
Two contemporary issues in work that I feel deserve a good deal of attention is the current corporate structure and how it leads to unethical business practices as well as the current trend of employing adjunct professors at universities, who are underpaid and treated as second-class academic citizens.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/18/worlds-top-firms-environmental-damage
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2014-04-16/growing-reliance-adjunct-professors
http://www.academia.edu/2100902/The_Work_of_the_University_The_Adjunct_Phenomenon
Questions for Debera Johnson
1. What qualities do you look for in a designer versus a design entrepreneur? Is there something special that separates one from the other?
2. Have you ever encountered a student who didn’t work out as an entrepreneur? Who perhaps was a great designer but never quite made it as an entrepreneur?
Questions for Debera Johnson
1. Under your leadership, the Pratt Design Incubator for Sustainable Innovation has helped launched twenty-five design driven enterprises in four sectors: clean energy, fashion, design and design consulting. Which sector would you say you are most passionate about and why?
2. Brooklyn Design & Fashion Accelerator is described as “a hub for ethical fashion and design that provides designers with the resources they need to transform their ideas into successful businesses.” What would you say is the most important resource that you provide to these business and why?
Questions for Debera Johnson
1) What exactly is your connection to the Pratt Institute? How does partnering with such a big name benefit the BF+DA?
2) Does your PALS program and the collaboration done there help accomplish the goals of the BF+DA? If so how?
