[kenberg]

But back to inequality.

Provide children and adolescents with nutritious food and provide them with a decent education. We cannot make them eat the good food and we cannot make them learn the material. But we need to provide the opportunity. These two things are so fundamental that they should, in my view, come before almost anything else.

As for education, that absolutely does not mean making everyone ready for college. To attempt such a thing is to set ourselves up for failure or, more likely, pretense. Or both. By all means have college prep available. But other viable options deserve respect.

And nutrition can also be approached with goodwill. Mostly I ate well as a child, we had a garden and my mother canned. But I also ate marshmallows by the box. And many fudgsicles. A balanced diet is important.

I started high school in 1952, Decent hot lunches were available at low, presumably subsidized, prices for everyone. No need to go through the embarrassment of proving that you were poor (we weren't). If that could be done in 1952, I assume it could be done today.

Bottom line: We can do better, and it's not hard to see how.

[mike777]

Ken as you point out, there have been hot lunches at schools for decades upon decades.

Yet inequality rises.

Money has been poured into schools for decades and decades.

Yet inequality rises.

the response is more hot lunches and more money.

[kenberg]

mike777, on 2015-May-31, 22:18, said:

Ken as you point out, there have been hot lunches at schools for decades upon decades.

Yet inequality rises.

Money has been poured into schools for decades and decades.

Yet inequality rises.

the response is more hot lunches and more money.

Hot lunches are good and I hope that they are universal. Actually I think students in some of the districts around here can also get a decent breakfast by showing up a half hour or so before classes start. I don't know how universal this is but I like it.

The other item I am advocating is better education. Easy to say, hard to do, of course. It certainly takes money, but money can be squandered.

Under performing schools are not a new phenomenon. In my high school my engineering drawing teacher was an alcoholic. We were to turn in 60 drawings during the year. I did about five and turned them in 1-2-3-4-5-1-2-3-4-5-1-2-3 etc. 12 times. Occasionally he would mention that he thought he had seen the drawing before, I would assure him that he hadn't. His class was the last period of the day so i would usually take off after a bit and pick up my girlfriend who was going to a different and better) school. My biology teacher, as near as I could tell, knew no biology. He could more or less get through the day's lesson but if you asked something about what was in the book but not in the day's lesson he had no idea. If it was further ahead, he hadn't read it, if it was a few days back, he had forgotten.


So I have had some experience with not so good instruction. But it was not uniformly bad and some of it was quite good. All in all, I benefited from being there. I am by no means sure that this is true for many of our schools. The best are much better than what I had. My oldest granddaughter, now 22, got a fine education. Her brother, now in high school, is doing great. But at the low end, I think it is really bad. And I mean really bad. To my mind, educational inequality is the most devastating inequality.

Fixing it will be tough. Locally we recently had an example. School systems here are run, except in the case of Baltimore, by the counties One of the counties has had a cap on property taxes since sometime in the 1970s. Their school system is second only to Baltimore in being awful. The current county executive, a good guy I think, wanted to raise the property taxes by 15% to better fund the schools. The residents and the county council had a fit. I think he actually got a 5.5% increase, something of a miracle that he got any. The reports on the thinking of residents were fascinating. One of them was worried that if the schools got better that would raise property values and thus increase his assessment and so increase his taxes. Can't have that!

It's a dilemma. I doubt this can be fixed without money, but money can be squandered. The county mentioned above could afford to spend more, but they don't want to. And so things are bad and they stay bad.

I'll finish this with another story from long ago. In St. Paul in the early 1950s they needed more money for the schools and it had to go to the voters. It failed. So they announced that since they were short of funds they would be cutting out the football program. They then put the funding up for another vote. it passed.
Plus ca change.....

[y66]

From Walmart Raised Wages In April. It’s Already Seeing The Benefits:

Quote

After it raised wages for employees in April, Walmart said on Friday that it’s already seen lower turnover and an increase in job applicants.

“Our job applications are going up and we are seeing some relief in turnover,” CEO Doug McMillon said at a media briefing after its annual shareholders meeting. The company’s performance has been suffering recently thanks to understaffed stores, among other things.

The company announced that all workers would make at least $9 an hour this year, a minimum that would increase to $10 an hour in February. The company’s rationale at the time was that it would reap the benefits of its $1 billion investment in higher wages through lower turnover, which is apparently already playing out.

Turnover can be quite costly: it eats up the equivalent of a fifth of a worker’s salary to replace him. Higher wages have been found to stem a tide of fleeing workers, however: two different reports found that increased wages lower turnover as well as increase recruitment and employee performance.

McMillon said Walmart might consider going even further than a base wage of $10 an hour in the future to keep attracting and retaining employees. “This won’t be the last jump,” he said. Workers have repeatedly gone on strike to demand that they make at least $15 an hour, be given more predictable schedules, and have the right to form a union.

Other employers have also decided to raise wages in recent months with many of the same justifications as Walmart’s. The Gap and TJX, owner of TJ Maxx and Marshall’s, increased their base wages to $10 and $9, respectively, in the hopes of attracting and retaining better talent. Target also increased wages, as did McDonald’s, but only for those who work at its company-owned stores, which are a small share of its overall locations.

[barmar]

That's great to hear. But if they had high turnover before, where were all those workers going? If someone quits because of poor wages, it's presumably because they found another job that pays better. But it seems like the workers affected by this policy change would be those who earn minimum wage wherever they are.

[mycroft]

Frequently it's "I found another minimum wage job and this environment sucks, so why not?" rather than "that pays better". "That pays better" can make up for some perceived suckage (and it is very likely that the next job sucks too, just in new and exciting ways). Also, knowing that your next job will come with a cut in pay may reflect in less of the kinds of behaviours that force termination (if you're the kind of person that can always "just get another job" - unfortunately I'm not one of them, even when I was limited to minimum wage positions - why should you care about your behaviour. The worst they can do is fire you). Finally, being paid not like a replaceable cog can instill some of that mythical "company loyalty" every employer expects you to have (this must be "if we say it it will be so", as they should expect that having no loyalty to their employees leads to their employees having no loyalty to them).

Frankly, partly there's more of an incentive for the company to treat their employees better if the replacement cost goes up.

And then there's the actual issue the "raise the minimum wage" people go with - if you pay me enough that I'm not worrying about choosing between food or transportation, even if I could just go to another job at the same wage, there's less reason to go looking for another job.

[barmar]

Regardless of the particulars, it's a good development, like Starbucks's announcement a few months ago that they'll pay all their employees to go to college (ASU's online program).

Once upon a time, paid vacation time and subsidized insurance were perks that only some enlightened companies offered, as a way of attracting better employees. Then other companies started offering them to "keep up with the Joneses", and now they're expected of almost all employers (well, health coverage and other insurance programs are still uncommon for small businesses, although Obamacare is changing some of that). Someone has to be the vanguard -- they'll stand out from the crowd at first, but eventually they'll be mainstream.

[bobsolow]

These guys are on an interesting mission:

Quote

Great Place to Work® began with an unexpected discovery. In 1981 a New York editor asked two business journalists - Robert Levering and Milton Moskowitz - to write a book called The 100 Best Companies to Work for in America. Though the pair were skeptical they could find 100 companies that would qualify, they agreed, starting a journey that would lead to more than 25 years of researching, recognizing, and building great workplaces.

What was the core insight uncovered by the pair’s extensive research? It was that the key to creating a great workplace was not a prescriptive set of employee benefits, programs and practices, but the building of high-quality relationships in the workplace -- relationships characterized by trust, pride, and camaraderie. These relationships weren’t a “soft” activity, but key drivers that help improve an organization’s business performance. The role of trust in the workplace became core not only for that first, pioneering 1984 book, but its 1988 sequel, A Great Place to Work: What makes some employers so good - and most so bad.

The blurb says they've been thinking and writing about this stuff since 1981. No doubt many other companies have understood what it takes to create great workplaces and high performing businesses for a lot longer than they have. So, it's good to see Walmart figuring some of this out. But let's not call them the vanguard. And no, I'm not suggesting they will ever be a great place to work. Who knows where sucking less will take them?

I met a guy in my neighborhood a few days ago who used to work for Giant Food in the old days when it was run by Izzy Cohen who also happened to be a DC area bridge player. He was someone who certainly understood what it took to create a great workplace including paying a decent wage to his employees. Apparently, he was still out there talking to his employees, including my neighbor who managed the receiving department at the store in McLean, and inspecting his stores 3 days before he died. If half of all CEOs had his business acumen and his sense of responsibility to his employees, inequality would not be a problem.

[barmar]

bobsolow, on 2015-June-12, 11:22, said:

So, it's good to see Walmart figuring some of this out. But let's not call them the vanguard. And no, I'm not suggesting they will ever be a great place to work. Who knows where sucking less will take them?

Good point. But since they're the largest private employer in the country (world?), anything they do is important. And if it happens to be something we'd like to see other employers emulate, that makes it doubly important. They may not be the first, but they're the most visible.

It's kind of like saying that Columbus "discovered" America, even though we know the Vikings also made it over here hundreds of years earlier. The difference is that they hardly anyone knew or cared what they were doing.

I just hope that others don't view it as something they can't emulate because they don't have the same economies of scale.