Tag Archives: pay

Breaking the Alt-Right’s Piggy Bank

Surprised by Alt-Right and White Supremacist content on YouTube and Other sites…With Advertising for Coke or Pepsi right beside it?

While the tech companies were fine with it, and did little to filter it out – the big companies who buy ads aren’t happy at all.

Smack-down for the racist enabling tech companies.

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Major companies pulling advertisements a sign that many doubt Google’s ability to prevent marketing campaigns from appearing alongside repugnant videos









YouTube has begun reviewing its advertising policies and will take steps to give advertisers more control, Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer, wrote in a blogpost this week. Google also plans to hire more people for its review team and refine its artificial intelligence – a key step, since much of the ad-serving is handled by automation.



But Google’s public statements have done little to assuage advertisers’ fears, said David Cohen, president, North America, for the media buying firm Magna Global.

Even before the most recent revelations about YouTube, control over online ad placement had become a hot-button topic for advertisers. Social networks and news aggregators came under fire during and after the US presidential election for spreading fake news reports, and advertisers have also sought to avoid having their brands appear beside content that they categorize as hate speech.



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Chumph’s Racism Destroying Agriculture

So…What happens if the Chumph gets his wish to deport all illegal aliens in this country…

The Agricultural industry in the US collapses.

Despite incessant whining by the white right snowflakes of flyover country…There just aren’t going to be any white folks out there picking cotton as long as they can get a welfare check, Even if you raise the pay to be competitive with other work.

Tell me again “who” is exactly unwilling to work for a living?

Wages rise on California farms. Americans still don’t want the job




Solorio moved on to two men huddled nearby, and returned quickly. “They were drug addicts,” he said. “And, they didn’t have a car.”

Before the day was through, Solorio would make the same pitch to dozens of men and women, approaching a taco truck, a restaurant and a homeless encampment. Time was short: He needed to find 100 workers to fill his ranks by April 1, when grapevines begin to grow and need constant attention.

Solorio is one of a growing number of agricultural businessmen who say they face an urgent shortage of workers. The flow of labor began drying up when President Obama tightened the border. Now President Trump is promising to deport more people, raid more companies and build a wall on the southern border.








Instead, companies growing high-value crops, like Cabernet Sauvignon grapes in Napa, are luring employees from fields in places like Stockton that produce cheaper wine grapes or less profitable fruits and vegetables.

Growers who can’t raise wages are losing their employees and dealing with it by mechanizing, downsizing or switching to less labor-intensive crops.

Jeff Klein is doing all of the above. Last year Klein, a fourth-generation Stockton farmer, ran a mental ledger, trying to sort out the pros and cons of persevering in the wine business or quitting. He couldn’t make the math work.

Wineries pay Klein a tiny fraction of what they pony up for the same grape variety grown in Napa, and the rising cost of labor meant he was losing money on his vineyards. So in October, Klein decided to rip out 113,000 Chardonnay grapevines that once blanketed land his family has owned for decades. Now they lay heaped into hundreds of piles, waiting to be taken to the dump.

“I try to make any decision I make not emotional. When you’re running a business, it has to be a financial decision,” he says, sifting through the mangled metal posts.

Five years ago, Klein had a crew of 100 workers pruning, tying and suckering his grapevines. Wineries paid $700 for a ton of grapes, and Klein could make a solid profit paying $8 an hour, the minimum wage.

Last year he could barely get together 45 laborers, and his grapes sold for only $350 per ton. Klein knew his vines were done for when California passed laws raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2023 and requiring overtime for field laborers.

“There’s not enough guys, and everybody is fighting for everybody else’s guys,” he says. “In Napa and Sonoma, they’re getting $2,000 a ton [for grapes]. So, those guys can afford to pay $15. For me, I’m just trying to break even.”

Although Trump earned Klein’s vote, he worries that recent executive orders ratcheting up deportation plans and calling for a wall are putting a chokehold on an already tight pool of workers.

“That’s killing our labor force,” says the 35-year-old grower.

Already, fewer Mexicans had been willing to risk border crossings as security and deportations escalated under the Obama Administration. At the same time, Mexico’s own economy was mushrooming, offering decent jobs for people who stayed behind.

With the grapevines he has left, Klein is doing what he can to pare his crews. Last year, he bought a leaf puller for $50,000, which turns the delicate process of culling grapevine canopies into an exercise in brute force. The puller hooks onto a tractor and, like an oddly shaped vacuum cleaner, sucks leaves from grapevines.

He used to spend $100 an acre culling the canopies, which allows the right amount of sunlight to hit the grapes and turn them into sugar balls. Now, he says, “It will cost me 20 bucks, and I can get rid of some labor.”

Klein says he’ll spend the next five years replacing his 1,000 acres of grapevines with almond and olive trees, which require a fraction of the human contact to grow.

About 80 miles west in Napa, growers aren’t facing quite the same challenge. Cabernet Sauvignon grapes in Napa go for nearly $6,900 per ton, 10 times more than in San Joaquin County.

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Read the Rest Here…


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Here in Virginia, this is one of my neighbor’s Tomato Fields. This one is run by a major company, and the crop can wind up in anything from your Marinara and Spaghetti Sauces under a major label, to canned tomatoes, depending on what they plant. There are about 300,000 to 3 million plants out there on this field (of which the photo is only of a small part). All of these tomatoes are picked by hand by immigrant labor. Teams of hundreds go out to pick the crop, twice, before the plants are killed, and a second crop is planted. Typically they get two crops a year in Spring to fall. If the Chumph deports these workers…There ain’t gonna be any Mamma Ragu anymore.

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Same Job – Same Qualifications…Different Pay in Black and White

Like the much touted Gender Pay Gap, there is a racial pay gap. The growth in white female executives has done nothing to change the math. One of the reasons black people are somewhat ambivalent about Hillary Clinton’s feminism.

Searching for the Origins of the Racial Wage Disparity In Jim Crow America


Even with the bevy of data collected on American workers every year, it can be difficult to nail down the exact causes of disparities in certain workers’ pay, let alone do something about them. Workplace protections such as anti-discrimination clauses and minimum wages have helped a little, but there are still big employment and earnings gaps between black and white Americans.

In a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the economists Celeste K. Carruthers and Marianne H. Wanamaker shed more light on today’s racial wage gap by turning to history: In their research, they look into the forces that determined the wages of Southern men during the 1940s, when segregation was legal and black workers weren’t protected by any anti-discrimination laws.

The big question that Carruthers and Wanamaker wanted to sort out was why the average black man and the average white man were earning different wages. Was it because employers were discriminating against black workers when determining pay? Or was it because black workers’ skill sets were relatively less valuable?

The answer they arrived at, after analyzing school quality, employment and wages, was that differences in skills accounted for the most significant portion of the wage disparities in the 1940s. But the root of that skill gap was still racial. The explicit sanctioning of segregation by Jim Crow meant that black public schools lacked of resources and public funding—shortcomings that limited the skill sets and education levels of young, black men during this period, which in turn limited their job opportunities.

Carruthers and Wanamaker argue that a major determinant of public-school quality—and thus a school’s ability to churn out skilled workers—is funding. As the mid-20th-century South illustrates, a shortfall of money can hamper the development of entire groups of people: “The discriminatory preferences of white southerners were powerful in limiting black public school quality and reducing the wages of young black men through the human capital channel,” the authors write. The persistent inequality of educational opportunities, they found, singlehandedly cut earnings of black Southern workers by as much as 50 percent.

Carruthers and Wanamaker’s findings are notable because they suggest that if black Americans were given equal educational opportunities, they could have had significantly better jobs and compensation, even during periods of systemic and intentional discrimination and disenfranchisement. “Education equality would have been a powerful tool for raising black economic standing in the South,” the authors write. Had schools not been kept separate, or had they actually lived up to the promise of educational equality, the authors hypothesize that the wage gap would be a lot narrower than it is today.

The development that, since the ‘40s, has had the most profound impact on starting to close wage gaps was the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, which effectively ordered more funding for black children’s education by integrating both schools and neighborhoods. Twenty years earlier, in the era Carruthers and Wanamaker were focusing on, many black workers’ best bet was to move: Migration was an effective way for them to beef up their salaries and enter labor markets that were a better fit for their skills (not to mention find school districts that, while still separate, were perhaps not quite so unequal).

Of course, improvements to educational access haven’t been a cure-all. Median wages of black male workers during the fourth quarter of 2015 were only 72.4 percent of those of their white counterparts. And unemployment among black workers is around 8.8 percent, while for whites, it’s closer to 4 percent. And for workers lower down on the totem pole of skills, the gaps are even more troubling. As the Brookings Institution recently noted, nearly half of black male workers who haven’t graduated high school have disappeared from the labor force over the past 45 years, while the share of white male workers without a diploma has declined by less than 20 percent.

Today, many neighborhoods remain effectively segregated, and concentrated poverty means poorer areas don’t yield the taxes and investments to build up high-quality school districts. The result is a black populace that tends to earn lower wages, which keeps cycles of poverty going. School segregation is a major cause of labor inequality in the U.S.—whether it’s intentional or not.

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Posted by on February 9, 2016 in The New Jim Crow


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Race and College Sports

The last major bastion of slavery in America – college sports. College Football and College Basketball are major revenue drivers for the schools. Being part of a major conference, even for a school at the bottom of the standings still means $8-10 million revenue in TV Rights and ticket sales. The big money from football has caused major realignments of traditional leagues – resulting in major realignments of the Atlantic Coast Conference, and the Big East as schools have fled to the big(ger) money conferences.

Schools winning the Championship series can garner over $50 million in revenue counting TV Rights, Ticket sales, and the ale of licensed material. This is BIG Business…



That’s because college sports is a tremendously lucrative business for everyone but the athletes. The National College Athletic Association (NCAA) will receive $7.3 billion from ESPN for the right to broadcast the seven games of the College Football Playoffs (CFP) between 2014 and 2026, and $11 billionfrom CBS and Turner Sports to broadcast “March Madness” over the next 14 years.





Most blacks want college athletes to be paid. Most whites don’t

There’s evidence that he’s right. In survey after survey, strong national majorities oppose paying college athletes. In March 2015, for example, anHBO Real Sports/Marist Poll found that 65 percent of Americans do not think college athletes in top men’s football and basketball programs should be paid.



Could some of that gap grow from racism?








When we talk about paying college athletes, we’re talking about race 



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The “Meritocracy” Lie

The most successful meritocracy in America is the US Military – despite some setbacks due to politicization  during the Bush Administration under Donald Rumsfeld. Coming in second is the US Government. Dead last is commercial industry.

You can pretty much figure out whether an organization will be monochrome or open based on the management’s performance objectives. Those companies who hire minorities tend to have objectives built in to the senior management’s performance. Those which do not either don’t care, or don’t want any changes to their monochrome workforce.

The False Promise of Meritocracy

Managers who believe themselves to be fair and objective judges of ability often overlook women and minorities who are deserving of job offers and pay increases.

Americans are, compared with populations of other countries, particularly enthusiastic about the idea of meritocracy, a system that rewards merit (ability + effort) with success. Americans are more likely to believe that people are rewarded for their intelligence and skills and are less likely to believe that family wealth plays a key role in getting ahead. And Americans’ support for meritocratic principles has remained stable over the last two decades despite growing economic inequality, recessions, and the fact that there is less mobility in the United States than in most other industrialized countries.

This strong commitment to meritocratic ideals can lead to suspicion of efforts that aim to support particular demographic groups. For example, initiativesdesigned to recruit or provide development opportunities to under-represented groups often come under attack as “reverse discrimination.” Some companies even justify not having diversity policies by highlighting their commitment to meritocracy. If a company evaluates people on their skills, abilities, and merit, without consideration of their gender, race, sexuality etc., and managers are objective in their assessments then there is no need for diversity policies, the thinking goes.

But is this true? Do commitments to meritocracy and objectivity lead to more fair workplaces?

Emilio J. Castilla, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, has explored how meritocratic ideals and HR practices like pay-for-performance play out in organizations, and he’s come to some unexpected conclusions.

In one company study, Castilla examined almost 9,000 employees who worked as support-staff at a large service-sector company. The company was committed to diversity and had implemented a merit-driven compensation system intended to reward high-level performance and to reward all employees equitably.

But Castilla’s analysis revealed some very non-meritocratic outcomes. Women, ethnic minorities, and non-U.S.-born employees received a smaller increase in compensation compared with white men, despite holding the same jobs, working in the same units, having the same supervisors, the same human capital, and importantly, receiving the same performance score. Despite stating that “performance is the primary bases for all salary increases,” the reality was that women, minorities, and those born outside the U.S. needed “to work harder and obtain higher performance scores in order to receive similar salary increases to white men.”

These findings led Castilla to wonder if organizational cultures and practices designed to promote meritocracy actually accomplished the opposite. Could it be that the pursuit of meritocracy somehow triggered bias? Along with his colleague, the Indiana University sociology professor Stephen Bernard, they designed a series of lab experiments to find out. Each experiment had the same outcome. When a company’s core values emphasized meritocratic values, those in managerial positions awarded a larger monetary reward to the male employee than to an equally performing female employee. Castilla and Bernard termed their counter intuitive result “the paradox of meritocracy.”

The paradox of meritocracy builds on other research showing that those who think they are the most objective can actually exhibit the most bias in their evaluations. When people think they are objective and unbiased then they don’t monitor and scrutinize their own behavior. They just assume that they are right and that their assessments are accurate. Yet, studies repeatedly show that stereotypes of all kinds (gender, ethnicity, age, disability etc.) are filters through which we evaluate others, often in ways that advantage dominant groups and disadvantage lower-status groups. For example, studies repeatedly find that the resumes of whites and men are evaluated more positively than are the identical resumes of minorities and women.

This dynamic is precisely why meritocracy can exacerbate inequality—because being committed to meritocratic principles makes people think that they actually are making correct evaluations and behaving fairly. Organizations that emphasize meritocratic ideals serve to reinforce an employee’s belief that they are impartial, which creates the exact conditions under which implicit and explicit biases are unleashed.

“The pursuit of meritocracy is more difficult than it appears,” Castilla said at a recent conference hosted by the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford, “but that doesn’t mean the pursuit is futile. My research provides a cautionary lesson that practices implemented to increase fairness and equity need to be carefully thought through so that potential opportunities for bias are addressed.” While companies may want to hire and promote the best and brightest, it’s easier said than done.

GapJumpers, a Silicon Valley start-up, is focused on making meritocracy a reality by taking a skills-first approach to identifying the highest-performing talent.  Modeled after research showing that blind auditions block biased evaluations, GapJumpers developed an online technology platform that enables hiring managers to hold blind audition challenges. In the challenges, job applicants are given mini assignments that are designed to assess the applicant for the specific skills required for the open position. All submissions are evaluated and ranked, and the top-performing submissions (minus any applicant identifiers) are then reviewed by the hiring manager who selects candidates to bring in to interview. The result: About 60 percent of the top talent identified through GapJumpers’ blind audition process come from underrepresented backgrounds.

Hiring managers do not expect this outcome. “The high percentage of underrepresented applicants that make it through the skills-first screening process is often met with suspicion,” says Sharon Jank, a social psychologist and Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University, who is conducting her doctoral research with GapJumpers.  In her work, Jank has observed that “hiring managers tend to be surprised that the top performing submissions they pick to advance very often come from applicants without an elite education, training, or experience.  This suggests blind performance auditions are a powerful tool to manage bias and address the pervasive and incorrect assumption that elite pedigree best predicts performance of on the job skills.”

“Our biases lead to sub-optimal talent selection decisions when evaluating resumes,” says GapJumpers cofounder Kédar Iyer. “By scaling the successful and proven method of blind performance auditions, GapJumpers’ results show that real work performance trumps labels on a resume.”

In addition to blind auditions, transparency and accountability also support more meritocratic outcomes. Recently, Castilla published the results from a longitudinal study he conducted with the same large service-sector company that he had studied years earlier. After learning from Castilla’s analysis that there were pay disparities in their organization (white men received more compensation than equally performing women, minorities, and non-U.S.-born individuals) the company asked Castilla to recommend practices to close the pay gap….More Here

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Posted by on December 3, 2015 in The New Jim Crow


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Crime Doesn’t Pay – The Wasabi Zombie…And Other Stories

Things are getting weird out there!


Using her jeans.


Man Arrested for Attacking Girlfriend With Wasabi








Police arrested McGuinness at his home on Roseland Terrace.



Robbing banks a bad idea for crooks from economic standpoint

Bonnie and Clyde






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Posted by on June 12, 2012 in The Post-Racial Life


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