T.R. Reid's World View of Health Care

I recently found Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid's PBS special, Frontline: Sick Around the World to be an enlightening view of the various ways other industrialized nations have addressed health care in their societies. To hear some right-wingers talk about it, you'd think the rest of the world had gone universally socialist, but of that's not only untrue, it's an extremely simplistic notion. Now Reid has written a book on the subject, out August 24, and he's introduced it with a good column in the Post. Take a look: Five Myths About Health Care Around the World

Rethinking the JD and the MBA

As an unemployed lawyer with too much time on her hands, I have been reading news and journal articles about the notion that the legal profession needs to reconsider its current model of training, namely, the Juris Doctor. Lawyers, firms and law schools have been prompted to think about such changes in the wake of the recent economic downturn, which has resulted in fewer good jobs for new law school graduates, with too many overworked attorneys who aren't earning enough to cover sky-high student loan payments. In recent years, traditional, steady law firm jobs seem to be disappearing, while more and more young attorneys are winding up doing the kind of temporary, mass contract work that doesn't seem to use the full range of skills gained in law school. One wonders if law schools shouldn't just go ahead and spend a semester of school teaching electronic document review skills and mass litigation preparation skills, since so many lawyers wind up doing that kind of work and not the meticulous research and analysis for which lawyers are currently trained.

Meanwhile, some are questioning whether three years of law school are really necessary, especially since the cost of law school has become so high that many earners of JDs become virtual indentured servants in exchange for the loans that pay for their degrees. Perhaps students could earn a JD in two years and still pass the bar exam at a lower cost. After all, it wasn't so long ago that law schools were simply undergraduate programs, an alternative to a Bachelor of Arts or Science.

This New York Times opinion piece by Adam Cohen, which focuses on the need for compensation reform and reigning in tuition, is one example of this professional soul-searching: With the Downturn, It's Time to Rethink the Legal Profession. This particular piece addresses the problems but barely hints at solutions; law journal articles are tending to be more circumspect and are sometimes offering ideas for meaningful changes.

I am pleased to see that recent economic problems are also causing business schools to reconsider the training given to MBA students. It appears some commentators in the field are recognizing that MBAs are spending so much time on theory that they are missing out on some real-world aspects of management. They believe ethics and social concerns are downplayed, while some aspects of economics are simplified into one-size-fits-all business models. Maximizing shareholder value is the major goal of MBAs who have graduated from these programs, while long-term sustainability is sometimes ignored. Perhaps this is why highly-qualified business school graduates have been unable to recognize the deficiencies in corporate structure and governance that have contributed to recent economic trends like over-lending and over-consolidation of certain industries.

A recent (March 2009) New York Times article mentions that reviews of graduate business programs have long suggested a need for more "professional" training, which would include codified ethics (as exists for lawyers and doctors) as well as an agreed-upon ideology about the role of the professional business manager in society at large. I am impressed that some business management experts are finally seeing some of the cracks in their system and suggesting educational changes to address the need for a balance between maximizing profit, creating economic sustainability, and respect for societal interests beyond pure finance. Hopefully business schools are taking some of these suggestions to heart, but I suppose only time will tell. If the economy turns around again, will these ideas once again seem quaint to the profit-hungry MBAs of tomorrow? The article can be found here: Is It Time to Retrain B-Schools?

Preventable Deaths on the Job: Farm Workers

There's not much for me to comment on here. Just read the story:

NY Times: UFW Sues CA over Farm Workers' Deaths

Why Exercise Might Not Be Helping With Obesity

Check out this article in Time magazine about why exercise can sometimes hinder rather than help weight loss:

Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin - Time Magazine

Apparently, people tend to negate their exercise by eating more afterwards. Exercise, you see, makes you hungry! The article suggests the solution is to keep one's activity level up during the day rather than relying on bursts of more extreme exercise, say, in the gym. And of course, a person trying to lose weight simply shouldn't take in more calories than he can use.

Since reducing calories in an extreme way has a tendency not to "stick" as a long-term habit (no one wants to be hungry their whole life!), I'd say this is yet another argument in favor of very slow weight loss, achieved by adjusting diet gently and staying somewhat active throughout the day. And personally, I think it vindicates my dislike of running -- I'd much rather walk for two miles than run it, and since I will burn the same number of calories but be physically less uncomfortable at the end, I'm probably less likely to compensate by thinking I "deserve" an extra doughnut.

Why Labor Rights are Civil Rights - an Introduction

When black leader A. Philip Randolph began his career as a civil rights and union activist in the early part of the 20th Century, mostly-white unions usually fought against allowing African Americans to be members of their bargaining units. Just as white workers feared management would take advantage of them as individual employees, they also feared black workers would steal their jobs. And to a certain extent, they were right -- striking workers were sometimes replaced by black "scabs" to add racist insult to injury by management. Historically, management was able to play upon racist fears and blacks' low economic status to divide and conquer the workforce.

But Randolph was a visionary. When he helped unionize the mostly black railway porters of the Pullman Company in 1925, he understood that the company was taking advantage of racism and the economic condition of Black America to create a public image of subservient black men eager to please their white customers. He also understood that white unions and black unions would ultimately be fighting for the same goal: fair wages and tolerable working conditions accompanied by dignity and respect. The struggle for dignity and respect is at the heart of the black civil rights movement, and because they are shared goals of feminists, other minority activists and the organized labor, all of these movements are rightly included in the larger struggle for civil rights.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew this as well. As he said in a speech to the AFL-CIO's constitutional convention in 1961:

"Our needs are identical with labor's needs: decent wages, fair working conditions, livable housing, old age security, health and welfare measures, conditions in which families can grow, have education for their children and respect in the community....The duality of interests of labor and Negroes makes any crisis which lacerates you a crisis from which we bleed."

It was not long after this that A. Philip Randolph joined with leaders from communities of many colors and faiths to organize the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, at which King made his now-legendary "I Have a Dream" speech. Randolph and King were at the crossroads of civil rights, and they understood that good jobs with fair wages and working conditions were at the heart of the civil rights they sought.

Today, organized labor continues to work side by side with minority groups like the NAACP to ensure dignity and respect for all people, especially those marginalized by racial and economic circumstance. Among the issues affecting laborers and minorities alike are the need for affordable health care for all Americans, the protection of American jobs from encroachment by cheap labor overseas, balance of work and family life, security for the aged, and education for all. Though even many politically liberal observers in the educated middle and upper middle classes may not realize it, organized labor is at the heart of civil rights, perhaps now more than ever. That's because now more than ever, the values of dignity and respect at work are spilling over to inform our values about how we treat one another as human beings -- and how we treat each other as human beings falls within the very definition of civil rights.

For more, see this Wikipedia Article on civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph

I'll be talking more about the importance of organized labor, both in the workplace and in society, in future blog posts.