👓 Not my shoes | Music for Deckchairs

Read Not my shoes by Kate Bowles (Music for Deckchairs)

Disrupt your industries, if that is what you are in business to do, but do not disrupt the bonds that tie employees, however loose or unspoken they may be.
—Isabel Berwick, 'Workplace communities matter–now more than ever'

Kate has a fantastic parable here. I highly recommend everyone reads it. While she talks about her daughters and their shoes and applies it to inequity in higher education, it applies to nearly every facet of our lives. We need to fix these problems, not only to improve equity within our economy, but to improve our humanity and our lives.

Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia

In this future, we’re all being asked to accept that the sticker price of our success is indifference to how things turn out for others. Of course, this isn’t a novelty, and it’s barely a disruption; this is how the demands of profit have needed work to be managed for a long time. ❧

December 03, 2018 at 09:01AM

It’s treating someone else’s wellbeing, someone’s lost job, someone’s public dressing-down, someone’s stolen idea as somehow not your problem, not your shoes. ❧

December 03, 2018 at 09:01AM

This is what higher education is currently saying to its long-term casual staff. While universities are underfunded for teaching and expected to compete globally on the basis of research, then the revenue from teaching will be diverted into research. This isn’t a blip, and there won’t be a correction. This is how universities are solving their funding problems with a solution that involves keeping labour costs (and associated overheads like paid sick leave) as low as possible. It’s a business model for bad times, and the only thing that makes it sustainable is not thinking about where the human consequences are being felt. ❧

This last sentence is so painful…
December 03, 2018 at 08:58AM