Shirk work? Working at home can mean longer hours -- Feb. 28, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer has decreed that workers must start showing up at the office.

Uh, oh. What if her employees get less work done -- not more?

Contrary to what many employers think, telecommuters actually work more overtime than their office-bound colleagues, Mary C. Noonan of the University of Iowa and Jennifer L. Glass of the University of Texas at Austin reported last June in “Monthly Labor Review.” 

In their article, titled “The hard truth about telecommuting,” the sociologists say people who work regularly, but not exclusively, at home work between five and seven hours more per week than those in the office.   

Noonan and Glass studied telecommuting trends of nearly 67,000 workers from the mid-1990s through the mid-2000s and found that telecommuters were far less likely to work a regular schedule and more likely to work more than 40 hours a week.  

Fans laud telecommuting for everything from reducing traffic congestion and air pollution to boosting productivity and promoting work-life balance. Employees in cubicles dream of padding down the hall in their slippers to sit at their computers and having more time for children and other relatives. But the study suggests a dark side to telecommuting: It may allow employers to increase or intensify work demands among salaried employees. 

Mayer stunned not only Yahoo employees but the 21^st century workplace when her human resources chief sent an internal memo telling employees “We need to be one Yahoo! and that starts with physically being together.” Angry employees leaked the memo to Kara Swisher at All Things D, a site that covers the digital world.

The memo raises an intriguing point. What are we missing with our reliance on email and texting? “Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings,” the memo said.

The irony was delicious, an Internet search company insisting that people chat face to face. How quaint. What’s next – typewriters and carbon paper?

Mayer, who was hired to breathe life into Yahoo, became its chief executive at 37 while pregnant with her first child. Working women hoped that she, of all people, would be sympathetic to the needs of other working moms. She reportedly lavished free food and iPhones on Yahoo employees. When that didn’t turn the company around, she reined in the troops – and reaped criticism from all sides.

Even fellow CEOs questioned her judgment. Richard Branson, founder of Virgin, blogged about trust. “To successfully work with other people, you have to trust each other. A big part of this is trusting people to get their work done wherever they are, without supervision,” he wrote.  

No one would argue with the value of trust in the workplace, but what happens when the trust is abused? The New York Times reported that some Yahoo employees used their working time at home to start their own businesses.

Several studies have found that telecommuting improves productivity. To spark innovation, though, research suggests interaction is key. Yahoo joins a few other large corporations that have upset workers by requiring them to show up.

The uproar strikes many as rich people’s problems. Most Americans juggle jobs and family without the luxury of being able to work at home. 

White, college-educated managers and professionals are far more likely to telecommute than is the population as a whole. Telecommuters are less likely to be black and Hispanic. Noonan and Glass also found that while many companies say they have flexible workplace policies, the rate of telecommuting has stayed at about 17 percent through the mid-2000s.

The federal government has increased telecommuting. Three years ago, President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama sponsored the first White House forum on workplace flexibility. In December 2010, the president signed the Telework Enhancement Act, requiring federal agencies to promote working remotely.

Yahoo intends to be “the absolute best place to work,” the memo said. Mayer may yet discover that more work gets done at home than in the hallway and cafeteria.   

© 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Hey, Congress: First, do no harm -- Feb. 21, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

A Wal-Mart executive complained that February sales were “a total disaster.”

His email leaked and naturally made news. We rarely sniff panic from the world’s largest retailer.

The fact that Wal-Mart shoppers were staying home, though, was hardly surprising.

On Jan. 1, Congress and the White House raised the payroll tax 2 percentage points -- from 4.2 percent to 6.2 percent – for every working American. A family earning $50,000 will have a thousand dollars less to spend this year.

 

A thousand dollars may sound like zip when some Americans can afford to spend $100,000 on a closet -- not on the clothes in the closet, mind you, but on the spacious and fancy dressing room where they armor-up to meet the day.

    

“These days the cost of a closet can rival or surpass that of the kitchen,” the Wall Street Journal cheerfully advised.

     

Talk about parallel universes. For most Americans, confidence in the economy has slipped. We’re  worried about higher gas prices. Gas rose 45 cents on average in 31 days, the fastest climb since 2005.

We still have 12.3 million people officially unemployed, and 46.2 million of us live in poverty. The poverty rate for children under 18 is about 22 percent.

But other Americans, a fortunate few, have disposable income such that they can drop $100,000 to $250,000 on a closet.

While Wal-Mart sales are down this month, high-end retailers have been on a roll, reporting huge gains in sales. 

  

And we’re worried about higher taxes on the very rich? Really?

The country’s richest citizens, the Forbes 400, are worth an astonishing $1.7 trillion, the most ever.  Income inequality has been growing by leaps and bounds.

In the past, the very mention of income inequality provoked Republican wrath and charges of class warfare. Fortunately, Warren Buffett has changed that.   

“In recent years, my gang has been leaving the middle class in the dust,” the sage of Omaha wrote in a New York Times op-ed last November.

President Barack Obama declared in his inaugural address last month that “our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.” He has proposed a hike in the minimum wage, which Republicans are expected to kill.

It’s too bad that “first, do no harm,” the pillar of medical ethics, doesn’t apply to our elected officials in Washington.

While Congress enjoyed an extended Presidents Day vacation, political leaders played a game of chicken with the looming sequestration spending cuts. Many economists warn that if those across-the-board cuts take effect March 1, they will usher in another recession.

When the president arrayed blue-uniformed emergency medical workers behind him on Tuesday to warn of impending job losses should Republicans fail to negotiate on a deal, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell dismissed it as a campaign stunt. 

House Speaker John Boehner took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal  Wednesday to warn that the sequester threatens national security and thousands of jobs – and to lay blame at the president’s feet. Both Boehner and McConnell gigged Obama for wasteful federal spending.

      

 “No one should be talking about raising taxes when the government is still paying people to play videogames, giving folks free cell phones and buying $47,000 cigarette-smoking machines,” Boehner wrote.

I looked into Boehner’s claims. The Energy Department did pay 13 workers at a company in Michigan who played video games and otherwise goofed off when they should have been working. I’m shocked, shocked that this could happen in an American workplace. 

  

The government started providing discounted phone service to poor people in 1985. Cell phones were added under President George W. Bush. As for the cigarette-smoking machine, Veterans Affairs recently approved such a contract for research into the health effects of smoking in lab mice. 

Nobody likes government waste, but taken together all three projects represent such a miniscule amount that they hardly should be allowed to hold the entire nation hostage. 

  

Washington needs to find a way to keep the economy afloat. If a few can build $100,000 closets, most should be able to shop at Wal-Mart.

© 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Vote: Waiting not the hardest part -- Feb. 14, 2013

By MARSHA MERCER

At 10 a.m. on the first day of early voting in Florida last October, Desiline Victor showed up at her polling place in North Miami. The wait to vote was estimated at six hours.

Other voters might have left immediately, but Ms. Victor, 102, stood in line for three hours. A poll worker then suggested she come back that night. Ms. Victor did, and when she finally put on her “I voted” sticker, people cheered.

The nation cheered when President Barack Obama  told Victor’s story last week as she sat with first lady Michelle Obama at the State of the Union address.

    

“When any American – no matter where they live or what their party – are denied that right simply because they can’t afford to wait for five or six or seven hours just to cast their ballot, we are betraying our ideals,” Obama declared.

  

In his inaugural address, the president also decried long lines at polling places:  “Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote,” he said.

Perhaps it’s a sign of the impatience of our times that the president has declared war on waiting.

No one should have to wait for hours to vote, but that is hardly a poll tax or literacy test. Every state should have no-excuse early and absentee voting.

Yet long lines are just one strand in a tangle of impediments to voting. Recently passed state voter ID laws can discourage and even suppress the vote.

   

To improve “the voting experience in America,” the president announced a bipartisan commission. Ho hum.  In Washington, commissions are where good ideas go to die.

 

In a memorable line from Charles P. Pierce in Esquire’s politics blog:  “A bipartisan commission is the Washington policy equivalent of a sock drawer.”

The League of Women Voters said it was “surprised and disappointed.”   

“Setting up a commission is not a bold step; it is business as usual,” the league said in a statement.

Besides, while lines were long in a few polling places, especially in Florida, most voters did not endure long waits.

One poll found 83 percent of voters either didn’t wait at all or waited less than 30 minutes to vote last November, about the same percentage as in 2004 and 2000. Nearly three in four voters said the voting process in their area was managed very well, the Pew Research Center also reported.

Long lines both during early voting and on Election Day were just one problem in 2012 identified by Caltech-MIT’s Voting Technology Project, which evaluates the election process.

Researchers called on state and local officials to improve voter registration so fewer provisional ballots are needed and to make contingency plans for voting after a disruption like Hurricane Sandy.

 Obama didn’t comment on those proposals or on Democratic efforts in Congress to reform the voting system or on a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that has reached the Supreme Court.

The court will hear oral argument Feb. 27 in a case from Alabama on whether the Voting Rights Act is still needed.  Section 5 of the law requires some states and jurisdictions, mostly in the South, to have state voting law changes pre-approved by the U.S. Justice Department.

At issue is whether Congress exceeded its constitutional authority in 2006 when it reauthorized Section 5 for 25 years. Officials in Shelby County, Ala., argue that the law exacts a “heavy, unprecedented federalism cost” on covered states and localities as they have to prove to the federal government that changes do not undermine minority voting rights.

 

The Justice Department, defending the law, argues Section 5 has blocked more than 2,400 discriminatory voting changes since 1982. Absent Section 5, it would have been necessary to go to court on a case by case basis, “a system that would have resulted in years of discriminatory treatment of minority voters and required an enormous expenditure of resources on all sides,” it says.

Some court watchers predict that the Supreme Court will strike down Section 5 before summer. That puts waiting to cast a vote in a new light.

   

  © 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Dueling values at State of the Union -- Feb. 7, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

For his 1965 State of the Union address, Lyndon Johnson tried something new.

Wanting to reach the largest audience possible, LBJ moved the speech from day to primetime.

At 9:04 p.m. on Jan. 4, 1965, before a joint session of Congress, the president laid out his vision for a Great Society -- including hospital insurance for the elderly, a voting rights law for African Americans, federal aid for education and an extension of the minimum wage.

Not to be outdone, Republicans demanded time for a response, also a first. GOP House leader Gerald Ford and Senate leader Everett Dirksen did the honors.

Within two years, most of Johnson’s proposals were law.

Those were the days. LBJ had just won by a landslide. He knew he had to act fast to get big things accomplished. His laundry list became marching orders for the fattest Democratic majority in Congress since the New Deal.

Shortly after 9 p.m. on Tuesday, President Barack Obama will deliver his State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress. He knows he has to act fast to accomplish his goals. He’ll outline a laundry list of legislative priorities. A Republican response will follow. And that’s where similarities with 1965 end.

Obama will face a divided, deeply partisan Congress. He’ll expound on how the Democratic values he talked about in his Inaugural Address translate into policies to strengthen the middle class. If the last four years are a guide, though, many of his proposals will go nowhere.    

Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a Cuban-American in his first term, will give the Republican response. Rubio is a fresh face and he’s trying something new: He will speak in Spanish and English. He’s expected to offer a view of how smaller government, as championed by the GOP, will help the middle class.

Rubio has a tough assignment – to hit the reset button on a party that fumbled the last election. Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana recently called the GOP “the stupid party” for dumbing down its brand and failing to appeal to minorities. Plus, Rubio has a lot of hype to live up to. He’s glorified on the cover of this week’s Time magazine as “The Republican Savior.”

As theater, the night of dueling values could get interesting.

Obama will use the bully pulpit to promote job creation, targeting education to job skills, reducing dependence on foreign oil while promoting green energy, reforming immigration and reducing gun violence. He wants to increase spending on those priorities.  

At the same time, the president insists he’s eager for a “big deal” on deficit reduction that will end the cycle of government by crisis that replays every few weeks or months.

Obama’s brand is strong among Democrats after his Inaugural Address in which he set out liberal themes for his second term, but he has alienated Republicans. The White House envisioned the two speeches as a package with the State of the Union offering what former senior Obama adviser David Plouffe called “details and blueprints.”

Obama gave a glimpse of Tuesday’s speech in remarks this week to House Democrats.

“The question I will ask myself on every item, every issue is, is this helping to make sure that everybody's got a fair shot and everybody is doing their fair share and everybody's playing by the same rules?” he said.

Next month, Obama is expected to send Congress his budget for the fiscal year that starts in October.

Despite Lyndon Johnson’s legendary success, most presidents fail to get what they ask in the State of the Union speech.  

Between 1965 and 2002, on average 43 percent of the policy proposals contained in State of the Union addresses were enacted by Congress in the legislative session in which the president gave his speech, Donna R. Hoffman and Alison D. Howard wrote in the 2006 book “Addressing the State of the Union.”

For second presidential terms, the success rate drops to 39 percent.

In 2013, the Democratic president’s State of the Union address will be a wish list. The Republican response will be one too.

 © 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Obama the marriage president? -- Jan. 31, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

President Barack Obama made history and gladdened many hearts when he endorsed gay rights and gay marriage in his second inaugural address.

Just think what additional good he could have done had he also endorsed marriage generally.

   

I know. The tired phrase “marriage between one man and one woman” has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the political and religious right. But that need not scare the president or anyone else from talking about its benefits to individuals and society.  Married people live longer, healthier, more prosperous lives than singletons, studies show.

And you don’t have to be Rick Santorum to know that marriage is a grand anti-poverty program. Many studies have shown that If people marry before they start families, the children fare far better. This isn’t a news flash.

In 1965, an obscure assistant secretary of Labor named Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a report for President Lyndon Johnson about the breakdown of the black family. Moynihan warned that the crumbling family structure left many households headed by single women and these were more likely to be stuck in poverty. He hoped the report would be the impetus for a national strategy to break the cycle of poverty.

But Moynihan’s report was leaked to the press, causing an uproar. Any hope of a national conversation was lost as critics lambasted Moynihan for blaming the victims of poverty, insulting single moms and ignoring supports in the black community. His controversial report  notwithstanding, Moynihan went on to serve 24 years in the U.S. Senate. He died in 2003.

The problem of the collapsing American family has only gotten worse since the Moynihan report.

“Nearly 50 years later, the picture is even more grim – and the statistics can no longer be organized neatly by race,” says Isabel V. Sawhill, a budget expert and scholar at the Brookings Institution. “Moynihan’s bracing profile of the collapsing black family in the 1960s looks remarkably similar to a profile of the average white family today.”

Sawhill writes in the latest Washington Monthly: “White households have similar—or worse—statistics of divorce, unwed childbearing, and single motherhood as the black households cited by Moynihan in his report.

“In 2000, the percentage of white children living with a single parent was identical to the percentage of black children living with a single parent in 1960: 22 percent,” she says.

While Moynihan saw family formation as a racial divide, Sawhill says it’s increasingly a class issue.

“Because the breakdown of the traditional family is overwhelmingly occurring among working-class Americans of all races, these trends threaten to make the U.S. a much more class-based society over time,” she writes.

When educated, middle-class couples form two-parent families, they’re able to give their children “time and resources that lower-and working-class single mothers, however impressive their efforts to be both good parents and good breadwinners, simply do not have,” Sawhill says.

In his autobiography, “The Audacity of Hope,” Sen. Barack Obama writes that liberal policy makers and civil rights leaders, in their urgency to avoid blaming the victims of historical racism, wrongly labeled Moynihan a racist and “tended to downplay or ignore evidence that entrenched behavioral patterns among the black poor really were contributing to intergenerational poverty.”   

As president, Obama has approached making families stronger by focusing on the responsibilities of fatherhood, usually around Fathers Day. In June 2010, he announced a nationwide Fatherhood and Mentoring Initiative, but he conceded that it’s hard for government to change attitudes or behavior.

“Now, I can’t legislate fatherhood – I can’t force anybody to love a child. But what we can do is send a clear message to our fathers that there is no excuse for failing to meet their obligations,” he said.

That may be sound social policy, but it doesn’t make anyone’s heart sing.   

As Obama and other leaders promote the value of gay marriage, they shouldn’t be silent on the value of marriage between a man and woman. It’s not either-or. Both are good.    

©2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Obama's risky strategy to fire up fans -- Jan. 24, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

President Barack Obama is converting his campaign apparatus to a tax-exempt organization aimed at pushing his agenda.  It’s a bold but risky move.

The newly created Organizing for Action will accept unlimited contributions from individuals and corporations.

The strategy could be a way for Obama to assure his legacy through legislative accomplishments and beat the second-term curse, a supposed phenomenon of the modern era that says most re-elected presidents have less –than-successful second terms.     

Or the strategy could backfire and bring disillusionment to the idealistic young people Obama hopes to motivate. That would be more than a setback to his progressive agenda. That would be a curse that could damn Democrats in future elections.   

Fred Wertheimer, a leading campaign finance reformer, was among the first to sound an alarm.

 “It opens the door to opportunities for government corruption by allowing corporations and individuals to provide unlimited amounts of money to directly benefit the president’s interest and potentially to receive government benefits and favors in return,” Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, said in a statement. His group describes itself as working to eliminate the undue influence of big money in American politics.

“This would take President Obama about as far away as he could possibly get from the goal he set in 2008 to ‘change the way business is done in Washington,’” said Wertheimer.

The last thing Democrats need is to alienate the fans Obama brought out in droves in 2008 and 2012. Organizing for Action does plan to disclose names of donors, even though the law doesn’t require it. Aides told the New York Times they were unsure whether individual amounts would also be released.  It would help if they just said yes to full transparency.

The new group is the successor to Organizing for America, the Obama campaign arm that operated as part of the Democratic National Committee. Organizing for Action is separate from the national party and is being chartered as a  501(c)(4) organization, which must operate exclusively for the promotion of social welfare. These groups may lobby. Donations are generally not tax deductible as charitable contributions.

Obama’s position on corporate contributions evolved as he faced competition from well-funded Republicans. Wertheimer noted that Obama had refused corporate contributions for his 2009 inauguration. Planners of the 2012 Democratic National Convention initially refused corporate cash but later reversed themselves and accepted $20 million from banks and other sponsors. Obama accepted corporate contributions for his 2013 inauguration, including $250,000 from ExxonMobil.

The Organizing for Action is being run by some of Obama’s closest political advisers. Michelle Obama announced the new grassroots effort in a video three days before the inauguration. Typical of their firm grasp of the obvious, news outlets mostly focused on her new hairstyle.

It’s “the next step in our grassroots movement and will be crucial to finishing what we started,” the president wrote in a note on the Organizing for Action website.

Organizing for Action plans a grassroots structure with local control while running expensive, campaign-style TV ads.

Let’s assume that supporters are not turned off by the potential fat cat influence on the second term. Does that mean it’s smooth sailing for Organizing for Action? Not exactly. Some Democrats worry that the group will drain energy and support from the party.

“We need a unified organization that will bring about victories in 2013 and 2014, and we don’t need to be splitting our efforts,” Fred Hudson, vice chairman of the Virginia Democratic  party, told Beth Reinhard of the National Journal.

 “It’s a recipe for how to lose an election. We’ve been told there will be no competition for fundraising, but that’s difficult for me to accept, and there will certainly be competition for staff and volunteers,” Hudson said.

Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager and Organizing for Action’s chairman, said before the inauguration the group will focus on gun control, immigration and climate change.

Traditionally, a second-term president has a short time to accomplish anything. By the second year, attention shifts to the midterm congressional elections, and by the third, the next presidential campaign is underway. The lame duck president may find himself not only fighting irrelevancy but scandal, as Nixon and Clinton did.   

In his inaugural address, Obama emphasized “collective action.” He used the word “together” seven times and “we” five dozen times in 15 minutes.  You might say he was organizing for action or for a strategy that holds both promise and peril for his second term.

© 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

Thank George -- first in war, peace, inaugurations -- Jan. 17, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

The Constitution requires only the 35-word oath of office.

All the rest in our presidential inaugurations – the address, poetry, prayers, marching bands and balls -- is gravy.

Before we get swept up in the pomp and pageantry – lobster and bison luncheon in the U.S. Capitol! Native Americans in their regalia! Unicyclists from Maine!  -- let’s take a moment to remember that George Washington was first in the hearts of his countrymen and first to invent a presidential inauguration.

The father of our country had to decide not only what to wear and what to say but how big the buttons on his coat should be and whether to say anything at all. He had to decide where he wanted to stay. The nation’s capital and first inauguration were then in New York, a long way from Mount Vernon.

   

Washington was aware he was setting precedent, and, although not everything he did stuck, it’s instructive to see where we started.

       

In the weeks before his swearing in as the first president on April 30, 1789, Washington wrote letters (yes, by hand) praising the locally made “cloth and buttons” his friend and future Secretary of War Henry Knox had sent him and asked Knox for “six more of the large (engraved) button to trim the coat in the manner I wish it to be.”

He was determined to stay only in “hired rooms” or inns, and not in private homes when he made the trip. “I am not desirous of being placed early in a situation for entertaining,” he wrote James Madison.

    

Washington worried about the “oceans of difficulties” awaiting him as the first Congress had failed to begin its business, and he lamented his lack of political skill. In fact, Washington’s war service had given him excellent political skills, says Jim Zeender, a long-time registrar in the Exhibits Division of the National Archives, whose excellent blog posts about early letters of the founders I draw from here. Zeender’s posts can be found on the National Archives’ Prologue: Pieces of History blog.

The Library of Congress and Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies also have robust web pages on inaugurations.

In 1789, Washington took the oath on the balcony of Federal Hall on Wall Street before a joint session of Congress and addressed the crowd below:  “Fellow citizens of the Senate and House of Representatives,  among the vicissitudes incident to life no event could have filled me with greater anxieties” than the notification of his election as president. His flowery speech continued for 1,400 words.

   

And later that day, another tradition – of critiquing the president’s inaugural performance -- was born.

U.S. Sen. William Maclay of Pennsylvania wrote in his diary that Washington “read off his address in the plainest manner, without even taking his eyes from the paper, for I felt hurt that he was not first in everything. He was dressed in deep brown, with metal buttons, with an eagle on them, white stockings, a bag, and sword.”

For his second inauguration in Philadelphia, Washington wore a black velvet suit with black stockings. He was weary and his speech was just 135 words. Maclay had lost his re-election bid, so we don’t have his review.

  

Inaugurations have taken place in various locations. The first in the new capital city of Washington was Thomas Jefferson’s second inauguration in 1801. He walked over from his boarding house. 

Social butterfly Dolley Madison came up with the first inaugural ball in 1809, but her husband the president was not impressed. “I’d rather be in bed,” James Madison reportedly confided.

We’ve now come to the 57^th inauguration. Expectations are low for President Barack Obama’s second act.   

Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse likened second inaugurations to the renewal of wedding vows – “the ceremony might be great, but you can’t ignore what you already know about the groom: He snores, he sniffles and he forgot to pay the electric bill last month.”

While almost nothing could equal the pure joy and excitement of four years ago, this inauguration is a time to look at our history and our future with hope.

   

An inauguration gives us a day to celebrate us. Let’s enjoy it. We don’t need George Washington’s big eagle buttons. We have apps.

© 2013 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.