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Clearlake woman located
Angelina Trisha Fagundo, 34, was reported overdue on the way home to Clearlake from the Vacaville area.
Police said Monday Fagundo was located.
First it was the “Great Resignation.” Then it was “nobody wants to work anymore.” Now it’s “quiet quitting.”
Yet it seems like no one wants to talk about what I see as the root cause of America’s economic malaise – work under contemporary capitalism is fundamentally flawed.
As a political philosopher studying the effects of contemporary capitalism on the future of work, I believe that the inability to dictate and meaningfully control one’s own working life is the problem.
Democratizing work is the solution.
What can be said about the malaise surrounding work under capitalism today?
There are at least four major problems:
First, work can be alienating. Workers are often not in control of how they work, when they work, what is done with the goods and services they produce, and what is done with the profits made from their work.
This is particularly evident in the rise of precarious forms of work, like those that are found in the gig economy.
According to the Pew Research Center, there’s been a decline in people finding meaning in their work. Nearly half of front-line managers and employees do not think that they can “live their purpose” through their jobs.
Second, workers are not paid the full value of their labor. Real wages have not kept pace with productivity, driving economic inequality and a decline in labor’s share of income.
Third, people are time poor. In the U.S., full-time employed workers work an average of 8.72 hours per day despite productivity increases. Long working hours, along with a number of other factors, contribute to the feeling of “time poverty,” which has a negative impact on psychological well-being.
Fourth, automation puts jobs and wages at risk. While technological innovation could in theory liberate people from the 40-hour workweek, as long as changes aren’t made to the structure of work, automation will simply continue to exert downward pressure on wages and contribute to increases in precarious employment.
Ultimately, the potential of automation to reduce working hours is inconsistent with the profit motives of capitalist companies.
On the one hand, many people lack work that is personally meaningful. On the other hand, many are also desperate for a more complete life – one that allows for creative self-expression and community-building outside of work.
So, what is to be done with the problem of work?
There are two competing visions of the best way to arrive at a solution.
The first is what Kathi Weeks, author of “The Problem with Work,” calls the “socialist humanist” position. According to socialist humanists, work “is understood as an individual creative capacity, a human essence, from which we are now estranged and to which we should be restored.”
In other words, jobs often make workers feel less human. The way to remedy this problem is by re-imagining work so that it is self-determined and people are better compensated for the work they do.
The second is what’s known as the “post-work” position. The post-work theorists believe that while doing some work might be necessary, the work ethic, as a prerequisite for social value, can be corrosive to humanity; they argue that meaning, purpose and social value are not necessarily found in work but instead reside in the communities and relationships built and sustained outside of the workplace.
So people should be liberated from the requirement of work in order to have the free time to do as they please, and embrace what French-Austrian philosopher André Gorz called “life as an end in itself.”
While both positions might stem from theoretical disagreements, is it possible to have the best of both worlds? Can work be humanized and play a less central role in our lives?
My own research has focused on what I see as a critical answer to the above question: democratic worker control.
Democratic worker control – where companies are owned and controlled by the workers themselves – is not a new concept. Worker cooperatives are already found in many sectors throughout the U.S. and elsewhere around the globe.
In contrast to how work is currently organized under capitalism, democratic worker control humanizes work by allowing workers to determine their own working conditions, to own the full value of their labor, to dictate the structure and nature of their jobs and, crucially, to determine their own working hours.
This perspective recognizes that the problems people face in their working lives are not merely the result of an unjust distribution of resources. Rather, they result from power differentials in the workplace. Being told what to do, when to do it and how much you will earn is an alienating experience that leads to depression, precarity and economic inequality.
On the other hand, having a democratic say over your working life means the ability to make work less alienating. If people have democratic control over the work they do, they are unlikely to choose work that feels meaningless. They can also find their niche and figure out what’s fulfilling to them within a community of equals.
Democratizing work also leads to an increase in labor’s share of income and a reduction in economic inequality. It has been shown that unionized workers earn an average of 11.2% more in wages than nonunionized workers in similar industries. Income inequality is also much lower in worker cooperatives compared with capitalist companies.
But work should not be confused with the whole of life. Nor should it be assumed that a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging and the acquisition of new skills can’t occur outside of work. Playing, volunteering and worshipping can all do the same.
However, in capitalist companies, labor-saving technologies do not afford workers with more leisure time. Instead, labor-saving technologies mean workers are more likely to face unemployment and downward pressure on wages.
Under democratic worker control, workers can choose to prioritize values that are consistent with themselves rather than the dictates of profit-seeking shareholders. Labor-saving technologies make it more likely that leisure time can become a choice. Workers are free to assert their own values, including that of less work and more play.
Of course, democratic worker control is not a silver bullet to economic discontent, and these changes to the workplace can’t occur in a vacuum.
For instance, trials of a four-day workweek without a reduction in pay are increasingly popular, and they have had resounding success in both the United Kingdom and Iceland. Workers report feeling less stressed and less burned out. They have a better work-life balance and report being just as productive, if not more so. Federal legislation to reduce working hours without a reduction in pay, such as through the implementation of a four-day workweek, could accompany a movement for democratic worker control.
The expansion of social services, the development of a public banking system and the provision of a universal basic income may also be important components of meaningful change. A broader movement to democratize the U.S. economy is needed if society is going to take the challenges of work in the 21st century seriously. In short, I believe a mosaic of approaches is necessary.
But one thing is clear: As long as work remains the dictates of shareholders rather than the workers themselves, much work will remain a source of alienation and will persist as an organizing feature of American life.
Alec Stubbs, Postdoctoral Fellow of Philosophy, UMass Boston
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Herman Daly had a flair for stating the obvious. When an economy creates more costs than benefits, he called it “uneconomic growth.” But you won’t find that conclusion in economics textbooks. Even suggesting that economic growth could cost more than it’s worth can be seen as economic heresy.
The renegade economist, known as the father of ecological economics and a leading architect of sustainable development, died on Oct. 28, 2022, at the age of 84. He spent his career questioning an economics disconnected from an environmental footing and moral compass.
In an age of climate chaos and economic crisis, his ideas that inspired a movement to live within our means are increasingly essential.
Herman Daly grew up in Beaumont, Texas, ground zero of the early 20th century oil boom. He witnessed the unprecedented growth and prosperity of the “gusher age” set against the poverty and deprivation that lingered after the Great Depression.
To Daly, as many young men then and since believed, economic growth was the solution to the world’s problems, especially in developing countries. To study economics in college and export the northern model to the global south was seen as a righteous path.
But Daly was a voracious reader, a side effect of having polio as a boy and missing out on the Texas football craze. Outside the confines of assigned textbooks, he found a history of economic thought steeped in rich philosophical debates on the function and purpose of the economy.
Unlike the precision of a market equilibrium sketched on the classroom blackboard, the real-world economy was messy and political, designed by those in power to choose winners and losers. He believed that economists should at least ask: Growth for whom, for what purpose and for how long?
Daly’s biggest realization came through reading marine biologist Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “Silent Spring,” and seeing her call to “come to terms with nature … to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature but of ourselves.” By then, he was working on a Ph.D. in Latin American development at Vanderbilt University and was already quite skeptical of the hyperindividualism baked into economic models. In Carson’s writing, the conflict between a growing economy and a fragile environment was blindingly clear.
After a fateful class with Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Daly’s conversion was complete. Georgescu-Roegen, a Romanian-born economist, dismissed the free market fairy tale of a pendulum swinging back and forth, effortlessly seeking a natural state of equilibrium. He argued that the economy was more like an hourglass, a one-way process converting valuable resources into useless waste.
Daly became convinced that economics should no longer prioritize the efficiency of this one-way process but instead focus on the “optimal” scale of an economy that the Earth can sustain. Just shy of his 30th birthday in 1968, while working as a visiting professor in the poverty-stricken Ceará region of northeastern Brazil, Daly published “On Economics as a Life Science.”
His sketches and tables of the economy as a metabolic process, entirely dependent on the biosphere as source for sustenance and sink for waste, were the road map for a revolution in economics.
Daly spent the rest of his career drawing boxes in circles. In what he called the “pre-analytical vision,” the economy – the box – was viewed as the “wholly owned subsidiary” of the environment, the circle.
When the economy is small relative to the containing environment, a focus on the efficiency of a growing system has merit. But Daly argued that in a “full world,” with an economy that outgrows its sustaining environment, the system is in danger of collapse.
While a professor at Louisiana State University in the 1970s, at the height of the U.S. environmental movement, Daly brought the box-in-circle framing to its logical conclusion in “Steady-State Economics.” Daly reasoned that growth and exploitation are prioritized in the competitive, pioneer stage of a young ecosystem. But with age comes a new focus on durability and cooperation. His steady-state model shifted the goal away from blind expansion of the economy and toward purposeful improvement of the human condition.
The international development community took notice. Following the United Nations’ 1987 publication of “Our Common Future,” which framed the goals of a “sustainable” development, Daly saw a window for development policy reform. He left the safety of tenure at LSU to join a rogue group of environmental scientists at the World Bank.
For the better part of six years, they worked to upend the reigning economic logic that treated “the Earth as if it were a business in liquidation.” He often butted heads with senior leadership, most famously with Larry Summers, the bank’s chief economist at the time, who publicly waved off Daly’s question of whether the size of a growing economy relative to a fixed ecosystem was of any importance. The future U.S. treasury secretary’s reply was short and dismissive: “That’s not the right way to look at it.”
But by the end of his tenure there, Daly and colleagues had successfully incorporated new environmental impact standards into all development loans and projects. And the international sustainability agenda they helped shape is now baked into the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals of 193 countries, “a plan of action for people, planet and prosperity.”
In 1994, Daly returned to academia at the University of Maryland, and his life’s work was recognized the world over in the years to follow, including by Sweden’s Right Livelihood Award, the Netherlands’ Heineken Prize for Environmental Science, Norway’s Sophie Prize, Italy’s Medal of the Presidency, Japan’s Blue Planet Prize and even Adbuster’s person of the year.
Today, the imprint of his career can be found far and wide, including measures of the Genuine Progress Indicator of an economy, new Doughnut Economics framing of social floors within environmental ceilings, worldwide degree programs in ecological economics and a vibrant degrowth movement focused on a just transition to a right-sized economy.
I knew Herman Daly for two decades as a co-author, mentor and teacher. He always made time for me and my students, most recently writing the foreword to my upcoming book, “The Progress Illusion: Reclaiming Our Future from the Fairytale of Economics.” I will be forever grateful for his inspiration and courage to, as he put it, “ask the naive, honest questions” and then not be “satisfied until I get the answers.”
Jon D. Erickson, Professor of Sustainability Science and Policy, University of Vermont
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
The repeat concussions suffered by Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa less than a week apart in September 2022 have brought the seriousness of traumatic brain injury back into the public eye and triggered scrutiny of the NFL’s concussion protocols. And the upcoming World Cup soccer competition, which begins Nov. 20, 2022, will likely include highly visible head injuries.
The Conversation asked David Howell, director of the Colorado Concussion Research Laboratory at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, to explain the latest science behind concussions and why a recently injured brain is more vulnerable to repeat injury. Howell’s work focuses on the many different areas of concussion-related dysfunction and recovery, including movement deficits, sleep problems and rehabilitation.
The word concussion can evoke a variety of different images for different people. While concussions are most visible during high-profile sporting events, they can also occur on the playground, during the junior varsity football team practice or on the ski slope. The effects can be just as severe for children and teens as for high-profile athletes.
Concussion effects range from mild to severe, from short term to long term, and can affect many different facets of life. A concussion is defined as a traumatic brain injury caused by an impact to the head, resulting in an alteration of brain function.
A concussion often leads to disruptions to everyday life – whether it be a job, academics, sports, physical activity or sleep. Given how unique people’s brains are and how differently they may respond to the injury, concussion recognition, diagnosis and treatment remain challenging for patients and clinicians alike.
There is a complex set of events that occur within the brain during and after a concussion occurs.
As a result of the trauma to the brain, brain cells – or neurons – stop functioning as they typically do when healthy. Generally there is not one specific area of the brain that is affected by a concussion. Instead, the injury can affect a widespread set of brain regions, not necessarily at the impact point. Thus, each person may experience a unique set of symptoms or functional problems following the injury.
One main problem that arises following a concussion is an energy crisis of sorts. This occurs when the brain requires a large volume of energy, in the form of glucose delivered by blood flow to the brain, to restore the injured processes. The body also may have trouble delivering blood to the brain because of a brain blood flow disruption caused by the injury, at the very time the brain needs extra energy to restore the injured areas. This mismatch can produce a variety of different symptoms people experience following a concussion.
Concussions produce a wide range of signs and symptoms, such as problems with walking and balance, dizziness, mood changes, disruptions to sleep and more.
Some of the main signs that health care providers look for following an impact to the head or body include unsteadiness of gait, loss of consciousness, seizures or other concussion symptoms like headache, cognitive impairment or problems with vision or balance.
It is critical that if a concussion is suspected, individuals cease playing their sport or activity. A simple mantra of “If in doubt, sit them out” should always be applied, regardless of the setting.
Miami Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, who was carted off the field in late September 2022 after his second head injury in less than a week, serves as an example of how vulnerable the brain can be to additional trauma following an initial concussion.
Research shows that the rate of second concussions is highest in the immediate days following an initial concussion. In addition, recent studies have found that athletes who continue to play following a concussion experience longer recovery times and more severe symptoms.
While athletes of all ages may want to continue competing after a concussion, relying on a person with an injured brain to determine whether their brain is healthy enough to continue playing is flawed logic. Qualified health care professionals should always make these sorts of decisions for an athlete, rather than someone with a vested interest such as the athletes themselves or their coaches.
Given the energy crisis described above that occurs following a head injury, the brain simply cannot handle the added and cumulative stress of two injuries occurring in short succession. A second insult to the brain is often simply too much for the brain to handle, and the brain will preserve its most basic functions, such as breathing, above all else.
This is why it is imperative that athletes who experience a concussion be removed from the field of play and allowed to recover fully before returning to unrestricted sport participation. This often involves a stepwise reintegration approach, which allows for a gradual and safe reintroduction into physical activity at first, and an appropriately safe return to play under medical care.
The first step following a concussion is to stop playing sports and to rest for a day or two. Sleep is critically important in the days following a concussion.
A myth that continues to persist is that a person should be woken up every hour following a concussion. This is simply not supported by science. In fact, poor sleep after a concussion has been widely documented as being a predictor of poor outcomes, including longer recovery times and more severe anxiety, depression or cognitive symptoms. Waking someone up every hour applies to more severe brain injuries that would be ruled out by a health care provider during diagnosis.
In addition, recent guidelines and past research suggest that complete physical and cognitive rest, which is sometimes called cocoon therapy, can actually be harmful to recovery.
Therefore, it is important to keep a balanced approach in mind. Following a day or two of physical rest, people with a concussion should begin resuming light physical and cognitive activity that does not provoke or exacerbate ongoing symptoms.
When a person begins to feel better following a concussion, they should gradually add in higher intensity and greater amounts and duration of exercise, dictated by whether their symptoms are not significantly provoked. Recent studies have focused on the value of an individualized aerobic exercise program in the week following a concussion. Past work suggests that performing aerobic exercise at a heart rate just below the level at which symptoms are exacerbated is safe and effective for recovery.
It is important to note that the effects of a concussion may also result in secondary conditions, such as anxiety or depression due to the biological, social or psychological effects of the injury. A recent study showed that adolescents who sustained a concussion have a higher risk of mental health issues compared to those with an orthopedic injury.
David Howell, Assistant Professor of Orthopedics,, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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