On The Concept of Privilege As A Tool in Social Justice Movements

Contents include rape and sexual harassment.



I've written about this before, but there's more I want to say about it, partly brought up by this quote from a post about the new supposedly feminist website called Bustle:

Based on his statements and interviews, it seems fair to say that Goldberg has, at best, a rudimentary understanding of the concept of feminism — while it's a broad and controversial term for sure, most people who have bothered to read up on the subject seem to agree that part of being a 21st-century feminist includes embracing intersectionality, questioning stereotypes, being aware of your privilege, and letting women speak for themselves.

Bolds are mine.

Being aware of your privilege is fine, and it as an excellent tool for introspection, for understanding what I don't have any lived-in experience about, for understanding that the world can treat other people quite differently, and for placing oneself at the beginning of some debate (do I know something worth sharing here?  do I make assumptions about what others know that are incorrect?)

But what about using the concept in other ways?  That's where I think the concept of privilege fails as a tool.  It's too blunt, too prone to being used as a shut-up in conversations, too prone for being used as a check on the ideological purity of someone to be in the room (which also turns lack of privilege into a certain type of odd privilege).  To give you an example, to tell someone his or her privilege is showing is a statement which both conveys certain information and argues that the person has committed a faux pas of a type, that the person probably should shut up and leave the conversation.

That doesn't matter, perhaps, except in the sense that one catches more flies with honey than with vinegar, though it does tend to stop any further attempts to increase mutual understanding.

 What matters much more is when privilege is used as an actual tool of theoretical analysis.

The reason for that, in my opinion, is that the concept of privilege is so stretching, so meaningless, so capable of inversions that we don't get anywhere by using it.  The bigger worry, by far, is the idea of starting to add up privileges, to decide who is the least privileged, and then to use that impossible summing to make conclusions about what one should do in a particular situation, whose position one should focus on, whose worries one should evaluate. 

That's partly because some things listed as privileges can depend on one's choice, partly, because many aspects of privilege focus the study of a societal problem on the relative position of different individuals with respect to that problem, and such focus then tends to blind us to the larger problem and concentrate on individuals and their lives rather than the wider problem.  But the different types of privileges are not commensurate and so trying to sum them up introduces pure subjectivity into the analysis.

To give you a more concrete example of some of the problems, I have urban East Coast "privilege".  But if I move to a bubolic area, because of my own choice, I lose that "privilege?"   I can now participate in discussions as a representative of rural people?  That doesn't make the best approach to the very real problems of the rural poor or the very real problems of how to provide, say, adequate media coverage of sparsely populated areas or how to make sure that feminism or other such movements aren't just bicoastal ones.  In a sense the concept of "privilege" is both too general, vague and too narrow, individualistic.

Here's what I really want to stress:  My criticism of the concept of "privilege" is not an argument for implying that one's race, gender, ethnicity and so on wouldn't place people into different boxes, with different access to the good things in life and with different levels of bad things happening to us.  It's crucial to be clear about that.  But when we lump all the different aspects of these and other concerns (social class, religion, sexual preference, gender identity, health etc.) together and throw them into one box marked "privilege" we don't really get very far in our analyses.

That's because different types of "privilege" have different underlying reasons, and a proper study of those reasons is imperative, in my view.  One way of doing that study is by looking at one particular question (say, race) first in isolation and then in how it interacts with other important questions (gender, income, etc.)  If we don't do that disaggregated analysis, we are stuck with a concept of "privilege" which tells us very little about what to do to make things better.

To apply all this to a particular problem, consider the recent media coverage of gang rapes and sexual harassment and the like in India.  Let's begin with a piece published at the CNN.com about the experiences of an American exchange student in India.   The story is an outpouring of pain and grief with very little analysis (which isn't necessarily required of such stories).  But it also equates the sexual harassment the writer had to undergo with the whole country of India in a way which might be essentializing, implying that India is somehow ineradicably a misogynist place which foreign women should avoid.

A companion piece at the CNN.com site provided a different narrative of the possible experiences of another exchange student on the same trip.  The author of that stressed the kindness and humanity of the Indian men she met and the fact that one shouldn't label a whole society based on what some individuals in it do.

Here's where the concept of privilege enters all this:  A post on Ms Magazine site discusses these two essays from the point of view of a professor of gender studies. The post makes a complicated argument:

So RoseChasm is not incorrect to feel hunted, but her words unfortunately line up with global power grids. She depicts India as irredeemably patriarchal, with no nod to the long history of Indian feminists protesting against sexual violence in public spaces, homes and by police and military. By default, the U.S. gets seen as a haven of gender equity. We forget that U.S. campuses have four times the number of sexual assaults that off-campus sites do, that domestic violence kills in record numbers and that the U.S. military commits rapes in huge numbers with little impunity. RoseChasm’s testimony may be a terrified survivor’s account, but it reinforces ideas of places like India as primitive frontiers, desensitizing us to violence launched against other countries with the alibi of culture.
RoseChasm wants to be invisible, neutral, “just a person” in India, but the very fact of her presence on a study abroad trip underlines a one-sided privilege: Students on such programs can travel to others’ lives, gawk at them and pretend to live their lives for a brief moment, with little recognition that people may be looking or talking back, sometimes in violent ways. For women on these trips, this becomes a violent, gendered difference from men in their programs, to be sure, but for all it’s a reminder that global inequalities often provoke vicious backlash. And RoseChasm’s U.S. privilege doesn’t protect her from the everyday violence Indian women negotiate. A return to the U.S. provides no protection from gendered violence, either—it only compounds the complete lack of safe havens for women.

The bolds are mine.

My beef isn't with the author, Srimati Basu, pointing out the global power grids or the fact that American tourists in India are privileged in many ways over the general Indian population.  My beef has to do with the idea that the modern concept of privilege benefits the analysis here.  The older one, based on income, education and social class, might have been more useful.

Basu's two points in that context are contradictory.  She both argues that the US and India are not that different* when it comes to gendered violence AND that the author of the initial essay, RoseChasm, is privileged** because she can move from one of these countries to the other, whereas Indian women cannot do so.   But if that is so, then Basu herself, say, is privileged when it comes to the US, compared to poor American women.  Basu can leave the country, they cannot.

That's nit-picking, sure, and a bit stupid.   My point may become clearer when we introduce to this discussion the most recent gang-rape case from India:

Out on an assignment, the photojournalist was raped in a deserted textile mill in central Mumbai on Thursday evening after the five accused assaulted and tied her male colleague.
Twenty police teams, including 10 from the crime branch, are tracking their three other accomplices, all of whom have been identified and are aged between 18 and 20.
On Friday afternoon, the police had arrested Chand Abdul Sattar who lives at Dhobi Ghat, close to the mill. The accused later confessed to the crime.
"We have arrested one of the suspects who has named the others involved in the incident. The suspect has also confessed to the crime," Mumbai police commissioner Satyapal Singh had said in a press conference on Friday.
The five men, all school dropouts, were jobless and visited the mill often. Two even have robbery cases registered against them.

If we apply the privilege concept to this story, it might be necessary to point out that the victim comes across as probably of a higher social class than the perpetrators, who are school dropouts and unemployed.  From this it's not a terribly big step to discussing which rapes are in some sense more understandable than other rapes and so on.   I don't want to go there.

This is what I see as a big problem with the simultaneous discussion of different types of privileges and attempts to compare them or to add them up or to subtract from them.  I don't see how that approach would diminish any of the underlying problems.  The tools for fighting poverty and global inequalities are different from the tools for fighting rape, in general, and I don't think that conflating the two increases our analytical abilities.  This doesn't mean that an understanding of the variables which make rape more likely on the perpetrators' part isn't useful.  But that's something different altogether.

To conclude, I want to reiterate that this post is about the concept of privilege as an analytical tool, not an argument for the absence of what the concept attempts to capture,  and certainly not an argument against using it as a device for introspection.
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* The discussion of gender violence in different countries often concludes with the argument that gender violence exists everywhere.  This is correct, of course.  But it's still important to study different cultures, the way they handle rape and sexual harassment, whether the authorities take them seriously or not, whether the victim-blaming and shame associated with being a victim is identical and so on.  It's also important to try to get good international figures of actual rapes and to understand the reasons for any differences that are found.  Those reasons include several possibilities:  For example, women have different "rights" to go out alone or unattended by a male relative, and how the society views those "rights" determines the incidence of rapes in complicated ways.  Then the rate at which women report rapes can differ because of the cultural incentives or disincentives for doing so.  And so on.  To give one extra flavor of the complications in this, it's possible that a country which experiences an upsurge of attention aimed at rapes (such as India) may, in fact, be improving its actual hidden statistics if those rapes in the past went unreported and even hidden.

Such international comparisons should avoid the kind of approach that Basu warns us about.  But the comparisons are necessary for both learning what works in the prevention of gender violence and for measuring improvements.

**That RoseCharm tells us she suffers from PTSD and was admitted to a psychiatric ward for some time and is now on mental disability leave from college further complicates the analysis if we use being able-bodied or able-minded as yet another form of privilege.

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What Some Treatments of Chelsea Manning Teach Us About Views On Women

On CNN Newsroom:

CNN host Fredricka Whitfield continued to incorrectly refer to Chelsea Manning as a male as one of her guests suggested that providing Manning with hormone therapy while in prison would be "beyond insanity."

During the August 24 edition of CNN Newsroom, Whitfield invited civil rights attorney Avery Friedman and criminal defense attorney Richard Herman to discuss the possibility of providing Manning - previously known as Bradley Manning - with medical treatment for her gender dysphoria while she serves her sentence in an all-male military prison for leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks.

Herman, who is a regular CNN legal commentator, railed against the possibility of providing Manning with adequate medical care, calling the idea "beyond insanity" and suggesting that Manning could get "good practice" presenting as a female in prison: 

HERMAN: It's absurd. Sometimes we have to step back and say, "you know, some of these cases we cover, this is beyond insanity." There's no way that taxpayers are going to pay a hundred thousand dollars for a gender transformation for this guy while he's in prison. If he wants to be Chelsea, he can practice all he wants at Fort Leavenworth, because those guys are there for a long time. So he can get good practice and when he gets out, he can have the operation or whatever, and he can pay for it.

Bolds are mine.  I wonder what on earth Herman might have meant by that comment.

No, I don't.  The implication is that the role of women is to get raped and that a male prison is a good place to practice for that role, given the high rates of prison rape.

Meanwhile, in Finland, the chief editor of a newspaper called  Kaleva cut a joke on the topic of transgender Manning:

Tietovuotaja Bradley Manning haluaa muuttua naiseksi. Se ei ole ihme. Laverteluhan on aina ollut ämmämäistä".

My translation:

The information leaker Bradley Manning wants to turn into a woman.  That's no wonder.  Blabbing/tale-telling has always been what chicks/hags do.

When questioned about it, editor Mantila defended his joke as summarizing everything important really well.  He also didn't get what the fuss was about and pointed out that his newspaper has been among the most liberal when it comes to sexual minorities.  Nobody should be wrapped in cotton wool, he also stated, not even sexual minorities.

I went and read the comments to the story about Mantila's beautiful and hairy foot in his mouth, and most didn't think his joke was that good.  But one person there linked to a Daily Mail article which argued that women do so speak more than men.*

The placement of transgender individuals into a scheme of theoretical analysis about gender can be very difficult.  But one way of approaching this might be to look at it in the context of enforcing rigid gender norms, including the impossibility of leaping over the border between male and female sexes.

 If we apply this tool, the above two examples seem to demonstrate the idea that Manning is moving from the better sex to the worse sex, one which is sorta made for passive reception of sexual advantages but which also talks nonstop.
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*The article from last February, which I missed, is about testing boy and girl rats.  The boy rats are more vocal than the girl rats and get more attention from the mommy rats.  There's a difference in a protein P2 between the boy and girl rats (boy rats have more of it), and when the researchers switched the relative amount of P2 in the boy and girl rat brains, the girls became more vocal and got more mommy attention. 

The researchers then argued that in a small sample of human children (5 girls, 5 boys) the girls had more of P2 than the boys.  But they never measured how vocal those girls and boys were.  Yet the popularization argued that "Women Really Do Talk More Than Men."

There are all sorts of problems with that, of course, because the study didn't show any difference in how vocal the children were and even the initial study didn't compare adult rats with each other.  A sample size of ten can be a bit tricky, for all sorts of good reasons, too.  For a nice discussion of the issues, go here.

But do see the leap the commentator took:  We move from the idea that women tell more tales, blab more to the idea that women just speak more.  The latter is now somehow associated with the idea that women would leak more information than men.

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Speed Blogging, Monday 8/26/2013. On Anniversaries, Women in the Obama Administration and The Question of Religious Freedom

Or word salad.  Not coleslaw, but the kind of salad where you have goat cheese lumps, too, among lettuce leaves a bit too big to swallow without knife-work.

First, Saturday was the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, today is the 93rd anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment (women's right to vote).  So we are a very very young country when it comes to civil rights.  Worth keeping in mind. 

Second, the Koch brothers have decided not to buy the Tribune papers.  This is good news.  Or as much good news as we are likely to get for a while so you should revel in it.

Third, has the Obama administration a good record of hiring women or not?  That may depend, as wise people say, but the weasel-word of "diversity" doesn't suffice as a defense:

“The president’s commitment to diversity is second to none, and his track record speaks to it,” Alyssa Mastromonaco, the deputy chief of staff, said in an e-mail message. “This is a man who has appointed women as national security adviser, as White House counsel, as budget director and to lead the task of implementing our single most important domestic policy accomplishment,” namely Mr. Obama’s health care law. “This president has single-handedly increased the diversity of our courts, and he will continue to select from a field of highly qualified and diverse candidates for all federal posts.”

For those who don't know of my dislike of the term "diversity," a short explanation:  You can have diversity with a government which has one white woman, one black man, one Asian-American man and umpteen zillion old white guys.  "Diversity" is not the same thing as a representative government*, in short, and it's a representative government that I think we want.  "Diversity" could provide that, of course, but it also offers a loop-hole for those who don't want a representative government etc..

Fourth, I find the concept of religious rights or religious freedom interesting because it can clash with other types of rights, given that religious rights only crop up in a society with more than one flavor (or perhaps intensity) of religion.  One crucial question is naturally to what extent religious rights infringe on the rights of those who don't share the same religion.  This article addresses some of those issues. 

But very few articles analyze how women's rights and religious rights may conflict on a much deeper level, if the religion specifies women's roles as inferior and secondary and if survival after death is taught to depend on the internalization of those teachings.  That puts the believing woman into an impossible Catch-22 position when it comes to choosing between her religion and her human worth. 

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*Representative in terms of population group sizes, with certain basic guarantees and possibly positive discrimination to reassure that group such as Native Americans have representation, too.

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Random Writing Post. Can Be Ignored.

This is necessary because I took two days off from the computer and its simulacrum of the real world.  But that's a post for a different day when the gears in my brain are better oiled.  I'm feeling more and more that I pretend-live on the net and that my real life isn't saved and set aside for that, to be enjoyed later.  Must consider.

In any case, the last two days I spent at the seaside.  Wonderful view of the Mother Ocean, making me feel tiny tiny and unimportant, yet quite safe.  The world is OK, even if the human race disappears which might be an improvement, from the ocean's point of view.

I watched a family of groundhogs and they came by to check me out.  An interesting inter-species moment.  A worried look from the groundhog (waddling quickly past after turning its head to gawk at me), a worried look from me until I figured out what animal this was and that it most likely wasn't rabid but just sorta tame.  Or it had tamed me or whatever.

To return to the topic of that first paragraph:  I took the weekend off because of how my return from the Finnish vacation struck me:  The Internet (Twitter, blogs, articles and so on) pulled me hither and pushed me yonder and made my brain feel like I had been twirled around for an hour.  I would follow a thread of thought and find it disintegrate into hundreds of strands which would then get entangled with each other and produce a knot impossible to tease apart.  I would try to follow some other thread of thought and end up with the same dilemma.  Where is my place here?  Do I have any useful function left?

I don't know, and neither does the groundhog.  Though it likes lawnmowers which make its dinner easier to reach.

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The Bunny Rabbit Theory of Male Advantage And Other Wild Stories

This has been a fun week in the sorta-essentialist camp of gender stories. 

Sit back and relax, because you are going to be fed lots of very serious theory about why women have the roles they do and why men have the roles they do, at least traditionally speaking.  Very Serious Theory, Coming After Decades of Study.

First, here's the reason why most programmers are men in the US:

Now, I'm sure there is sexism, probably a lot of sexism. But I also think there's something about programming that makes many women not want to do it. Here's a theory why that might be. 

Programming is a very modal activity. To be any good at it you have to focus. And be very patient. I imagine it's a lot like sitting in a blind waiting for a rabbit to show up so you can grab it and bring it home for dinner. 

There is specialization in our species. It seems pretty clear that programming as it exists today is a mostly male thing. Which also raises the obvious question that perhaps we can make it so that it can better-use the abilities of the other half of our species?

To give the author, Dave Winer, credit, he decided to strike out that theory part.  But I still like that "theory!"  It's a lot like the theories I might get about, say,  opera (on which I know nothing) after a mug or two of divine mead, while chatting to my demon opera friends.  It shares with them the lack of information, the lack of any deep thinking and a certain lack of respect towards the possibly-more-knowledgeable audience.

Beautiful. 

It's also based on evolutionary psychology, the idea that squatting silently, waiting for the bunny to put its shy head out of the hole, is what prehistoric guys did, all day long, most days.  Or at least long enough to develop an advantage over the kinds of guys who did other stuff, so that the programmer guys passed their genes on more than the non-programmer guys.  And the programmer genes were passed on only in the male line and so on.

It's a possible theory, naturally, given our inability to learn anything about the life of ancient bunny rabbits or their enemies.

But it skips merrily over various other more proximal causes, including the fact that computers, in general, have become coded more male fairly recently.  It also skips over the fact that things such as sitting silently knitting etc. have some similarities to programming, too.

And it does the usual thing where something like a connection between hunting and being male can be used in any which way, depending on what one wishes to support.  So that usually hunting is assumed to be more vigorous, more ranging, more amenable to teach guys map-reading and three-dimensional mental rotation etc.  But it can also be turned upside down like in this example, to explain why guys are better able to concentrate and sit quietly.

That's why I call this beautiful.  Though it makes me wonder why I bother studying any of this crap at all.

A second pretty story just came out at Slate.  It's  an answer offered  to this question:

Why Did Almost All Societies Believe that Women Were Inferior to Men?

The answer argues:

All modern societies evolved out of agrarian societies. Before the Industrial Revolution, the male endurance value and physical strength translated directly to political power. Men fought in wars, hunted beasts, erected buildings, and plowed fields PRECISELY because they possessed the physical stamina to do so at a far greater degree than females.

I'm a HUGE fan of saying, "History does not occur in a vacuum." Which is a fancy way of saying, "S*** throughout human history happens for VERY good reasons." Back before the Industrial Revolution, human fertility was the highest premium factor in existence. People lived to have babies, and babies were the most important thing men and women brought into the world. The female role in reproduction—shall we say—involves a lot more time, effort, and pain (and before recently, a hell of a lot of death). Every moment women spent pregnant (which was a LOT of time) was time that she would have been taken away from power-playing.

Bolds are mine, to point out the obvious contradiction between the question and the answer.

In any case, that the article doesn't really answer the question.  It's perfectly possible to imagine an early society where the ability of women to make babies (what with human fertility being the "highest premium factor") would have been worshipped to such an extent that they would have been given a lot of power in the society.  In short, it's not the presumed gender roles that explain why women would be regarded as inferior.

Those presumed gender roles in the article are probably also incorrect, because they simplify women's role into just some sort of queen-bee-egg-laying-activity. 

Women not only cooked, wove and made pottery but also  farmed, cultivated gardens, probably domesticated some animals and so on.  Or at least there's a good case to argue that this was the case.  And pregnancy doesn't turn a woman comatose in such a way that she cannot play power games.  Neither does breast-feeding or any of the other stuff related to bringing up children.

It's also hard to state how common pregnancy was in the prehistoric world.  The author of the piece I discuss, Dan Holliday, assumes that women were pregnant essentially most of their reproductive lives.  But some studies of more recent nomadic tribes suggest that the number of children born per woman isn't that high, given prolonged breast-feeding, say.

It could be that the calculus changed with agriculture, but that's an assumption, not actual evidence.  One study from the medieval Paris found that the average number of children among lower class families wasn't that high then, mostly because the poorer people got married at older ages. -- I'm not arguing that data so old can be used for evidence.  But the point I wish to make is that we can't just assume some meta-trends in history without questioning their veracity.

My guess is that the piece is really about pointing out that it's not current men's fault what happened in the past and, in any case, women then liked it well enough. Or at least those who didn't like it didn't get their voices heard very easily (with the possible exception of a few rare examples such as the Wife of Bath in Canterbury Tales).  And of course it isn't current men's fault what happened in the distant past, just as it isn't my fault, either.  Or yours.

But that's no excuse for off-the-cuff stories about the meta-history of gender.

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Speed Blogging Thursday, August 22 20013. On Heroism, Internet Hate, What I Don't Write About And Why.

This is a great story about a woman who prevented a massacre.  I think that took real courage and skill, all without a gun.

More on the question of hate on the Internets:  Huffington Post is to stop anonymous commenting because of the trolling.  Not sure how that can be guaranteed, but in any case my problems with comments are not their anonymity but the emotional use of comments to express nothing but hate.

A somewhat different take on Internet hate, when it comes to hating on women, is given by this article.

It talks about the possible extra fee on women who would participate and also hints at one possible desire behind some of the trolling:  To get certain types of women to shut up, pretty much.

In my opinion the scarcity of women editors on Wikipedia may be linked to something similar, by the way, because the system allows for concentrated attacks on any posts, and groups of editors may pick posts put up by female editors for those attacks.  So women need to not only edit but also defend their work  more stringently.  That would be an extra user fee.   But that's speculation right now, based on some anecdotal stories I've heard.

In Massachusetts, a rapist is playing games in the family court.

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There are many extremely important stories I don't write about at all.  My silence doesn't mean that the stories are of no interest to me, just that I have nothing worthwhile to say about them that others wouldn't cover much better.

Sadly, many of those stories, such as climate change and the nuclear catastrophe in Japan appear not to be amenable to political and/or technical solutions.  Or at least the will to do something decisive enough is not there, even if the knowledge of what to do might be.  And often that knowledge is absent, too.  The same applies to some extent to Syria and Egypt and what is going on in those countries.  I can't think of any short-term solutions to the pain and suffering, given the history and current power structures.

Then there are stories like this one *(warning:  the link in the linked story leads to  sick stuff on prison sexual abuse).  Mostly I avoid linking to stories which seem to be created as click-magnets: the more extreme the arguments, the better.  But in this case many of the arguments sound similar to arguments made about women and rape and noting the similarities can be useful.

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*Note added later:  The Daily Beast is doing post-publication editing on this piece, so it's no longer the same as what I read.

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Speed Blogging 8/21/2013. Or How We Work: The Death of the Forty-Hour Workweek, Flex-Time not for Single Women and the Gender Wage Gap Among Kids

This sad story deserves much more than a note in a speed list.  I've written a little before about the slow death of the forty-hour week, the way working much, much longer is regarded as ethical and important and AOK, the way we ignore the fall of productivity with fatigue and the fact that nobody working like that really can be said to have a family. 

That all this is "voluntary" (though perhaps the Roman gladiators also volunteered) and trickling down from the top income classes makes the analysis trickier but not impossible.  An odd sort of capitalist work ethic. 

Two studies (neither of which I have read) suggest that women are less likely to be given flex-time at work than men, and that this applies especially to young single women.  Why that might be the case (if the studies are done well) is worth thinking about.  The linked article suggests a few reasons.

On the gender wage gap among little children.  Once again, I have not checked the studies the article mentions, but the results seem intuitive:  Traditional boys' jobs pay more than traditional girls' jobs (and that is a bit surprising, given that babysitting might be the most important of these jobs in some deeper sense and it's a traditional girls' job).   I think market analysis breaks down here (as it mostly does, outside real marketplaces).

Soraya points out that girls' traditional jobs are hidden inside the house, boys' traditional jobs are outside.  To that I'd like to add that the girls' traditional jobs actually take many more weekly hours, because dusting, folding, doing the dishes, sweeping etc. must be done quite frequently, at least when compared to cutting the grass and taking the trash out (among the traditional boys' jobs).

If I had to make a guess about what's going on I'd add to the obvious reasons (gender roles, duh) the fact that the jobs were much more equal on a traditional farm with animals and many outside chores, only some of which (such as feeding the chickens?) were allocated to girls.  The shift from farms to other occupations meant that the boys' jobs shrunk but the girls' jobs didn't, at least not to the same extent.

And just for fun:  On being an introvert.

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Added later:  This post should not be interpreted as an overall review of "how we work."  It doesn't cover what's happening in the lowest-paid jobs in this country or the lack of proper vacations or the increasing shift towards more and more employer rights and fewer and fewer worker rights.  The title is just a short-hand cover for some of the things that caught my eye in the last day or so.

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