French workers receive paychecks with dozens of line items explaining how their taxes are spent.
Tip policy ordered halted The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco has ordered an end to casino executive Steve Wynn’s policy of forcing casino workers to share their tips with management employees. In a case that combined disputes from Nevada and Oregon, the court effectively reversed itself in a 2010 case that prompted lower courts to allow the tip policy. The policy at Wynn Las Vegas led casino workers at that house to successfully unionize, affiliating with Transport Workers over Wynn’s personal objection. The Ninth Circuit ruling quoted a 1937 Franklin Roosevelt message to Congress: “A self-supporting and self-respecting democracy can plead no justification ... no economic reason for chiseling workers’ wages or stretching workers’ hours.”
Dems accuse Heck of working One of the peculiar run-ups to the Nevada Republican presidential caucuses was that Nevada Democrats tried to make an issue of U.S. Rep. Joe Heck failing to attend them. The Nevada Democratic Party put out a news release headed, “NV Dems Statement on Congressman Heck Skipping the Caucuses to Return to Adoptive Hometown of Washington.” Heck’s likely opponent in the U.S. Senate race, Catherine Cortez Masto, issued her own statement: “Nevadans fought hard for our early state status on the presidential nominating calendar, and it’s a shame Congressman Heck will not help protect that by participating in the Republican caucuses tomorrow evening. I was proud to participate in the Democratic caucuses this last Saturday because I believe Nevadans deserve a say in selecting the nominees to be our next president.” Republican Heck was in D.C. when caucuses were held. The Democrats seemed to find this unseemly, if not an indictable offense. D.C. is where the U.S. House of Representatives is. Heck is a member of the House, which met from 2:01 in the afternoon until 9:20 in the evening of caucus day, Feb. 23. There were at least five votes in the House on that date. Two of them were roll call votes, and Heck was recorded as voting on both those measures.
KNPB president chastised The ombudsman for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting filed a Feb. 18 report saying that Reno’s KNPB made a mistake in failing to broadcast the last Democratic presidential debate. The Feb. 11 debate between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders was held a week before the Nevada caucuses, but station president Kurt Mische said he did not carry it because, “There was and is no Republican debate scheduled” on PBS. PBS ombudsman Michael Getler, after examining the dispute, wrote, “I applaud Mische’s forthrightness in explaining his position and his dedication to fair and balanced coverage. … But personally, I find the decision not to put it on television, although perhaps made with the best of intentions, to be incomprehensible in this case. To me, it turns journalistic principle on its head, producing instead a form of censorship that is disrespectful to local viewers—Republicans, Democrats and Independents. How can you refuse to allow viewers, especially those without cable, to see a nationally-televised Democratic primary debate … because a debate among Republicans, which PBS had also asked to do, has not yet been granted?”
Trial balloon short lived On Feb. 24, the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post sent up a flare about President Obama naming the tax-raising, Affordable Care Act-embracing, abortion-supporting Republican governor of Nevada, Brian Sandoval, to the U.S. Supreme Court. It came to nothing, but was aloft for a few hours, long enough for conservative websites to start sharpening the knives, such as National Review calling the possibility “horrific.”
—-Dennis Myers
8 | RN&R |
MARCH 3, 2016
Lessons for the U.S. Documentary offers programs that work Give workers lots of time off and they still produce—but live longer. Get rid of homework and student by achievement goes up. Dennis Myers Repeal drug prohibition and drug problems go down. These are some of the results of a filmmaker’s search for corporate and government policies and practices on the other side of the world that the United States might emulate—innovations in the U.S., SOP elsewhere. Michael Moore’s documentary, Where to Invade Next—the title is deceptive—is in current release and playing at one Reno theatre. It’s an intriguing movie, full of information that rarely appears in news coverage, and we asked some folks to watch it and comment.
“If Finland can do what it’s doing, why are we back in the dark ages?” Howard Rosenberg Washoe County School Board State governments have long swapped techniques through associations like the National Conference of State Legislatures and the Council of State Governments, and corporations have traditionally learned from each other. But U.S. parochialism and xenophobia have limited how much was learned from other countries. One exception to this was the Reagan years, when a sort of
let’s-be-like-Japan corporate ethos brought pressure for workaholism and greater productivity to U.S. corporations—and schools. Moore traveled to Eastern Hemisphere nations to check out reports of successful policies, such as Germany’s practice of requiring that workers hold half the seats on corporate boards, making it more difficult to cover up corporate misconduct. “The film is definitely right in showing more participation by workers in management,” said former Nevada casino executive Phil Bryan. “The German model is discussed a lot and used a lot, whether knowingly or not. Their overall educational systems aims at early placement on a track, but doesn’t inhibit growth within work to higher management either. It has been very effective there, and I personally see signs of that understanding growing here now, but also some resistance here from some educationalcredentials-required quarters.” Frequently, what Moore found was simple common sense—civility or a lack of punitive policies, for instance. In France, Moore learned that workers receive paychecks with long line-item statements of where their deducted taxes go, making accountability of government much easier. Italian workers are also treated well, receiving—by law—eight weeks of paid vacation a year, paid 14-day honeymoons following marriage, five months of paid family leave following a birth. Yet with all that time off, the productivity of Italian workers is comparable to that of U.S. workers, Moore reported, and in the top 15
among nations. Ducati Motorcycles CEO Claudio Domenicali told Moore, “There is no clash between the profit of the company and the well being of the people.” And Italians live four years longer than people in the United States, which some figures in the film relate to the lack of workplace tension in Italy. If workers are given a life outside work, why not do the same for their children? Children in Finland have been regarded as among the best educated in the world for several years. “Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), a standardized test given to 15-year-olds in more than 40 global venues, revealed Finnish youth to be the best young readers in the world,” Smithsonian magazine reports. “Three years later, they led in math. By 2006, Finland was first out of 57 countries (and a few cities) in science. In the 2009 PISA scores released last year, the nation came in second in science, third in reading and sixth in math among nearly half a million students worldwide.” Paradoxically, one thing Finnish educators recommend against is standardized tests. Multiple choice questions are rare. Finland has also done away with most homework and shortened school hours. “We’ve heard this,” Washoe School Board member Howard Rosenberg said. In fact, there have been plenty of home field warnings about U.S. homework. “As I watch my daughter struggle through school days on too little sleep and feel almost guilty if she wants to watch an hour of television instead of advancing a few yards in the trench warfare of her weekly homework routine, I have my doubts,” author Karl Taro Greenfeld wrote in the Atlantic Monthly two years ago after he tried doing his daughter’s homework for a week. “When would she ever have time to, say, read a book for pleasure? Or write a story or paint a picture or play the guitar?” No homework. Would the U.S. public stand still for this kind of thing? Rosenberg said the public is already convinced of one thing about existing education—“It doesn’t work,” he said. “Reading, writing, arithmetic— what you’re talking about when you’re doing reading, writing and arithmetic is mechanics. It has nothing whatever to do with content. What we’ve got to do is start teaching our children using content that will make them think. Instead of doing some of the things that we do in the middle schools, why not Planet of the Apes? It poses some marvelous questions about who actually has the most intelligence—and how do they use it. If Finland can do what it’s doing, why the hell are
