03.13.09
Picket lines
What is the purpose of a picket line during an industrial strike action? I can think of a couple possible goals:- Discourage non-striking workers from “crossing the line” and working in defiance of the strike
- Communicate to the customers/suppliers/etc of the striken industrial concern that some of its workers/employees are involved in a dispute with the concern
- Communicate same to passers-by, perhaps under the implicit assumption that these might potentially become customers of the striken concern
- Demonstrate to the striken industrial concern that the strikers are serious
- Give the striking workers something to do other than just sit home all day watching pr0n on the internets
Now let us observe an actual in-progress-right-now strike and see which of the above seem to be the focus.
For perhaps a month now, maybe longer, a union has been striking against a contractor hired by a local sport club. I have observed this passively, as I drive by the club most mornings, and again in the opposite direction often around noon-1pm. The strikers are always there (perhaps 10 or a dozen of them) in the mornings. I have seen then from about 8am through about 10am. By noonish, they’re gone. Some days they have one of the picketers dressed in a giant rat costume. On rainy days, they have a little tent/marquee thing, but I’ve seen many of them standing in jackets in the rain cos the marquee really doesn’t offer all that great a shelter. So — why only in the mornings? To me, it looks like this is basically timed to correspond with the morning prime commute hours. Certainly, the rat, when he’s there, is generally gesticulating at passing traffic. I have often observed what are presumably local patrons of the sports club walking in and out of the club wearing bathrobes, presumably over swim suits; the strikers seem to completely ignore these folks, despite the odd spectacle of people walking on public streets wearing bathrobes. I have seen delivery trucks presumably for the contractor’s job site go in and out without interaction with the pickets. So the 2nd option above, influencing the customers/suppliers of the concern does not seem to be a primary focus of the pickets.
The third option, that passers-by might become customers or in some way influence the concern seems unlikely; I am perhaps somewhat more likely to not hire Mission Electric to do a job for me, but I can’t imagine there’s a ton of impact on M.I. Similarly, the first option seems unlikely — I can’t believe that anyone probably walked off the job with M.I. because they didn’t want to cross the line, though I could be wrong I guess. This is not an action where these guys were employed on the job by M.I. and walked out due to disagreement; as I understand it, from the start of this job M.I. has been using non-union workers are non-union rates. Those guys seem unlikely to want to join the union and strike too, since they presumably would have done so by now.
#4 is a possibility, but does the union think Mission Electric is going to fold and pay 20% more to the electricians on the job, when they’ve likely got a fixed-price contract with the club? M.I. is just going to eat the 20% on the job after bidding it? Seems unlikely. Will they likely up their next bid to include 20% extra in electrician wages? Also seems unlikely, but perhaps they might compromise with the union somehow.
#5 doesn’t quite work either. These guys are only out of the house for a couple hours in the morning. They don’t seem to have walked off *this* job, which presumably means they’re otherwise unemployed on some other job, so might profitably spend their mornings looking for new work rather than standing around with a man in a mouse suit, though perhaps they are seeking job experience for their resumes so they can apply to work later at Disneyland. Or perhaps they are hired by the union specifically as pickets? The mouse costume guy is certainly good enough that he might be a professional picket rat and move from job to job for the union. He might even do basketball games sometimes as a sideline. Really, he’s pretty good.
So anyway, what’s the deal here? Who is the union trying to influence to do what with this action? Their stated objective of getting M.I. to pay the workers on the job 20% more just seems very implausible.
07.07.08
Inbox three!
I just did some (late) spring-cleaning, and I’m down to only 3 items in my inbox, having started with about 100 or so. So if you’ve been waiting for a reply from me, and you haven’t got it, you’re not gonna. If it was important, resend it.03.19.08
Belkin OmniGuard 2300 with nut under linux
Just posting this for google to find it, since there’s not much helpful out there online now:
The Belkin Omniguard family of UPSes can be made to work with nut by using the “gamatronic” driver. Neither the belkin nor belkinunv drivers work, bu gamatronic seems to work just fine. I guessed this based on some random post I did find on the internet from someone saying they’d forward-ported something they called the SEC drive from an older nut release; grepping the current nut tree’s source code I found some SEC_xyz defines in the gamatronic driver, so I just tried that, and it worked.
I have a new favorite Unicode character
My favorite used to be the right-to-left override character. My new favorite is the zero width non-breaking space. Just think about that for a minute. Of course, people use it as a byte-order marker at the start of documents, but the concept of a zero-width non-breaking space is just so abstract that I can’t help but love it.02.03.08
$1000 for your genetic profile
So you can now order a complete genetic profile for $999 at http://www.23andme.com/I’m waiting for the facebook app…
Gregor Mendel has scored 93 genetic defects at 23andme. Compare your profile now…
01.03.08
My album cover
Here’s my album cover:
Original image is cc-licensed, and available here.
The quote is from J.M. Barrie and makes a nice pun on the image.
I have no idea what to make of the band name, though it does not seem implausible.
More info on this meme here. Pass it on.
12.10.07
Handy tip for windows remote desktop users…
When you’re remote-desktopped into a (possibly headless) windows machine, Windows helpfully doesn’t include “shutdown” or “restart” options on the start menu. But they’re still there in the task manager. So CTRL-SHIFT-ESC and shutdown to your heart’s content.10.23.07
Microsoft’s C-fonts suck
I installed the Vista “C” font family, since MS swore up and down that it’d improve the web experience, and let me see how the other half lives on Windows. Well, it turns out that the other half sucks:
What you’re looking at is a web page using Colibri in its stylesheet. The font just slobbers all over itself sometimes, for no clear reason. I’m not sure if it’s broken kerning, or what. Maybe it’s Firefox’s problem, who knows. All I know is, I expect to be able to actually read web pages I visit, and this is not helping me.
update: Looks like it renders fine in Safari; it’s just Firefox which doesn’t like Microsoft’s fonts.
