Tag Archives: education

In his January 2014 State of the Union Address and thereafter, President Barack Obama has repeatedly mentioned apprenticeships and vocational education when discussing the jobs crisis. One might be critical as to why the nation’s first black president would advocate for a policy that has been historically exclusive and harmful to African Americans. In his autobiography, Malcolm X notes, when telling his middle school English teacher of his aspirations to be a lawyer, the teacher advised him to instead become a carpenter. To Malcolm, this was in stark contrast to the overwhelmingly affirming advice he gave to less-promising white students. Malcolm X’s case was not an aberration, but reflected a general trend of structural and systemic discrimination that operated through vocational education programs (where African Americans were tracked into lower-paying jobs) and apprenticeships. This history involved reifying and reinforcing class divisions along racial lines. Apprenticeships can be problematic in that often they are awarded to relatives or friends who share the same racial background as the master technician. As many have noted, white social networks often function to exclude African Americans from potential jobs.

Education, Skills and the Servant Economy

By matt vidal

November 27, 2012

Announcements

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In last weekend’s New York Times Magazine, Adam Davidson had a nice article debunking the so-called skills gap in manufacturing. He noted that manufacturers constantly complain about not being able to hire skilled workers – yet they offer starting pay as low as $10 per hour.

One manufacturer Davidson spoke with stated that workers with an associate degree can make $15 per hour in his factory. Yet, as Davidson noted “a new shift manager at a nearby McDonald’s can earn around $14 an hour.” The problem is not lack of skilled workers, but that manufacturers are offering wages too low to attract skilled workers.

Some employers are willing to train but even they are facing a deficit in basic math and science skills, which are increasingly important for modern, computer-based manufacturing. Davidson closes by suggesting that “so-called skills gap is really a gap in education, and that affects all of us.”

While it may be true there is a general education deficit in the US, this barely scratches this surface of a deeper problem facing postindustrial economies: what kinds of jobs are replacing formerly-well paying manufacturing jobs as these are outsourced to low-wage countries and lost to advancing technologies?

Internet Privacy and the Workplace

By Chris Prener

March 14, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis, Panel - Facebook

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We’ve been posting quite a bit on Facebook here in recent weeks, and I wanted to pass on a pair of new stories that have recently been posted on MSNBC’s website. Each are quite troubling and deserve our attention as digital citizens and as sociologists.The first article, which was published last week, describes how employers (including a police department) and colleges have been demanding “behind the scenes” access to Facebook accounts as part of their “background” checks of employees and/or students. The second article, published just yesterday, describes how a middle school student was forced, with police in the room, to turn over her Facebook password to her school principal. What is most troubling is that this is done, in all cases, to gain access to “private” messages that are not publicly available to viewers of an individual’s page on Facebook.

Each of these stories represent our society’s struggle over how to cope with the brave new world of social media. Facebook has become just the latest venue to criticize the boss or principal (though nothing beats a resignation letter posted on the New York Times’ opinion page). Unlike the water cooler or the local coffee shop, however, the digital footprints left behind on Facebook provide physical evidence of an employee’s displeasure. We lack a cohesive set of legal protections in the United States from this sort of behavior by management (be it the boss or the principal), though such intrusions do violate Facebook’s terms of service.

Until such protections are enacted, some are advising their students and colleagues to take their more sensitive discussions underground. We should all consider strongly the ramifications of our tweets, Facebook status updates, and blog posts for that job down the road or the one we’ve got. This much perhaps goes without saying. Yet we also need to consider as a society how to protect this speech and ensure that speech that occurs out of the public eye using social media can stay that way.