Taking a Break from Work

Happy Labor Day!

ESPN commentator Stephen A. Smith almost can't believe what he's hearing about someone's work ethic.

https://t.co/V3brHELkWd pic.twitter.com/qWjs8PG9Gm

— Stephen A Smith (@stephenasmith) August 31, 2024

Out of Rhythm

Lester Beach, South Lake Tahoe (Chron)

Moderate weather is forecast for this Labor Day:

Tranquil weather is expected in the Bay Area for the holiday weekend as west-southwest winds keep marine air flowing from the ocean to the land, preventing temperatures from climbing too high. Sunday will be the windiest day of the extended weekend, with gusts up to 30 mph.

Along the coast, the ebb and flow to the marine layer will keep temperatures in San Francisco in the 60s to low 70s with morning and evening clouds from Friday through Monday. Oakland should reach the mid-70s each day, while San Jose will steadily be in the low to mid-80s.

It looks like a good weekend to get away.

During my working years I looked forward to holiday weekends. Dates were circled months in advance, and travel was scheduled to minimize the use of paid vacation. Holiday weekends took a lot of work, but the payoff was often great.

Now that I'm retired I don't much care for long weekends. Shopping centers, restaurants, and supermarkets are crowded on what would normally be a weekday, and the local bank and post office are closed. I rarely go on long car trips, especially not when most other people are on the road like the upcoming Labor Day weekend.

I do regret being out of rhythm with the rest of America.

MEI, not DEI

(Image from Diversio/Linkedin)

There's a new Human Resources acronym to learn about: [bold added]

From tech to tractors, companies are dialing back diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Instead, a DEI alternative endorsed by Elon Musk could alter the fate of your next job application.

It’s known as MEI, short for merit, excellence and intelligence. As described by Scale AI Chief Executive Alexandr Wang, who helped popularize the term, MEI means hiring the best candidates for open roles without considering demographics.

The George Floyd riots of 2020 kickstarted the whole Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion movement, and companies raced to install DEI programs that would diversify their work forces, diversity being typically measured by the number of people they would hire who were not white, straight males.

Four years later the lack of a return--or perhaps even a negative return--on their investment have caused some companies to renounce DEI in favor of merit-based personnel policies.

Your humble blogger finds it important to note that one major organization that wholeheartedly embraces DEI is government, which has few performance metrics and no competition to show whether an alternative might be better.

By the way, expect DEI to be a hot-button topic this election year:

That tension is now in the brightest of spotlights, after President Biden abandoned his re-election bid and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. Biden picked Harris as his running mate four years ago, after vowing to consider only women for the job. Almost immediately, some political opponents began painting Harris, who is Black and South Asian, as a “DEI hire.”

Fox News:

Florida Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost said on Tuesday that calling Vice President Harris, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, a "DEI hire" was like using a "racial slur."

The race card has already been played, and there's still over three months to go to the election.

Labor Day, 2022

My office view, 2010: I didn't mind coming in.

On Labor Day, 2022, employers are pleading, demanding, and even subtly threatening their employees to make them come back to the office.

After months of encouraging white-collar employees to return, or attempting to coax them back with free pizza, warm cookies and catered lunches, many executives now say they feel emboldened to take a tougher stance. No longer can workers merely come to the office if they so choose; this fall, executives say, attendance is expected and the office resisters will be put on notice.

With fear of the coronavirus fading, employers think it's time to recapture the benefits of working in the presence of others:

promoting collaboration, energizing the corporate culture and helping younger employees connect with colleagues

Companies who have the capability are trying to persuade with data:

Some are linking identification-badge swipe data with separate metrics to show whether employees who go to the office regularly are more productive and engaged, said Zig Serafin, chief executive of cloud-software company Qualtrics, recounting an experience of one of the company’s clients.

Some kind of hybrid schedule will probably be the norm. Take Apple, for example:

Apple Inc. set a Sept. 5 deadline for corporate employees to be in the office at least three days a week, marking its latest return attempt after COVID-19 spikes delayed its plans several times. The company will require employees to work from the office on Tuesdays, Thursdays and a regular third day that will be determined by individual teams. That is a shift from Apple’s original plan, which called for in-person work on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Your humble blogger put in at least 37.5 hours per week for 40+ years at five different employers' locations, so it's difficult to work up sympathy for a new generation who won't go back in, especially if they accepted the terms of their job pre-pandemic.

That said, this manager was flexible with granting time off when staff had to go to the doctor or pick up kids, as long as the work was of acceptable quality and completed on time. My key realizations were: I did not want to look over the shoulder of staff closely, whether they were in or out of the office. My function was to teach, review their work, and trust them to come to me with problems and questions.

The most important decision, by far, was the hiring one. If gotten right, everything falls into place, including asking people to return to the office after Labor Day.

Back to Work

Elon Musk via email has ordered Tesla employees back to the office. Asked for confirmation, he responded with the tweet shown at the bottom, "They should pretend to work somewhere else."

="ltr">They should pretend to work somewhere else

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 1, 2022

Comments:

1) I hope that vaccinated workers who have COVID co-morbidities (or who live with someone who has) can be accommodated by maintaining physical distance, allowing them to mask, and ventilating their workspace.

2) If (1) is true, then there's little justification for workers complaining; showing up for work on time was the minimum requirement pre-COVID.

3) Elon is implying not very subtly that remote workers "pretend" to work.

4) One of the criteria for being classified an employee, according to tax law, is that the employer dictates the working hours and location of the job. If recalcitrant office-goers otherwise like working for Tesla, perhaps they can work out a deal to be classified as self-employed contractors.

It's Tough to Labor On

Mosaic Law Synagogue in Sacramento has been without
a full-time rabbi for much of the pandemic. (WSJ photo)

Eighteen months ago our priest of 23 years retired. We were assigned an interim minister--who has been excellent but according to canon law cannot become a permanent replacement--and have been going through an extensive process, again dictated by canon law, of getting to the point where we could even post the job.

Meanwhile three other nearby Episcopal churches, two much larger and wealthier than ours, are also looking for ministers.

Every congregation who is choosing its leader for the next, perhaps 10, years must be thorough, but realistically how selective can we be? The decades-long nationwide decline in Sunday worship has been matched by a clergy shortage:

For eight years, Keith Mudiappa accepted the challenges of serving as pastor at his nondenominational Minneapolis church—the 70-hour workweeks, the low pay, the calls from parishioners at all hours—in exchange for the joy of seeing people come to the faith.

But the rewards of the job were tough to come by during nearly two years of online-only services. Late last year, Mr. Mudiappa quit and moved with his wife and children to Florida. He now works at a bank.

“I decided I wanted to take care of my family,” he said. “I don’t think I could do that in a church setting.”

In religious groups across the country, clergy members are stepping down from the pulpit.

They say the job, always demanding, has become almost impossible during the pandemic: Relationships with and among parishioners have frayed while meeting only over video, and political divisions have deepened, fueled by fights over Covid-19 protocols.

Though no national data about clergy resignations exists, an October study from the Barna Group, which studies faith in the U.S., found that 38% of pastors were seriously considering leaving full-time ministry, up from 29% in January 2021. Among pastors under age 45, nearly half were considering quitting.

In some denominations, resignations are exacerbating clergy shortages that began long before the pandemic. As the country has grown more secular, seminaries have closed and the pipeline of faith leaders has dwindled. The labor shortage within the clergy, which parallels shortages in other industries, is reshaping worship in some parts of the country as more congregations search for ways to operate without a pastor.

Leaders of the Conservative Jewish movement sent an email to synagogues in December, warning that at least 80 of the movement’s roughly 600 synagogues would be looking for a new rabbi this year; they expected at most 60 rabbis would be looking for new jobs. In the Reform Jewish movement, the country’s largest Jewish denomination, there are 5% to 10% more congregations searching for a rabbi than in a normal year, according to leaders.

Some 3,544 Catholic parishes in the U.S. lack a parish priest, up 25% from in 2000, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. The Diocese of Buffalo, N.Y., recently launched a pilot program in which as many as six parishes share one priest.

In the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, at least 10% of its roughly 120 churches in Montana are looking for a pastor—and still more don’t have a pastor but can’t afford to hire one. Some are beginning to explore sharing a pastor with other mainline denominations, including Methodists and Presbyterians.

“Pastors are tired,” said Laurie Jungling, the ELCA’s bishop for Montana, who said the departure of pastors from their pulpits began accelerating in the summer of 2020. “They’re giving a lot of themselves to help folks deal with the trauma of the pandemic. They’ve had to face polarization in their own congregations, people’s anger and frustration about masks and vaccines, whether to have worship or not.”

In eight years as lead pastor of Rainier Avenue Church in Seattle, Peter Chin built the congregation from about 200 in weekly attendance to around 700 before the pandemic forced them online.

Over the past two years, the congregation has met almost exclusively over video. Relationships have suffered, Mr. Chin said. Staff have resigned, leaving more work for him, and finding replacements has been harder than it used to be, as the nation’s labor markets have tightened. There are disagreements over vaccine policy, politics and whether to gather in person.

“I love to see real change in people’s lives where they don’t feel hope or don’t feel community,” and then find it at church, he said. “I still find a lot of joy in that. But the scale of it, versus the controversy over mandates, political disagreements, expectations that come with pastoring even in the best scenarios—it feels lopsided now.”

Clergy leaving the pulpit now have more options than they did a quarter-century ago. In addition to those making wholesale career changes, some go into chaplain roles. Others are moving to nonprofits, which usually have more limited hours and emotional expectations.

Noah Farkas had expected to remain a pulpit rabbi his entire career. But after 13 years at a Los Angeles synagogue, he left to run the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, the largest Jewish nonprofit in the area. It became hard to hold the community together during the trauma of the pandemic, he said.

“You get to a point where, after being in the place for over a decade, and you see your friends and parents of your friends dying, it takes a toll,” Rabbi Farkas said.

Some denominations say the pandemic hasn’t affected clergy staffing. A study last year from Lifeway Research found that evangelical and Black Protestant pastors were more likely than in 2015 to say they were frequently overwhelmed and on call 24-hours a day, but that the rate at which they were leaving the pulpit was effectively unchanged.

Still, more congregations around the country now are learning how to cope without an ordained leader. In the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America in Montana, some pastors serve congregations that are 100 miles apart. Laypeople are trained to lead services when there is no pastor.

Mosaic Law Congregation, a Conservative Jewish synagogue in Sacramento, Calif., has spent much of the pandemic without a full-time rabbi since its prior leader of 25 years retired in 2020. A retired rabbi led services on Zoom from Montreal for months, and congregants filled in for events such as funerals and bar mitzvahs.

The congregation has hired a full-time rabbi who starts this year, but Executive Director Caren Rubin said she has warned members that they can’t expect him to remain another quarter-century.

“It’s like corporate culture,” Ms. Rubin said. “People don’t stay.”

Mr. Mudiappa said he works regular hours now in Florida and earns almost 39% more. His wife, who also worked at the church in Minneapolis, can stay home with their two children.

“I was always on the phone. You feel guilty spending time with your family, because there are a lot of other needs,” he said. “I’m enjoying weekends now. The weekends used to be chaos.”

Our church is looking for someone to fill that empty space.

Priests, like teachers, have characteristics--public speaking, leadership, integrity, writing ability, conscientiousness--that attract high compensation in private industry.

In many cases there would be less stress; being responsible for a parishioner's well-being is more soul-consuming than finishing a project.

Baby boomers embarked on second careers in ministry after finding their secular jobs unfulfilling. With some ministers leaving their initial calling, the pendulum is swinging back,

Those Who Can, Do

A block from a couple of old shopping centers in Burlingame are the headquarters of the California Teachers Association.

The gray concrete, the paucity of windows, and the darkened entrance had an unwelcoming feel, but architecture is a matter of personal taste. One should not draw conclusions about an organization based on its building.

We are permitted, however, to make inferences from the CTA's website (snapshot below), which lists the organiation's priorities:

There was not one word about teaching Johnny or Susie to read, but many words on Progressive causes, like those against Charter Schools and standardized tests and for Black Lives Matter and Immigration Reform ("we support safe-haven schools and sanctuary cities"),

Shocking, I know: A big, costly building on expensive Peninsula land houses an organization that demands ever more taxes and dues to pay for its political advocacy, not helping children acquire the useful skills that will help them succeed in a rapidly advancing technological society.

There wasn't much visible activity going on in the building, as there isn't in the schools I pass by every day. But I'm sure they'll need more money to do the same next year.