March 15 is Equal Pay Day in the USA. The date is chosen to show how far into the year women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year.
Year: 2022
Workers need employer-provided training and they aren’t getting it
Results from a survey of 3,600 U.S. workers conducted by MIT professor Paul Osterman in early 2020:
- White workers, college-educated workers, and standard workers received more formal and informal training than non-white workers, less educated workers, and those employed on a contract or freelance basis;
- Less than half of all surveyed Hispanic workers received informal training, for example, and just 32% of high school educated workers received informal training;
- A majority of workers do receive workforce behavior training, orientation training, and safety training. What’s missing is skills training: learning how to do your job, and the one above it on the career ladder.
h/t Thinking Forward
the evolution of the soul
In an exquisite case of synchrony, I happened to read this right after Vonnegut’s letter:
I have always believed, always, even when I was a precocious little girl crying alone in my bed, that our purpose in this life is to experience everything we possibly can, to understand as much of the human condition as we can squeeze into one lifetime, however long or short that may be. We are here to feel the complex range of emotions that come with being human. And from those experiences, our souls expand and grow and learn and change, and we understand a little more about what it really means to be human. I call it the evolution of the soul.
It is from a letter Julie Yip-Williams wrote to her daughters before colon cancer took her life.
I love how reading sometimes echo each other.
source: https://lettersofnote.com/2021/03/01/live-a-life-worth-living/, accessed 220104
Kurt Vonnegut: a simple way to learn more about what’s inside you
In 2006, a high school English teacher asked students to write to a famous author and ask for advice. Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to respond. And his response is magnificent:
Dear Xavier High School, and Ms. Lockwood, and Messrs Perin, McFeely, Batten, Maurer and Congiusta:
I thank you for your friendly letters. You sure know how to cheer up a really old geezer (84) in his sunset years. I don’t make public appearances any more because I now resemble nothing so much as an iguana.
What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.
Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives. Draw a funny or nice picture of Ms. Lockwood, and give it to her. Dance home after school, and sing in the shower and on and on. Make a face in your mashed potatoes. Pretend you’re Count Dracula.
Here’s an assignment for tonight, and I hope Ms. Lockwood will flunk you if you don’t do it: Write a six line poem, about anything, but rhymed. No fair tennis without a net. Make it as good as you possibly can. But don’t tell anybody what you’re doing. Don’t show it or recite it to anybody, not even your girlfriend or parents or whatever, or Ms. Lockwood. OK?
Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash receptacles. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.
God bless you all!
Kurt Vonnegut
source: https://www.timelesstimely.com/p/ars-gratia-artis, accessed 220104