So What, Who Cares (vol 1, issue 41) Why only vampires think working at night constitutes acceptable work-life balance
Hello and welcome to the last week of the year where it is socially acceptable in the U.S. to consider the Reese's pumpkin as a serving of vegetables.
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Modern workplaces are not conducive to actual work, so a growing number of employees rely on quiet nights at home to be productive. It will surprise no-one to learn that this phenomenon is largely restricted to the U.S., and fueled by the pervasive fear of losing one's job. It may not surprise you to learn that "a study by doctoral students at Kansas State University, published in the Journal of Financial Planning, showed that people working more than 50 hours a week are more likely to skip meals and report higher overall levels of depression."
So what? The "good" news is that the average American workweek is merely 47 hours (thereby eluding the dreaded missed meals/depression risk by 360 minutes), 39% of Americans work 50+ hours per week. The more troublesome notion is that those 47-hour workweeks are not exactly lucrative for anyone: Research has shown that employees with shorter work hours are more productive on an hour-by-hour basis.
Who cares? Workers who want some semblance of control over their schedules, for starters. Managerial types should also pay attention to what role they play in establishing and enforcing an office culture.
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By the way, please do not knock yourselves out trying to achieve the elusive "work-life balance." Although the Web is replete with checklists on how you can have it all if you just quit Facebook, use the right planner and make time for you, reality is vastly different. As people who study workplace productivity for a living has said, putting the onus on workers to come up with work-life balance solutions does nothing to produce long-term, systemic fixes for all U.S. workers.
So what? Companies that make work-life balance a core corporate priority are usually much better off than their peers: “We find more productive, faster growing and better managed firms offer their employees a more attractive work-life balance package,” said Stanford economist Nick Bloom.
Who cares? Our current cultural and political climate is already paying serious attention to livable wages (vol 1, issue 14) and the radical notion that paid parental leave is a good thing (vol 1, issue 30). The idea that Americans should not be overworked is going to gain more political currency as we head into 2016 -- especially since overworked Americans now are running hard to stay in place (vol 1, issue 37).
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Etsy has launched a program where they hand out credit-card readers -- for free -- to sellers who also peddle their goods offline. The machine is free, but Etsy takes a 2.75% percentage of each sale as their convenience fee.
So what? This is a brewing battle between Etsy, Square and Amazon. All of them are hoping to corner the market on the maker economy types who are equally comfortable vending online or off.
Who cares? Amazon is the one to watch here. They're already trying to poach low-margin vendors by only taking 1.75% off every transaction with their reader, and the company is really heavily vested in trying to establish channels between online e-commerce and offline (vol 1, issue 31). Amazon's critical competitive edge may not be low transaction fees but the ability to offer reports on transactions before Etsy can.
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Your pop-culture note of the day: We recorded the "new fall TV shows we've watched" episode of The Incomparable last night, and while I was attempting to explain John Constantine to someone with, "Look, he's the Wolverine of the Vertigo universe -- he just showed up in a book whenever the publisher needed to boost circ on a title," it hit me that so long as we're looking at supernatural comics to adapt, I would love to see television take on Promethea.
Here is what you need to know about this title: First, it's finished, so you can binge on the entire series run.
Second, it's written by Alan Moore, a man who casually deconstructs and remixes narrative genres before his daily snake-worshipping rituals (not kidding about him being into snake gods) and thus is responsible for genius reads like Swamp Thing (what if a horror comic about a talking plant turned into a meditation on planetary consciousness and the cyclical nature of civilization?), The Watchmen (what if people who like to dress up to punch criminals are not particularly well-adjusted?) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (what if all the protagonists from your seventh grade summer reading list decided to fight crime together?)
Third, Promethea is basically "What if Wonder Woman was a pagan goddess who possessed a teenaged girl? How would that work?" Like a lot of Moore's work, it is pitched toward adults with adult sensibilities. You should read it before some development executive at Showtime decides that what their channel needs is a comic adaptation where a great deal of nudity is totally in canon and oddly relevant to the plot.
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Did you miss an issue of So What, Who Cares? The archive is here. Also, there is now a topic index that tells you what was in each issue. If you're like, "I remember there was an issue with a gratuitious picture of The Rock, but when ...?" -- well, now you can find it. (It was September 4, 2014, btw.)
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