We understand and respect that people have choices in the current highly competitive job market. However,
The long term expense was not worth the short term cost
Hello and thank you for being here. Here’s some news to be pissed off about. If you get anything out of this newsletter at all you know what to do buddy.
Something extremely shitty happened in Wisconsin over the weekend and I’m not talking about Aaron Rodgers’ performance against my beautiful Italian son Jimmy G.
An Outagamie County judge ruled on Friday that a group of healthcare workers are not allowed to leave their job at one hospital for better working conditions and pay at a second hospital because it would be unfair to the first one.
On Thursday lawyers for ThedaCare — a non-profit health system with seven hospitals in the state — asked a judge to block seven of its employees in the radiology and cardiovascular department from beginning new jobs at Ascension Northeast Wisconsin until replacement workers could be found. Circuit Court Judge Mark McGinnis granted that request effectively telling the workers — at will workers without a contract to be clear — that they are not free to go.
ThedaCare accused Ascension of “poaching” their stroke care workers (sorry but lol at “stroke care”) but an attorney for the latter David Muth said the workers simply applied for open job listings and were then hired. You know exactly how the system we have is intended to operate.
The Post Crescent reports:
Timothy Breister, an Appleton resident and one of the seven employees involved in the systems’ dispute, submitted a letter to McGinnis Friday before the hearing describing his experience.
One of his colleagues received an offer from Ascension that was attractive “not just in pay but also a better work/life balance,” which caused others on his team to apply, Breister wrote.
After approaching ThedaCare with the chance to match the offers they’d been given, Breister wrote that they were told “the long term expense to ThedaCare was not worth the short term cost,” and no counter-offer would be made.
No counter-offer would be made!
This is obviously fucked on its face before you even get to the part where there is apparently money to pay for lawyers to force the workers to stay instead of simply counter-offering them better wages.
On top of that there’s also been some crying about the effect on the health of the community being pushed by ThedaCare management. A letter reportedly sent by ThedaCare president and CEO Imran Andrabi ($317,492 salary) essentially lays a guilt trip on the employees for their personal irresponsibility and indifference to patients:
“We understand and respect that people have choices in the current highly competitive job market. However,”
While I’m sure that losing a bulk of a specialized team will indeed impact the hospital’s ability to operate there seems to be a pretty obvious solution to that problem at hand which is to pay them what they are worth!
This appeal to the empathy of healthcare workers in the letter there is a common tactic to pressure them into longer hours and poorer working conditions in facilities around the country. You wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to your patients if you left for another job would you? Why would you do that to the people you care for? Same thing happens to teachers and other jobs where one of the main requirements is giving a shit about people.
Around one in five healthcare workers have in fact left their jobs since the start of the pandemic nonetheless and considering the PTSD-like conditions many of them have experienced — and their continued tireless care for patients who stubbornly refuse to take a very simple life-saving vaccine — it’s not hard to understand why.
Another hearing on the case is set for Monday morning so here’s hoping the judge comes to his senses.* Although this decision seems to be based on no actual legal reasoning (something we’re seeing at the Supreme Court lately as well!) it’s not hard to imagine something like this setting a horrible precedent for healthcare and other “essential” workers during the still very much ongoing pandemic. Don’t want to work at the Covid-ravaged school anymore? Too bad get the fuck back in the hole.
*McGinnis was in the news a few years ago for sentencing a poor black defendant in his court to six months in jail for rolling his eyes at him. The man served 42 days before it was overturned on appeal. Around that same time an outside observer was brought in to witness how McGinnis behaved in truancy court. The observer compiled a list of grievances which noted the judge called the students stupid and regularly did other offensive shit like “talking down to parents and attorneys, sending students to shelter care without notifying their parents and giving students excessive amounts of community service hours.”
There are certainly a lot worse judges out there to be clear. Judges like Donna Scott Davenport of Rutherford County in Tennessee. Here’s a little sample quote from her honor to give you a taste of what she’s like.
“I’ve locked up one 7-year-old in 13 years, and that was a heartbreak,” she said in 2012 as ProPublica reported. “But 8- and 9-year-olds, and older, are very common now.”
This lady fucking loves locking up kids!
Any guesses on what types of children she most frequently sent to children jail by the way? And if she believed she was operating under a higher power than the law?
More from ProPublica:
Davenport describes her work as a calling. “I’m here on a mission. It’s not a job. It’s God’s mission,” she told a local newspaper. The children in her courtroom aren’t hers, but she calls them hers. “I’m seeing a lot of aggression in my 9- and 10-year-olds,” she says in one radio segment.
She also had a radio show of course.
She encourages parents troubled by their children’s behavior to use over-the-counter kits to test them for drugs. “Don’t buy them at the Dollar Tree,” she says on the radio. “The best ones are your reputable drugstores.”
…
Davenport has lots of favorite sayings. “God don’t make no junk,” she says to kids, to instill self-worth. To instill fear, she will say, “I’m going to let you be young and dumb — one time.” There’s no jury in juvenile court, so Davenport decides the facts as well as the law. “And that is why I should get 12 times the pay,” she likes to joke.
Davenport enforces a strict dress code in her courtroom, requiring people to “show deference.” There will be no untucked shirts. No sundresses, spaghetti straps or spandex. No body piercings, no uncovered tattoos. Pants shall be pulled up, and if a child shows up without a belt, the judge keeps a bag of them, and if she runs out, “you’ll just have to make do with a piece of rope,” one newspaper profile said.
Davenport says children need consequences. “Being detained in our facility is not a picnic at all,” she says on the radio. “It’s not supposed to be. It’s a consequence for an action.”
Surprisingly there’s been some (relatively) good news recently regarding this horrific pig. After a move by lawmakers in the state to have Davenport removed from the bench she announced that she would stepping down after over twenty years.
“I will always look back at my time as Judge as one of the greatest honors of my life and I am so proud of what this Court has accomplished in the last two decades and how it has positively affected the lives of young people and families in Rutherford County,” she said.
I probably don’t need to elaborate on this if you’re reading this newsletter but I would like to reiterate at this time that cops are the dumbest motherfuckers alive. Look at this shit from two major city police departments this week.
This is the realest shit I’ve ever heard and it’s definitely happening. There is no other easier way to rob a home. Please be careful out there.
You hear a lot of talk lately about how people are “over” the pandemic and how they’re sick of being constrained from going about their normal day to day lives by the so-called Covid scolds who want the pandemic to go on forever. Yes I know it doesn’t make sense but you do hear it more and more. Setting aside the fact that almost 4,000 people died in a single day on Friday I really don’t understand what it is they’re being prevented from doing at this point in time?
As best as I can tell right now in suburban Boston anyway— an area you would think would be doing a lot of prevention shit — you can pretty much do whatever. Maybe you have to wear a mask in some places but not all. Even then I have never seen anyone enforcing it with any sort of vigor.
A lot of this frustration with the pandemic still going on — which I understand of course because it fucking sucks in so many ways — would be easier to take if it all also didn’t start like a week into the whole thing. People were already calling it tyranny and shit and doing whatever on like March 25 of 2020 have we forgotten that?
For a while after I put my last book out I thought ah maybe dumb to have written a book about the 1st year of Covid when it’s nowhere near over but now a lot of the beginning seems like it’s been memoryholed right? A lot of people everywhere were over it instantly after almost zero effort at anything!
Remember this shit? This was like a month into things.
It’s not just in places like Missouri that people are itching to get back to business there was a shitty little stunt protest in Brooklyn last week held by people who think getting to the salon is more important than other human lives.
“My fingernails are breaking, I’ve got hangnails, I’ve been getting my nails done for 14 years . . . I’m very much into yoga, I can’t go to my Bikram yoga studios, I can’t go get my eyelashes done, I can’t go and socialize with the people that are my friends,” a woman from Mississippi named Hillary Angel Barq told Brooklyn Paper. “It’s led me to depression, it’s made me not feel sexual—I mean it’s awful.”
It does sound awful not going to argue with her there.
Anyway I don’t care about that I just wanted an excuse to share this with you the best sentence I’ve read in all of Covid and maybe all of my life from a story about the protest.
“Frank Scurlock, a former candidate for mayor in New Orleans and heir to an inflatable bounce house fortune, was arrested in 2017 for allegedly masturbating in the backseat of an Uber in California, for which he pled no contest in 2018, according to a report in the Times-Picayune.”
It’s important to keep in mind that the loudest voices when it comes to reopening and getting everyone back to work are usually people like that people who are the heirs to bounce house fortunes and not the actual workers who will be putting their lives at risk at the bounce house factory.
The same people who started crying instantly are still crying even as the virus goes on and on and on. And these people won! They got what they wanted: nothing much being done. It seems like what they really want I guess is to continue to behave exactly as they are able to now but without anyone else talking about all the death churning in the background because it’s spoiling the vibe.
I thought Alex Pareene’s latest was very good on this idea of people — like Bari Weiss on Bill Maher recently :) — saying they’re not doing Covid anymore.
The people in the press and on social media complaining the loudest about Covid-19 restrictions are, at this point, people for whom Covid-19 is just a thing they are sick of hearing and thinking about.
What most of the restrictions on our behavior (and the behavior of most other Americans) have in common is that they are not being imposed on us by power-grabbing authority figures. They are largely decisions we made, or decisions made for us by other private actors, in response to the inescapable fact that a dangerous and highly transmissible virus is spreading rapidly throughout the city, and the state, and the country, and the world.
This is why I find the tenor of discussion around Covid-19 restrictions genuinely bewildering. There basically aren’t any. The United States is powering through the Omicron wave with its usual enforced individualism. The hard restrictions on our activities are, for the most part, not mandated or enforced by the state, acting at the behest of liberals who refuse to go back to normal because they are addicted to panic and quarantine; the limits are imposed by the virus that isn’t going away. My kid’s school class went remote for a while because people had Covid-19. He’s back in school now even though his principal has Covid-19. As usual in the United States, the people who won the political argument are now complaining the loudest that they’re dissatisfied with the results, and, apparently, it’s all the fault of the losers.
This popped up in my memories the other day. What a show!
That was at Great Scott in 2014. In case you never read this one you should.
It starts like this:
I remember the first and last time I went to Great Scott it’s just the few hundred times in between I’m having trouble keeping track of.
The first time would have been twenty years ago this summer. It was an aggressively average frat bar then not the iconic indie rock club it would soon become and I remember it being terrible and exhilarating but maybe that’s just in the way that everything is terrible and exhilarating when you’re young. I did not particularly like it at the time it would take a while for that to change.
My friends and I lived across the street in an apartment that smelled like a marmot had pissed all over the rug because that’s exactly what had happened with the previous tenants. There would be fights outside on the corner almost every weekend this being the DMZ between Boston College and Boston University and I wasn’t particularly interested in finding out what they were about but I’d still go in sometimes anyway because it was right there across the street as I said and the apartment wasn’t very comfortable on account of the roaches all over the sink that had migrated over from the Pizzeria Uno next door and the fact that I slept on a random mattress in the living room I had rescued from the sidewalk. No one really worried about or knew what bed bugs were back then I don’t think or maybe I was just twenty one and disgusting.
The last time I went was a few months back for the release party for my Hell World book. It’s about how capitalism destroys everything and nothing good can stay. The last song I heard there was this one “Glacier” by my dear friend and sometimes bandmate Aaron Perrino who performed at the release.
Last song @mishkafrances and I ever heard at Great Scott was this by our man @dearleader at the Hell World book release party. Fitting.It starts so pure
Yeah we dream big
Something happens
Something changes
Like a glacier
That slowly melts away
The hopes we have
Corrode and it starts a tidal wave
Lot of miserable shit in here today but here’s something I found genuinely delightful.
Flowers on my dick and bees all around is the winner for me. Also this Balkan contradiction.
Alright I gotta get out of here man. I don’t feel so good. Be back soon.