OPINION
4A
THE DAILY ASTORIAN • TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2016
Founded in 1873
DAVID F. PERO, Publisher & Editor
LAURA SELLERS, Managing Editor
BETTY SMITH, Advertising Manager
CARL EARL, Systems Manager
JOHN D. BRUIJN, Production Manager
DEBRA BLOOM, Business Manager
HEATHER RAMSDELL, Circulation Manager
OUR VIEW
Scheduling laws
have unintended
consequences
S
eattle last week joined San Francisco in requiring some
employers to schedule shifts 14 days in advance and pay
workers extra for certain last-minute scheduling changes, the
Associated Press reports. This idea also has come up in Oregon. It
is a kind-hearted step that comes with unintended consequences.
Initially applying to retail and fast-food companies with 500
employees globally and to full-service restaurants with 500
employees and 40 establishments, the Seattle law is the latest
effort to improve the lives of workers. Others include phasing in a
$15 an hour minimum wage and requiring many irms to provide
paid sick leave.
Each of these ideas has some merit. It is argued that they fall
within the spectrum of much older reforms, such as ending child
labor and requiring overtime pay when regular employees work
more than 40 hours a week.
Irresponsible managers can make their workers’ lives unnec-
essarily dificult, for example by shifting schedules in ways that
make it hard to ind childcare or by disrupting natural human
rhythms in unhealthy ways. A study of irregular shift scheduling
found about half of such workers report “serious psychological
distress,” Bloomberg reported on Sept. 19. Too much disruption
also leads to constant uncertainty about income.
But laws like the new one in Seattle reach deeply into the
sphere of internal business management. Faced with additional
burdensome bookkeeping and ines for changing schedules, busi-
nesses confront a real prospect of having too many or too few
workers on hand to deal with customers.
Employers don’t make schedule changes for their own amuse-
ment, but because it is in the nature of economics that short-term
luctuations in supply and demand are unpredictable.
This month the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 3.5 million
Americans were able to rise above the poverty line last year, an
historic indication that the hangover from the Great Recession is
really fading. “More than seven years after the recession ended,
employers are inally being compelled to reach deeper into the
pools of untapped labor, creating more jobs, especially among
retailers, restaurants and hotels, and paying higher wages to attract
workers and meet new minimum wage requirements,” The New
York Times said Sunday.
This news tells us that capitalism is working, and that employ-
ers who unfairly jerk their workers around will suffer as employ-
ees jump ship to take up better positions elsewhere.
Just as minimum-wage increases have extended farther into
rural areas and into smaller business enterprises, there is a risk that
scheduling requirements that start in big cities will migrate into
our region’s small-business sector.
It’s important to let lawmakers know about the risks of doing
so. At the same time, citizens need to bear all these factors in mind
if they are asked to support ballot initiatives that may sound good,
but burden ma-and-pa businesses with big-business obligations.
There is an old saying in the legal profession that “tough cases
make for bad law.” Mandatory scheduling laws are rooted in
humanitarianism, but threaten to make life worse instead of better
for workers.
American epidemic,
American consent
By CHARLES M. BLOW
New York Times News Service
A
nother set of black men
killed by the police — one in
Tulsa, Oklahoma, another in
Charlotte, North Carolina.
Another set of protests, and even
some rioting.
Another television cycle in
which the pornography of black
death, pain and
anguish are
exploited for visual
sensation and rat-
ings gold.
And yes, another
moment of mistak-
enly focusing on individual cases
and individual motives and indi-
vidual protests instead of recogniz-
ing that what we are witnessing in
a wave of actions rippling across
the country is an exhaling — a pri-
mal scream, I would venture — of
cumulative cultural injury and a
frantic attempt to stanch the bleed-
ing from multiplying wounds.
We can no longer afford to buy
into the delusion that this moment
of turmoil is about discrete cases
or their speciic disposition under
the law. The system of justice itself
is under interrogation. The cul-
tural mechanisms that produced
that system are under interroga-
tion. America as a whole is under
interrogation.
Trauma rises
We are in a new age in which the
shroud has slipped and trauma has
risen.
This is a video age, in which
facts that were previously iltered
though police accounts and media
sources, that were previously whis-
pered over shoulders at barbershops
and across kitchen tables, have been
buttressed by the immediacy and
veracity of visual proof.
It is an age in which the lan-
guage of resistance has been set
and accepted, in which the mode of
expression and resistance has been
demonstrated and proved effec-
tive. It is an age of enlightenment
and anger, of fear and frustration, of
activism and alertness. Black Amer-
ica is beyond the breaking point, a
point of no return.
And in this era, the discus-
sion around these issues must be
broad and deep because the actions
required to address the problems
must be broad and deep.
This moment in our nation’s his-
tory is not about how individual
fears are articulated — in an emer-
gency call, in an oficer’s response,
in weapons drawn and ired, in
black people’s desire to lee for
their lives, in black parents’ anx-
iety about the safety of their chil-
dren. This moment is about the
enormous, almost invisible struc-
ture that informs those fears — the
way media and cultural presenta-
tions disproportionately display
black people, and black men in par-
ticular, as dangerous and menacing
and criminal.
It’s about the way historical pol-
icies created our modern American
ghettos and their concentrated pov-
erty; the ways in which such con-
centrated poverty and its blight and
hopelessness can be a prime breed-
ing ground for criminal behavior;
the way these areas make poverty
sticky and opportunity scarce; the
way resources, from education to
health care to nutrition, are limited
in these areas.
Context
We keep talking about choices,
but we don’t talk nearly enough
about the fact that choices are
always made within a cultural and
historical context.
People didn’t simply choose to
live in neighborhoods with poor
housing and poor schools and crum-
bling infrastructure and few grocery
stores and fewer adequate health
care facilities. There were many fac-
tors that created those neighbor-
hoods: white light, and the black
light of wealthier black people,
community disinvestment, business
lending practices and government
policies assigning infrastructure and
public transportation to certain parts
of cities and not others.
And the people living in those
communities — sometimes trapped
in those communities — make
choices, sometimes poor ones,
within that context.
We may say that a poor choice
is simply wrong and the offend-
ing party must deal with the con-
sequences. But poor choices made
in a poor environment don’t have
the same consequences as those
made in wealthy environments. For
poor people, the same poor choices
are punished more often and more
severely, compounding their deicit.
Then America takes it further,
imputing the poor choices of a few
onto a whole race, and in so doing
sets the stage for disaster. This cre-
ates the suspicion and fear that can
lead to the deaths we’re seeing, in
which the person killed may have
made no poor choices, in which the
only poor choice was the pulling of
a trigger.
This is what people mean when
they talk about the impact of sys-
temic racism in these cases and in
these areas. It is not that the police
harbor more racism than the rest
of America, but rather that rac-
ism across society, including within
our police departments and sys-
tem of justice, has been erected in
ways that disproportionately affect
poor, minority communities. That is
acutely clear in these killings.
What took centuries to grow may
take a long time to fully chop down.
You can’t ight racism by plucking
leaves from the top of the poisonous
tree, but by taking an ax to the root.
Republican vice-presidential can-
didate Mike Pence said last week,
“We ought to set aside this talk, this
talk about institutional racism and
institutional bias,” calling it “rheto-
ric of division.” That is exactly the
opposite of what we should do.
The police are simply instru-
ments of the state, and the state is
the people who comprise it. The
police are articulating a campaign
of control and containment of pop-
ulations and that campaign has the
implicit approval of every citizen
within their jurisdictions. This is not
a rogue oficer problem; this is a
rogue society problem.
And now, the presidential dog days
By GAIL COLLINS
New York Times News Service
I
think it’s time to talk about the
presidential candidates’ pets.
Look, you need a break. And
everybody — or almost everybody
— likes an animal
story. I’m not quite
sure about Donald
Trump, but we’ll get
to him in a minute.
Pets, particularly
dogs, pop up all the
time in White House lore. Richard
Nixon might never have even gotten
there if he hadn’t used Checkers the
cocker spaniel as a diversion from
a campaign inance scandal. Lyn-
don Johnson posed — for reasons
we will never understand — picking
up his beagle by the ears. The décor
at one Obama White House holi-
day party was many variations on
the theme of Bo. This tradition goes
way back. James Garield had a
Newfoundland named Veto. Calvin
Coolidge seems to have acquired
four cats, seven birds, nine dogs,
two lion cubs, a raccoon, a bear, a
wallaby, an antelope and 13 ducks.
I used to enjoy occasion-
ally pointing out that Mitt Rom-
ney had once driven his family to
Canada with Seamus the Irish set-
ter strapped to the roof of the car.
A campaign consultant told me that
the Seamus story elicited stron-
ger reactions from focus groups
than any other aspect of the 2012
campaign.
Pet count
along the poodle line.
If Trump has ever in his life had
a pet, his campaign doesn’t know
about it. There’s some question, in
fact, about whether he’s ever even
had an animal friend. For a while,
there was a story about Trump beg-
ging for prayers for a Lab named
Spinee who was undergoing major
surgery. I am very, very sorry to tell
you that this appears to be a total
fabrication.
Donald Trump doesn’t have any
pets, and the animal anecdotes about
him seem to be … unsettling. Clin-
ton has had a number of dogs and
cats, but their stories are gener-
ally … kind of boring. While she
was irst lady, Clinton wrote a book
called “Dear Socks, Dear Buddy:
Kids’ Letters to the First Pets.” In
it, you can learn that Socks the cat’s
tail was one foot long.
Socks, the most famous of the
Clinton pets, has since passed
away. So has Buddy the Labra-
dor retriever, who was replaced by
another chocolate Lab named —
yes! — Seamus. This is a total coin-
cidence. Right now the Clintons
have a couple of fuzzy little dogs
There are two colorful stories
about Trump’s previous encounters
with animals in books written by
ex-employees.
The irst goes back to the 1980s,
when Trump was in his irst bloom
of glitzy celebrity and acquired a
promising 2-year-old racehorse
named Alibi. John O’Donnell, a for-
mer Trump casino president, wrote
that the colt fell apart when Trump
insisted, despite the trainer’s objec-
tions, that Alibi be worked out even
though a virus was going through
his barn. O’Donnell claimed Alibi
got very sick as a result — so ill he
eventually had to have some of his
In books
hooves amputated and was retired.
Then, O’Donnell said, Trump
announced that he was not buying a
defective animal and backed out of
the sale.
“Jack O’Donnell is a disgrun-
tled former employee, and this is
a totally unsubstantiated and false
claim,” said a spokeswoman for the
Trump campaign.
You decide who’s right. The one
thing we do know for sure is that
when Trump irst bought Alibi, he
changed the poor horse’s name to
D.J. Trump.
The other, much less depress-
ing story involves a chicken named
Ginger, who once played tic-tac-
toe with Trump at a casino near
Palm Springs. Like so very many
things in our world, the casino had
Trump’s name on it, but it was
owned by someone else — in this
case an Indian tribe.
Perhaps you have never seen
a tic-tac-toe-playing chicken, but
they’ve been around a long time.
According to Gary Green, another
former Trump casino executive who
wrote a book, a computer under
the board lit up a square, and if the
chicken pecked it, said bird got
some corn. Hey, it’s a job.
After the game was over —
Trump won — Green ran an adver-
tising campaign that featured Trump
iring Ginger and starting a Chicken
Apprentice contest for a replace-
ment. While Ginger’s fate was not
described explicitly, the casino
started serving chicken wings as
part of the promotion.
Beyond that, connections
between Trump and the animal
kingdom seem pretty sparse — if
you ignore Jane Goodall’s recent
comment to The Atlantic that his
performances “remind me of male
chimpanzees and their dominance
issues.” Bloggers have pointed out
that Trump tweets a lot of unlatter-
ing dog references. (“… cheated on
him like a dog …”) It is true that he
does seem to specialize in insult via
canine analogy. I once got a letter
from him suggesting I resembled a
dog. He did not seem to be thinking
about my large, friendly eyes.
If he wins the election, we could
have the irst president in history to
refuse to pardon the Thanksgiving
turkey.