I’m at Esther Dyson’s PC Forum for the next two-and-a-half days, and will try to blog intermittently as events allow. Right now we’re in the middle of an opening panel bringing together three seemingly disparate speakers:
-Howard Gardner of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, best known for his theory of “multiple intelligences,” who made a quiet but impassioned call for the movers and shakers in the room to aim to “do good” now, rather than just focus on making a pile and giving it away later in life.
-Andy Stern of the SEIU, perhaps the most tech-savvy of union leaders (see Purple Ocean and his blog), who made an impassioned call for high-tech leaders and labor to find common ground in two areas: insuring that the path to the middle class in America isn’t shut off by the Walmartization of the economy, and by doing something to fix America’s declining public schools.
-Jerry Yang of Yahoo!, who Esther is gently pushing to explain how his company is going to do “good work” now with its enormous power, say, as it enters markets like China. I’m waiting for an answer and haven’t heard a good one yet. So far all he’s talked about are vague things like “dialogue” and trying to help the Chinese deal with spam. Esther just asked a slightly more pointed question: “Is there anything you think there that is wrong?” Yang’s responding by saying that government officials have explained their need for censorship to him, and that it has struck him as “understandable” though he doesn’t have any idea if their reasons are valid. Government bureaucrats have told him about the need to control false information from being published. And that’s understandable???! Ahh, he just said he disagrees with censorship as a value. But (good for Esther), she’s pushing further, noting that surveys in the US show support for censorship too, and that people here talk about the need to regulate bloggers for publishing false information in the same way that people in China talk about the need to control the net.
….updating about a half hour later: The three speakers are now up on stage with Esther, who started things out by tossing them a softball about where courage comes from. After that fell flat, somehow they have fallen into a desultory conversation about how to fix education. Stern, correctly, is railing against the whole system (including, heads-up NEA/AFT, the teachers’ unions). Gardner talks about culture, like the role of parents. And Yang just told a long anecdote about his mom, who is a teacher. Sigh…the perils of panels.
Wait, there’s hope–Scott Heiferman of Meetup is asking a question about the power of the net for enable collective action and community. He’s cut his hair! How will the traditional union world fare in a net-empowered age, he asks. Stern talks about “playing around with this Internet union”–hmm, “playing around” is not a good way to promote it. And then essentially he punts. Huh.
Now Mitch Kapor is raising a question about whether the standard 80-hour work-week, “that is the norm in this industry,” is compatible with a healthy environment for raising kids. “This stuff isn’t abstract: the way we run our companies has an impact on our larger communities,” he argues, and urges people to start there. All the 80-hour-week workers in the room without stock options just applauded. (Including me.)
Stern responds by noting that Kapor is the reason he’s at PC Forum, and then riffs on the need to give employees time off to go to their kids parent-teacher conference meetings. I wish someone would ask Stern how much the SEIU pays its union organizers and on what kind of work week. I’ll ask him that tomorrow, when we sit down. (If you have suggestions of other things I should ask Stern, comment here or email me at micah at personaldemocracy dot com.)
Mitch Ratcliffe just asked Stern if the SEIU would forgo the concept of employment entirely and instead look to defend the rights of freelancers. And Stern’s somewhat unsure answer is “yes,” but he argues there’s a difference between an independent contractor and a janitor.
There’s a fruitful conversation to be had on redefining unions as communities that bring people together to provide forms of social insurance that specific companies or industries will fail to do without prodding, such as health coverage, retraining, etc. Too bad it’s coming at the end of the whole panel.
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