#U.S. labor trends

[thisway-global]

Episode 10: Cary Sparrow - Greenwich.HR

[abignewscom]

How Trump's Victory Could Affect the U.S. Economy

How Trump’s Victory Could Affect the U.S. Economy In the wake of Donald Trump’s recent election win over Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, questions are emerging about how his economic policies might shape the future of the U.S. economy. With a Republican-led Senate and possible House control, Trump’s plans for tariffs, tax cuts, and immigration reforms are expected to take centre stage,…

[financia012]

Why Investors Should Focus on Jobs Reports Amid Market Volatility

As October kicks off, many investors grow anxious about potential market turbulence. Historically, this month has seen notable market downturns, fueling fear among investors. However, rather than succumbing to market speculation, a more grounded approach involves analyzing key economic indicators. One of the most significant reports to watch is the U.S. jobs report, which offers crucial insights…

[hislop3]

FTC Bans Employment Non-Compete Provisions - Healthcare Implications Aplenty

On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission issued a final rule effectively, banning non-compete agreements, provisions, etc. for employees, including executives. The final rule contains separate provisions defining unfair methods of competition for the two subcategories of workers. Specifically, the final rule provides that, with respect to a worker other than a senior executive, it is an unfair…

[g33ktragedy]

source: https://www.worldpolicycenter.org/policies/for-how-long-are-workers-guaranteed-paid-sick-leave (live map accessed 10 Sept. 2023)

Nationwide guaranteed paid sick leave

[hyperlexichypatia]

This post reminded me of it, but my partner has observed that in contemporary gender discourse, maleness is so linked to adulthood and femaleness is so linked to childhood, that there are no "boys" or "women," only "men" and "girls."

This isn't exactly new -- for as long as patriarchy has existed, women have been infantilized, and "adult woman" has been treated as something of an oxymoron. Hegemonic beauty standards for women emphasize youthfulness, if not actual neoteny, and older women are considered "too old" to be attractive without ever quite being old enough to make their own decisions. There may be cultural allowances for the occasional older "wise woman," but a "wise woman" is always dangerously close to being a madwoman, or a witch. No matter how wise a woman is, she is never quite a rational agent. As Hanna K put it, "as a woman you're always either too young or too old for things, because the perfect age is when you're a man."

But the framing of underage boys as "men" has shifted, depending on popular conceptualizations of childhood and gender roles. Sometimes children of any gender are essentially feminized and grouped with women (the entire framing of "women and children" as a category). In the U.S. in the 21st century, the rise of men's rights and aggressively sexist ideology has correlated with an increased emphasis on little boys as "men" -- thus slogans like "Teach your son to be a man before his teacher teaches him to be a woman."

Of course, thanks to ageism and patriarchy (which literally means, not "rule by men," but "rule by fathers"), boys don't get any of the social benefits of being considered "men." They don't get to vote, make their own medical decisions, or have any of their own adult rights. They might have a little more childhood freedom than girls, if they're presumed to be sturdier and less vulnerable to "predators," but, for the most part, being considered "men" as young boys doesn't really get boys any more access to adult rights. What it does get them is aggressively gender-policed, often with violence. A little boy being "a man" means that he's not allowed to wear colors, have feelings, or experience the developmental stages of childhood.

This shifts in young adulthood, as boys forced into the role of "manhood" become actual men. As I've written about, I believe the trend of considering young adults "children" is harmful to everyone, but primarily to young women, young queer and trans people, and young disabled people. Abled, cisgender, heterosexual young men are rarely denied the rights and autonomy of adulthood due to "brain maturity."

What's particularly interesting is that, because transphobes misgender trans people as their birth-assigned genders, they constantly frame trans girls as "men" and trans men as "girls." A 10 year old trans girl on her elementary school soccer team is a "MAN using MAN STRENGTH on helpless GIRLS," while a 40 year old trans man is a "Poor confused little girl." Anyone assigned male at birth is born a scary, intimidating adult, while anyone female assigned at birth never becomes old enough to make xyr own decisions.

Feminist responses have also really fluctuated. Occasionally, feminists have played into the idea of little boys as "men," especially in trans-exclusionary rhetoric, or in one notorious case where members of a women's separatist compound were warned about "a man" who turned out to be a 6-month-old infant. There's periodic discourse around "Empowering our girls" or "Raising our boys with gentle masculinity," but for the most part, my problem with mainstream feminist rhetoric in general is that it tends to frame children solely as a labor imposed on women by men, not as subjects (and specifically, as an oppressed class) at all.

Second-wave feminists pushed back hard on calling adult women "girls" -- but they didn't necessarily view "women" as capable of autonomous decision-making, either. Adult women were women, but they might still need to be protected from their own false consciousness. As laws in the U.S., around medical privacy and autonomy, like HIPAA, started more firmly linking the concepts of autonomy with legal adulthood, and fixing the age of majority at 18, third-wave feminists embraced referring to women as "girls." Sometimes this was in an intentionally empowering way ("girl power," "girl boss"), which also served to shield women (mostly white, mostly bourgeois/wealthy) from criticism of their participation in racism and capitalism. But it also served to reinforce the narrative of women as "girls" needing to be protected from "men" (and their own choices).

I'm still hoping for a feminist politic that is pro-child, pro-youth, pro-disability, pro-autonomy, pro-equality, that rejects the infantilization of women, the adultification of boys, the objectification of children, the misgendering of trans people, and the imposition of gender roles.

[autisticadvocacy]

"The increase in work-from-home arrangements and greater flexibility in work hours seen during the height of the pandemic may have permanently opened new employment opportunities for people with disabilities," 

[contemplatingoutlander]

Worried by Florida’s history standards? Check out its new dictionary!

As always, Alexandra Petri is spot on in satirizing the right-wing censorship and educational nonsense happening in Florida. This is a gift 🎁 link, so you can read the entire column, even if you don't subscribe to The Washington Post.

Below are some excerpts 😂:

Well, it’s a week with a Thursday in it, and Florida is, once again, revising its educational standards in alarming ways. Not content with removing books from shelves, or demanding that the College Board water down its AP African American studies curriculum, the state’s newest history standards include lessons suggesting that enslaved people “developed skills” for “personal benefit.” This trend appears likely to continue. What follows is a preview of the latest edition of the dictionary to be approved in Florida. Aah: (exclamation) Normal thing to say when you enter the water at the beach, which is over 100 degrees. Abolitionists: (noun) Some people in the 19th century who were inexplicably upset about a wonderful free surprise job training program. Today they want to end prisons for equally unclear reasons. Abortion: (noun) Something that male state legislators (the foremost experts on this subject) believe no one ever wants under any circumstances, probably; decision that people beg the state to make for them and about which doctors beg for as little involvement as possible. American history: (noun) A branch of learning that concerns a ceaseless parade of triumphs and contains nothing to feel bad about. Barbie: (noun) Feminist demon enemy of the state. Biden, Joe: (figure) Illegitimate president. Black history: (entry not found) Blacksmith: (noun) A great job and one that enslaved people might have had. Example sentence from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R): “They’re probably going to show that some of the folks that eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.” Book ban: (noun) Effective way of making sure people never have certain sorts of ideas. Censorship: (noun) When other people get mad about something you’ve said. Not to be confused with when you remove books from libraries or the state tells colleges what can and can’t be said in classrooms (both fine). Child: (noun) Useful laborer with tiny hands; alternatively, someone whose reading cannot be censored enough. [...]

[See more select "definitions" below the cut]

Classified: (adjective) The government’s way of saying a paper is especially interesting and you ought to have it in your house. Climate change: (noun) Conspiracy by scientists to change all the thermometers, fill the air with smoke and then blame us. [...] Constitution: (noun) A document that can be interpreted only by Trump-appointed and/or Federalist Society judges. If the Constitution appears to prohibit something that you want to do, take the judge on a boat and try again. [...] DeSantis, Ron: (figure) Governor who represents the ideal human being. Pronunciation varies. Disney: (noun) A corporation, but not the good kind. [...] Election: (noun) Binding if Republicans win; otherwise, needs help from election officials who will figure out where the fraud was that prevented the election from reflecting the will of the people (that Republicans win). [...] Emancipation Proclamation: (noun) Classic example of government overreach. Firearm: (noun) Wonderful, beautiful object that every person ought to have six of, except Hunter Biden. [...] FOX: News. Free speech: (noun) When you shut up and I talk. Gun violence: (noun) Simple, unalterable fact of life, like death but unlike taxes. [...]

Jan. 6: (noun) A day when some beautiful, beloved people took a nice, uneventful tour of the U.S. Capitol. King Jr., Martin Luther: (figure) A man who, as far as we can discern, uttered only one famous quotation ever and it was about how actually anytime you tried to suggest that people were being treated differently based on skin color you were the real racist. Sample sentence: “Dr. King would be enraged at the existence of Black History Month.” Liberty: (noun) My freedom to choose what you can read (see Moms for Liberty). Moms for Liberty: (noun) Censors, but the good kind. [...] Pregnant (adjective): The state of being a vessel containing a Future Citizen; do not say “pregnant person”; no one who is a real person can get pregnant. Queer: (entry not found) Refugee: (noun) Someone who should have stayed put and waited for help to come. Slavery: (noun) We didn’t invent it, or it wasn’t that bad, or it was a free job training program. Supreme Court: (noun) Wonderful group of mostly men without whom no journey by private plane or yacht is complete. Trans: (entry not found) United States: (noun) Perfect place, no notes. [emphasis added to defined words]

[iww-gnv]

A troubling trend is brewing underneath America's strong employment market: more children are working in dangerous jobs, violating the nation's labor laws and putting their lives at risk.  In the last 10 months, federal regulators have found almost 4,500 children working in violation of federal child labor laws, an increase of 44% from a year earlier, the Labor Department said on Thursday. Some of the children were operating dangerous machinery, such as deep fryers and meat-processing equipment, the agency noted.  The surge in cases of illegal child labor come as some states are weakening their child labor laws, while some lawmakers have also pointed to an influx of unaccompanied minors crossing into the U.S. as an underlying cause. On Wednesday, a congressional hearing focused on the hundreds of thousands of children who have entered the U.S. alone since 2021, with some lawmakers questioning Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra about their safety.  "Earlier this year, news reports detailed cases of unaccompanied minors working in harsh conditions in plants and factories," Rep. Kathy Castor, a Democrat from Florida, said at the hearing. "The reports were shocking and deeply disturbing." Almost 400,000 children have entered the U.S. alone since 2021, according to government data. The numbers have spiked in 2021, 2022 and 2023 compared with 2020, the data shows. A New York Times investigation published earlier this year found that the use of child migrant labor in factories across the U.S. has "exploded" since 2021, and concluded that "the systems meant to protect children have broken down."

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Yale Environment 360:

Here in Burnt Corn Valley, smack in the middle of the Navajo reservation’s vast Black Mesa region, the hilly land both craves water and is brutalized by it. The sandy Arizona soil cracks under a punishing August sun as red-striped blister beetles search for moisture across its baked surface. Cottonwood trees and sagebrush rise from deep gullies carved by floodwaters that, during the intensifying summer monsoon, sluice off surrounding mesas and wash away fragile topsoil — reminders that with climate change, even quenching rains harbor powers of destruction.

This portrait of climatic havoc belies a softer reality, though. Farming once thrived in this parched region and could once again — if the right practices are adopted. Exhibit A: The crops on Roberto Nutlouis’s 12-acre Sliding Rock Farm, in his reservation hometown of Piñon, a five-hour drive north of Phoenix. “The corn is actually pretty big and thriving,” Nutlouis says. He believes — and both Western science and the lived experience of his Native elders affirm — that the traditional rock and stick structures he’s built on his property, which help store water and prevent erosion, have a lot to do with it. These structures, similar to those used by Native peoples long before Europeans arrived on the continent, are not only delivering water to crops (the broader, 27,000-square-mile reservation has the highest reported rate of food insecurity in the U.S.). They are also restoring Nutlouis’s watershed and those of his neighbors, helping to sequester carbon, and reviving this high-desert ecosystem. It’s all part of a bigger effort among a range of local and regional grassroots organizations to build back the reservation’s fragile, depleted ecosystems and bring greater sovereignty over food, water, and health to its communities.

Diné (the Navajo name for themselves) are well aware that climate change is making the weather on their semi-arid plateau weirder, wilder, and more destructive. Depending on elevation, precipitation in Black Mesa averages 6 to 16 inches a year; recent heat extremes — the Navajo government declared a state of emergency in 2023 due to soaring temperatures —mean that the scant water evaporates more quickly. Climate models predict the region will experience increasing droughts that decimate plant life, part of a growing trend of human-caused desertification across the globe, as well as higher-intensity seasonal rainfall, which can sweep away crops and roads. The ecological health of the reservation has also been weakened by deforestation from timbering operations and from overgrazing over the years.

Still, this season, Nutlouis, 44, has been able to skip his usual two-hour roundtrip drive to a reliable well to haul water home for his corn. His crop is healthy and hydrated because his land still holds last winter’s snowmelt. Clearly, his heavy labor over the past 20 years — during which he has built woven brush dams, gabions (wirework cages filled with rocks), earthen berms, concrete spillways and trenches, limestone aprons and walls, and stone-lined “Zuni bowls,” which stabilize eroding streambeds — is paying off.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Dave Jamieson at HuffPost:

Every year, U.S. employers spend millions of dollars on outside consultants who specialize in breaking up union campaigns. Because much of that work is cloaked in secrecy, progressive groups are urging the Biden administration to crack down and make it more transparent. A paper released Wednesday recommends that the Labor Department force employers and their consultants to make greater financial disclosures related to anti-union spending so workers can better understand who’s being paid to lobby them. The authors write that the firms are “deploying increasingly aggressive tactics to dissuade employees from unionizing.” The paper was co-released by Harvard Law School’s Center for Labor and a Just Economy, the nonprofit watchdog group LaborLab, and the advocacy group Governing for Impact, which has been pushing the Biden administration to pursue progressive federal regulations.

"This is an urgent problem because we are seeing more organizing,” said Block, who previously ran the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Biden White House. “It’s super important that those [union] elections actually reflect the will of those workers and that they’re not a reflection of manipulation or fear or coercion.”

A new report came out warning about the increased trend of aggressively anti-union organizing behavior by employers, and progressives are urging the Biden Administration to crack down on the anti-union “consulting” industry.

[st-just]

“Seller services,” as Amazon refers to these and other sources of revenue, are a large and growing part of Amazon’s revenue — larger than Amazon Web Services and quite profitable. They also mean that letting a seller market off-brand products on your platform is often going to be more profitable than selling your own discount brands: Undercutting an independent seller’s small coffee-grinder business is, it turns out, a bad look and, in the big picture, maybe not worth the trouble. Sellers serve a lot of purposes for Amazon and joke among themselves about the free labor they provide. In exchange for access to the largest sales channel on the internet, they do a lot more than just pay Amazon its fees. They perform market research, obsessively investigating review data and marketplace trends to figure out what’s going to be popular on the platform next. (Recent red-hot third-party product types include miniature waffle-makers, reading lights that drape around your neck, and dog puzzles.) They handle customer service. They exert downward price pressure on one another, and they absorb a lot of risk (dozens of dog-puzzle sellers fail so that one may thrive). No matter what happens to them, whether their own businesses succeed or fail, Amazon makes money. This is a great deal for Amazon, and over the years it has become Amazon’s main deal — in 2021, the company estimated that activities on its marketplace created “more than 1.8 million U.S. jobs” and shared success stories from its hundreds of thousands of American sellers, some of whom had become millionaires. It was a slow and, in hindsight, astounding transformation in which the “everything store” substantially outsourced its store.

-John Hermann, The Junkification of Amazon

[comeonamericawakeup]

Immigrants fill a U.S. labor shortage

Since February 2020, all the job growth in the United States has been driven by foreign-born workers, said Justin Fox in Bloomberg. Critics of immigration have used this remarkable fact to claim that foreigners are displacing American labor. But that’s hardly the case. Rather, the supply of working-age, native-born Americans is falling. “The continued aging of the Baby Boomers, the last of whom will turn 65 in 2029,” is the main factor in the diminishing labor supply. Fewer young Americans will be entering the workforce to replace them, since U.S. births peaked in 2007 and the trend “has been almost all downhill since.” Without immigration, the labor shortages faced by employers would be much worse. If it seems like “immigrants are taking all the jobs,” it’s because “no one else is available.”

THE WEEK April 26, 2024

[evidence-based-activism]

How many men are misogynistic?

This is a very vague question!! To give a concise answer I'd need an operationalized definition of "misogynistic". But it's unlikely that any two random people would give the same operationalized definition. As such, in my opinion, it's better to ask about the prevalence of a specific misogynistic behavior. (Even then, depending on the behavior chosen, there may or may not be sufficient data to answer the question.)

That being said: if you are really wondering "how many men benefit from the patriarchy?", the answer is: all of them. Every single man benefits from the patriarchy on the basis of being a man. Yes, it also "backfires" on some men (e.g., gay men), but even those men benefit from the patriarchy in other ways.

On the topic of specific misogynistic behaviors, I have a few relevant sources.

First, approximately 1 in 3 men around the world openly admit to abusing or raping women. Keep in mind that these are only the men who openly admit to these behaviors. There is an unmeasured quantity of men who (1) have committed these acts but won't openly admit to it and (2) have not (yet) committed these acts but indicate a willingness/desire to do so (e.g., if they were assured they wouldn't be caught/fact consequences).

In addition, a recent report [1] (from the same people who gathered most of the above data) attempted to illustrate the "state of men" around the world. The quality of the synthesis of the data is mixed (i.e., they fail to provide single global reference figures for many of the topics), but there are still some clear trends. For example:

The global average "Men’s Gender Attitude Scale" was 1.2 out of 3, where a higher number indicated more equitable views.

Globally, almost 30% of men report having never participated in any of the 3 "traditionally feminine" household tasks. Also, 35% of men report that their fathers never participated in these tasks. (And since men's reported recollection of their father's participation increased very little over age groups, it's unlikely this result is the result of only very old men.)

They also gathered per-country prevalence data for the percentage of men who report ever abusing and/or raping their wives/partners. The prevalence rates ranged from 18% – 93% with a mean and median of 51%. (I provided the mean and median to illustrate the data distribution, but these are not adjusted for population size, and therefore should not be taken as a global prevalence rate. Frustratingly, the organization does not attempt to provide a global prevalence rate for men's perpetration domestic violence despite (presumably) having the tools to do so.)

Other per-country prevalence data indicated between 9-66% (mean & median = 34%) of men believe it is a "women's responsibility (not a man's) to avoid getting pregnant" and 27-73% (mean & median = 51%) believe "men need sex more than women do". (Same mean/median warnings apply.)

Keep in mind, however, that while this data covers a number of countries and world regions it hasn't (yet?) directly sampled developed countries (e.g., USA, Canada, Australia, Western Europe), and thus the data may not be generalizable to them. However, previous research suggests that developed countries likely have similar prevalence rates (i.e., within the range of rates reported above). For example:

The linked post above describes data that suggests 1 in 3 men in developed countries report abusing or raping women.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that, depending on the specific activity and measurement used, women spend 1.5-2.5 times more time on unpaid domestic work than men. Or, stated another way, men spend 33-60% less time on unpaid domestic work than women. [2]

This study details women's pregnancy burden in the USA, detailing how "responsibility for preventing pregnancy in heterosexual relationships disproportionately falls on women". [3]

Beyond that, this 2020 literature review [4] indicates that "the majority (> 80%) of adult men have accessed pornography at some point, and in the past year (40–70%)." This time the populations covered in this review are primarily developed countries, although the few developing countries covered showed similar results. (This example is also a good way to highlight how that operationalized definition of misogyny is important ... given the degree to which pornography is normalized in society, do you count all men who have ever watched it as misogynistic? Only those who watch it repeatedly? Or only the ones who have been exposed to arguments against it and continue to watch it? Or some other condition? There are reasonable arguments for each of the above perspectives!)

So, all in all, the answer to your question depends entirely on how you define misogyny (and how you operationalize this definition). My best estimate for the minimum number of men who are (or would be, if given the chance) violently misogynistic is 1 in 3 men. (But this neglects to consider non-violent behaviors and the prevalence of misogynistic beliefs.)

More importantly however, 100% of men benefit from the patriarchy, regardless their personal beliefs or actions.

References below the cut:

Equimundo. (2022). The International Men and Gender Equality Survey: A status report on men, women, and gender equality in 15 headlines. Washington, DC: Equimundo.

American time use survey—2022 results. (2023). U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm

Kimport, K. (2018). More than a physical burden: Women’s emotional and mental work in preventing pregnancy. Journal of Sex Research, 55(9), 1096–1105. https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2017.1311834

Miller, D. J., Raggatt, P. T. F., & McBain, K. (2020). A literature review of studies into the prevalence and frequency of men’s pornography use. American Journal of Sexuality Education, 15(4), 502–529. https://doi.org/10.1080/15546128.2020.1831676

[girlactionfigure]

🟡 Friday - ISRAEL REALTIME - Connecting to Israel in Realtime

Rosh Chodesh Sivan, have a good new month!

Erev Shabbat - Parshat Bamidbar - Numbers 1:1 - In the Sinai Desert, G‑d says to conduct a census of the twelve tribes of Israel.

🌡 HEAT WARNING.. high temperatures today and tomorrow, returning to normal summer temps Sunday.  Hydrate, check your elderly.  And there have already been several baby and toddler deaths from left-in-car overheating, be extra careful!

🔸DEAL.. Hamas leader Sinwar to mediators: "Hamas will not disarm”. (WSJ)

.. Qatar has threatened senior Hamas officials to be expelled from Doha if they oppose the deal.

.. Qatari Foreign Ministry: "Hamas has not yet responded to the proposal for a ceasefire; they are still studying the proposal and the efforts of the mediating countries continue.”  (Yes this is opposite from previous reports.)

▪️INFILTRATION FROM JORDAN.. overnight near Tirat Zvi.  Town alert squads activated, IDF searching area.

▪️HEZBOLLAH FIRED ANTI-AIRCRAFT MISSILES.. at Israeli jets over south Lebanon.  This is the first time they have fired at jets, but have previously shot down Israeli high flying observation drones.

▪️NETANYAHU TO SPEAK TO U.S. CONGRESS.. on July 24.

▪️US SEC STATE BLINKEN TO ISRAEL.. early in the coming week.

▪️ISRAEL ORDERS MORE F-35’s.. Israel signs a contract with the US to purchase 25 F-35 fighter jets for $3 billion.

▪️KIRYAT SHMONA SHOPPING MALL HIT.. by Hezbollah suicide drone.  Significant damage, no injuries.  (( As a precision weapon, someone want to comment about shooting at military vs civilian sites?  Israel is literally dropping leaflets warning civilians, Hezbollah is targeting civilians. ))

▪️MEDIA FEEDING THE ENEMY ENERGY.. The Lebanese Al Mayadeen channel quotes from the editorial of the Haaretz newspaper this morning:  “The countdown has begun and it is only a matter of time to the final collapse of Israel. A Lebanon war will push Israel into the abyss with a lack of international legitimacy and an exhausted army.”  This is from an Israeli newspaper during a war!

▪️HOUSING.. High Court decision on a long running case on who pays differences in some indexed payments on fixed price new apartments, the contractor, the State, or the buyer which was agreed between the contractors and State to be divided among the 3 - the court rules buyers aren’t party to the agreement and therefore can’t be charged.  Savings of NIS 8,000 per 1,000,000 of home price for buyers are expected. (Calcalist)

▪️MORE POLITICAL POLLING.. this time from right wing Ch. 14..

Likud - 25

National Unity - 17

Israel our Home - 14

Yesh Atid - 13

Shas - 10

Otzma Yehudit - 9

Labor - 9

United Torah Judaism - 8

Ra’am - 6

Religious Zionism - 5

Hadash-Ta’al - 4

Balad - below minimum at 3%

Meretz - below minimum at 2.2%

National Right - below minimum at 1.7%

Trends of note:  Labor significantly up with new leader, Israel our Home trending up.

⭕ HAMAS ROCKETS at Magen and Ein HaBsor near Gaza.

⭕ HEZBOLLAH ROCKETS at Beit Hillel, Ma'ayan Baruch, HaGoshrim, Zarit in the north.

SPECIAL REPORTS

❗️ON INFILTRATION from Gaza attack:

.. The tunnel shaft through which the terrorists reached 200 meters from the border is a shaft that is connected to a tunnel that has been known to Israel for 10 years, since Operation Protective Edge, and has not been destroyed.

.. When the terrorists reached the first fence, the old fence, they passed through an opening in the fence that remained breached and unprepared.  And while IDF forces are using it for entry to Gaza, not even a gate added.

❗️EMERGENCY PLANNING

Links to prepare for greater conflict.  Note many of the links work on in Israel, to view from outside use a VPN (special app or program that lets you appear somewhere else on the internet).

.. Preparing your home for an emergency.  https://www.oref.org.il/12490-15902-en/Pakar.aspx

.. Supplies and Equipment for Emergencies.  https://www.oref.org.il/12490-15903-en/pakar.aspx

.. Help Prep your Neighborhood and Family Elderly.  https://www.oref.org.il/12550-20999-en/pakar.aspx

.. Know the Emergency numbers

Police 100 emergency, 110 non-urgent situation

Ambulance 101

Medics 1221

Fire 102

Electric Company 103

Home Front Command 104

City Hotline 106

Senior Citizen Hotline *8840

Social Services Hotline 118

Cyber (hack) Hotline 119

[mariacallous]

In the 2020s, love triangles are all the rage—at least in American literature. The last five years have seen a proliferation of novels about non-traditional triads. Raven Leilani arguably ignited the trend with Luster, followed by Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby, Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir, and Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss, among others. Each novel featured a female protagonist armed with a sardonic voice, and each used a love triangle to probe social issues related to sex, power, race, gender, and class.

Mostly, these novels have been about American lust. But a new addition to the list, The Lady Waiting by Polish novelist and filmmaker Magdalena Zyzak, offers an international spin on the genre. This mischievously delightful caper centers on the love triangle between a wealthy American couple and their Polish assistant, who conspire to steal a Vermeer.

Although Zyzak, like her predecessors, is interested in the dynamics of sex and power, she throws a new element into the mix: globalization. The Lady Waiting is, beneath the sex, a story of the global economy, where workers from countries on the periphery do most of the labor for a tiny slice of the pie, while investors from the core economies feast.

The Lady Waiting is the second novel by Zyzak, who was born in Poland but has lived in the United States since she was an undergraduate in the early 2000s. Zyzak writes in caffeinated English: On the spectrum of foreign-born writers who switched to English, she is far closer to Vladimir Nabokov than Joseph Conrad—she never passes up a chance at puns, chiasmus, or word play.

The novel opens when a 23-year-old Polish immigrant, Viva, spots a posh woman in a green cocktail dress standing on an island of Los Angeles’s 101 freeway. Viva stops to offer a ride to the woman, who turns out to be a rich Polish-American named Bobby. Soon, Bobby and her husband, Sleeper, a retired U.S. film director, offer Viva a job. They want her to be their live-in help. “Sleeper says our household needs a wife,” Bobby explains.

Viva has been in the United States for a year and is floundering, going unhired because of her faltering English and her failure to absorb American social norms. (When an interviewer asks what her greatest weakness is, Viva answers, “manipulating”; she doesn’t get the job.) Viva never wanted to come to the country in the first place. But a boyfriend convinced her to enter the green card lottery; when she won, everyone told her she’d be crazy not to cash in the ticket. In Poland, she has a “teaching degree, though nothing to teach”; in America, the only job she can get is as a home aid for an older woman who soon dies.

Viva’s reasons for being in the United States crystallize when she meets Bobby, who strikes her as the kind of woman you see on Los Angeles billboards. Bobby is rich and comfortable being rich. She charms Viva at an expensive lunch in Beverly Hills. The waiter brings out rosé and sharing plates, and Bobby says, in characteristically gleeful free association, “People hate rosé but I love it … Doesn’t give you as much of a headache, as long as it’s a quickie, not an affair. Never date a socialist unless he’s the champagne kind. Oh, hey, socialism! We’re going to share all the plates!”

Viva is intoxicated not just by Bobby’s money but also her command of English. When Viva speaks, she is hobbled by her adopted tongue; in Viva’s narration, though, her internal monologue sounds kind of like Bobby’s dialogue. Explaining her origins, Viva narrates: “The man who had impregnated my mother in a rapeseed field—not a metaphor, a major Polish crop—had ridden a motorcycle.”

After lunch, Bobby takes Viva to an expensive boutique, where she steals a $9,000 dress for her. Viva is distraught—she could lose her green card if she’s an accomplice to a crime.

“Why did you steal it?” Viva asks.

“Because I could afford it,” Bobby says with a shrug.

The dress turns out to be a harbinger. Bobby convinces Viva to steal—or fake-steal, in a move that she claims is “neutral legally”—a Vermeer that went missing from a museum nine years earlier, from her ex-husband, a Russian mobster. The fictional Vermeer, “The Lady Waiting,” is a small portrait of a woman seated in front of a window, gazing at her hands. The ex-husband recently acquired it as repayment for a debt, and he’s looking to return it to a German museum that’s offering a 10 million euro reward.

Her ex is outsourcing the job because it would be difficult for a Russian on the Magnitsky list to claim the reward. If they succeed, the Russian ex will get the majority of the 10 million, paying out a million each to his German lawyer as well as the Americans—Bobby and Sleeper. In a mirroring of globalization, Viva, the laborer brought in to do the actual work and assume the actual risk, will get only 1 percent. But 100,000 euros is a life-changing amount for Viva. It might buy her a ticket on the elusive route from immigrant to expat.

As for the love triangle, Viva sleeps first with Bobby, who excites her in context if not action. (“It was not the technique but the situation—that she was my boss—that aroused me.”) Sleeper excites her in a much more straightforward way: “It was remarkable that other men had never made me come, because the whole thing had taken less than two minutes.” It’s Bobby who pushes her to Sleeper—each of them knows of Viva’s involvement with the other—and every time Viva sleeps with Sleeper, it seems to bring him closer to Bobby. She begins to fall for Sleeper, but also for Bobby, in a confusing way: “Sometimes I like you so much I want to be you,” she tells the latter.

Sleeper and Bobby are idle rich. They live like “nineteenth-century aristocrats,” working little and drinking often, in constant pursuit of drollness. Viva is paid $1,000 a week for an unwritten and varying set of tasks that includes making breakfast, bringing ice to cocktail hour in the hot tub, breaking in Bobby’s shoes, and, implicitly, sex. She is alternately ignored, fawned over, spoiled, and humiliated. “Was their behavior an abuse of power if that power was the very thing that turned me on?” she wonders.

Through Bobby, she gets a taste of American opulence. When she tries on Bobby’s expensive boots, she feels a “desire to own them that was akin to lust or hunger.”

“Poor girls from Poland, Russia, Ukraine in my generation had little to no inoculation against luxury products, communism having wiped out most hereditary wealth,” Viva says. “We’d kill for a pair of designer shoes.” When Viva later climaxes with Sleeper, she fantasizes that she is Bobby, surrounded by designer shoes.

The plot to retrieve the painting goes smoothly, but—spoilers ahead—after Viva brings it back, it is stolen from Bobby’s closet. Viva, Bobby, and Sleeper travel to Venice to hunt down the Vermeer, all the while being tailed by a Russian mafia thug. Abroad, their affair turns more overt, and Viva begins sleeping with the couple together. At one point, she catches Bobby watching her have sex with Sleeper. Viva later tells Bobby that she wants to be the one spectating. Bobby replies, “do you really think I care to know what’s in your bird brain? This is my fantasy. Mine, not yours.”

This is when Viva begins to realize, if she hadn’t already, that she is on the lowest rung of this ladder, and if she wants money, power, or choice, she’ll have to break out of the system. She tracks the now thrice-stolen Vermeer to a mining town in Poland, where she buys it from an old lady storing it in her car for a little more than $1,000. The woman lives in a communist housing bloc where, “in an apathetic nod to individualism, each cube was painted a different, faded underwear color: gray-white, dull red, brown-pink, lint blue.” When Viva talks to the woman, she notices in her mouth “a gap from a missing canine, a tiny black door to the mean world I’d escaped, a world where you’re reduced, one indignation at a time, by cheap dentists, expensive priests, needy parents, treacherous children.”

Viva’s emigration isn’t easy for the Americans in the novel to understand. She didn’t leave Poland to pursue a dream: “Where I’m from, fantasies tend to be about revenge, not aspiration.” Nor is she, as a friend of Bobby’s assumes, fleeing “some hellhole where men raped sheep and women gave birth in ditches.” Poland, which acceded to the European Union in 2004, is something of a development success story, and it’s often seen by its neighbors to the east as a land of prosperity and opportunity. But opportunity is relative.

In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s 2013 novel Americanah, a Nigerian émigré says of the white people in his adopted country:

they would not understand the need to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness. They would not understand why people like him, who were raised well fed and watered but mired in dissatisfaction, conditioned from birth to look towards somewhere else, eternally convinced that real lives happened in that somewhere else, were now resolved to do dangerous things, illegal things, so as to leave, none of them starving, or raped, or from burned villages, but merely hungry for choice.

Viva ambivalently left the “shabby comfort” of home for opportunity. But once she’s walked in the shoes of her U.S. employers’ blend of boundless optimism and reckless shortsightedness, she can’t go back. She swipes the painting, cuts off contact with Bobby and Sleeper, travels to Berlin, gets her own German lawyer, and claims the reward. The consequence of her actions quickly becomes clear when she sees that Interpol has declared Bobby and Sleeper missing, last seen in Russia.

In the real world, it would likely be the worker who bore the consequence of a scheme gone sideways. But Zyzak’s world is more just than ours, in a sense, while still adhering to the hierarchy. Here it’s the wealthy American investors who must answer for their actions and Viva who claims their spot as the aspirational rich.

Toward the end of the story, Viva’s German lawyer recommends that she give up her green card and settle in a tax haven such as the Cayman Islands to keep more of her reward money.

“I think I want to keep my green card,” she says.

“May I ask why?” the lawyer asks.

“Because,” Viva says, “I won it in the lottery.”

Viva may be a millionaire now. But more importantly, she’s an American.