Author Archives: Alan Pugh

Details on #PTO15 and building a broader coalition before going live

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Last week, I got a bit caught up in the moment.  I didn’t intend to suggest launching a movement at the beginning the blog entry (or even halfway through writing it, for that matter), but sometimes I simply feel like something would be so widely beneficial—and so widely supported—that there’s no reason to avoid it.  The fact is, though, that this is a personal hobby blog that has not published consistent content, has never worked to self-promote, and does not have a passionate (or even dispassionate) following.  Before we move forward with the #PTO15 concept, we need to build a coalition. Continue reading →

Revisiting a familiar topic: Paid Time Off

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I’m going to start today’s blog with a list.  You’ll recognize that these are countries around the world and that the United States is conspicuous in its absence.  Typically, we’re used to seeing “United States” at the top of lists, even alphabetical ones, because we tend to feel pretty entitled like that.  However, our absence from this list demonstrates one area where we are definitely not on the “entitled” end of the spectrum. Continue reading →

Hypocrisy: Blaming Underpaid Consumers for Buying Outsourced Goods

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I captioned a photo of the graves for the 112 Bangladeshi workers slaughtered by fire in a garment factory that was locked from the outside, and that picture has been shared a couple of times.  I’m including it (with caption) in this article to drive home the point that 112 individual people lost their lives in a locked-down clothes factory in 2012, despite all the health and safety advancements the world has made, despite the labor laws and regulations in developed countries, so we can think about the real cost of cheap, outsourced goods. Continue reading →

You Know, I Should Really Be Posting More Content…

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Yeah, Chavez just won in Venezuela and the debates have started for the US presidential campaign… and between GOP leaders saying that science is Satan’s way of leading us away from God and asserting that doctors perform abortions on women who aren’t pregnant, there has been plenty of asinine material to work with.  Alas, life has been a bit too busy lately, and with my desktop out of commission, I’m doing all my work off my corporate notebook as well, which is more than just a little obnoxious. Continue reading →

Back to the friendly skies.. Will I even remember how to fly?

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When I board the plane on Monday morning, it will have been over ten weeks since the last time I was at an airport.  That is three times longer than I’ve kept my feet on the ground at any other period in the last year.  I flew over thirty segments between my initial trip to MSP for my new position on September 18th of last year and my last trip back to that same airport on July 8th of this year.  Looking back, the baggage check, gate agents, and flight attendants were getting to know me by name, which seems so unusual now.

After driving my car back through Milwaukee and Chicago on my way to Elyria, I was relieved that I wouldn’t need to go three weeks at a time without seeing Kristin anymore, and I must say that the time apart really helped me understand how lucky I am to have the opportunity to work from my home office.  After 2.5 years of remote work for Online Support, I had definitely started taking the arrangement for granted.  That is not a mistake I’ll be making again.

There are definitely some changes in my travel arrangements these days.  Most importantly, I’ll be traveling to Minneapolis once every couple of months for 4 to 5 days, a far cry from my previous schedule.  Also of note is the fact that, despite my love for them over the last few years, I will no longer be flying out of CAK or flying on AirTran.  Despite the fact that I have already renewed my Elite status for 2013 due to my previous flight commitments, the 2.5 hour round trip commute from home to airport makes the trip quite tiring.  Also, AirTran’s fares have shot through the roof as Southwest continues to convert the airline to their brand, and soon, AirTran will cease to exist.  We’ll be flying on the airline one more time:  Our spring vacation, which I’ll talk about later.

The new airline of choice is United.  After Kristin’s not-so-great experience with them, it was a tough call, but airfares have gone up drastically over the past year and they had some very strong things going for them:

  • They offer the lowest fares for CLE-MSP round trips
  • They offer nonstop service to MSP on early Monday mornings
  • They offer nonstop service to CLE on early Thursday evenings
  • CLE is only about twenty minutes away, saving two hours of round trip driving vs. CAK
  • They are a preferred airline partner of my employer
  • They offer a great quasi-Elite experience without the necessity of earning status

All those things considered, it was a no-brainer that I had to make the switch.  Even AirTran has raised their fares higher than United.  The last bullet was a real kicker for me: Since I won’t be flying nearly enough to earn status on United, I was a bit sad to lose some of the benefits that let me be lazy and show up late to the airport to buzz through baggage check and security.  Fortunately, United introduced a pretty sweet package this year with one of their credit cards, the MileagePlus Club card, that offers Priority Access to baggage check, security, boarding, and gives you a couple of free checked bags on each flight as well.

I balked at the annual fee at first, but then I did the math:  Six round trips to MSP per year X $25 each way for one bag = $300.  One vacation round trip for Kristin and I, with one bag each, adds another $100 for a total of $400 in bag fees.  The card’s annual fee?  $395.  Suddenly, I was breaking even, and it was sort of a no-brainer.

(Seriously, if you’re not using credit cards with rewards like this, you’re not getting the best bang for your buck.  Krissy and I have the Giant Eagle Advantage credit card, it doesn’t cost a thing, it saves us a ton of money on gas, and we pay it off when we use it.  Hooray for free gas and plane tickets and stuff!)

Anyway, back to my trips… I leave bright and early Monday morning for MSP.  I’ll touch down in Minnesota at 8:33, take a taxi over to the corporate office, and walk into my 9:00 meeting right on time.  I hope.  During the four days that I’m out there working at my desk on C7, I have about 28 hours of appointments and four hours of open time to take breathers and respond to e-mails.  It’s going to be one hell of a busy week.  Beyond that, I have happy hours all three nights with coworkers that I haven’t seen in nearly two months and a Twins game with some coworkers on Tuesday night.  Thursday, I leave a volunteer event at 5, get on a plane at ~6:30, and get back to Cleveland a little under two hours later.

Friday’s a work day, of course, but I’ll get to enjoy Friday night and all day Saturday here at home before heading back to Cleveland Hopkins on Sunday morning.  Just after noon, I’ll be on a plane to Orlando for a company event to prepare for the holiday shopping season. I’ll keep busy on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday while the e-mails pile up, and I will take the team back to the airport bright and early Thursday morning.  My flight is the last to leave, so I’ll be chilling at MCO for a while, grabbing some lunch, and probably working via my phone’s 4G.  When I do fly home, I’ll get back to the house at nearly the same time as Kristin.  If I’m lucky, I’ll beat her.

And then, again, Friday’s another workday.  Both Fridays will probably be frantic e-mail reply days.  Looking at the task list I already have on the notepad beside me, I shudder to think what it will look like after all this madness.  All that said, this is the type of flying by the seat of my pants that made Covert Ops so much fun, so it’ll be invigorating to see if I’m still up to the challenge.  Mountain Dew as fuel, and here I come!

In the end, I’m looking forward to a little time off, as well.  I have cancelled multiple vacations this year for various reasons (excessive triple digit heat, Kristin’s new job, etc.) and so I have a little bit saved up.  The plan right now is to take advantage of Kristin’s spring break week and visit San Juan, Puerto Rico before my AirTran A+ Rewards points expire.  It will likely be our final flight on what was once my favorite airline.

Anyway, it’s finally Friday night and I’m off to do some relaxing.  And by relaxing, I mean laundry.

Labor Day: Modern Class Warfare and Rules of Engagement

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It is essential that there should be organization of labor. This is an era of organization. Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize.

– Theodore Roosevelt, Republican and 26th US President

At least once a week, I hear the anecdote that unions were once great and necessary and they made wonderful progress for the working class and then the job was done and the unions became worthless to society.  The long list of organized labor’s various accomplishments is well-known, including this partial list from Barack Obama: Continue reading →

Back in Ohio and Starting a New Schedule

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I definitely haven’t written a “Love” category post in quite a while but the truth is that it’s long overdue.  Today, I started my fourth week back in Ohio, and while I’d imagine everyone knows I’m back, I hadn’t made it “blog official” yet so here we are.  The first three weeks have flown by.  I’ve been quite productive both at work and with the household chores that were in a bit of disarray upon my return and things seem to be working well in the eyes of both my bosses:  my manager Chrissy and my girlfriend Krissy.  Weird, huh?  Still, all around great news.

I paid out my lease, which extended through the end of September, and signed a paper stating that I wouldn’t reoccupy the premises.  Ostensibly, this meant I’d get my deposit back pretty quickly, but I haven’t received it yet, so we’ll see.  I look to be returning to Minneapolis for a week in late September; I’ll be sure to let everyone know and to plan a happy hour.  As I mentioned previously, the verbal agreement calls for me to return every six to eight weeks and I think that will be valuable time.

OK, so now that I have all that out of the way… congratulations to Kristin on her new job!  She starts tomorrow at (school removed because she wants to play by the rules – 🙂 ).  We both feel quite fortunate considering the fate of most college graduates, and further considering that her licensure hasn’t even arrived in the mail yet and she already has a job in her field; however, I didn’t have much doubt as she was a phenomenal student and a much better networker than she gave herself credit for.  The networking definitely paid off as this school didn’t want anyone but her for the spot.

The positives, other than the obvious, are many.  For one, Kristin will finally experience the wonders of having evenings and weekends off and being on a relatively fixed schedule.  I’m looking forward to having her here on Saturdays, though she may have to suffer through a bit of college football.  She has the month of July off, as well as winter break, spring break, and school holidays.  We’ll probably be saving money on insurance as well, considering my “Me + Domestic Partner” is a bit pricey.

The only downsides are the waking up at 6am which is about to be a big adjustment for both of us and that we’ll have to work our vacations around her times off, but considering that Independence Day and Christmas/New Years weeks were already part of my plans, it won’t be a huge adjustment.  I’d say this is pretty much all positive stuff and I’m pumped about the added stability and all that.  She’s not going to like waking up early but I’ll be making breakfast so that should help, because I make a mean breakfast.

Current time is 9:30.  I’ve taken a sleeping pill to help start the adjustment to early bedtimes.  Let’s see if I can make it work.

USPS: Bankrupt or the Epitome of Nationalized Efficiency?

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One of the more interesting fairy tales that I’ve heard over the past several months is that “the US Postal Service is in default, they’re bleeding money.”  The simple fact is that the USPS is completely self-sufficient (and even profitable) and these stories are an extension of a law designed to make the post office appear insolvent.  This bill was crafted not by legislators, but by private postal competitors.

Many people have heard of ALEC in passing but really have no idea what this group is or what it does.  Known officially as the American Legislative Exchange Council, ALEC is a group of corporations that write legislation – yes, corporations that make laws – and is responsible for much of what you see coming out of Washington, D.C. these days.  Almost every piece of legislation is crafted with these wealthy folks in mind, but many are drafted, ratified, and presented directly by the group itself.

UPS and FedEx are members of ALEC.  They donate millions in lobbying to ensure that their interests are protected, and their servants in Congress answer those calls.  Some of the servants are former members of the group itself that have gone through the revolving door to be stooges for the organization.  One such man, ALEC alumnus Rep. John McHugh began working on behalf of UPS and FedEx in 1996 with a goal of tearing down the United States Postal Service.

How would one go about such a task as putting a successful, useful and efficient federal operation out of business?  Many folks use this inexpensive, reliable, ubiquitous and expedient service regularly, spending less than two quarters to shoot a handwritten letter or birthday card or check all the way across the country in a mere few days.  What method would be chosen by these thugs to sway the public opinion of the post office?

ALEC had a great idea, of course.  That idea was to tap into the myth that all government is bad, nationalization is socialism, the US federal government is fiscally irresponsible, and the free market is the answer to all of the “problems” that didn’t really exist.  Ten years and millions in lobbying (bribery) dollars later, the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act was passed.

This bill forced, as its primary focus, the USPS to prefund all retirement costs for all postal workers for the next 75 YEARS by 2016, at a rate of ~$5,600,000,000 a year.  Yes, each year, the USPS was required to fund the next 7.5 years of pension.  Typically, of course, you’d expect an organization to fund a year’s worth of retirement every year, but then… that’s not a good way to make a national institution falsely appear to be bankrupt.  No private company, of course, is required to prefund 75 years’ worth of retiring employees, because frankly, it’s fiscally retarded and there was only one possible outcome.

Now, six years into this screwjob, the USPS is “in default.”

They’re six years in and they’ve funded the next 40 years of retirement ahead of schedule, but they’re “in default.”

Perhaps they could take some of that $35,000,000,000 the Republicans and their “friends” at FedEx and UPS have forced them to bank and reallocate it back to their operations, thus demonstrating how profitable they really are, but their hands are tied and nobody is coming to their rescue, because no politician wants to stand up and be the one caught “defending socialism and trying to stifle the free market.”  This illusion of competition and inefficiency in government operations demonstrates just how misled American voters are, because standing up for USPS could very well mean political suicide despite the truth, the  unavoidable fact that the USPS is the best solution for parcel shipment and that private firms are not needed in this field.

Government organizations aren’t designed to be profitable.  They’re designed to provide a service.  That said, how could we tear down an institution that is not only providing that service exceptionally well, but also without costing the taxpayers a dime?  How do we eliminate a nationalized service that is self-sufficient and completely satisfies the needs of the populace and employs tens of thousands of hard-working Americans while costing the population nothing more than the cost of the postage they need to send their packages?

Have you priced FedEx or UPS lately?  Perhaps if the USPS wasn’t subject to unfairly targeted, privately-created regulations put forth by a Congressman on the corporate payroll, and perhaps if they charged the ridiculous rates of their private counterparts, they could afford some lobbyists of their own to battle this ridiculous attack.

At this point, though, their only defense is the truth, and that defense is only effective if it’s heard.  When you hear someone talking about the waste that is our USPS, that bankrupt, obsolete and socialist institution, combat their talking points with plain, simple truth, because once the post office falls, the private profiteers will be lined up to figure out the next basic public service they can exploit and replace.

And use the USPS.  Your grandma prefers a handwritten letter to an e-mail anyway.

ADDITIONAL INFO:  If you’d like to learn lots (and I mean lots) more about this, visit http://www.vltp.net/alec/aleckoch-cabal-pursuing-privatization-postal-service-ups-fedex