The number one single today in 1959:
The number one British single today in 1967:
Today in 1971, selections from the Beatles’ White Album were played in the courtroom at the Sharon Tate murder trial to answer the question of whether any songs could have inspired Charles Manson and his “family” to commit murder.
Manson was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty.
The number one single today in 1960 was written by a one-hit wonder and sung by a different one-hit wonder:
The number 45 45 today in 1964 was this group’s first, but not last:
Today in 1974, members of Free, Mott the Hoople and King Crimson formed Bad Company:
On Sunday, CBS will carry the AFC championship between New England and Denver, and Fox will carry the NFC Championship between San Francisco and Seattle.
Each network will use its top NFL announcing pair — CBS’ Jim Nantz and Phil Simms, followed by Fox’s Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, who will also announce Super Bowl XLVIII.
And Awful Announcing asks why:
This Saturday you couldn’t help but notice the diametrically opposed CBS and Fox announcing teams for the NFL Divisional Playoffs. In the early game, Fox rewarded the team of rookie play by play man Kevin Burkhardt and John Lynch with their first playoff assignment. In the late game, Hall of Famer Dan Dierdorf announced his last game alongside Greg Gumbel for the eighth consecutive year. Dierdorf had called a playoff game for CBS every year since joining the network for the 1999 season and Gumbel has been either the #1 or #2 announcer at the network save for two seasons when he hosted The NFL Today.
Only one of the broadcast teams were there based on merit – the Fox duo of Burkhardt and Lynch. The pair received positive reviews for their work on Fox throughout the season and the network has made it known their second playoff assignment is no longer set in stone as it had been for several years. Last year Thom Brennaman and Brian Billick replaced Kenny Albert, Daryl Johnston, and Tony Siragusa for the Divisional Round game. This year it was Burkhardt and Lynch. Fox has shown they are willing to give deserving announcers a chance on the big stage instead of depending solely on entrenched boardroom hierarchy. …
Announcing jobs in sports is one of the few professions in society that isn’t continually based on merit. Imagine if your productivity or quality of work dropped at your day job. You would be demoted or even fired if your work suffered a great deal. What about the sports that these networks cover? The Super Bowl and World Series aren’t contested between the same two teams every year, so why should networks assign the same announcers week after week, year after year to their biggest sporting events? Fans should ask themselves – is it really the birthright of Jim Nantz, Phil Simms, Joe Buck, Tim McCarver, Al Michaels, Bob Costas, Chris Berman and others to be in their positions as lifetime appointments? Instead of a merit based system, once announcers climb the ladder to the top they stay there until they decide to walk away no matter how much criticism or praise their work may receive.
All over the sports world are examples of deserving announcers being held back from great opportunities because of the holiness of the status quo. In fact, there’s almost too many to list in this space. It’s the central reason why Gus Johnson left CBS for Fox Sports – he couldn’t break the March Madness glass ceiling that was Jim Nantz. How many years has Trey Wingo deserved to be the lead studio anchor for ESPN’s NFL coverage for his excellent work? It’s a subjective business, but consider how many younger announcers have been passed over by multiple networks that have decided to stick with older announcers who are bigger names, but well past their prime.
For multiple seasons now, media analysts and fans alike have been calling for Ian Eagle and Dan Fouts to receive a promotion from CBS, much like Fox gave Kevin Burkhardt and John Lynch. Eagle and Fouts have proven to be the best NFL announcing team at CBS over the past few seasons. In a merit based system, they should be the ones who deserve an opportunity to call the AFC Championship Game this weekend. They are informative, entertaining, and have great chemistry together. However, Eagle and Fouts will never sniff that kind of opportunity as long as Nantz and Simms have working vocal cords, let alone a chance to move to #2. CBS has refused to budge from their predetermined hierarchy, no matter how deserving younger and yes, better, announcers may be. …
Imagine how much different it would be if announcing assignments were based solely on merit and not longevity or name recognition. What if networks rotated who got to call the Super Bowl or host the Olympics? We got a window into that realm with Fox’s NFL Playoffs assignments this weekend and the universe shockingly did not collapse on itself. In fact, it turned out to be a victory for everyone involved. Fans were given a higher quality broadcast for Saints-Seahawks and Fox now has a legitimate top NFL announcing team in Burkhardt and Lynch. If more announcers were given more opportunities across sports, it would do wonders in giving a new, fresh perspective to broadcasts and build new stars across the industry. And isn’t that more beneficial than seeing the same ol’ same ol’ year after year?
There are a lot of things, other than their failure to employ me (and other great choices), that might mystify the sports viewer about the networks. The reason Fox uses Buck and CBS uses Nantz is that that’s what their contracts specify. Buck is Fox’s number one NFL and baseball announcer, and Nantz is CBS’ number one NFL, college basketball and golf announcer. Those decisions are based on business considerations, namely ad revenue and ratings.
But when you’re on the top, you’re a target. Bleacher Report selects its own bad Super Bowl announcers …
Phil Simms
Simms is sort of like Jon Gruden-light, in that he seems to really try and avoiding criticizing many of the players he covers. He’ll spar with fellow analysts and announcers or when he’s doing something that isn’t live game commentary, but during a game, he keeps it safe. …
I have been trying to figure out how Aikman manages to use more words than any other sportscaster in the history of broadcast to say so little. Aikman will take five minutes to tell you about a 20-second play.
I don’t think the man has ever heard a cliche he didn’t like and use. And use. And use.
I think Aikman has some great insight. I just don’t have 45 minutes to wade through the wordage to figure out what it is. The game is going on and Troy’s just rambling on and on. …
Joe Buck
You know, there are some people who really like Buck’s forced enthusiasm but listening to him is like listening to a drunk guy try to convince you that he’s REALLY happy to be at the party his wife dragged him to.
Of course, there are large stretches of time when he’s not even faking it. He just sounds like he’s watching some game. You know, whatever, just some game.
Maybe that cuts it in baseball, where they play for 18 hours and the pace is slow but constant. In the NFL where the stop and start of a play, the rhythm of a game is violent and sudden? You need someone who sounds like they understand that every play is huge.
Buck calls a major play the same way he calls a minor play. ‘Oh, did that happen? A 70-yard catch? That’s interesting, first and goal.’
… which you may notice are three of Sunday’s announcers, and three of the four announcers who worked last year’s Super Bowl or will work this year’s Super Bowl.
There is a familiarity-breeds-contempt aspect to this. NBC’s Curt Gowdy, who announced seven of the first 13 Super Bowls, was also NBC’s lead baseball and college basketball announcer for most of that time. (Gowdy therefore also did 12 consecutive Rose Bowls on NBC, and did every Olympics on NBC and ABC from 1964 to 1984. He worked for ABC before he moved to NBC, yet still hosted ABC’s “The American Sportsman.) The latter stages of Gowdy’s career coincided with the rise of newspaper TV critics, and the latter weren’t kind to Gowdy toward the end of his career. (Gowdy, however, was in 22 halls of fame, and has a state park and post office in Wyoming named for him. Take that, Gary Deeb.)
Ratings may explain why some football fans prefer announcers other than the networks’ top announcers. Sports Illustrated’s Paul Zimmerman complained for decades that the top NFL announcer teams weren’t sufficiently focused on the actual game — line play and defensive schemes, for instance. The reason, of course, is that playoff games and specifically the Super Bowl and conference championship games attract more casual viewers than regular-season games. The announcers down the pecking order, who are only contract employees of the networks for the length of the NFL season, stick to the game because that’s their audience.
Readers know that I believe NFL viewers should have the right to decide on more than one set of announcers they want to listen to during the game. ESPN’s final NCAA football Bowl Championship Series game allowed viewers to choose between Auburn’s and Florida State’s announcers, in addition to ESPN’s duo. CBS did that during its NFL coverage in the 1950s and 1960s without the technology that exists today. For, say, a Bears-Packers game, if you were a Packer fan in Madison or Eau Claire (because the NFL blacked out home games in home markets), Ray Scott and Tony Canadeo delivered the game to you, while in Illinois, Red Grange and George Connor announced the game. Same video, but different audio.
The networks weren’t always locked in to announcers by ranking. Jack Buck was never CBS’ number one NFL announcer, but got to announce Super Bowl IV, won by his future partner, Hank Stram.
NBC used announcers of the participating teams in the World Series through 1976. The 1965 World Series featured Scott, who had worked for CBS, along with Vin Scully, who would later work for both CBS and NBC.
Because of that, baseball viewers got to hear the work of announcers they’d never otherwise get to hear, for better or sometimes worse:
Now, the only way you hear a local announcer nationally is if he’s also employed by the network:
And since, in this case, Nantz and Buck are full-time employees of CBS and Fox, respectively (as is NBC’s Al Michaels and ESPN’s Mike Tirico), they’re all you get, like it or not.
Some of my hometown is depicted well in this Lia Spaulding Design map:
However, my neighborhood is not on this map. The three places I lived are all northeast of “Swamp Things” and east of “Pretty Flowers.” My four cousins lived in “Malls & Suburbia.” My father worked at the border between “Hippies” and “Pretty Flowers,” and my mother worked at “Madison (Area Technical) College.” And of course I spent five years at “You’ve Said It All.”
The number one album today in 1976 was Earth Wind & Fire’s “Gratitude” …
The number one British album today in 1999 was Fatboy Slim’s “You’ve Come a Long Way Baby”:
It seems that anyone who has something other than no TV or mere over-the-air TV gets to watch this take place — in this case, from the website Keep the Weather Channel:
DIRECTV DROPPED THE WEATHER CHANNEL
DIRECTV ended negotiations and turned off The Weather Channel.
There are 3 Ways you can take Action to:
- Tell DIRECTV there is no substitute for 30+ years of experience and more than 220 meteorologists.
- Tell DIRECTV there is no substitute for accurate, real-time forecasts that local communities count on to save lives.
- Tell DIRECTV they won’t deny you access to The Weather Channel: You’re switching.
This is because, as you may have been able to discern (pardon the sarcasm), DirecTV is no longer carrying The Weather Channel due to yet another dispute over how much DirecTV should pay The Weather Channel to carry The Weather Channel — fees that, as with nearly every other cable channel, are passed on to DirecTV’s customers.
If the above isn’t blunt enough for your taste, elsewhere on this home page are the dire words “If you’re a DirecTV customer, you’ve lost your access to The Weather Channel’s life-saving coverage.” They’ve even got heavy-hitter “Friends” you can see here, and you can “Take the Switch Pledge” and “Don’t let DirecTV control the weather.”
If this seems familiar, it should. Last summer, Time Warner Cable and Journal Communications had a dispute that deprived Time Warner’s customers of watching Packers preseason games. I think every TV station owner in the Green Bay market besides Journal (which owns WGBA-TV) has had a carriage dispute, shown by crawls on the bottom that implore viewers to call an 800 number or go online somewhere to register your umbrage. It seems these days as though every TV station or cable channel owner and every cable or satellite provider are engaged in a pitched battle against each other over carriage fees, with the former’s viewers and the latter’s customers the losers, of course.
Unlike most of the other disputes, however, DirecTV didn’t start its own We’re-Right-They’re-Wrong website. Instead, BusinessWeek reports:
Where do you check the weather: phone or TV? That’s the essence of the fight between DirecTV (DTV) and Weather Channel, which disappeared early today for 20 million subscribers of the satellite broadcaster. The companies have been waging a public battle over how much DirecTV will pay for the channel.
DirecTV wanted to cut the fees it pays for weather programming by “more than 20 percent,” Weather Channel’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer David Kenny says. “I think it’s done,” he says of the talks. “There’s never been an earnest negotiation. They have taken a very arbitrary stance that they don’t need the Weather Channel on DirecTV.”
The satellite broadcaster sees weather as a Web function—the average app-equipped smartphone can tell you whether you’ll need an umbrella quicker and more easily than a television can. DirecTV also argues that Weather Channel has replaced roughly 40 percent of its live forecast broadcasting with reality TV-style programming such as Deadliest Space Weather, Coast Guard Alaska, Prospectors, and Hurricane Hunters. “Consumers understand there are now a variety of other ways to get weather coverage, free of reality show clutter, and that the Weather Channel does not have an exclusive on weather coverage–the weather belongs to everyone,” Dan York, DirecTV’s chief content officer, said in a statement. …
The satellite broadcaster has replaced the channel with weather from WeatherNation TV, a Colorado-based weather forecaster launched in 2010 by Dish Network (DISH) amid its own carriage-fee dispute with Weather Channel. That programming is also available for free on Roku’s streaming boxes.
Well, the weather does belong to everyone (unfortunately for Wisconsinites right now), though weather coverage does not. Taxpayers pay for the National Weather Service, so there are alternatives to the Weather Channel. Nearly every TV station with a news department employs degreed and certified meteorologists to forecast and broadcast the local weather, because weather is a proven driver of TV news ratings.
My favorite online meteorologist, Mike Smith (who works for one of those alternatives, which is developing its own weather channel), posted this on Facebook:
I believe the Weather Channel has hurt its own brand so much that it will some day be studied in college marketing classes. Yes, there have been huge changes with the internet, etc., but airing ridiculous programming and then asking Congress to intervene because they are essential to public safety is laugh out loud ridiculous.
My interest in The Weather Channel started waning during a Memorial Day 2008 tornado outbreak in northeastern Iowa, including the EF5 tornado that flattened Parkersburg, Iowa and killed several people:
This was of keen interest at the time because we were in Wisconsin’s most southwestern county, one of the state’s top counties for tornadoes and, it seemed, in the path of the storms. The three Waterloo/Cedar Rapids/Dubuque stations did excellent wall-to-wall coverage of the storms.
What did The Weather Channel do? Reruns of “Forecast Earth,” their global warming/climate change propaganda series. TWC has abandoned all premise of scientific objectivity to the global warming/climate change/it’s-all-Americans’-fault crowd. For instance:
Similar to the rest of the Algore crowd, TWC has yet to study such inconvenient questions as whether humans drive climate change instead of having some indeterminate influence, if climate change is actually a bad thing, and the global climate change cure is worse than the disease.
The Weather Channel also covers, if that’s what you want to call it, weather with:
Even their supposed weather coverage strikes one as unscientific. What does the weather have to do with the flu, or allergies? Or, for that matter, green?
(I was going to go on a 10-mile run today, but look at the Fitness Index and the Aches and Pains Index! I better stay home.)
And then there’s the mobile meteorologists, Jim Cantore and Mike Seidel (among others), who TWC flies or drives into the center of bad storms, putting into danger not merely Cantore and Seidel, but all the staffers who have to go with them, as well as others who have to help the crew on scene. (Does it seem spectacularly dumb to send a satellite truck, which has a lot of parts attractive to lightning, into severe weather?) Of course, other TV channels and stations do the same thing, and I assume it will continue until someone is actually killed live on TV while reporting. (Maybe.)
This isn’t weather coverage, it’s weather porn, and it negatively affects The Weather Channel’s credibility. (But I suppose it sells ads.) My kids like “Coast Guard Alaska,” but to pretend that’s weather coverage makes you look dishonest.
The other interesting aspect is that, at least on The Weather Channel’s Facebook page, viewers are fighting back, and not always against DirecTV:
These are all business disputes. The fine print in all the agreements with satellite and cable providers specifies that your provider has the right to discontinue carriage of channels at any time, whether or not you like those channels, and regardless of whose fault it is — whether DirecTV is offering too little or The Weather Channel is asking too much.
There is a certain whistling-past-the-graveyard aspect to this too, on both sides. If I want to know our weather, why should I have to wait until “Local on the 8s”? The Internet, whether accessed on computer or smartphone, gets you the information you want when you want it, while allowing you to avoid the propaganda from the Church of Algore, in TWC’s case. The increasing amount of content available online (including a lot of TWC programming) means you don’t have to wait until the regularly scheduled viewing of “Prospectors” to watch.
The Weather Channel isn’t the only place to get weather information. DirecTV isn’t the only source for TV. Consumer choice is at the heart of free enterprise.
Former U.S. Rep. Lee Hamilton (D-Indiana), now of the Indiana University Center on Congress:
Of all the numbers thrown at us over the course of last year, one stands out for me. I hope we can avoid repeating it this year.
That number is 12. It’s the percentage of Americans in a December Quinnipiac poll who said they trust the government in Washington to do what is right most or all of the time. It’s a depressingly small number — especially compared to the 41 percent who say they “hardly ever” trust the government. This meshes with recent polls that echo a bleak truth: trust in government is at historically low levels.
That’s not all, though. Americans are feeling vulnerable and highly distrustful of both government and private-sector prying. More worrisome, a few months ago an AP poll found that fewer than a third of Americans trust one another. The poll’s message is clear: our society is in the midst of a crisis in trust.
This might seem like a touchy-feely concern, but it’s not. Trust is essential to our political system and our way of life. The belief that people and institutions will do what they say they will do is the coin of the realm in our society. It is what allows people to work together — in their daily interactions with others and in their communities, legislatures and Congress. Negotiation, compromise, collegiality, and the mechanisms our complex and diverse society depends on are impossible without trust. Trust is one of the medley of virtues that have allowed our institutions to develop and prosper, along with honesty, competence, responsibility, and civility.
A breakdown in trust between Congress and the executive branch invariably brings problems: the turmoil of the Vietnam War era, Watergate, Iran-Contra, our current budget travails. A society-wide lack of trust imposes real costs. It makes the drafting of laws and their implementation extremely difficult: government becomes more expensive because it requires more emphasis on regulations and enforcement.
In fact, you could argue that we see all around us the results of our trust deficit. Government dysfunction, an economy performing below its potential, public officials’ scandals and misdeeds, trusted institutions’ willingness to skirt the law and standards of good conduct, our social safety net under attack because people mistrust recipients — all of these speak to a society struggling as trust weakens.
Yet here’s a question. Do the polls match your experience? In my case, they do not. Trust still figures in my dealings with institutions and individuals, most of whom are good people trying to live a decent life and to be helpful to others. They deal with one another honorably and with care. I’m convinced that this is because, no matter what the polls say at the moment, the habits instilled by parents, schools, and a vast number of public and private institutions do not just disappear.
The first thought I have is that if 12 percent of people trust the government to do the right thing, we know who the truly naïve are. Opponents of the Obama administration, for instance, distrusted Obama from the start, and have been proven right time and time again. The only thing you should trust about federal or state government is that everyone in it is in it for his or her own political power, first and foremost. Anyone who has a negative dealing with a local unit of government has no reason to trust that that unit of government will do the right thing thereafter either. (And, as you know, there are far more laws and ordinances than really need to exist, particularly those that restrict use of private property.)
This may be somewhat unfair piling-on upon Hamilton, who was one of the better Democratic Congressmen during his 34 years in the House. Hamilton went from the public sector to the public sector, and moving from Washington bubble to academic bubble he may have insufficient dealings with the real world — for instance, the struggles of people with five-, not six-digit, salaries and the lack of perks of the real world.
Consider the current New Jersey Bridgegate scandal. The most charitable reading of it is that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie hired staffers to do the right thing every day, and they didn’t. (Note that Christie merely fired the offending staffers, really for violating the commandment of not publicly embarrassing the boss, instead of having them prosecuted for misconduct in public office.) The most cynical reading is that Christie decided to stick it to a political rival because he had the power to do so, in the same way that politicians stick it to political rivals, whether or not that hurts their constituents (including those who voted for Christie), because politics is a zero-sum game.
Our country’s founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, are in fact based on lack of trust. If those who signed the Declaration of Independence trusted the British government at any point in their lives, that trust was surely gone (other than trust that the British would do the wrong thing) by the early summer of 1776. You don’t need separation of powers, and you certainly don’t need the Bill of Rights, if you trust the government to act wisely and make good decisions. A republic is based on lack of trust in pure popular democracy. The Constitution is full of what government cannot do to American citizens, because of lack of trust that the evils of British rule wouldn’t be repeated in the new United States.
As to Hamilton’s last point: Are most people “good people trying to live a decent life and be helpful to others”? If that were the case, we wouldn’t need laws. Trust is something you earn; most people are not automatically granted trust. In a business relationship, one side doesn’t pay, or the other side doesn’t perform, and that trust is gone. That obviously applies much more in personal relationships. The world is full of bad people and is unfair besides that.
When it comes to politics at any level, to quote Fox Mulder, trust no one.
The number one single today in 1956:
The number one single in Great Britain …
… and in the U.S. today in 1964:
Earlier this morning I spent an interesting hour on Wisconsin Public Radio debating the proposal of Sen. Glenn Grothman (R–West Bend) to allow employees to work seven consecutive days without a day off.
WPR played, at my suggestion, some appropriate music …
… though they could have played this too (which I didn’t think of until after the show):
Listeners got the chance to voice their opinions, and they were overwhelmingly opposed. That could be a manifestation of WPR’s overwhelmingly, reflexively anti-conservative demographics. It also could be evidence that what I’ve always heard from employers about the work ethic of the Wisconsin workforce isn’t true anymore. It also could be a sign of the dysfunctional relationship between Wisconsin employers and employees. It could also be a sign of our increasingly stressful times. (Which aren’t going to get any better, by the way.)
As readers know, at StevePrestegard.com something is either right or wrong based on its merits, not on whether or not it’s popular. Since I entered the full-time work world a quarter-century ago, I have never had a job that was limited to 40 hours a week, five non-holiday weekdays a week. In the news business, news has to be covered whenever it takes place.
I don’t think I have a work ethic superior to anyone else’s. But what I learned from my parents and others I’ve worked with is that work takes as long as it takes to be done well. The comment from a minister from Ladysmith reminded me that God wants and expects us to be productive. That’s evident from Genesis through at least Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians.
The argument I made on the show for passage of Grothman’s law is flexibility for employers. In today’s business world if a customer wants a product the customer needs it now, not next month or next week. Manufacturers do not keep parts in stock anymore, because inventory costs money. As for retail businesses, many are open seven days a week, particularly in tourist areas. If a business has a customer, it has to serve that customer whenever the customer wants to be served if that business wants to stay in business. (Unless you’re OK with waiting until Monday to have the furnace that died on Saturday fixed.)
None of those who opined during the show seemed to be employers. There remains a remarkable amount of ignorance about how business works, and perhaps that’s employers’ fault for not telling their employees how their businesses, their areas of business and the economy work. So here are some potentially harsh truths:
Since a lot of my work has involved covering business, I’ve met a lot of business owners over the years. I’ve written before that, to paraphrase William F. Buckley’s comparison of the Harvard University faculty and the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone book, I’d rather be governed by the members of any chamber of commerce than any elective governing body. Business people earn every cent they get, because every cent they get comes from a customer who decided that that business’ product or service is worth their money, more so than the potential alternatives.
Business owners work nights, and weekends, and holidays already. They get virtually no respect in this state from elected officials of a certain party whose name starts with D, and little respect from the allegedly smart people who get paychecks from a unit of government. The contribution of any business to its area far outweighs the taxes it pays, which is why I argue here that the correct level of business taxation is zero.
In addition to the general anti-business rhetoric listeners heard (and can read on Cardin’s Facebook page) today, I always find amusing how people ignorant of business feel free to tell a business how it should be run. The opposing view this morning said that businesses should hire more people, ignoring the fact that it costs less for a business to give its existing employees more work than to hire more employees. It’s unclear to me why a business should hire more people if there’s a reasonable chance that those people will have to be laid off if business dries up. (That makes me wonder how his union, which by the way is a business too, is run.) People are employed based on the business’ needs — businesses do not exist to employ people.
There was both an on-the-air comment and an online comment that some people work seven days a week already, so there needs to be no law to approve that practice. That’s a nicely small-L libertarian view that doesn’t mesh with reality in this very unlibertarian state (other than in alcohol issues) of ours. In this state, based on experience, it’s not that anything not specifically prohibited is allowed; it’s the other way around — anything not specifically allowed is prohibited. I suspect some business owners have inadvertently found that out.
If you believe the callers I heard, you would assume that every workplace is a 19th-century sweatshop, or would be if those evil businesses had their way. I work in a field that by reputation is the pits in terms of workplace environment. (Journalism, it is said, puts the word “fun” in “dysfunction.”) I wouldn’t say that about business, but then again I’ve dealt with more of them than apparently WPR listeners have.
It may be that some negative opinions of business come from people dissatisfied with their employers. (I always wonder where reflexive anti-business attitudes come from — someone’s own experience, the experience of someone that person knows, or what they claim to know based on what they’ve read.) Some of them may be dissatisfied with their work as a result of poor personal decisions they’ve made in their past in such areas as their own education — failing to make themselves more valuable in the workplace through education and training. I’m not unsympathetic to that, but I’m not sure what can be done about that, and government cannot undo, for instance, getting stuck in bad jobs because you had to go to work because you had a family younger than you should have.
The one comment after the show that brought up an original point was what happens to an employee of two businesses when employer A wants that person to work overtime when that person is supposed to be at employer B. I don’t have a good answer for that, and I suspect that, thanks to the wonderful job the federal government and current presidential administration is doing with the economy, that is likely be an increasingly prevalent dilemma.
The fact is that in a healthy economy (which this is not), employees always have the last word, because they can choose to work somewhere, or not. The evidence is the roaring 1990s, where minimum-wage jobs paid more than minimum wage because that’s what it took for employers to hire and keep employees. That’s obviously not happening now, which is why the state needs to be actively pro-business. I’ve argued here before that state policy is less anti-business, but it’s really not pro-business when bureaucrats remain free to enact regulations actively hostile to business and businesses and everyone else are all (still) taxed too much.
Now I have to go back to work.
I will be on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Joy Cardin show today at 7 a.m. (Yes, I know today is not Friday.)
Wisconsin Public Radio’s Ideas Network can be heard on WHA (970 AM) in Madison, WLBL (930 AM) in Auburndale, WHID (88.1 FM) in Green Bay, WHWC (88.3 FM) in Menomonie, WRFW (88.7 FM) in River Falls, WEPS (88.9 FM) in Elgin, Ill., WHAA (89.1 FM) in Adams, WHBM (90.3 FM) in Park Falls, WHLA (90.3 FM) in La Crosse, WRST (90.3 FM) in Oshkosh, WHAD (90.7 FM) in Delafield, W215AQ (90.9 FM) in Middleton, KUWS (91.3 FM) in Superior, WHHI (91.3 FM) in Highland, WSHS (91.7 FM) in Sheboygan, WHDI (91.9 FM) in Sister Bay, WLBL (91.9 FM) in Wausau, W275AF (102.9 FM) in Ashland, W300BM (107.9 FM) in Madison, and of course online at www.wpr.org.
The subject today is a proposed state law to allow employees to work seven consecutive days. How do I feel about this? Tune in or log on and find out.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 