$100,000 is now much too low of an annual salary threshold for Ontario, Canada’s annual, public sector “Sunshine List.” In 2024, a total of 377,666 public sector employees made at least that much, up from 300,680 in 2023.
Continue reading
Welcome to The Tower – by Dr. B. (Durrell Bowman, Ph.D.), 2024, 47:05: a Progressive, Pop-Rock, Experimental-Electronic Concept Album about One Person’s Path into and Exit from Higher Education. It’s available for streaming and/or download for $7 Canadian (approximately $5 US) on Bandcamp. You can choose to pay more, if you want to. Some of the eleven songs are new or new-ish, but often evoking certain existing styles and/or artists … especially from, say, 1969 to 1984. (I guess that’s my “Eras!” 🤪) Some of the songs are not so recent (one is as old as high school old!), but re-written with new words and re-arranged. The three weirdest pieces were composition-course projects to which I’ve now added words and vocal effects.
Continue readingI’m still very slowly working on my concept album The Tower (about the various problems with higher education), but I’ve moved beyond “concepts of a plan” to an actual plan. I know what all ten songs are (plus the “bonus track,” which is lyrically only tangentially related to the concept), what 95% of their words are, and what style they’re in. Some are based on much earlier songs and instrumental pieces of mine (but with new lyrics and/or added spoken words), and some are entirely new songs.
It’s going to be very “old school” (say, 1969 to 1984) experimental/electronic music and progressive rock influenced, keyboard-based, classic rock and pop-rock sounding. Parts of it have influences from Tangerine Dream, Supertramp and the Who, David Bowie and Peter Gabriel, Ultravox (probably, contingent on finding certain late-’70s/early-’80s synth and electronic drum sounds), Rush (I like switching into 7/4, etc.), and Laurie Anderson (I’ve figured out pitch shifting, but vocoding so far remains a mystery to me).
I’m using the free (!) Digital Audio Workstation / DAW called Cakewalk, and I use freely available soft synths and other sounds from a variety of sources. Just to give a sense of what this crazy, elaborate type of software is like, here are photos of the first two songs (“Spread Too Thin” and “The Ivory Tower’s Crumbling”), but still without vocals added.
Our union (0PSƏU) reps are having meetings this week with our employer (L1feL@bs) and an arbitrator. About a month ago, we overwhelmingly voted for strike action, if no new deal can be arranged. However, only about a quarter of our drivers have full-time routes, and a further quarter or so are permanent part-time (21 guaranteed weekly hours, with benefits). I assume that most of those drivers usually feel like actual employees.
About half of us are casual/on-call drivers (without benefits) and don’t necessarily get more than two shifts per week, especially outside of the summer vacation period. I’m in the bottom half of the seniority list and probably will be for quite a while. Even a permanent part-time position apparently only comes up once every year or two. Most of our part-time and casual drivers are retired or semi-retired from other things and already have pensions, other retirement savings, and benefits in place from those, not to mention being homeowners. A few of us do not have any of those things. Once my employment insurance top-up from being laid off from my last job ends in a few months, things will get very tough. I guess I need to find a second part-time job.
Our work is important: picking up medical specimens and delivering accumulated bags, sharps bags, empty bags, supplies, and reports (“mail”). A few routes have as many as 70-120 stops, but some of them are multiple doctors’ offices in larger buildings, of which some are report delivery only. Several routes each take many dozens of full bags from the Kitchener-Waterloo/Cambridge/Guelph/Fergus and surrounding area to major facilities in Etobicoke and Mississauga (about an hour or more away, in the Greater Toronto Area), where the specimens are processed. Sometimes, our manager gets stuck at the last minute having to hire a third-party company, which gets paid two to three times more than we do, even though their drivers skip many thing (e.g., sharps, empties, supplies, and mail) and frequently make mistakes.
After only about five months, I’ve already done (or, in a few cases, just been trained on) 14 of our 17 routes. However, even with extensive notes it’s hard to be efficient, stay on schedule, and get one’s breaks in when there can be a gap of up to several months before doing the same route again. Also, all routes have aspects that are illogically arranged and expected stop timings that are impossible, even for the most experienced drivers. My favourite is downtown Guelph to Rockwood back to downtown Guelph to west Waterloo in 52 minutes, including all of the time it takes to do things at these places.
We drive all over the place in all weather conditions and deal with potentially hazardous things all day (anywhere from 8 a.m. to 1:30 a.m.), but we are the company’s lowest paid employees. The company is just being sold, though, and the new owner’s US drivers actually get paid more per hour (in equivalent Canadian dollars) than we do. I hope this week’s meetings will address some of these things.
Imagine painstakingly collecting several hundred academic and other books and thousands of research and teaching documents and other things over about thirty-five years, keeping all that in storage, and then having nowhere to keep it anymore and getting rid of about 90% of it into recycling, trash, and thrift store donations.
I like the PWHL, and I also like that its player salaries are in a reasonable range for what is, after all, just a game: from $35,000 to $80,000 US (averaging $55,000, or lower middle-class). On the other hand, if it’s going to sell out Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena, perhaps it could try to double that, so all professional women hockey players would be at least solidly middle class and only some of them above that. If the NHL’s salaries didn’t range from $750,000 to $12.6 million US (averaging $3.5 million), I might also take it seriously. Not to mention football, baseball, basketball, etc.
It’s too bad other professions, also with highly-credentialed/experienced/talented people, can’t be bothered to guarantee an annual income of at least $35,000. Instead, organizations such as academic societies give amounts on the order of $500 a year to a handful of unaffiliated scholars. That doesn’t even cover the cost to attend a national or international scholarly meeting, let alone pay anyone anything like a month’s rent. Academic publishers also continue to expect people to write book chapters and journal articles without paying them anything. They should at least find money to pay people who don’t have any related income coming in.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01425-4 (“Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty”)
In the US, “faculty are up to 25 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D. Moreover, this rate nearly doubles at prestigious universities and is stable across the past 50 years. Our results suggest that the professoriate is, and has remained, accessible disproportionately to the socioeconomically privileged … .” It must be similar in Canada.
In the field of history (their humanities’ example), 26.7% of tenure-track professors have at least one parent with a Ph.D., and 34.3% have at least one parent with a master’s degree. Professors are 25.3 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D. than the general population does, whereas all people with Ph.D.s are merely 1.9 times as likely to have such a parent. Both cases, but especially permanent faculty members, approach zero in having–like me–high school completion as the highest level of study of either parent.
It’s unusual for someone of my lower socioeconomic background to have completed a Ph.D. at all and not in any way surprising that I didn’t become a tenure-track professor. It would have been several hundred times as unlikely for me to become a professor compared to people with at least one Ph.D. parent. Ethnicity is rightfully discussed as an important factor in these issues, but I am white, and socioeconomic status is also a major factor.
The Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) won’t accept my additional employment expenses for a used vehicle I purchased in 2021 to work as a Rural and Suburban Mail Carrier (RSMC) for Canada Post for about fifteen months. I kept meticulous records about my purchase and my fuel, maintenance, and repair expenses beyond what Canada Post gave me, but the CRA claims I owe them $2,857.27. Given the number of days I worked 8, 10, or even 12 hours while only being paid for 4, 5, or 6 hours, the federal government should be paying me that amount. I’ve re-sent my paperwork both electronically and in printed form, but they’ve so far ignored my attempts to make them look at my file again. Canada Post relies on a patch-work of 8,000 mainly part-time RSMCs (70% of whom are women) who generally use their own vehicles, and I honestly don’t know how they get away with it.
https://globalnews.ca/news/9753491/mcgill-instructor-lost-job-lawsuit-diversity/amp/.
There are tens of thousands of us out here wishing we could each sue the academic institutions that didn’t hire us for tenure-track positions. That’s especially the case for instances in which we were short-listed, did multi-day campus interviews (sometimes in another country), and so on. Most of us have already been left behind by academia. This guy should get over himself and move on.
I’m now working full-time as a delivery agent for a FedEx Ground contractor. It’s for a largely rural route about 1.5 hours south/southwest of Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge, but including very scenic stretches along Lake Erie. I get to drive a fancy, almost-new Mercedes Benz Sprinter cargo van and use an excellent package route phone app. I also get benefits (including retirement savings) and a raise after a three-month probationary period. Thanks to Ryan and to Gerry (who put me in touch).
After over a year of getting nowhere, I got tired of working for Canada Post as an on-call relief (OCRE) rural and suburban mail carrier (RSMC). I had only occasional full-time work, no guarantee of continuing part-time work (which they told me I’d have until the end of August), no benefits, no pension, and no way to pay off the used mini-van I needed to do the job much of the time. Other times, I had to drive 20-30 year old, corporate-provided right-hand drive vehicles: Grumman LLV step-vans (which I called “ice-cream trucks”) and a rusty old Honda CRV. That FedEx can be run so much better makes me seriously question a bunch of socio-economic and political issues.
Durrell Bowman 