Emerging data is beginning to back up such anecdotal evidence: many workers report that hybrid is emotionally draining. In a recent global study by employee engagement platform Tinypulse, more than 80% of people leaders reported that such a set-up was exhausting for employees. Workers, too, reported hybrid was more emotionally taxing than fully remote arrangements – and, concerningly, even full-time office-based work. …
The highest attainable standard of health is a fundamental human right
In countries like the United States, Brazil, and India we are seeing a major human rights violations… Each of these countries is a member of the WHO, whose Constitution, written in 1946, envisages ‘the highest attainable standard of health [as] one of the fundamental rights of every human being’. Two years later, the International Declaration of Human Rights (1948), Article 25, asserted that ‘everyone …
San Diego’s Climate Action Plan – Mobility and Land Use Measures and Actions
The Climate Action Plan draft is now out: Climate Action Plan Draft The City of San Diego’s new Climate Action Plan establishes a community-wide goal of net zero by 2035, committing San Diego to an accelerated trajectory for greenhouse gas reductions. PDF: https://www.sandiego.gov/sites/default/files/climate_action_plan_draft.pdf or read and comment online at: https://sdclimateaction.konveio.com/strategies-reduce-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://sdclimateaction.konveio.com/plan-overview Related to building electrification it has: Strategy 1: Decarbonization …
The Frustration with Productivity Culture: Why we’re so tired of optimizing our work lives, by Cal Newport
In 1999, the management theorist Peter Drucker noted that the productivity of the manual worker had grown fiftyfold during the last century. “On this achievement rest all of the economic and social gains of the 20th century,” Drucker concluded. In other words, the increase in productivity is why today most Americans own a smartphone, while a century ago they didn’t have indoor plumbing. By Cal …
Costa Ricans Live Longer Than Us. What’s the Secret? We’ve starved our public-health sector. The Costa Rica model demonstrates what happens when you put it first.
By Atul Gawande, New Yorker, Costa Ricans Live Longer Than Us. What’s the Secret?, August 23, 2021 In the United States and elsewhere, public health and medical care are largely separate enterprises. Costa Rica shows the benefits of integrating the two—it spends less than we do on health care and gets better results.Photographs by Fred Ramos for The New Yorker The cemetery …
An Equity-Based Primer on Paying to Pollute
Nuts, Bolts, and Pitfalls of Carbon Pricing While carbon pricing and emissions trading schemes have been a part of climate policy discussions for decades, the concept has gained popularity in recent years. The term usually refers to two common policy mechanisms, “cap and trade” and a “carbon tax,” which are market-based measures that create a carbon market by putting a …
How Insurers Obscure Healthcare Costs And How to Get Past That
How Insurers Obscure Healthcare Costs (Un-covered) — “As any magician will tell you, you can obscure what you don’t want people to notice by using a technique they’ve used forever: misdirection. Insurers want you to look at the fingers pointing away from them, not at the ones picking your pocket. An important goal of the industry’s misdirection is to keep …
Public Health Insurance: People Want Single-Payer and Have For Decades
The idea that most Americans support universal health care is neither new nor particularly controversial. Surveys showing broad public dissatisfaction with the current system go back at least a decade, and in a 2018 Reuters-Ipsos poll, 70% of respondents said they would support a program of Medicare for All — numbers identical to a survey conducted later that year by the HarrisX polling company. Still, …
Heat Wave Shows Climate Change Is a Workers’ Rights Issue
June 2021 While the 100 million computer workers in this country are more likely to be able to work safely indoors, other urgent and necessary work must continue outdoors, no matter the severity of the weather. The entirety of the working class is (or will be) affected by climate change, but it’s farm workers, letter carriers, construction workers, sanitation workers and other outdoor …
Senate Testimony: Concentration of economic and financial power is squeezing out pharmacies, jobs, and livelihoods in rural areas
“At the root of much of rural America’s distress is the concentration of economic and financial power,” ILSR Co-Director Stacy Mitchell testified before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, April 20th. “We have a few superstar cities mostly on the coasts that are prospering. Meanwhile, much of rural America is falling further and further behind. Good jobs are rare. Poverty …