17 May 2022. Poverty | Business
Blaming the poor for foodbanks. // Looking for corporate malpractice? Just take a look at Glassdoor.
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story. Recent editions are archived and searchable on Wordpress.
A reminder that posts will likely be erratic for the rest of this week, since work commitments have piled on top of each other. And also an apology for sending out yesterday’s Just Two Things with a March dateline on it. I haven’t a clue what caused that particular aberration.
1: Blaming the poor for foodbanks
The number of foodbanks in the UK has mushroomed since 2010, and this has been largely a direct result of both austerity economics and a targeted assault on levels of welfare support for the most vulnerable. The long run stagnation in real wage levels, which is clearly related to austerity economics, and other foolish policy ideas, hasn’t helped either.
(UK foodbanks, as seen on Google Maps. Via @hcsgts on Twitter)
One of the features of this world of policy-driven poverty is the recurring outbreak of tropes about the undeserving poor—a framing that seems to go back, at least, to the 1834 English Poor Law. It was parodied, Recently we had a Conservative MP suggest that the poor needed cooking lessons; a team at his local foodbank, which included him, had made a big batch lot of meals for 30p each, with the obvious implication that the poor should be able to do the same thing. (The rise of this kind of foodbank porn is one of the odder features of the current British political landscape.)
One of the most articulate voices critiquing this is the food writer Jack Monroe, whose star has risen more or less in line with the rising number of foodbanks. As people will know, she is a single mother who knows firsthand what it’s like to live below the breadline, and has written a series of what would once have been called ‘budget cookbooks’—although these days ‘budget’ seems positively luxurious.
She also posts recipes for free on her website, and is—by her own account—autistic, which means that she keeps records of almost everything, while also caring passionately. Not an opponent to pick a fight with: said Conservative MP is on the wrong end of a potential libel action after some misjudged remarks about her.
(Source: House of Commons Library)
But the reason I’m picking her out today is because I read her earlier piece written about someone—‘Kevin’—who had responded on Twitter to a news piece about a nurse who had said she was skipping meals to feed her family by recommending that she buy a bag of ‘50p pasta’. Barely controlled anger is a difficult register to write in for sustained periods of time, but Monroe pretty much manages it here. And—because she knows what it’s like to be barebones poor—she doesn’t lose sight of its destructive, sapping effects. The piece is quite long, so I’m going to find just a couple of extracts:
Half of food bank users are in debt to the DWP(Department of Work and Pensions), whether through Universal Credit ‘advance payments’, Council Tax debt, or other deliberately cruel, inherited fuck-ups that weren’t theirs to shoulder in the first place. When asked why the Government don’t simply pay Universal Credit claimants their first payment instead of making them take it out as a loan..., one representative from a centrist think-tank looked me dead in the eye and blinked, as though I were incomprehensibly stupid. ‘The Treasury benefits from that delay. Financially, I mean. Why would they change it?’
Because the thing is, as she says, it’s not got anything to do with pasta, although she does wish that people like Kevin would get the price of things right when they advise the poor on how they should eat:
But it’s not about the pasta, Kevin. And we both know that really. Its about the ghoulish, dogged insistence that the Better-Off repeat, day in, day out, that they would be better at being poor than actual poor people would be... So I have a challenge for them all. Walk to your local Asda or Tesco and pick up three packets of Magic Pasta for just under a quid. That’s 15 meals, apparently. Eat nothing but 3 meals each consisting of 100g of plain pasta for five days straight. Nothing else. No salt in the cooking water. No butter. No oil. No pepper. No sauces. No proteins. No vegetables or fruits. No snacks.
Well, we know enough about nutrition to know that the experience wouldn’t be good for you. Because being hungry goes right to your core. It affects your health, and your judgment, even your body temperature. But as she also observes, doing it for five days straight doesn’t tell you what it’s like to be poor. And this is also the problem with all of those ‘changing places’ type reality TV challenges: they have an end date.
The thing about poverty – true, everyday, mundane, survivalist, poverty – is the sheer dragging endlessness of it all. The not knowing when or if it will ever end, the self-condemnation to a life clinging to the periphery of nothingness by your bitten-down fingernails, the exhaustion of micromanaging every last eventuality in a vain attempt to mitigate the inevitable monotony of every day being a little bit worse than the day before... Ten years on from my own experiences of it, and the void is never far away. An unexpected knock on the door, an agony in my bones from the temperature dropping overnight, the skittish lack of any kind of self confidence, the automatic apology for existing in the first place. There’s not a recipe for filling that hole.
2: Looking for corporate malpractice? Just take a look at Glassdoor.
There’s an intriguing piece on the Harvard Business School Working Knowledge blog about whether anonymous employee comments and reviews on workplace sites such as Glassdoor could be analysed as a sign of impending company issues. TL:DR? It turns out that they can.
(Company reviews on Glassdoor: source Glassdoor.com)
Dennis Campbell, who’s a Professor of Business Administration, ran the research with Ruidi Shang at Tilburg University. It’s worth listing what they did to collect and analyse the reviews, by the way. Research isn’t what it used to be:
To pick up on the indicators of trouble, Campbell and Shang constructed a dataset of reviews from more than 4,000 publicly traded firms between 2008 and 2016, extracting a vocabulary of 11,772 unique words used in the reviews. At the same time, they obtained a database assembled by the nonprofit Good Jobs First of almost 27,000 violations by the same firms from 2008 and 2017.
They then trained a machine-learning algorithm on the text, letting it independently decide which words were most highly associated with eventual violations. The words that rose to the top ranged from descriptive words, such as "pay" and "promotion," to clearly negative evaluations, such as "discrimination," "trouble," "favoritism," and "unethical."
Within the results, the researchers found that there was no difficulty in distinguishing between companies that had cultural and business problems, and those that didn’t. Actually, they found quite a lot more than that. The proportion of negative to descriptive words was a clear indicator of of firms with higher levels of corporate violations—even without knowing the actual history of the firm. Wells Fargo, the American bank, popped up quite a lot in the research. It was also a leading indicator.
the measure was able to predict violations before they were exposed by whistleblowers or the press. “Where the rubber meets the road is whether this measure says something about future misconduct,” Campbell says. “And (we found that) yes, it does, at least a year ahead of time.”
They have a theory about this, which is that the decision to be an actual whistleblower is a high-stakes, high-stress decision which often doesn’t turn out that well for the whistleblower. But the issues around a corporate culture which might lead to the sort of corporate issue that a whistleblower is willing to call out don’t just happen overnight.
In the absence of directly observing egregious behavior by a particular individual, an employee may not think that a general breakdown of values and standards rises to the level where it should be reported to outside regulators or the press... On the other hand, sites such as Glassdoor allow employees to freely vent about problems within companies that may not amount to criminal malfeasance but can cause problems nonetheless. “They are not even designed to detect misconduct, which is part of what makes this work,” (says Campbell).
There’s nothing special about Glassdoor, here, either. Any site that allows employees to sound off safely would likely generate the same findings. Campbell thinks that regulators might be interested in using this approach to monitor the types of cultural breakdown that might lead to corporate violations.
Perhaps more optimistically, he also thinks that companies might be interested too. Although in my experience, companies that are doing the wrong thing know it already.
One thing that did strike me about this was that it linked to the idea of ‘Storylistening’, the book by Sarah Dillon and Claire Craig that I wrote about a few months ago. They argue that there are many types of narrative data out there that can be used as evidence. This seems to be one of those types of narrative data.
j2t#315
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