Contracting

Yesterday I read this: 

 'Thin contracts' will be required for groups bidding to take over L.A. schools 
and this

Pitiful wages, anti-union policies and corporate welfare to make America competitive with China
Which Linked to this:

Foxconn workers forced to sign promise not to commit suicide due to working conditions 

I’m currently working on this:

LAUSD Adjusted Growth over Time 
and this

Public School Choice 

Which kind of made me think of this:

Rally for deceased poorly ranked LAUSD teacher 


Which in my twisted logic, necessitated this from the perspective of someone at Beaudry:


Working Draft:
SACOM made the following observations about Foxconn, we at LAUSD feel that we don’t want to be labeled  as “overbearing” so we should learn from Foxconn’s mistakes.


■ Excessive overtime is routine, despite a legal limit of 36 hours a month. One payslip, seen by the Observer, indicated that the worker had performed 98 hours of overtime in a month.

LAUSD: “Overtime means you are being paid for your extra hours ie, teachers time spent lesson planning/ grading/ community outreach. This work outside of the school day is not overtime its unpaid time.”


■ Workers attempting to meet the huge demand for the first iPad were sometimes pressured to take only one day off in 13.

LAUSD:  “We don’t make iPads, but we do make API’s and CST scores which parents/ teachers/ administrators line up to see when they come out.  If a teacher is working so hard that they are only getting 1 day off every 2 weeks to get their CST scores up, we should point out that its not contracted and they have that summer/furlough time coming up afterwards.”


■ In some factories badly performing workers are required to be publicly humiliated in front of colleagues.

LAUSD. “Thank god for the LA Times publicly shaming out teachers for us, we get teachers to leave out of shame and we can say we care about our employees.  I wonder if there is a trade press in China where employers could shame their employees without being directly linked to the press.  Thankfully we can use people’s misunderstandings of AGT and their faith in the supremacy of numbers to shame “low growth” schools and teachers.”


■ Crowded workers' dormitories can sleep up to 24 and are subject to strict rules. One worker told the NGO investigators that he was forced to sign a "confession letter" after illicitly using a hairdryer. In the letter he wrote: "It is my fault. I will never blow my hair inside my room. I have done something wrong. I will never do it again."

LAUSD. “I am sure every teacher understands the explicit fire hazard of hair dryers and would agree to such a policy.  Note...add no hairdryers to list of things teachers can’t have in a classroom”


■ In the wake of a spate of suicides at Foxconn factories last summer, workers were asked to sign a statement promising not to kill themselves and pledging to "treasure their lives".

LAUSD. “Rigoberto Ruelas, taught us that we need to push our mental health services division which is included in select health care plan options.  This might mean rejecting some of the pricier health care options for employees that do not include the mental health benefits to deal with the added stress of single dimensional evaluation.  A no-suicide pact would be a good addition to our 800 number for employee suicides and might be seen as more engaging and less passive than a listing the District phone book. I’m attaching an example below”