Page 4-Sunday, November 21, 1978-The Michigan Daily
P
Wbr Sidhigan 1Bai1y
420 Maynard St., Ann Arbor, MI 48109
Eighty-Nine Years of Editorial Freedom
An army of the partly employed
Vol. LXXXIX, No. 65
_-
News Phone: 764-0552
Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan
Police brutality
'AFTER SATURDAY'S football
7 victory over Purdue, thousands
- of joyous fans stormed onto the field
nand attempted to tear down the goal
Aposts. For their exuberance they were
'rewarded with billy club blows about
the head and body from overzealous
~Ann Arbor police officers. Several fans
,n reported that people were beaten by
police officers who were trying to drag
them down from the goal posts, and
:that police continued the abuse once
the "offender" had been knocked to the
ground. At least one fan left the fracas
with a bleeding gash on his head.
Such behavior is simply outrageous.
UTearing down goal posts and cutting
down basketball nets is a college
- sports ritual, not a major crime. The
police and athletic department point
out that such activities are potentially
n.dangerous and we agree. They say
t they were only trying to prevent injury
-to the fans. In view of the results, such
,claims are pathetically ironic. While
,;the goal of protecting the fans is
*.certainly admirable, there ar'e surely
better ways of preventing a riot under
' the goal posts than beating the
participants over the head.
Also, if the police officers' goal was
; to protect the goal posts and the fans,
twhat possible justification can there be
for continuing to hit people once they
have been knocked to the ground?
* Clearly they has already fulfilled their
misguided protective function, so the
additional abuse can only be dubbed
police brutality. Violence is self-
escalating, and when persons are
given clubs or guns and told to break
up the crowd the result is the kind of
police repression that occurred during
the bookstore demonstrations here in
1969, the anti-war protests at Kent
State and other campuses, and at
Michigan Stadium last Saturday.
While these incidents vary in the
degree of brutality involved, they all
Hershey's
YES, ONCE AGAIN, a transnation-
al corporation has decided to
stuff the already bulging pockets of its
overfed stock holders and scheming
chief executives at the expense of the
unrepresented, much-abused student
class. This time it is the Hershey Foods
Company, which has, for what seems
to be time immemorial, provided
students with one of their staple
survival foods - the chocolate bar.
Hershey has raised the price of a
chocolate bar from 20 to 25 cents. The
increase came under instant attack frr
those who said the boost was not within
the voluntary wage and price controls
set by President Carter one month ago.
But Hershey executives, sly
4
4\
center around the problem of police
abuse of power.
But the police did not act completely
on their own. The Athletic Department
has established the policy that no fans
are permitted on the field after the
game, and Director Don Canham has
asked the police to enforce that rule.
Canham claims that he has no
control over the police, and therefore is
not responsible for their actions. He is
concerned with protecting the field and
the goal posts, and preventing any
injury to the fans that might occur
when they rush the field.
"The policeman is just doing his
duties," Canham says. "If for some
reason someone gets hit over the head,
it's part of his job."
This is the sort of response we might
expect from the police commissioner,
but not from an official of the
University. Students were beaten with
clubs for the comparatively minor
transgression of trying to take down
the goal posts and Canham chalks it up
to being part of the police officer's job.
The Athletic Department is notorious
for its lack of concern for students -
students sit in the end zone because
less than one quarter of' the seats
between the goal line and the 50 yard
line are allocated for students, ticket
prices went up 33 per cent' for football
and 90 per cent for basketball, and so
on - and this is the ultimate
manifestation of such an attifcde.
While his no-one-on-the-field-policy
might be sound in theory, it has been
proven dangerous in practice.
It is Canham's job to be concerned
with the fans' welfare, and he should
be appalled by Saturday's incident. If
he and'the police cannot devise some of
safer method of crowd control - fire
hoses or human rings around the goal
posts, perhaps - then Canham should
consider revising his policy. The goal
posts are simply not as important as
the fans.
choco-gate
businesspersons that they are,
increased the weight of the 1.05 ounce
bar to 1.2 ounces. That kept the actual
price increase to 9.4 per cent, just .1
per cent below the maximum allowed
under the President's program.
While the nickel increase could have
a disastrous effect on the country,
students will undoubtedly bear the
By Thomas Brom
Mamie Curtis, 32. the mother of three small
children, is on the "mother's shift" at the
Control Data bindery plant in a St. Paul,
Minnesota, ghetto. She's one of the 151
employees at the.plant, all of whom work only
part-time.
Control Data set up the part-time schedule
to contend with the fatigue caused by mind
numbing collating work. The company now
runs three shifts a day at the non-union shop,
paying about half the union scale wage.
Although the st. Paul plant is one of the few
hiring short hour workers exclusively, part-
timers are the fastest growing sector of the
labor force. More than 90 per cent of
McDonald's 250,000 employees work part-
time. About half of Sears' 400,000 employees
are part-timers. More than a third of United
Parcel Service wo'rkers are part-time;
Upjohn employs 60,000 part-timers in its
epnvalescent care subsidiary, and Travelers
Insurance in Hartford hires 1,400 part-timers
for the 6 p.m. "mini-shift."
Hiring patterns are undergoing a rapid and
still dimly understood upheaval in the U.S.
that could shatter the trade unions and
radically alter the way people live. Pushed by
the drive to reduce labor costs and prodded by
women, young people, and the elderly who
are desperately trying to enter the labor
market, employers are hiring a virtual army
of part-time and temporary workers.
Since 1954, the number of part-time
employees in non-agricultural industries has
increased at an average annual rate of nearly
4 per cent, more than double the rate of
increase for full-time workers. as a result, 22
per cent of all nonagricultural employees now
work fewer than 35 hours per week. That
accounts for about 20 million jobs, ranging
from department store clerks and data
processors to professional office workers.
Although part-time work has increased in
all categories of the labor force, the greatest
increase is among women and the young.
Women with children under age 15 constitute
only 12 per cent of the full-time labor force,
but make up 34 per cent of single job part-
time workers. Similarly, workers under age
25 represent less than 17 per cent of the full-
time labor force, but account for 47 per cent of
the part-timers. Nearly half the nation's
younger and older people, men and women
under 20 and over 65, work part-time.
This increase has brought a new interest in
permanent part-time work patterns from
government and private employers.
Employment services - such as New Ways to
Work in DSan Francisco and Flexibe Careers
in Chicago - have been formed to meet the
needs of people who specifically seek part-
time careers.
"We try to educate both employers and
employees to change the work environment,"
says New Ways to Work co-director Gretl
Meier. The non-profit agency attempts to find
job openings for pairs of people seeking
shared work.
But for all the reports of satisfied part-time.
professionals and consultants, most of the
new part-time workers are caught in low
wage, low skill jobs in the growing service
sector. In May of 1977, about 90 per cent of all
voluntary pirt-time employees were in the
service industries: They earned an average
wage of $2.87 an hour, compared to $5.04 for
full-time workers.
Voluntary part-time workers are primarily
unskilled young people and middle-aged'
women re-entering the work force, many to
supplement family incomes no longer keeping
pace with inflation. They represent an eager
labor reserve that threatens to overwhelm the
halting union attempts to organize service
workers.
"Job sharing is really an employer-oriented
tool to keep labor costs down," says a
spokesperson for the AFL-CIO. "It has been
around since the RDepression and comes up
whenever there'a a recession. You find it
cropping up in work not covered by
bargaining arrangements, such as in retail
trade, where unions aren't that strong."
"Sure, part-timers are a problem," says
Richard Williams, secretary-treasurer of
Retail Clerks Local 1100 in San Francisco.
"Our local is one of the few in the country to
organize the/big downtown stores, which all
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use large numbers of part-time workers."
Retail and wholesale stores hire about one-
fourth of all part-time workers, primarily in
sales and clerical jobst But the greatest
increase in the use of part-timers is in office
-work, now about one-fifth of the total.
"We see the increased use of part-time
workers as a threat," says Lee Brasted,
senior nusiness representative of Office and
Professional Employees Local 3 in San
Francisco. "They are definitely harder to
organize, and are generally less willing to
fight for a better contract when they're in one
of out bargaining units."
But part of the problem is the apparent
inability of the service unions to adapt to new
job conditions, or to young workers who
genuinely don't want to work 40 hours a week.
"The unions use the increase in part-timers
as an excuse for rot organizing," says one
Retail clerk member at San Francisco's'
Emporium department store.
Part-time workers offer a number of
benefits to employers. In a report on part-
time work for th,, U.S. Labor Department,
Prof. Stanley Nollen of George Washington
University. found that employers using part-
timers reduced company overtime costs,
absenteeism, wage rater and fringe benefits,
and increased worker productivity.I
Significantly, not a single company Nollen
studied that used part-time employees had
aunionized work force.
"Of course the companies like part-
timers," says Williams of the Retail Clerks.
"Our contracts say you have to work 80 hours
a month to get full benefits. So a lot of stores
are now hiring people for just under 20 hours a
week."
Fringe benefits now average $4,000 a year
per emloyee, and often amount to 30 per cent
of total payroll costs. But Nollen found most
companies listed benefit savings as
secondary to the scheduling advantages of
using part-time workers.
Morecemployers are also using the "mini-
shift" concept for high stress jobs to get
maximum productivity from workers over a
short, intensive period.
A study by management professor William
Werther of Arizona State University found
that part-time workers, turned in better
performances than full-timeworkers on
assembly line production. "The only
explanation management could offer," he
writes, "was that the part-time workers were
less fatigued and did not have to pace their
work as full-timers did."
Robert Kahn of M.I.T. has even suggested
that work schedules be broken into 2-hour
modules, with the number of modules varying
according to the needs of the employer.
As Gretl Meier says, "You really can ge.
much more out of two people than one."
While the AFL-CIO remains adamanl
opposed to these developments, a number o
trade unions have written contracts including
part-time workers in the bargaining unit.
Unions such as the Retail Clerks, Office and
Professional Employees, Hotel & Restaurant
Employees, and american Federation of
State, County and Municipal Employees
(AFSCME) have had to make changes
because of the high percentage of part-timer
in the work force they organize.
"We have an entire local of part-timers i
Torrance," says California AFSCME public
affairs coordinator Judy Baston. "The
include museum workers, park supervisors
crossing guards and library employees. We
won full benefits for them."
AFSCME attempts to set minimum hour.
for workers, setting a floor for shift hours t
keep some continuity in the work force.
"We are not opposed to part-time work per
se," Baston says.
But other unions are. "All our contracts are
40 hours a week," says Rudy Tham
secretary-treasurer of the Teamster office
employee division in San Francisco. "We
don't have any problems with part-time,
workers. If they're around when we sign al
contract, we phase them out."
Contracts in some unions, such as OPE,
include employer wage payments of 10 per
cent over scale for part-time workers not
eligible for benefits - thus reduscing the
financial incentive for the employer.
No labor organization is happy about the
prospects for organizing an army of part-time
workers, and none has an answer for the
rapidly changing -atterns of work in the U S.
"When one of our full-time workers at
Macy's retires," says Williams of the Retail
Clerks, "the company replaces him with-two!
workers at half time. 'What are you crabbing
about?' the company asks. 'You've still got a
union contract.'- But they've got a whole
nation of part-time workers."
brunt of this morally bankrup t,
excessive profit-motivated, repressive
ploy.
How long will students endure this
overt oppression? How long will it be
before students loose their chocolate
chains and refuse to submit to these
capricious price increases? Hershey
Foods Company beware.
0
0
Thomas Brom is a Pacific News Service
editor specializing in ecomonics and
labor.
Journalistic
impropriety
To the Daily:
As a Tantric Buddhist I am
deeply concerned about Friday,
Nov. 10, article dealing with the
teachings of Bhagawan Shree
Rajneesh, the Indian "sex guru."
Within the Tantric Buddhist
tradition we too recognize the
emense energy potential of
sexuality in the pursuit of
Enlightenement. One, however,
does not give a razor blade to a
child when a pair of blunt nosed
scizzors would be more ap-
propriate-not, that is, if one has
any sense of compassion or
responsibility toward the child. It
is precisely our neurotic concep-
tualization of sexuality that
makes it not only an inap-
propriate, but also a highly
dangerous tool in the hands of the
beginning meditator.
Letters to the Daily
mut be very sane, rock bottom,
feet on the floor, sane. We must
know the nature of our own minds
and the nature of our enivor-
nment with crystal clear clarity
and precision. It would be very
nice to think we could avoid the
years of non-spectacular,
sometimes downright boring,
work that that entrais. But I'm
sorry, both from my own eight
years of meditatie experience
and from all the literature on the
subject brought down to me
through 2500 years of meditatie
experience in the Buddhist
tradition. There is no shortcut.
I write this letter not because I
wish to expound the, wisdom of
Buddhist Teachings, but
because I am deeply concerned
for the welfare of people who
might choose this path. When I
must realize the inherent dangers
in playing with these situations as
part of a meditative experience.
Admittedly, our new Ann Arbor
group seems relatively tame, and
I doubt that NPI will be taking
reservations on Monday mor-
nings. But the remark of Swami
Prem Amido about their L.A.
ashram-"Its behind closed
doors, so it doesn't matter what
the law says,"-is deeply
distrubing. Spirituality is not a
matter of "us" and "them." We
cannot so completely ignore our
environment and the needs of the
people around us. The spiritual
path is a path of compassion and
insight-both toward ourselves
and others. Swami Prem Amido's
remark shows little of this.
The philosophy that "-people in
the West cannot 'get it together'
their intrinsic emptiness so we
will not be blown around by them
like so many grains of sand in the
wind.
As my own personal opinion, I
caution people in dealing with the
Sat Dharma Rajneesh Meditation
Centre. If you wish only to ex-
plore the nature of your own
sexuality you might be better off
with a more Western approach.
And if you are searching for a
spiritual path, you should con-'
sider a pracise that
acknowledges the whole of
human nature-not just one
aspect of our neurosis. Bhagawan,
Shree Rajneesh presents a distor-
tion of the intended use of tantra
by taking one aspect out of"con-
text from the rest. This is not how
the tantras are intended to be
used-both in the Hindu and the
Buddhist traditions. Rather it is
an exploitation of our par-
ticularly Western weakness in
dealing with our own sexuality.
V I IV1
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