Not only made in American, made in Virginia!

It always feels good to buy products that are made in America.  Yesterday, I got a really nice surprise.  My grandparents had a beautiful tiger maple wood bedroom set.  Unfortunately, the head board was made for a full bed.  My husband and I both love antique furniture and we really wanted to use this heirloom furniture for our bedroom.  After doing some research, my husband figured out that you can buy converter kits to adapt a full head board for use with a queen mattress.  He ordered the kit and I hired a contractor to assemble the kit(too complicated for us to handle). 

Good thing I hired a contractor.  The conversion kit was not what was expected and the contractor had to do some major brainstorming to get it to work.  Sleepys delivered the new mattress and box spring in the early part of the quoted time frame (nice surprise). 

Much to our surprise, when we pulled off the mattress tags (yes, the consumer is allowed to remove the tags), my husband noticed that the tag said -- designed and built in the USA.  And, to our greater surprise Simmons manufactures the mattresses in Fredericksburg, VA.  So not only was our mattress USA made, it was made locally! 

The tag also indicated that the mattress was manufactured on 10/07/11.  I don't know anything about mattress manufacturing, but that seems like a really quick turn-a-round, which I guess is possible when there is a local manufacturer.

A little labor economics

Women provide an important part of the American work force.  While studying American labor and labor economics at Cornell University’s School of Industrial Labor Relations, I wrote one of my first major research papers on the disparity of pay between men and women. 

Today, while watching the Today Show, I enjoyed hearing New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand speak about the importance of women in the American labor force.  She referred to the famous Rosie the Riveter campaign, encouraging women to join the work force during WWII. 

Senator Gillibrand sees the need for women to take vital roles in today’s workforce, especially in politics.  She noted that she is one of few women, 17 female senators, in today’s United States Senate.  She mentioned that she and her female colleagues work well together, even when they are on different ends of the political spectrum. 

When I wrote my labor economics paper in 1983, I focused on professional women – lawyers and doctors, concluding that female professionals did not earn comparable salaries to men.  Unfortunately, 28 years later, American women in the work force, still do not command equal pay as their male co-workers.

When I went on college visits with my daughter this summer, I noticed that the college statistics show that most colleges have a majority of female students.  I wonder, what it will take to equalize the pay of American male and female workers.  

I will continue to explore this topic in future blog posts.  I hope that you will provide me with your insight and comments on this important topic.  I don't think Rachel will be studying labor economics in college, but it is unfortunate to think that she would reach similar conclusions about workplace pay disparity as I did in 1983.

Interviews for a day in the life of an American worker or small business owner

I'm preparing for my next blog segment -- a day in the life of an American worker or small business owner.  I will be interviewing people about their jobs or business.  Please let me know if you would like to participate.  I'm interested in all jobs -- full or part time, fun or boring, union or non-union, typical or not, any professions or type of work.

Please contact me via comment, facebook or email:  lostcatjulie@gmail.com!

The Tallit

Among the many things I did not ask my grandfather about, I never asked him to tell me about the buttons.  It was enough just to play with them.  If I could talk to him now, say that it wasn’t too interesting – some designer ordered buttons from a button manufacturer.

I can, however, tell you the modern story of some of Grandpa Meyer’s buttons.  I know he would find this story interesting.

At our Temple, each Bar or Bat Mitzvah child gets to make his or her own personal tallit (prayer shawl).   Currently we (my son, Michael, my husband, and my father) are helping Michael design his tallit.

When my daughter, Rachel, designed her tallit, she wanted to incorporate things that were important to her into the design.  Her mitzvah (good deed) project involved helping the cats at Lost Dog and Cat Rescue Organization (where our cats our from).  We had our dear friend, Ginny, owner of Sandpiper Embroidery, Wildwood Crest, NJ, embroider replicas of our then five cats across the bottom of her tallit.  On the top of the tallit, she wrote the Hebrew words for “and God said, ‘fill the earth with animals.’” 

In the midst of planning Rachel’s tallit, the buttons called to me.  We could take some of the buttons and sew them on the corners of the tallit.  The buttons would no longer be waiting in the bottom of the sewing box.

Each corner of the tallit has a different design.  One corner has buttons to remind Rachel of her great Aunt Bobbie.  In the Aunt Bobbie corner, we sewed the butterfly button, a fish button, a flower button and a shell.  In two corners, Rachel selected her favorite Grandpa Meyer buttons. 

In addition to Grandpa Meyer’s buttons, the tallit also has one other very special piece – my father in law, Lester Shubin’s WWII army insignia from his uniform. 

The tallit keeps the memory of my grandfather, my aunt, and my father in law  alive.  The buttons, once a functional item and then a toy, now serve as a bridge from the past to the future. 

The button box

I want to tell you about my grandfather’s basement and the button box because these memories are my connection to the Helitzer Bros. blouse business.

I have such a vivid memory of going into my grandfather’s basement to look in the button box.  I can see it in my mind, almost like a movie. 

I’m sure that if I had an opportunity to look at my grandfather’s basement now, it would probably seem a lot smaller.  Memories of a space always seem to be bigger.

My sister and I spent a lot of time poking around in the basement.  Here’s what I remember.  Walk down the dark stairs and pass the picture of the horse my dad painted at camp (the same horse on the cigarette box in the living room).  At the bottom of the stairs, if you turn right, there was a room with lots of shelves filled with bolts of fabrics and boxes (I don’t think I was allowed to poke around in this room).  The main basement room had a really cool bar area (look behind the bar for the red apple cookie jar).  Toward the back of the room, there was a door with a red checked curtain leading to the washing machine and dryer and shelves of pantry goods.   

I loved going into the basement to look in the button box, waiting for me on the back shelf of the main room.  Open the box and find lots and lots of buttons.  Buttons with pearls, buttons with jewels, wood buttons, red buttons, big turquoise blue buttons.  Leather buttons, little tiny blouse buttons, plain old boring buttons.  Poke a little more and find glass buttons with horses underneath the glass (those now live in my sewing box waiting for me to find that special place for them).  One day, I found a button with a clock face.  Dig a little more and find a butterfly button or a flower.  Ouch, you might get stabbed by a pin, but ignore it so that you can search some more.  Years and years of entertainment, contained in one box. 

Oh no!  I spilled the contents of the button box on the floor.  I don’t remember my grandfather yelling or what he said – I just remember picking up so many buttons. 

You might want to know what became of those buttons.  A great number of them ended up in my sewing box.  I loved those buttons so much that my grandfather must have let me take them.  Funny, I don’t really remember leaving his house with those beloved buttons. 

I don’t sew, so the buttons remain in my sewing box, waiting and waiting.  If a button falls off a blouse or a coat, I’ll open my sewing box and the first thing I see is a remaining spool of thread from my grandfather’s house (thread on a real wooden spool).  When I’m done sewing, even if I’m really busy, I always open the bottom of the box and take out the buttons.  I sift through and find the clock, the jewels, the leather ones, and the big turquoise one.  I open the little box that holds the prized glass horse buttons.  And, I wish I could ask my grandfather to tell me the story of the buttons.    

From pink soccer cleats to pink cupcakes

As an adult, I've spent a lot of hours on soccer fields.  Both of my kids have played recreational soccer.  Much to my surprise, I've taken a soccer class and I've assisant coached my son's soccer team.  Little did I know that being on a soccer field would lead me to a great job!

Physics, Swimming Pools, Manholes, Contracts, Cats and Pink Cupcakes

My Personal Labor Journal   © 2011 Julie Shubin

George Mason University:  From the soccer field to the classroom, cats and pink cupcakes

While at a soccer field waiting for my daughter’s practice to end, my friend, Laura Poms, who teaches at GMU suggested that I look into teaching law classes for the School of Management.    For the last four years, I’ve taught numerous sections of Bule 302, The Legal Environment of Business, a survey class of legal topics impacting business – such as torts, criminal law, constitutional law, administrative law, and contracts.  For the past three semesters, I’ve also taught Bule 402, Commercial Law, an upper level elective class covering contract law, the Uniform Commercial Code, and other topics such as property law, ownership and risk, and securities law.

Bule 302 is really fun for me to teach because it gives students an introduction to the basic legal topics that all law students study, and it covers many areas of law that I’ve had the opportunity to practice during my legal career. 

When I was asked to teach Commercial Law, I remembered my Commercial Law professor asking, “Did you know that you could write a check on a napkin?”  I thought how much fun it would be to get to teach my students that checks actually have been written on items ranging from napkins to cows to underpants, and then explaining that while the law does not prohibit such acts, customer agreements with banks now preclude this “historic” practice. 

Bule 402 is a challenging class to teach because it involves the sometimes arcane and boring details of contract law, the Uniform Commercial Code, and some other dry topics.  That requires a lot of professorial effort to make it interesting.   I was very touched when one of my most recent students said “Law and the like may not be the most exciting of courses to teach so it is what it is in terms of material, but Professor Shubin didn't make it seem that way. I came to class always excited to learn, so I thank her for that.”  

I may be known on campus as the crazy cat professor.  During my first semester teaching, my cat, Henry, fell asleep on top of my textbook.  I snapped his picture and used in my PowerPoint slides on my first day of class as an icebreaker and a reminder to the students to “use” their textbooks.  Since then, I’ve continued to use a “cat of the day” slide to help students remember a legal topic.  For instance, to make the point that a contract is a promise, I use a slide showing a picture of one of the feral campus cats as an illustration of the Mason Cat Coalition’s “promise” or “contract” to take care of those cats.   My use of cats to help teach lessons at GMU was most recently noted in an article about Advocacy and Rescue, by Dusty Rainbolt, June 2011 Cat Fancy magazine.

In both of the Bule classes, I use a hypothetical business, The Pink Cupcake, to help students understand how laws and legal issues affect a business.  We cover topics from writing a contract for winter plowing services for The Pink Cupcake (a basic contract that a real local business would need) to ownership, insurance, and risk factors when The Pink Cupcake orders a shipment of cherries from an out-of-state farm. 

For now, part six of my personal labor journal is the last installment.  As I posted a few weeks ago, I'm not teaching this semester, but hope to get back in the queue.  What's next?  I don't know.  Many of my students have asked if I will open a pink cupcake bakery.  Well, I did bake a great banana bread this weekend that could easily be turned into cupcakes!

If you are late to work, don't use the excuse -- I didn't hear my alarm clock; it didn't work for the hearing impaired county employee.

Physics, Swimming Pools, Manholes, Contracts, Cats and Pink Cupcakes

My Personal Labor Journal   © 2011 Julie Shubin

Fairfax County Civil Service Commission:  Sometimes good employees make bad mistakes.

After my years at the Department of Justice, my public service continued in local government, as a hearing officer for the Fairfax County Civil Service Commission.   After years of being the “arguer” in court, I now had the chance to be the “judge,” and to rule on objections and motions.   

The cases involved county employees who had received some type of “employment action” – ranging from demotions and suspensions to termination of employment.  The cases exposed me to good and bad workers and good and bad managers.  Some of the cases involved bad workers who won cases because managers had not followed written procedures and other cases involved good employees who made mistakes that required discipline. 

There were cases involving offices where there was that feeling of discrimination, but not enough to make it illegal discrimination, as well as cases involving people who claimed discrimination where there was none.  Of course, we also heard cases where the grievant proved discrimination.

Other cases I heard involved pornography, drinking on the job, a runaway school bus, and a deaf employee who could not “hear” his alarm clock and get to work on time.  There was also a case involving a stellar day care worker who came to work, got sick with a stomach bug.  She told a co-worker that she urgently needed to use the restroom.  While she was in the rest room, a child got out of the day care center during “her watch.”  She ended up being disciplined.  Both sides were not happy with the case and I was able to help them reach a settlement agreement, the perfect way to resolve this case.

During my ten years at the Civil Service Commission, I spent many late nights at hearings, listening to the personal labor histories of County employees and their supervisors. 

FYI  -- LL Bean makes Moonbeam alarm clocks that flash light, instead of ringing.  Well, if you sleep through the flashing light for a certain amount of time, it does ring -- just ask Harry!  He knows from real life experience.  I want the pink version (we have the orignial color) .  http://www.llbean.com/llb/shop/63179?qs=3006424_pmd_google

Next post:  Never thought soccer would lead me to my next job.