Economic Scene: Unionizing at the Low End of the Pay Scale


Andrew Kelly/Reuters


A protester held up a sign at a demonstration outside McDonald’s in Times Square last week.







Other than poverty, José Carrillo and Joshua Williams have little in common. The austere life of Mr. Carrillo, a 79-year-old Peruvian immigrant from Washington Heights, is a universe apart from the hardscrabble reality of Mr. Williams, a 28-year-old single father from Atlanta staying at his aunt’s place in Brooklyn to save on rent.








Bret Hartman/Reuters

Striking Walmart workers and supporters on Black Friday outside a store in Paramount, Calif.






But their lives are connected. They both work in the fast-food industry — Mr. Carrillo at a McDonald’s in Midtown Manhattan and Mr. Williams at a Wendy’s in Brooklyn. They both earn a little more than $7 an hour. And they both need food stamps to survive. Last Thursday, both did something they had never done before: they went on strike.


Their activism, part of a flash strike of some 200 workers from fast-food restaurants around New York City, caps a string of unorthodox actions sponsored by organized labor, including worker protests outside Walmart stores, which, like most fast-food chains, are opposed to being unionized, and union drives at carwashes in New York and Los Angeles.


Labor unions are hoping that the unusual tactics, often in collaboration with social justice activists and other community groups, will offer them a new opportunity to get back on the offensive, helping to raise the floor for wages and working conditions in the harsh, ultracompetitive economy of the 21st century.


Mr. Carrillo’s and Mr. Williams’s meager salaries also underscore the straightforward choice we face as a nation: either we build an economy in which most workers can earn enough to adequately support their families or we build a government with the wherewithal to subsidize the existence of a lower class that can’t survive on its own. We are doing neither.


More than two million workers toil in food preparation jobs at limited-service restaurants like McDonald’s, according to government statistics. They are the lowest-paid workers in the country, government figures show, typically earning $8.69 an hour. A study by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning research organization, concluded that almost three-quarters of them live in poverty. And they are unlikely to have ever contemplated joining a union.


On a full-time schedule, they could make a little over $18,000 a year, just about enough to keep a family of two parents and one child at the threshold of poverty. But full-time work is hard to come by. With fast-food restaurants increasingly using scheduling software to adjust staffing levels, workers can no longer count on a steady stream of work. Their hours can be cut sharply from one week to the next based on the business outlook or even the weather.


Orley Ashenfelter, a labor economist at Princeton, published a study earlier this year that captured the plight of workers under the Golden Arches in a novel way: measuring pay by the burgers a worker could buy for an hour of work, he calculated that the real wages of McDonald’s workers in the United States hit about 2.2 Big Macs an hour last year. That’s 15 percent less than in 2000.


Many economists will argue that concern about the lowly McJob is misplaced. These jobs offer a wage to people with no training or education. Mr. Carrillo, for instance, doesn’t speak English. “To get a better job at my age, you need a profession,” he says. To improve the lives of American workers, most economists argue, we might do better by focusing on education to equip them with the skills to perform more productive, better-paid jobs.


But this argument overlooks the fact that the McJob is hardly a niche of the labor market reserved for the uneducated few. Rather, it might be the biggest job of our future.


The American labor market has been hollowing out for decades — losing many of the middle-skilled, relatively well-paid jobs in manufacturing that can be performed more cheaply by machines or workers overseas. It has split between a high end of well-educated workers, and a low end of less-educated workers performing jobs, mostly in the service sector, that cannot be outsourced or mechanized.


This process is not expected to reverse any time soon. According to government statistics, personal care aides will make up the fastest-growing occupation this decade. The Economic Policy Institute study found that some 57 percent of them live in poverty.


This poses an existential question for labor unions, which are struggling because of the loss of union jobs to automation and stiff competition, both from cheaper labor in the mostly union-free South and developing nations around the world: can they do something to improve workers’ lot?


They have in the past. A recent study by the International Labor Organization concluded that low-wage work was rare where unionization rates were high. In countries where more than half of workers belong to a union, only 12 percent of jobs pay less than two-thirds of the middle wage, on average.


Still, there is little reason to believe that American labor unions can do much to lift the floor on wages in the future. Fewer than 7 percent of workers in the private sector are in a union. We have the largest share of low-paid jobs in the industrial world, amounting to almost one in four full-time workers, according to the International Labor Organization. And our rates of unionization continue to fall.


E-mail: eporter@nytimes.com; Twitter: @portereduardo



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Santa Monica Nativity scenes to move to private property









Santa Monica's much-debated Nativity scenes will be staged after all — on private property. The decision was hailed by advocates for the separation of church and state, but there was little indication the acrimony would subside on the other side, where an attorney pledged to continue to fight for religious displays on public land.


Less than a week after a federal judge finalized a ruling that Santa Monica has the right to ban seasonal displays in public spaces, Nativity scene organizers announced that they would move to a new location.


The display — 14 scenes of life-size figures depicting the birth of Jesus Christ — will open Sunday in the 2700 block of Ocean Park Boulevard, between Clover Park and 28th Street, said Nativity Scenes Committee Chairman Hunter Jameson. The scenes are scheduled to remain on display until early January.





"We are deeply grateful for the use of this new site to allow all of Santa Monica's distinctive Christmas story to continue spreading the message of joy, hope and peace found in the Christ child's birth," Jameson said in a statement.


When told of the development, Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation, responded: "Well, hallelujah — praise secularism."


"This move is great," she said. "But it does undercut any argument they have that they don't have free expression. Obviously, they do."


For nearly six decades, scenes celebrating Jesus' birth were a seasonal fixture in Palisades Park, which runs along the coastal bluffs on Ocean Avenue. In recent years, debate over the displays had become rancorous, with activists submitting applications to establish their own displays, including a satirical homage to "Pastafarianism."


Earlier this year, the Santa Monica City Council — seeking to head off clashes between atheists and Christian organizations, as well as legal disputes that could become costly to taxpayers — barred private, unattended displays in the park.


At the time, city officials pointed out that those wishing to celebrate the Nativity, or anything else for that matter, could erect displays on private property. But Nativity scene proponents filed suit in U.S. District Court seeking to restore the Palisades Park tradition. The case drew national attention.


Last month, Judge Audrey B. Collins of the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles denied the church coalition's request to require the city to allow the Nativity scenes in the park.


William J. Becker Jr., an attorney for the Santa Monica Nativity Scenes Committee — who has compared the campaign against the nativity displays to Pontius Pilates' judgment against Jesus, — lashed out at the decision anew Monday and pledged to appeal.


"Judges are fallible," Becker said. "They are often motivated by their own ideological dispositions, whether they want to admit it or not."


The move to private land is "not a resolution," Becker said.


"Everybody has the right to use private property to express themselves," he said. "It's still no substitute for 1st Amendment protections that we are guaranteed to express our viewpoints in a public forum."


Gaylor, of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, said she is untroubled by the prospect of prolonged appeal.


"Santa Monica is going to win — should win, ultimately," she said. "This judge obviously did the right thing."


scott.gold@latimes.com





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Microsoft's Motorola Patent Violation Won't Stop Xbox Sales











A federal judge in Seattle has told Motorola Mobility that he will not grant its request to ban the sale of Microsoft’s Xbox 360, and the two need to stop bickering and broker a licensing deal to end their patent suit.


The ruling by Judge James Robart follows a finding by an International Trade Commission administrative law judge that the Xbox has violated four Motorola patents that pertain to the H.264 video compression codec and wireless technologies used in the console and its controllers. The ICT judge recommended in May that sales of the Xbox be banned in the United States.


Not so fast, Robart said. There’s no need for that.


“At this stage in the litigation, and based on this court’s prior rulings, the court concludes that Motorola cannot demonstrate irreparable harm,” Robart said in a ruling issued Friday (.pdf). “The Motorola asserted patents, at issue in this litigation, are standard essential patents of the H.264 Standard and are included in Motorola’s H.264 standard essential patent portfolio. Thus, Microsoft is entitled to a license to the Motorola asserted patents on RAND terms.”


Robart essentially said the two sides need to sit down and hammer out some fair patent licensing terms — RAND meaning “reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.” There really isn’t another option since the patents at the heart of the dispute are fundamental to any device using Wi-Fi or playing digital video. But there is disagreement over how much Microsoft should pay up in the inevitable agreement.


Previously, Motorola has proposed a licensing fee of 2.25 percent of the retail price of each Xbox, according to Bloomberg But Microsoft declined, arguing that was too high. Now Robart and the U.S. District Court are tasked with figuring out what a fair licensing fee would be. That won’t happen until sometime next year.


Motorola and Microsoft officials were unavailable for comment.






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LeBron James wins Sports Illustrated annual award












(Reuters) – LeBron James of the Miami Heat was named as Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year for 2012, the U.S. magazine announced on Monday.


In an outstanding year, the 27-year-old James won his first NBA championship, his third league Most Valuable Player (MVP) award, was named MVP of the NBA finals and a won gold medal with the United States at the London Olympics.












He became just the sixth basketballer to win the award, which began in 1954. The most recent was his team-mate Dwyane Wade in 2006.


Two years ago, James became a hate figure for many American sports fans after he announced his decision to sign for Miami live on television after his contract with the Cleveland Cavaliers had expired.


He was booed at courts across the NBA and received intense criticism for his performance as Miami lost the 2011 NBA finals to the Dallas Mavericks.


“Did I think an award like this was possible two years ago? ‘No, I did not,” James said in an interview with the magazine.


“I thought I would be helping a lot of kids and raise $ 3 million by going on TV and saying, ‘Hey, I want to play for the Miami Heat.’ But it affected far more people than I imagined.


“I know it wasn’t on the level of an injury or an addiction, but it was something I had to recover from. I had to become a better person, a better player, a better father, a better friend, a better mentor and a better leader. I’ve changed, and I think people have started to understand who I really am.”


Previous winners of the award include swimmer Michael Phelps (2008), cyclist Lance Armstrong (2002) and golfer Tiger Woods (2000) while the first award was given to British athlete Roger Bannister in 1954 after he became the first person to run a mile in under four minutes.


(Reporting By Simon Evans; Editing by Julian Linden)


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Global Update: GlaxoSmithKline Tops Access to Medicines Index


Sang Tan/Associated Press







GlaxoSmithKline hung on to its perennial top spot in the new Access to Medicines Index released last week, but its competitors are closing in.


Every two years, the index ranks the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies based on how readily they get medicines they hold patents on to the world’s poor, how much research they do on tropical diseases, how ethically they conduct clinical trials in poor countries, and similar issues.


Johnson & Johnson shot up to second place, while AstraZeneca fell to 16th from 7th. AstraZeneca has had major management shake-ups. It did not do less, but the industry is improving so rapidly that others outscored it, the report said.


The index was greeted with skepticism by some drugmakers when it was introduced in 2008. But now 19 of the 20 companies have a board member or subcommittee tracking how well they do at what the index measures, said David Sampson, the chief author.


The one exception was a Japanese company. As before, Japanese drugmakers ranked at or near the index’s bottom, and European companies clustered near the top. Generic companies — most of them Indian — that export to poor countries are ranked separately.


Johnson & Johnson moved up because it created an access team, disclosed more and bought Crucell, a vaccine company.


The foundation that creates the index now has enough money to continue for five more years, said its founder, Wim Leereveld, a former pharmaceutical executive.


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Deficit Talks Stumble Over Down Payment





WASHINGTON — For all the growing angst over the state of negotiations to head off a fiscal crisis in January, the parties are farthest apart on a relatively small part of the overall deficit reduction program — the down payment.




President Obama and the House speaker, John A. Boehner, are in general agreement that the relevant Congressional committees must sit down next year and work out changes to the tax code and entitlement programs to save well more than $1 trillion over the next decade.


But before that work begins, both men want Congress to approve a first installment on deficit reduction in the coming weeks. The installment would replace the automatic spending cuts and tax increases that make up the “fiscal cliff,” while signaling Washington’s seriousness about getting its fiscal house in order. That is where the chasm lies in size and scope.


Mr. Obama says the down payment should be large and made up almost completely of tax increases on top incomes, partly because he and Congressional leaders last year agreed on some spending cuts over the next decade but have yet to agree on any tax increases.


Republicans have countered by arguing for a smaller down payment that must include immediate savings from Medicare and other social programs. Republicans, using almost mirror-image language, have said that they do not want to agree to specific tax increases and vague promises of future spending cuts.


Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, chairman of the Budget Committee and part of a bipartisan “Gang of Six” senators who devised the two-stage process, said: “I think there’s a lot of confusion between the initial down payment and the framework. That’s for sure.”


The two biggest areas of dispute are tax increases and the big government health insurance programs, Medicare and Medicaid. On the health programs, neither side believes Congress could meaningfully overhaul them in the four weeks that remain before the fiscal deadline.


“Entitlement reform is a big step, and it affects tens of millions of people,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, another architect of the two-stage framework. “It’s not just a matter of cutting spending in an appropriation. It’s changing policy. And that’s why I was reluctant to include it in the down-payment conversation. I want this to be a thoughtful effort on both sides that doesn’t jeopardize this program.”


But Republicans say that it is possible to make some initial changes to the programs in coming weeks. “There are simpler things that can be done,” said Senator Michael D. Crapo, Republican of Idaho and another Gang of Six member. “The real structural changes would come later.”


Mr. Crapo said Congress could agree on some additional cuts to health care providers and change the way inflation is calculated to slow not only automatic increases in Medicare and Social Security benefits, but also the annual rise in tax brackets.


Democrats instead argue that the down payment should consist of a combination of tax increases and cuts to programs outside Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, like farm programs. Mr. Obama has pushed for a return to the top tax rates under President Bill Clinton.


Republican leaders have said that they are willing to raise new tax revenues — albeit not as much as Democrats want — but Republicans want taxes to rise by closing loopholes and curbing tax deductions and credits.


If the two sides are able to come to an agreement on the down payment, it would also likely fix targets for larger savings in the tax code and entitlement programs. The White House and Congress would then spend much of the next year trying to hash out the specific policy changes needed to hit those targets.


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Slaying of 4 rocks Northridge neighborhood









Shane Grady was jolted awake early Sunday when he heard gunfire on Devonshire Street.


He said he dropped to the floor and looked out his window, but the slowing traffic blocked his view.


Then came the police sirens and helicopter flying so low, another neighbor said, that it was "shaking the rooftop."





Residents in the usually quiet Northridge neighborhood woke up to a shocking scene. Police said two men and two women were found shot dead outside a home in the 17400 block of Devonshire in the San Fernando Valley.


Investigators do not have a motive or suspects. City Councilman Mitchell Englander, who represents the area and is a reserve LAPD officer, said police believe the slayings weren't a random act.


Officers were dispatched to the home about 4:25 a.m., LAPD Capt. William Hayes said. A 911 caller reported hearing yelling and "a number of shots," Hayes said.


Three of the bodies were found face-down, and the victims appeared to have been shot at close range, Englander said.


Officers searched the property and neighborhood immediately after the shooting, LAPD Cmdr. Andy Smith said, but no weapon was recovered.


The victims had not been identified Sunday evening. The female victims were in their 20s; one man was in his mid-30s and the other in his late 40s, Hayes said. Police believe at least some of the victims lived at the residence and may have been related.


Englander said the property was an unlicensed boarding home, but had not been a problem location for police.


That was confirmed by neighbors, who said the rooms appeared to have been rented out to single men who primarily kept to themselves. Nothing stood out, they said, except for some occasional loud music.


Englander said that about a dozen people were believed to have been living in the four- or five-bedroom home in conditions he described as "deplorable." Mattresses and makeshift kitchens were scattered about the house, he said, and one room was accessible only by a window.


A woman who lived around the block said she heard loud music hours before the shootings. About 1:30 a.m., the woman said she heard the music and people yelling. She managed to go to sleep an hour later but said the noise hadn't stopped.


"I just figured it was a party that was out of control," the woman said.


Residents described the area as quiet, the kind of neighborhood where people know one another and walk to the nearby grocery store or the synagogue down the street from where the slayings occurred.


The LAPD's Devonshire Division station is a mile away.


"It's usually sleepy-time America," said Richard Rutherford, 58, who also was awakened by the gunfire.


Englander, who chairs the City Council's Public Safety Committee, said he was "shocked" by the incident.


"Typically you don't have these kinds of incidents in this type of community," he said.


The violent crime rate for Northridge falls in the middle of all Los Angeles neighborhoods, but homicide is rare in the community, according to LAPD data analyzed in The Times' Crime L.A. database. In the previous six months, Northridge had one homicide out of the 89 violent crimes reported.


Since 2007, and before Sunday's quadruple homicide, Northridge had 11 homicides, 10 of them south of Nordhoff Street. The location of Sunday's slayings is on the border with Granada Hills, which typically has a much lower violent-crime rate than Northridge.


Jeff Kaye, 62, remembered a few incidents in the 33 years he's lived in the neighborhood. There was a shooting a few years back, he said, and he once walked in on a robbery. But nothing like Sunday's shooting had occurred.


"It concerns you," he said. "You want to know what's going on."


A few onlookers stopped by as investigators prepared to bring the bodies out of the home, and some drivers shouted questions at news crews gathered at the scene. "What's going on?" one man yelled.


"How often in this neighborhood do you hear about four dead bodies?" Grady said.


kate.mather@latimes.com





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Senators urge Obama to release more water into Mississippi River












WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Sixteen U.S. senators have appealed to President Barack Obama to divert more water to the Mississippi River to prevent barge traffic from shutting down due to low water on the country’s inland waterway, a crucial route for goods bound for export.


Low water is a looming disaster, said the senators in a letter to Obama that was released on Friday.












The senators, from states along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, asked for emergency action to release more water from Missouri River reservoirs to feed the drought-sapped Mississippi River.


Water levels are forecast to reach near-historic lows by mid-December, and shippers say low water will make it impossible to move cargo. Grain exporters have already slashed by up to 50 percent the weight of cargo shipped by barges on the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico.


“Substantial curtailment of navigation will effectively sever the country’s inland waterway superhighway, imperil the shipment of critical cargo for domestic consumption and for export, threaten manufacturing industries and power generation, and risk thousands of related jobs in the Midwest,” wrote the senators.


Signing the letter were senators Chuck Grassley and Tom Harkin of Iowa; Roy Blunt and Claire McCaskill of Missouri; Mark Pryor and John Boozman of Arkansas; Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota; Mary Landrieu and David Vitter of Louisiana; Thad Cochran and Roger Wicker of Mississippi; Mark Kirk of Illinois; Lamar Alexander of Tennessee; Joe Manchin of West Virginia; and Sherrod Brown of Ohio.


The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been battling extreme low-water conditions on the Mississippi for months following the country’s worst drought in half a century.


(Reporting By Charles Abbott; editing by Jim Marshall)


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Unboxed: Stand-Up Desks Gaining Favor in the Workplace





THE health studies that conclude that people should sit less, and get up and move around more, have always struck me as fitting into the “well, duh” category.




But a closer look at the accumulating research on sitting reveals something more intriguing, and disturbing: the health hazards of sitting for long stretches are significant even for people who are quite active when they’re not sitting down. That point was reiterated recently in two studies, published in The British Journal of Sports Medicine and in Diabetologia, a journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.


Suppose you stick to a five-times-a-week gym regimen, as I do, and have put in a lifetime of hard cardio exercise, and have a resting heart rate that’s a significant fraction below the norm. That doesn’t inoculate you, apparently, from the perils of sitting.


The research comes more from observing the health results of people’s behavior than from discovering the biological and genetic triggers that may be associated with extended sitting. Still, scientists have determined that after an hour or more of sitting, the production of enzymes that burn fat in the body declines by as much as 90 percent. Extended sitting, they add, slows the body’s metabolism of glucose and lowers the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol in the blood. Those are risk factors toward developing heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.


“The science is still evolving, but we believe that sitting is harmful in itself,” says Dr. Toni Yancey, a professor of health services at the University of California, Los Angeles.


Yet many of us still spend long hours each day sitting in front of a computer.


The good news is that when creative capitalism is working as it should, problems open the door to opportunity. New knowledge spreads, attitudes shift, consumer demand emerges and companies and entrepreneurs develop new products. That process is under way, addressing what might be called the sitting crisis. The results have been workstations that allow modern information workers to stand, even walk, while toiling at a keyboard.


Dr. Yancey goes further. She has a treadmill desk in the office and works on her recumbent bike at home.


If there is a movement toward ergonomic diversity and upright work in the information age, it will also be a return to the past. Today, the diligent worker tends to be defined as a person who puts in long hours crouched in front of a screen. But in the 19th and early 20th centuries, office workers, like clerks, accountants and managers, mostly stood. Sitting was slacking. And if you stand at work today, you join a distinguished lineage — Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, Winston Churchill, Vladimir Nabokov and, according to a recent profile in The New York Times, Philip Roth.


DR. JAMES A. LEVINE of the Mayo Clinic is a leading researcher in the field of inactivity studies. When he began his research 15 years ago, he says, it was seen as a novelty.


“But it’s totally mainstream now,” he says. “There’s been an explosion of research in this area, because the health care cost implications are so enormous.”


Steelcase, the big maker of office furniture, has seen a similar trend in the emerging marketplace for adjustable workstations, which allow workers to sit or stand during the day, and for workstations with a treadmill underneath for walking. (Its treadmill model was inspired by Dr. Levine, who built his own and shared his research with Steelcase.)


The company offered its first models of height-adjustable desks in 2004. In the last five years, sales of its lines of adjustable desks and the treadmill desk have surged fivefold, to more than $40 million. Its models for stand-up work range from about $1,600 to more than $4,000 for a desk that includes an actual treadmill. Corporate customers include Chevron, Intel, Allstate, Boeing, Apple and Google.


“It started out very small, but it’s not a niche market anymore,” says Allan Smith, vice president for product marketing at Steelcase.


The Steelcase offerings are the Mercedes-Benzes and Cadillacs of upright workstations, but there are plenty of Chevys as well, especially from small, entrepreneurial companies.


In 2009, Daniel Sharkey was laid off as a plant manager of a tool-and-die factory, after nearly 30 years with the company. A garage tinkerer, Mr. Sharkey had designed his own adjustable desk for standing. On a whim, he called it the kangaroo desk, because “it holds things, and goes up and down.” He says that when he lost his job, his wife, Kathy, told him, “People think that kangaroo thing is pretty neat.”


Today, Mr. Sharkey’s company, Ergo Desktop, employs 16 people at its 8,000-square-foot assembly factory in Celina, Ohio. Sales of its several models, priced from $260 to $600, have quadrupled in the last year, and it now ships tens of thousands of workstations a year.


Steve Bordley of Scottsdale, Ariz., also designed a solution for himself that became a full-time business. After a leg injury left him unable to run, he gained weight. So he fixed up a desktop that could be mounted on a treadmill he already owned. He walked slowly on the treadmill while making phone calls and working on a computer. In six weeks, Mr. Bordley says, he lost 25 pounds and his nagging back pain vanished.


He quit the commercial real estate business and founded TrekDesk in 2007. He began shipping his desk the next year. (The treadmill must be supplied by the user.) Sales have grown tenfold from 2008, with several thousand of the desks, priced at $479, now sold annually.


“It’s gone from being treated as a laughingstock to a product that many people find genuinely interesting,” Mr. Bordley says.


There is also a growing collection of do-it-yourself solutions for stand-up work. Many are posted on Web sites like howtogeek.com, and freely shared like recipes. For example, Colin Nederkoorn, chief executive of an e-mail marketing start-up, Customer.io, has posted one such design on his blog. Such setups can cost as little as $30 or even less, if cobbled together with available materials.


UPRIGHT workstations were hailed recently by no less a trend spotter of modern work habits and gadgetry than Wired magazine. In its October issue, it chose “Get a Standing Desk” as one of its “18 Data-Driven Ways to Be Happier, Healthier and Even a Little Smarter.”


The magazine has kept tabs on the evolving standing-desk research and marketplace, and several staff members have become converts themselves in the last few months.


“And we’re all universally happy about it,” Thomas Goetz, Wired’s executive editor, wrote in an e-mail — sent from his new standing desk.


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The Media Equation: John Huey, Editor in Chief of Time Inc., Prepares to Leave





In the decade I’ve covered John Huey, I’d never once been to his magisterial office on the 34th floor of the Time & Life building. It is large and imposing in a way its occupant is not, an unlikely landing spot for an old newspaper hack. On the wall is a photograph of William Faulkner, “the patron saint of all hard-drinking Southern writers,” as Mr. Huey, a native of Atlanta, describes him.




At the end of the year, Mr. Huey will vacate the office and leave his position as Time Inc.’s editor in chief. Martha Nelson, the editorial director of the company, will move in and become the first woman to hold the job.


Mr. Huey says he won’t miss the perch and I believe him, partly because the job now has brutal aspects. Besides, he is a reporter by nature, and seemed happy to be at-large whenever I saw him at events.


Mr. Huey, who had his start as a reporter at The Atlanta Constitution before heading to The Wall Street Journal and then Time Inc., is only the sixth editor in chief in the company’s history, a job that the writer Kurt Andersen once described as having “papal luster.” These days? Not so much.


“There’s been a fair amount of unpleasantness at that table,” Mr. Huey said, pointing to a big one in the corner. Rather than using it to plan magazine start-ups or acquisitions, he found himself going over lists of staff cuts necessitated by print’s collapse.


In his seven years as the top editor, the core magazines — like Time, Fortune, People and Money — have lost almost a third of their employees, and the future is no brighter. Overall revenue at Time Inc. fell 6 percent last quarter, to $838 million, although operating income increased 2 percent, thanks to the constant cost-cutting.


“Google sort of sucked all of the honey out of our business,” he said with a shrug, not complaining, just saying.


“When it was good, it was really good, but there were a lot of rough patches,” he said. “But I never wondered why I got into journalism during any of it. I still believe in the kind of storytelling we do here.”


But that confidence had limits. In the 11 years Mr. Huey helped run the editorial side of Time Inc. — first as editorial director, then as editor in chief — he commuted to his home and family in Charleston, S.C., on weekends, partly because he always felt he was on the cusp of being fired.


“There have been bullets flying since I got here, way back when I first came as a writer at Fortune,” he said, referring to his first job at the company, in 1988. “I came to work when it was just Time Inc., then it became part of Time Warner, and then it was Time Warner with Turner, and then it became AOL Time Warner and then just Time Warner again. I always figured my time might be up. Came close, but it never happened.”


As the editor of Fortune, Mr. Huey was a consummate magazine maker, turning out a product that was modern, knowing and highly decorated. A former naval intelligence officer, he displayed a remarkable understanding of how power operates in corporate America, which served him well as he navigated his way to the top of Time Inc.


“Media can be a very dangerous and political business — I am not an innocent in such matters, by the way — but I always had enough information to stay away from the more obvious hazards,” he said. “And we did O.K. We avoided major conflagrations, there were no $1 billion lawsuits, and no compromise in the journalism we were doing at our magazines.”


He had excellent relationships with Richard Parsons and Jeffrey Bewkes, the former and current chief executives of Time Warner, which came in handy, given that the leadership at Time Inc. became somewhat chaotic after the departure of Don Logan, the former chief executive of Time Inc. and a mentor of Mr. Huey.


Ann S. Moore, the chief executive when Mr. Huey became editor in chief in 2006, eliminated potential rivals and a lot of talent in the process. Jack Griffin replaced Ms. Moore in 2010 and quickly began remaking Time Inc. He grew tired of Mr. Huey’s resistance and took aim at him, according to executives at Time Warner, and was out after five months.


It fell to Mr. Huey, along with the company’s chief financial officer and its general counsel, to run the company until earlier this year, when Laura Lang, a newcomer to publishing, was selected as chief executive.


“It’s odd that a former newspaper guy ended up helping run the place, but it turned into a job for a ‘mudder,’ and I can run in the mud if I have to,” he said.


Approaching 65, he decided it was time to move on. He will not leave to a herald of trumpets, but he has had his wins: by some measure, Time and Money are the last players standing in their categories.


Mr. Huey installed a bureau in Detroit when the rest of the country was trying to forget about it, and he scrambled the jets so Time Inc. magazines had a presence in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.


He also brokered a deal with Turner Broadcasting to set up CNN/Money, which used the editorial content and staff of Money and Fortune to create a highly profitable Web site that makes more money than both those magazines. He was, in the main, an anchor for a company that often needed one.


“John is a very funny, self-deprecating guy, and none of that gets in the way of him being a very serious person,” said Daniel Okrent, who worked with Mr. Huey for many years. “He preserved the editorial independence of the magazines at a time when it was hard to resist the constant economic pressure to do stories that would help advertising.”


Now Mr. Huey is packing his stuff to prepare for a fellowship at Harvard. “I’m looking forward to getting back closer to the keyboard than I have been,” he said. Before he goes, he will probably slip Merle Haggard’s “Big City” into the CD player, an album whose title track frequently kept him company in his corner office.


I’m tired of this dirty old city.


Entirely too much work and never enough play.


And I’m tired of these dirty old sidewalks.


Think I’ll walk off my steady job today.


Gesturing at the magazines on the table, Mr. Huey said: “We still make a great deal of money because consumers pay us money for the products that we give them.”


“But I can’t look anybody in the eye who is coming into the business and tell them that they are going to end up in an office like this,” he added, with a wave at its expanse. “But who is to say that anybody should live like this anyway?”


E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;


Twitter: @carr2n



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