HACkers blog

The university is a learning organisation. And as such it takes skills development very seriously. Particularly among those most needing this - the vulnerable outsourced workers who are among us, but not of us.

Among the skills I've noticed being acquired by those whose monthly wages approximate the daily wage of those on the top end of our own salary spectrum are the following:

• affirmative shopping skills. A pair of handcuffs and a bottle of whisky were my personal contribution to this learning outcome, but more mundane contributions have included groceries, money and small, portable pieces of electronic equipment.
  
• panhandling skills. These will be particularly useful to those whose affirmative shopping skills have not been adequately matched by their detection evasion skills, and who find themselves unemployed having to draw on other skills along the side of the road should thie affirmative shopping skills be insufficiently advanced to produce enough income without the monthly stipend from the outsource company to augment it.
• budgeting skills. Keeping a family fed, clothed and schooled in the face of rising prices increasing inconvenience requires creative budgeting skills. Sadly these are not always matched with skills in nutrition, and skin pallor and immunodeficiency often raise questions about the depth of these skills or the degree to which the skill is sufficient.
• entrepreneurial skills. These range from the lamentable (such as the sale of exam papers to students) to the laudable (such as lunchtime car washing schemes) and include a fair amount of errand running for tips and subversion of official procurement processes for services such as office painting or office contents removal.
  
• stand-up comedy skills. Faced with the alternatives of abject misery or deft humour, many have opted for the latter to enable the continued placement of one foot in front of the other in the face of resistance, and sitcom writers could learn valuable tricks on situational humour from many of the successfully skilled in this aspect.
  

 But I'm still not sure how one claims against the Skills Levy to offset the acquisition of these skills, or how one ensures that sufficient numbers of qualifying staff are funneled into these programmes for it to be adequately beneficial. I also have questions around certification and NQF levels for these skills.

Perhaps we could include a special addition to grad week where these newly skilled are officially recognised and applauded?

We seem to have hit the start of voting season, with polls in Pakistan, following those of Kenya, and fun and games to follow in several other states including - sometime next year if I have it correctly - our own.

And some time, too, Americans will be voting. You'd be forgiven for thinking that this was the only election in the offing, given the media coverage, and it's a little perplexing that the candidates are more familiar to many locals than those in the looming Zimbabwean elections, despite the more immediate relevance of the latter.  

Having been asked by one too many person whether I supported Hillary or Obama (the girl gets called by her first name, the boy by his surname, just like primary school) I decided to take the test. You see, American politicians all look and sound the same to me unless they're Angela Davis, or the ghost of the former Angela Davis since she's also no longer what she once was. These days I'd probably have hard time telling her apart from Oprah.

Oprah endorses Obama. Perez Hilton endorses Hillary. This all makes perfect sense. But which US candidate would most closely represent my values? GlassBooth offers just such a tool to help you find out - and I was surprised to discover I'd best be represented by some guy I'd never heard of, who's no doubt lagging a good last in the race, if he hasn't dropped out entirely by now.  

Which made me wonder why no one had devised a similar quiz for local politics. Each election, thousands of new voters are faced with the prospect of where to place their X, and parties come and go faster than fashions, as a visit to the IEC website will attest. Trying to make sense of the political landscape if your horizons extend further than simply endorsing the ruling party can be tricky. Does anyone other than Powerhouse Pat, for example, know what the ID's political vision actually is? What would the UDM's economic policy involve? And is the FF+ the furthest the right wing has to offer, or would that be the ACDP?

It could be a very interesting exercise... 

Finally, after much speculation, the 2007 Institutional Climate Survey Report has been released. To us plebs, that is - having been lying steaming on desks in Bremner for some time previously. Needless to say, this fuelled further speculation - why had it taken mere months to release this time, when the previous report had taken years [not available online - if anywhere], and then only in a sanitised, stripped format? Was there - hushed whispers mooted - an agenda behind the timing of its release?

 The bold braved the bandwidth challenge and downloaded the 2.8MB of tables, tables, tables (no chairs) and text and scrabbled with febrile impatience for the bottom line: has the institutional prozac kicked in yet, or are we as miserable as ever? And indeed, despite the Jim Jonesoid adulation of Khuluma, the report resonated with lived experience: UCT was not a happy place. 

But the report was not all To Be Expected reporting: instead, there was something eerily disquieting. It took a while for it to sink in, and then it hit: the relative absence of spin. Simply findings, presented as such.

Rather than being told that we had the most beautiful mountain offices of any Western Cape-based university to compensate, we were told that we thought our pay sucked. And that non-academics thought it sucked wet dogs.  Instead of being told that we were so liberal in allowing a diversity of genders, ethnicities, sexual orientations and religious persuasions to access our university, we were told that many of us felt discriminated against, or reported experience of harassment, based on our diversity. And where we could have been sold a vision of freedom of expression and opinion, we were told that some of us feared, or had experienced, victimisation or discrimination as a result of dissenting or divergent views. 

We were told, too, that the poster campaign (including the infamous "PASS = Sheltered Employment" posters) had created anger rather than simply awareness, and may have impacted directly on the disappointing response rates.

But, perhaps most tellingly, we were told that - interventions notwithstanding - the overall picture was gloomier than that presented by the 2003 findings.

 The passage whisperers were non-plussed. Had someone forgotten to programme in the spin-cycle? Were the results so depressing that even the most adept spinners were at a loss? Was there Another Agenda to present as gloomy a picture possible on the eve of the changing of the guard? The head shakers agreed that something was afoot... but they were not sure quite what.

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