10 min read summer reading

Summer Reading 2024: On Management #55

The "I got it at my library" edition
White adirondack-style chair, next to a white table, on a dock; lake, trees, and blue sky/clouds in background.
Photo by Stephanie Klepacki / Unsplash (missing: coffee and books)

“This looks fun,” said the librarian at the drive-through. She handed me a small stack of employment law reference guides. “Light summer reading,” I said.

In my experience, naive or inexperienced leaders sometimes act as though employment law might just be common sense. This is incorrect.

Leaders who are full of themselves have been known to treat the law as though it’s a matter of their own convenience, or as something they can bend to fit their business model.

Like these guys:

"The U.S. Department of Labor recovered $11,969.50 in back wages and an equal amount in liquidated damages for a total of $23,939 for two front desk employees. An investigation by the Wage and Hour Division found Dada Guru Hospitality Inc. and its owner/operators Prakash Patel and Pratyush Patel paid two front desk workers a flat monthly rate ‒ regardless of the number of hours worked ‒ resulting in minimum wage and overtime violations," per the U.S. Department of Labor on August 9, 2024.

In my experience, stuff like this happens all the time. And when I say, all the time, I mean, it's a rare season that passes without a (privileged) friend, co-worker, or family member asking, “Can my company/organization/boss really do this?” And the answer is, yeah, they can. If they don’t expect to be called on it.

Many affected by broken employment laws don’t react, at least not in a consequential manner. Kudos to the hotel workers who figured out how to make a report; the process is time-consuming and confusing. Some people don't act because they fear retaliation, or don’t think it will make a difference.

Or, they don’t even know they’ve been wronged.

I recommend the Nolo employment law guides, like The Manager's Legal Handbook, by Lisa Guerin and Sachi Barreiro. These guides are easy to navigate, written in plain English, and will help you to understand if what you're being asked to do, as a manager, is on the up and up.

Every couple of years I check the newest editions out of the library, because the laws do change. Sometimes for the better. Sometimes because corporate lobbying can be effective.

Hopefully, not because evil-weird political actors have been successful in taking over your country.

Project 2025 will affect workplaces

I’m pretty sure that no 14-year-old wants to work in a slaughterhouse, industrial laundry, or meat packing plant. Or, in their survivalist dad's junkyard.

“I wanted to get away from the junkyard and there was only one way to do it…by getting a job so I wouldn’t be at the house when Dad rounded up his crew. The trouble was, I was eleven.”

Tara Westover, in Educated: a memoir

Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise is a 900+ page policy document, authored by evil-weird political actors, ostensibly to guide America’s next (disciplined) right-wing president to reshape the purpose and function of the US government.

As I understand it.

Though I long to be the person who reads Mandate for Leadership from cover to cover, I am not currently able to be this person. So, I'm reading about it. I downloaded the document from their website, which I'm dipping into to confirm and expand on coverage I've seen. There's quite a bit in there about the workplace. I'll come back to that another time.

But hey, how about starting off with Let's Make Child Labor Great Again?

“Hazard- Order Regulations. Some young adults show an interest in inherently dangerous jobs. Current rules forbid many young people, even if their family is running the business, from working in such jobs. This results in worker shortages in dangerous fields and often discourages otherwise interested young workers from trying the more dangerous job. With parental consent and proper training, certain young adults should be allowed to learn and work in more dangerous occupations. This would give a green light to training programs and build skills in teenagers who may want to work in these fields.

• DOL should amend its hazard-order regulations to permit teenage workers access to work in regulated jobs with proper training and parental consent."

Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, p. 595

I am a completionist

In 2023, almost by accident, I read Sue Grafton's entire Kinsey Millhone series. For those who haven't indulged, early in my career, Grafton's novels were top airport bookstore picks for women of my cohort.

Kinsey Millhone was a scrappy private eye, solo-business owner, and heroine for GenXers. She lived a good life on her own terms, with the support of her family of choice. Consistently underestimated by the bad guys (and sometimes the good guys) Millhone always overachieved.

Grafton died in 2017 before she could complete the last novel in the series. Last year, I read that Kinsey would be coming to the small screen. Having not read the last few novels in the series, I decided to go back to the beginning, with A is for Alibi. They're quick reads, and I knocked out the entire series in a couple of months. I was pleased that the books had aged better than I would have expected.

This summer, I read Robyn Gigl's thrillers, featuring criminal defense lawyer Erin McCabe, starting with By Way of Sorrow. Gigl and McCabe are both lawyers, and transgender women. Erin travels through a society and legal system that stacks the deck against her, the people she defends, and the people she loves.

Along with Erin's legal escapades, which, of course, routinely bring her into dangerous situations, Gigl draws us into Erin's post-transition story as she navigates her nuclear family relationships, her profession, and building her family. Erin's experiences opened my eyes to challenges and possibilities I had not imagined. Yes, I know: some people can be awful and dangerous. I did not know of the formidable legal issues, and expense, facing transgender people who wish to be parents.

My only regret: I read all 4 novels in the course of a month; the narrative exposition sometimes felt a bit ponderous. Of couse I hadn't forgotten how Erin and Mark had gotten together – I had just met them the week before!

If you like a legal thriller featuring a ripped-from-the-headlines New Jersey that can't stop being corrupt, and moustache-twirling power-brokers who use murder as a management strategy? This series is a solid beach read for the waning days of summer.

I know it when I see it

Of course, some wish to criminalize the good people at my public library who make it possible for anyone to read about, and empathize with, Erin's fictional but real challenges. No, I don't think it's a stretch that these folks would label anything written by, or about, a transgender person as "ideology."

Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children, for instance, is not a political Gordian knot inextricably binding up disparate claims about free speech, property rights, sexual liberation, and child welfare. It has no claim to First Amendment protection. Its purveyors are child predators and misogynistic exploiters of women. Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime. Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. (Emphasis mine)

Project 2025's Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, p.5

In my return to suburban Chicagoland, I've been flummoxed by how the landscape has been transformed by gaming establishments. They're in strip malls, annexed to family restaurants, and more. (I could not understand a hulking truckstop-like gas station complex in my neck of the woods. Until I realized it had a gaming room.)

My quick search of Project 2025 for "gaming" and "gambling" came up with nothing. Librarians should be jailed, and institutionalized gambling is, well, unremarkable? Weird.

Burn after reading

I read rapidly, and can read a book faster than I can listen to an audiobook. Audiobooks are great when I'm driving, folding laundry, or working out. Or when I'm in the mood to hear a book read by a great voice actor.

Not so great, though, when a book lags and I just want to skip ahead. Like early in Kara Swisher's memoir, Burn Book: A tech love story, when she goes on for many minutes, listing what seems like every computer she ever owned. I stopped listening.

Swisher has had an important voice in tech media. Though I'm not a huge Kara fan, I'm interested in what she thinks, well, about her. And about the Silicon Valley players she has been covering for decades. I won't go back to the audio, though. I'm on the hold list at the library for Burn Book, in book form.

TBR again: books I missed the first time around

I am sure I've had at least 2 of these books checked out of the library before, only to return them, unread, in the crush of everything else. Hopefully the next 3 weeks will bring me time to come back to them all.

  • David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, recommended by Kate Kern Mundie.
  • Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.
  • Nice White Ladies: The Truth about White Superemacy, Our Role in It, and How We Can Help Dismantle it, by Jessie Daniels.
  • Work won't love you back: how devotion to our jobs keeps us exploited, exhausted, and alone, by Sara Jaffe.

Just for fun TBRs

Circling back to legal thrillers:

  • Presumed Innocent came to prestige TV this summer. Did not watch. But I did check Scott Turow's debut novel out of the library. I read it in 1987, probably while commuting. I wanted to see how it landed on me today, and yikes. The main character has all of the charm you'd find in the comments section of an article about no-fault divorce. The murder victim is busty and slutty. I quit after a couple of chapters. Not fun, will not reread.
  • My 2017 summer reading list (below) included John Grisham's 1990 classic, The Firm, which I was read for the first time that summer and was surprised to actually enjoy. (Did not love the movie.) So yesterday, I picked up Grisham's 2023 sequel, The Exchange: After The Firm.

Circling back to dangerous jobs:

  • Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects features a family made wealthy by pig farming. Or at least it did in the prestige TV thriller. Did watch, will read.

What are you reading this summer, for work or for fun? Hit reply to this note if you're inclined to share – I'd love to hear from you.

Thank you so much for reading my newsletter. I sincerely apologize if my well-intentioned white lady musings about Robyn Gigl's heroine struck any unintentionally sour notes.

It has been a hell of a summer, dealing with an elder in the medical system, after they took a fall. Now that things have settled down a bit, I'm hoping to claw back bit of summer in the last 2.5 weeks of August, lol.

If you have recommendations, suggestions, feedback, or questions, please send me a note.

This edition was polished off after getting at 3am to try to see the Perseids – they did not live up to the hype, this time – and I could not go back to sleep. There may be typos or inelegant turns of phrase, which I'll fix later, on the Internet.

May you and your loved ones be safe, healthy and free – and may you squeeze every last drop of summer (and reading) out of the coming weeks.

Anne Libby

Remembrance of books from summers past

Homemade garden flag, ivory background, red/white and blue border, surrounded by greenery; HARRIS WALZ 2024
I couldn't wait for an official campaign sign, so I sewed a garden flag. Unironically.

Published by:

Anne Libby

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