Tuesday, January 06, 2004

A Feast for Sore Ears?

First a blogger, now a radio personality. Where will it end?

I've always wanted to be a pundit, and Sunday night I got my chance -- not quite Meet the Press. No, it was the Los Angeles radio show of "men's rights activist and radio host" Glenn Sacks. Ampersand at Alas a Blog, characterizing us as "strange bedfellows," recommended me to him after reading my posts about the NY Times series.
As I've said about Glenn in the past, I think his inability to view men as anything but victims (not to mention his knee-jerk anti-feminism) are mistaken. Nonetheless, I've debated him online and in email enough to know he's a nice guy, capable of civil disagreement, and worker deaths are one of the few issues he and I (sort of) agree on.

Anyhow, Glenn was interested enough to have Jordan as a guest on his show.
I actually haven't listened to it yet, but if you're interested, you can listen here. Ampersand says I come on at 12:20, and apparently the most interesting segment begins at 39:10.

The only part where the "men's rights activist" threatened to get in the way was when I made the point that it's not just men who knowingly do dangerous work because they don't want to lose their jobs. There are plenty of women who are heads of households and are equally reluctant to lose their jobs over a safety problem. And even if they don't die at the same rate that men do, they get injured in high numbers. His response: "I knew I'd get this lecture from you at some point, fair enough."

Also on the show was Barry Wood, a former construction worker who made some excellent points about how OSHA standards save lives and how little patience he had with employers who claimed that OSHA regs were too burdensome.

On the whole, I think it was a good show -- and the only one that I know of that's dealt with worker safety in the wake of the NY Times series. Thanks to Glenn and to Ampersand.


(And for those of you interested in Blogs, Alas a Blog is quite well written, and probably the most attractively designed Blogs out there.)