Places to Intervene in a System
By Donella H. Meadows

http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/places_intervene_system.html

Some excerpts:

"9.  Numbers (subsidies, taxes, standards).

8.  Material stocks and flows.

7.  Regulating negative feedback loops.

6.  Driving positive feedback loops.

5.  Information flows.

4.  The rules of the system (incentives, punishment, constraints).

3.  The power of self-organization.

2.  The goals of the system.

1.  The mindset or paradigm out of which the goals, rules, feedback structure arise."
...

"Numbers are last on my list of leverage points. Diddling with details, arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Probably ninety-five percent of our attention goes to numbers, but there's not a lot of power in them."
...
"When the Hungarian road system was laid out so all traffic from one side of the nation to the other had to pass through central Budapest, that determined a lot about air pollution and commuting delays that are not easily fixed by pollution control devices, traffic lights, or speed limits. The only way to fix a system that is laid out wrong is to rebuild it, if you can."
...
"The ability to self-organize is the strongest form of system resilience, the ability to survive change by changing."
...
"It is in the space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, get locked up or burned at the stake or crucified or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia."
...
If you haven't read the article you should.  If you have, you should read it again.  It's one of those that can be reread again and again.

So here I am, former geek, now massage therapist but also wearing the hat of part-time bookkeeper and computer programmer for a gym.  I am training the new guy into posting payments into receivables and managing schedules.  

I realize I must be the crusty old guy in the typical work pantheon.  Having once been the golden girl, the rising star, I guess I have really crashed and burned into a weird place.

You see, the new guy is getting the degree at the end of may that I got back in 1990.  He thinks he's going to be an investment banker when he graduates.  Right now he is taking a grad-student part time job.   You know the consequence- this is like a bartender job.  A who-cares job.  And he is taking the shift opposite mine.  "I coulda been a contender"

I started down this path of a more blue-collar-ish manual-labor-ish existance (doing massage therapy - no matter what prior experience I may allow to be exploited by my employer)... I started down this path when I was reading Dilbert cartoons, and realized that the garbageman was my hero. 

But there are some aspects of being the garbageman that I just wasn't expecting.

:-)

Somehow, even though being a stay-at-home-mom is even lower on the status chain than any other job in our culture (hotel maids at least get social security), taking that status didn't hit the way this did.  But I am glad I'm not making $0 a year anymore, I have to admit.

One thing I have been active in in the years I've been a stay at home mom is the arena of caregiver rights.  Our culture does not recognize that care is work.  It treats the parent who undertakes for the purpose of providing care to a child or dependent elder either the diminishment of a paid career or the complete surrender of such as if they were taking a vacation.  This leads to profound economic vulnerability and a high probability of poverty later on in the caregiver's life. 

The work of caring is invisible; completely unrecognized in our economy.  In the GDP, it's invisible. In the Social Security system, invisible. To the IRS and the Bureau of Labor statistics, invisible. We are a country in which paid work is valued above all else, and since it is mothers who do the overwhelming majority of unpaid caregiving work, it is mothers who are paying the price. Mothers face a wage gap far greater than the wage gap for women without children. Mothers spend an average of 11.5 years out of the workforce caring for others, decimating their retirement savings and increasing their risk of poverty. The scarcity of and exploitation of part-time workers speaks volumes about how much society cares about mothers' ability to both maintain their economic security and fulfill their responsibilities as caregivers.

Over time women have won access to the paid workplace but mothers have not yet won social change that truly acknowledges the contributions of our unpaid care work to both the economy and society. Our society cannot hope to address women's needs without addressing mothers' needs. And society will not address mothers' needs until mothers get involved.

Here is a site that goes into the subject in more detail:

http://www.mothersandmore.org/Advocacy/advocacy_and_action.shtml