Culture Vulture's Artful Solution To City's Woes
Newcastle Herald
Monday April 18, 2005
CONSIDER this scenario:
Boss: Half an hour late again, eh? Sorry, but I'm gonna have to dock your pay. Worker: Aw, c'mon, I was at the Knights away game last night. They've gotta have supporters. Anyway, she was two hours late, and you're not on at her about it. Boss: Yeah, but she was at the theatre, so that's OK. You probably won't be hearing that one in Newcastle any time soon. But if you lived in Cleveland, Ohio, you might (except, of course, that they have the Browns, not the Knights, and it's a moot point whether they have football at all). The reason you might well hear such dialogue in Cleveland is that they have just introduced a program called "Late Out, Late In". It means that a worker who has been to a suitably cultural performance on a week night can come in two hours late the next morning and no need to make up the two hours at the other end of the day, either. When I first heard of this on National Public Radio (NPR) I thought it might be a slightly delayed April Fool's Day joke. But NPR is a reliable independent American news source. What's more, a web-search showed that even the reputable Cleveland newspaper The Plain Dealer ran the story, headlining it "For sale: tickets to show up for work late". The program is the invention of the chief information officer of the Cleveland Museum, Leonard Steinbach, a "lifelong culture vulture", backed by the city's Convention and Visitors Bureau. Mr Steinbach said it symbolised "unique sophistication and enlightened self-interest among Cleveland's business community . . ."Taking part in cultural events made for a more productive and creative workforce, he said. Not all Cleveland's businesses agree. NPR quoted market researcher Alan Decker: "Good grief! You've got basketball, you've got baseball, you've got tons and tons of things that people are breaking the doors down to see, (but) they get to work the next day!"Yet the massive George Gund Foundation, a charitable trust, has let all its employees have unlimited "late outs". (Businesses can choose how often employees enjoy the scheme, from once a week to once a month or even just once a year.) So, even if it divides the community between sports freaks and culture vultures, the program has already had one desirable effect. It has won Cleveland major national, and even international, exposure as a "culture city".A shrewd move, you might think, for a place that's trying to drag itself out of a slump that saw the decline of its steel production, the loss of its heavy industries and unemployment so severe that at one stage it was America's poorest city. Today more than 80 per cent of its regional workforce of 1 million-plus works in industries that don't produce goods. Cleveland is trying for a new image as a city renowned for information technology, medical knowledge, education and culture. Now where have Novocastrians heard something along those lines? Then, too, Cleveland's population belongs to the unregenerately progressive end of national politics. This is the city that gave America its first black mayor; this is the city that voted solidly against the current American president. Remind you of the region that gave Australia its first labour martyr in Norman Brown and its first woman lord mayor in Joy Cummings? But, despite the similarities, there's little chance that Newcastle will follow our American counterpart into the field of headline-grabbing culture cultism. It's not just that we're so sorely outnumbered (how could we match seven theatres, nine theatre companies and the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame?). The problem is, Australians simply can't separate sport from art. Even the renowned Sir Robert Helpmann succumbed by staging a ballet about that game Victorians call football. We can't separate art from sport, either. Think about an event that costs lots of money, goes on far too long and sits bang in the middle of the grass-growing/paint-drying interest scale. Some, remembering a few of our celebrated opera divas, might call that art. Others, recalling interminable tennis, cricket and golf matches, might call it sport. In 1983, we called it the America's Cup. There was our prime minister, Bob Hawke, proclaiming, "Any boss who sacks a worker for not coming in today is a bum."He gave us, not two hours, but a whole day off. For a yacht race. Imagine how long we'd have had if there'd been anything worth seeing.
© 2005 Newcastle Herald