“The structural conditions shaping care work are highly exploitative—and are profoundly linked to the high degree of COVID-19’s spread within both long-term care facilities and the communities that supply their labor force.”
Nearly every exclusive field runs on assistants. The actor James Franco, like Buddha before him, had an assistant keep track of his meals and school assignments. The critic and writer Daphne Merkin has employed a steady stream of Ivy-educated elves. They’re tasked with everything from editing to returning dead houseplants. Bestselling novelist John Irving (The […]
The origins and the politics of the New York-based Freelancers Union—now 150,000 members strong: The shift toward short-term contracts was underway long before the 2008 financial crash. Charles Heckscher, director of the Center for Workplace Transformation at Rutgers University, sits on the board of the Freelancers Union, and likes to describe this shift in terms […]
