Tag: jobs

California native Katya Cengel contemplates whether living in Ukraine prepared her for life in the South.

Government jobs helped thousands of Black families move into the middle class. Now, increasing calls for government privatization are pushing them back out.

What do you do when it’s your first day on the job and the patient can’t stop crying?

As a result of Trump-era immigration policies, fewer highly skilled and educated legal immigrants — like 26-year-old Akirt Sridharan from India — are being hired by U.S. companies, despite their qualifications.

This month’s books newsletter is all about things. As in stuff, objects. Because, as Heike Geissler says, “It’s because of all the things that are here… that you’re here in the first place.”

Paying attention to the Poor People’s Campaign.

A jobs guarantee is a messy, awkward, good idea.

David Graeber’s “Bullshit Jobs” and Alison Green’s “Ask a Manager” offer differing views — and some good advice.

Grieving after giving up on academic life.

Is any new job a good job? A look at Amazon’s warehouse jobs, where workers struggle to keep up.

What do you do when you’ve only got a G.E.D and your high-paying union job goes to Mexico?

After a shooting at Iowa State leaves him feeling inept at protecting his students, Chris Wiewiora becomes a campus bus driver instead.

There is an ‘I’ in quit.

“As we grow more reliant on applications and algorithms, we become less capable of acting without their aid.”

In 2008 I sold a book-in-progress for $200,000 ($170,000 after commission, to be paid in four installments), which still seems to me like a lot of money. At the time, though, it seemed infinite. The resulting book—a “paperback original,” as they’re called—has sold around 8,000 copies, which is about a fifth of what it needed […]

Stories about work.

Emily Perper is a word-writing human for hire. She blogs about her favorite longreads at Diet Coker. I read a brilliant piece, “Zen and the Art of Cover Letter Writing,” that reminded me that I had not yet featured the stories of those suffering under the yoke of this abusive economy. These are stories about […]

How the U.S. lost out on iPhone manufacturing work, and what it means for the future of job creation in the United States:  But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States? Not long ago, Apple […]

On modern manufacturing in the U.S. and the unskilled-skilled labor gap—with 92-year-old Standard Motor Products serving as a case study:  Across America, many factory floors look radically different than they did 20 years ago: far fewer people, far more high-tech machines, and entirely different demands on the workers who remain. The still-unfolding story of manufacturing’s […]

The parallels between the story of the origin of the Great Depression and that of our Long Slump are strong. Back then we were moving from agriculture to manufacturing. Today we are moving from manufacturing to a service economy. The decline in manufacturing jobs has been dramatic—from about a third of the workforce 60 years […]

In the weeks since the immigration law took hold, several hundred Americans have answered farmers’ ads for tomato pickers. A field over from where Juan Castro and his friends muse about the sorry state of the U.S. workforce, 34-year-old Jesse Durr stands among the vines. An aspiring rapper from inner-city Birmingham, he wears big jeans […]