Tag: work

A woman who doesn’t feel like going to work today stays in bed and looks at the internet instead. She finds a blog by a fed-up call center employee who complains about the customers.

In Ling Ma’s “Severance” — a novel she began to write after getting laid off, while living partly on severance pay — the characters keep going to work, even though they know it’s the end of the world.

Can we imagine an economy built for free time?

What nurses’ unions can teach the Democratic Party.

Have technological advances left many of us with jobs devoid of meaning? Are we bullshit?

“Off-peakers” try to save time and money by avoiding a 9-to-5 schedule.

In the places I’ve worked, sexual harassment was identified as something that could destroy an organization. It was a story with consequences.

What do you need to do to have a consensual, romantic work relationship? The same things that make any workplace respectful and considerate.

Is it because we don’t want to, because we can’t, or is there something else at play?

Through my education I’d become a trusted source of specialized knowledge. But how could I become the kind of leader who is surrounded with people like me?

Why do we love reading about CEOs behaving badly? Perhaps it’s because we identify with their exhausted workers.

At Slate, Gabriel Thompson describes what it’s like to be a food-service worker at Levi’s Stadium at Super Bowl 50 — and explores the low-wage, part-time workforce of Silicon Valley.

After 300 years of breathtaking innovation, people aren’t massively unemployed or indentured by machines. But to suggest how this could change, some economists have pointed to the defunct career of the second-most-important species in U.S. economic history: the horse. For many centuries, people created technologies that made the horse more productive and more valuable—like plows […]

  In a 2009 paper for Administrative Science Quarterly, J. Stuart Bunderson and Jeffery A. Thompson studied zookeepers and found that the profession was about the closest anyone in the modern, secular world comes to having a calling—the sort of intensely meaningful career that Martin Luther said could turn work into a divine offering. Zookeeping is dirty, repetitive, […]

Salon workers describe a culture of subservience that extends far beyond the pampering of customers. Tips or wages are often skimmed or never delivered, or deducted as punishment for things like spilled bottles of polish. At her Harlem salon, Ms. Cacho said she and her colleagues had to buy new clothes in whatever color the […]

Along with wages and conditions, hours used to be a basic concern in worker organizing. During the heyday of the struggle over hours, in the century before World War II, the demand was always for fewer of them. The “Lowell Mill Girls” agitated for a 10-hour day, and the Haymarket strikers wanted to get down […]

Before the Civil War, the clerk was “a small but unusual phenomenon.” By the end of the 19th century, clerical workers were a social force to be reckoned with. This is the story of their rise.

In Bloomberg Businessweek, Claire Suddath reports that there are only two countries in the world that don’t have some type of legally protected, partially paid leave for working women who just had a baby: Papua New Guinea and the U.S. The result is another big gap between the haves and have-nots: The policies vary widely […]

It’s not just the workers who get a lousy deal. Over the years, Bob Baber, the Quiznos franchisee, became increasingly frustrated by the terms of his contract. One of the issues that galled him the most was that Quiznos was allowed to (and did) place additional sub shops in his franchise area, creating what he […]

“Many young poets have come to me and asked, How am I gonna make it?”

Warren believes that the two-income family has contributed to the bankruptcy rate. “For middle-class families, the most important part of the safety net for generations has been the stay-at-home mother,” Warren and her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, wrote in “The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke” (2003), a book aimed at […]

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 […]