News / labor
-
1 min read
Obsolete Since 1980
Read more . . . →The Labor Department just repealed protections for migrant farmworkers that have existed since 1980. Forty-six years of requiring OSHA and the Wage and Hour Division to actually coordinate on enforcing the rights of the people who pick your food. Gone. The official reason: the rules are “obsolete” and don’t reflect “modern, effective, and flexible coordination models.” Which is a beautiful way to say nobody’s watching anymore. This takes effect September 30. One week from now, the already threadbare safety net for seasonal farmworkers gets thinner. These are people who work in 100-degree heat for wages most Americans would reject on...
Subscribe →Weekly digestOne email per week with the tracks worth your time. No spam, no Coldplay. -
1 min read
Your Frustration Has a Score
Read more . . . →Amazon built an internal system called “Atlas” that assigns every warehouse a score between 100 and 900. A hundred means workers are organizing. Nine hundred means they’re not. Machine learning models crunch daily sentiment data to predict which buildings will unionize next, sort them into tiers, and deploy what the company calls “empathetic listening” before anyone can get to a card signing. Your break room conversations are a signal. Your desire for a living wage is a risk metric on a dashboard in Seattle. Workers at the Staten Island JFK8 facility voted to form a union in April 2022. Four...
Subscribe →Weekly digestSundays. One email. Zero ballads from white guys in beanies. -
1 min read
Performance Review
Read more . . . →Record profits. The ottoman has a mortgage. Every earnings call uses the word “growth” like it grew itself. Somebody drew that line, and in this picture he’s the one with the bruises and a back that doubles as a coffee table. The whiskey glass alone costs more than his shift. The red in the chart is the same red on his shirt, and nobody in the room is going to mention that. The stock price does not have feelings. The footstool does.
Subscribe →Weekly digestWhat you missed this week, minus the corporate emo. -
1 min read
The Smallest Slice Since 1947
Read more . . . →Since 1947, the government has tracked how much of the economy goes to the people who actually do the work. This year it hit 52.8 percent, the lowest number in the entire dataset. Not during Reagan. Not during the 2008 crash. Not during COVID. Right now, with corporate pre-tax profits at $4.8 trillion in a single quarter. The economy is doing fine. Your cut of it isn’t. Elon Musk’s Tesla compensation last year came out to $158 billion, 2.5 million times what the median Tesla employee made. Two and a half million times. The S&P 500 has gained 600 percent...
Get the tee →Support the blogSome shirts are statements. This one is a verdict. -
1 min read
Twenty-Four Million and a Straight Face
Read more . . . →Wynn Resorts pocketed $2.22 billion in profit last year. Their Encore casino in Boston cleared $237 million on its own. CEO Craig Billings collected $24 million in compensation. And last week, 1,350 housekeepers, cooks, valet drivers, and cashiers walked out because the company decided a $10-an-hour raise spread over three years was asking too much. Three dollars and thirty-three cents a year. Then the company offered to fund their healthcare coverage out of that raise, so the raise just pays for what they already had. A $24-million man looked at his $237-million casino and told the people who clean the...
Get the tee →Support the blogMade for people who left the room during Yellow. -
1 min read
Your Face Is a Performance Review
Read more . . . →There is a nine-billion-dollar industry being built around technology that reads your face at work and decides whether you’re happy enough to keep your job. Emotion AI (cameras and software that analyze your expressions and tone of voice, and in some cases the electrical activity of your actual nervous system) is already deployed in hiring, training, and performance reviews across the country. Your employer can run a sentiment check on your face during a meeting the way they run a spell check on an email. Independent research found the tech is about 50 percent accurate. A coin flip. They built...
Get the tee →Support the blogIf you wear this and someone hugs you, that's a real friend. -
1 min read
Fifty-Three Cents
Read more . . . →The government started tracking how much of the economy goes to workers in 1947. In seventy-nine years of data, it has never been lower than right now. Labor’s share of GDP just hit 52.8 percent. Corporate profits, in the same quarter, hit $4.8 trillion. Both are records. One of them gets celebrated on earnings calls. The other one is you. Twenty years ago, workers took home almost 65 cents of every dollar the economy generated. Now it’s 53 and dropping. Wages since 2019 are up 3 percent adjusted for inflation. Profits are up 50. That’s not a rounding error. That’s...
Get the tee →Support the blogLooks like Helvetica. Sounds like a closing argument. -
1 min read
The Country That Invented Labor Day Is on a Watchlist Now
Read more . . . →The International Trade Union Confederation put the United States on its Global Rights Watchlist this year. First time ever. The category is “systemic violations of worker rights.” The ITUC represents 200 million workers across 169 countries, and they looked at a nation that stripped collective bargaining from over a million federal employees by executive order and said yeah, that belongs on the list. The same kind of list the US waves around when it wants labor provisions in a trade deal. The ITUC called it “perhaps the biggest act of union busting in the nation’s history.” Not one union. Not...
Get the tee →Support the blogThree words. One opinion. Cotton. -
1 min read
The Economy Lost 23,000 Jobs and Unemployment Went Down
Read more . . . →The U.S. economy shed 23,000 jobs in July and the unemployment rate went down. Not a typo. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that payrolls went negative and the rate “improved” to 4.1 percent, because 264,000 people left the workforce entirely. Stopped looking, stopped being counted. Labor force participation is at 61.4 percent, lowest in five years. The rate didn’t improve. The pool just got smaller. This is the number they’ll wave around. Four point one. Strong. Meanwhile average monthly job gains this year sit at 34,000. May’s numbers got revised down by 66,000 after the fact. June got...
Get the tee →Support the blogWhat if your laundry was also a personality? -
1 min read
Where ICE Goes, Jobs Go Too
Read more . . . →Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went on television this week and said the quiet part at volume ten: “Where ICE goes, rents go down.” That’s the sales pitch — deport your neighbors and your landlord might charge you less. What he left out: the economy lost 23,000 jobs in July. First negative payroll number in years. Healthcare hiring slowed to a crawl. Construction craters every time enforcement surges. For every six undocumented workers ICE pushes out of a community, one American-born worker loses their job too. That’s from economists studying payroll data in hundreds of cities. The jobs don’t get “freed...
Get the tee →Support the blogShips in 3–5 days. The outrage ships immediately.
