News / labor
-
1 min read
The Richest School on Earth Just Waited Out Its Own Workers
Read more . . . →Harvard’s grad student union just ended the longest strike in its history — forty days on the line — and walked away with nothing. No contract. The raises they asked for, a real process for reporting harassment, protections for the non-citizen workers Harvard can punish just by doing nothing: all still “on the table,” which is the polite version of saying the table won. Eighty-one percent of members voted to go back, and not because anybody got what they came for. You can’t pay rent with principle, and a lot of these workers are on visas where one missed paycheck...
Subscribe →Weekly digestOne email per week with the tracks worth your time. No spam, no Coldplay. -
1 min read
They Named It a 'Jobless Boom' Out Loud
Read more . . . →Economists came up with a name for 2026 and said the quiet part straight into a microphone: the “jobless boom.” Corporate profits are sitting at the highest share of the economy since 1950. Workers’ share of what they actually produce just hit the lowest point since the government started counting in 1947. The 500 biggest companies grew earnings 28% last quarter. The seven tech giants grew theirs 63%. And they’re spending that money to fire you. Meta’s own internal memos described its May layoffs as a way to “offset the cost of AI investments” — corporate for: we swapped your...
Subscribe →Weekly digestSundays. One email. Zero ballads from white guys in beanies. -
1 min read
Fire 290 People, Then Wave a Million Dollars at the Survivors
Read more . . . →ClickUp just cut 290 people — 22% of the company — and the CEO announced it on X like he was shipping a feature. Zeb Evans calls the new structure a “100x org”: roughly 3,000 internal AI agents that now outnumber his remaining humans three to one. The money saved by firing nearly a quarter of the staff doesn’t go back to customers or get banked for a rainy day. It goes to the people who survived the cut, in the form of salary bands that climb to a million dollars a year in cash. Get laid off, or get...
Subscribe →Weekly digestWhat you missed this week, minus the corporate emo. -
1 min read
Salesforce Replaced the Engineers. The Salespeople Are Fine.
Read more . . . →Salesforce didn’t hire a single engineer last year. Not one. Marc Benioff — $145 billion company, personal net worth north of $10 billion — stood up and told the world that AI handles the coding now, so why pay humans to do it? Productivity’s up 30%, he said, clearly pleased with himself. Zero new engineers in fiscal year 2026. That’s the headline he volunteered. That’s the thing he thought was worth bragging about. But here’s what he made sure to mention in the same breath: sales is booming. Nearly 20% more salespeople hired. Because someone still needs to walk into...
Get the tee →Support the blogSome shirts are statements. This one is a verdict. -
1 min read
No Tax on Overtime. Also No Overtime.
Read more . . . →The Big Beautiful Bill is bragging about “no tax on overtime.” Zero percent tax on overtime pay — a real thing they announced as a worker win. What they didn’t announce, in the same breath, is that the Department of Labor just proposed a rule making it dramatically easier to call your employees “independent contractors.” Independent contractors don’t get overtime. They don’t get minimum wage. They don’t get workers’ comp or unemployment. There’s no tax on overtime when there’s no overtime to tax. This isn’t an accident. The rule rolls back Biden’s 2024 contractor classification protections — the rule that...
Get the tee →Support the blogMade for people who left the room during Yellow. -
1 min read
Fired on a Promise
Read more . . . →A Harvard Business Review survey of over 1,000 executives found something that should probably be front-page news: companies aren’t laying off workers because AI replaced them. They’re laying off workers because AI might replace them someday. That’s the deal now. You didn’t lose your job to a machine — you lost it to a PowerPoint slide about a machine. 113,863 workers in tech and adjacent industries are out in 2026 so far. 819 a day. Meanwhile CFOs are privately admitting AI layoffs will run 9x higher than what they’re telling the public. The productivity gains they promised haven’t materialized —...
Get the tee →Support the blogIf you wear this and someone hugs you, that's a real friend. -
1 min read
LIRR Workers Are on Strike and Good for Them
Read more . . . →3,500 Long Island Rail Road workers walked off the job at midnight, shutting down the country’s busiest commuter rail for the first time in over 30 years. The MTA offered 9.5% over three years. The workers asked for 16% over four years to keep up with inflation. Everyone’s going to tell them they should feel bad about this. The MTA runs on a $21 billion annual budget. It took a full service shutdown to get wages taken seriously. These workers went thirty years without striking, kept the trains running through the pandemic and every fare hike that followed. The city...
Get the tee →Support the blogLooks like Helvetica. Sounds like a closing argument. -
1 min read
Walmart cut 1,000 corporate jobs and pretended it wasn't about AI
Read more . . . →Walmart is the largest employer on earth and they just cut about a thousand corporate jobs in product, design, and tech. The internal memo was co-signed by the exec who runs “AI acceleration.” The memo somehow forgot to mention AI. They called it “platform consolidation,” which is the new corporate way of saying we bought software that does your job and we’re hoping you don’t read the news. The tell is what they’re still hiring for. Cashiers. Stockers. Warehouse pickers. The salaried middle gets the slide deck and a flight to Bentonville if they want to reapply for their own...
Get the tee →Support the blogThree words. One opinion. Cotton. -
1 min read
$725 Billion for AI, Severance for Everyone Else
Read more . . . →Coinbase just fired 700 people — 14% of its staff — and CEO Brian Armstrong described it as “building an intelligence, with humans around the edge.” Humans around the edge. You’re no longer a worker. You’re a decorative border on a product. Big Tech collectively committed $725 billion to AI this year — Amazon $200B, Microsoft $190B, Meta up to $145B — while burning through 80,000 workers in Q1 alone. Human salaries are the one cost flexible enough to cut fast enough to fund the buildout. Oracle made workers train the AI that replaced them. Not as a metaphor. They...
Get the tee →Support the blogWhat if your laundry was also a personality? -
1 min read
The Ghost of Spirit Airlines
Read more . . . →Spirit Airlines is gone. Not “restructuring,” not “emerging stronger” — actually gone. Yellow planes parked in the Mojave, gates absorbed by Delta and United, flight attendants told to file unemployment claims via a QR code on the breakroom wall. The closest thing America had to a working-class national carrier just bled out in bankruptcy court while everyone pretended this was inevitable. It wasn’t. The DOJ blocked the JetBlue merger to “protect competition,” which sounded reasonable right up until competition turned out to mean letting hedge funds peck at Spirit’s bones for two years until the carcass collapsed on its own....
Get the tee →Support the blogShips in 3–5 days. The outrage ships immediately.