January
Chrome Daydream
Chrome stars, jelly hearts and holographic colour. A nod to the glossy, optimistic graphics of the early web.
News / labor
-
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...
Subscribe →Weekly digestOne email per week with the tracks worth your time. No spam, no Coldplay. -
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...
Subscribe →Weekly digestSundays. One email. Zero ballads from white guys in beanies. -
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...
Subscribe →Weekly digestWhat you missed this week, minus the corporate emo. -
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 blogSome shirts are statements. This one is a verdict. -
1 min read
You're Paying to Power the Machine That Replaced You
Read more . . . →Oracle fired 30,000 people in March to free up cash for AI data centers. No warning. Employees got termination emails at 6am from “Oracle Leadership” — not from their manager, not from HR — a mass email from the void telling them their role had been eliminated and today was their last day. The company needed $50 billion for server farms, and the fastest way to find it was to stop paying humans. Call it what it is: a cash grab with a body count. Here’s where it gets good. Those data centers need electricity — obscene amounts of it...
Get the tee →Support the blogMade for people who left the room during Yellow. -
1 min read
They Work 35 Hours a Month for Free and the Airline Called It a System
Read more . . . →WestJet flight attendants work 35 hours a month for free. That’s not a union talking point — that’s how the credit hour system actually works. The clock doesn’t start when they greet you at the door, stow your bag, do the safety demo, or sit on the tarmac for two hours because the plane hasn’t pushed back yet. It starts when the aircraft leaves the gate. Everything before that — boarding, delays, deplaning — is, according to WestJet, not work. They have a term for this. They call it “the standard pay model.” Four thousand four hundred flight attendants voted...
Get the tee →Support the blogIf you wear this and someone hugs you, that's a real friend. -
1 min read
They Put a Clock-In App on the People Who Defend You
Read more . . . →Public defenders are the people who stand between a broke stranger and a cage, for a salary that wouldn’t cover a Brooklyn one-bedroom. Brooklyn Defender Services just spent days on a picket line to claw back a little dignity, and their contract fight ended in a tentative deal on Tuesday. The Bronx Defenders are set to walk on July 27. Not over some fortune. Over a tracking app that makes them clock in and out like they’re suspected of skimming the register, and over a probation period where management can fire a new hire “for any reason.” Sit with “for...
Get the tee →Support the blogLooks like Helvetica. Sounds like a closing argument. -
2 min read
Microsoft Fired the People Who Make Your Games. On a Three-Minute Call.
Read more . . . →Microsoft just deleted roughly 3,200 jobs out of Xbox — about a fifth of the whole division — closed or spun off a handful of studios, and in Montreal it fired a dozen unionized developers at Bethesda over a three-minute video call where they weren’t allowed to ask a single question. Sit with that for a second. Not the 3,200. The three. The people who built the worlds a lot of us disappeared into for a thousand hours — Doom, Fallout, the games that got some of us through a couple of bad winters — got less time to absorb...
Get the tee →Support the blogThree words. One opinion. Cotton. -
1 min read
One Day Out, Four Days Locked Out
Read more . . . →Four thousand nurses at Brigham and Women’s walked off the job for exactly one day. Mass General Brigham locked them out for four. Read that again: you protest for a single shift over pay and staffing, and management’s answer is to bar the doors and tell you to come back Sunday. That’s not a labor dispute anymore, it’s a punishment, and it’s the clearest confession of who these people actually are that you’ll get all year. Here’s the part that should make your teeth hurt. The hospital says the nurses’ ask — roughly 7% over eighteen months, and please stop...
Get the tee →Support the blogWhat if your laundry was also a personality? -
1 min read
He Cut 4,000 Jobs and Called Them 'Heads'
Read more . . . →Marc Benioff went on a podcast and explained, out loud, in his own voice, that he cut Salesforce’s customer support team from 9,000 people down to 5,000 “because I need less heads.” Heads. Not workers, not colleagues — heads, the word you use for cattle, applied to the people who used to pick up when your software ate itself at 2am. He replaced 4,000 of them with AI agents and mentioned, like it was a fun fact, that support costs dropped 17 percent. Four thousand livelihoods rounded down to a line item, and the man delivering the news couldn’t even...
Get the tee →Support the blogShips in 3–5 days. The outrage ships immediately.