Working Life

Calling people “gig” workers is a subtle trap. “Gig” can sound anywhere from upbeat to just a mundane description. The truth is the “gig” economy is just another way of exploiting people and it’s a dream for all capitalists to have a pool of workers who can be used and abused at the beckon call […]

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It is quite something to hear the elites in Washington—especially Republican members of Congress and the menace in the White House—blather on about wanting to wait to see how well the previous, inadequate fiscal stimulus works before deciding whether to do anything else. That’s while tens of millions of people are in the streets, huge […]

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There is no way to downplay the risks to U.S. frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic—and I’ve dug into that in the past month or so, in our various segments talking about workers in health care, postal service, hog and poultry processing, airlines, rail, and subways. It’s dangerous and frightening—and it’s exponentially more terrifying when […]

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Here’s a little riddle: What has 157 million daily delivery points, 35,000 offices and 500,000 workers? It’s your U.S. Postal Service, that would be the service that really is a democratic, small “d”, institution—it’s there for everyone at a reasonable cost, no matter where you live or who you are. Putting it mildly, postal workers […]

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The dinner plates of millions of people are soon going to be an interesting place to focus the mind on the balance between the desire to fill bellies with protein—poultry and pork, mainly—versus the worthiness of peoples’ lives, specifically the lives of the workers who process the chickens and hogs in plants across the country. […]

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When we come out of the immediate pandemic crisis, then, maybe we can have some accounting of who and what is responsible for the needless deaths of thousands of people—and among the “who” would be, say, politicians who are making themselves look like heroes today—I’ll just say, randomly, New York politicians—even though they sat on […]

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The other night I was watching an episode of Season 3 of Ozark and there was a scene in which the mother, played by Laura Linney, walks out of a supermarket with her son, both of them pushing a shopping cart. My head went immediately to, without a thought: I hope they sanitized that bar […]

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 When I have snuck out briefly in the past couple of weeks to safely get a few items at the supermarket, I made sure to thank the workers in the aisles and my cashier for being on the job, and I also tell them be safe and careful. They are supremely vulnerable to getting […]

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Last week I asked everyone to consider the coronavirus pandemic as a pretty clarifying picture of class warfare—who are the people who get hurt most when millions of jobs go away or at best are in limbo because of a nationwide shutdown? It’s working people, minimum wage workers, service workers—almost none of whom have enough […]

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