What can the history of the temp-work industry teach us about the precarity of modern working life?
Tag: Labor
Public Thinker: Virginia Eubanks on Digital Surveillance and People Power
“We have to build against the legacy of inequality. Intentionally. We have to build our values into our design practices.”
Public Thinker: Astra Taylor on Democracy’s Long Crisis
“If we want democratic scrutiny, the demos must first have power.”
College Worth Fighting For
Professors are in a class struggle, a real fight that cannot be won with critique alone.
Gig Authoritarians
In 2015, Stephen Colbert asked cofounder and then CEO of Uber Travis Kalanick how the company’s heavy investment in driverless car technology squared with its purported “commitment” to its “driver ...
Public Thinker: Adolph Reed Jr. on Organizing, Race, and Bernie Sanders
Growing up in a family of politically engaged black intellectuals in the ...
“They Demolish Our Houses while We Build Theirs”
The West Bank’s central highlands harbor some of the best quality dolomitic ...
On the Absurdity of Ethical Capitalism
I worked two “jobs” during my first summer as a graduate student in Indiana. One involved telemarketing research, convincing people to answer telephone ...
“There Is a Scottsboro in Every Country”
When we speak about a future in which all black people in America can be free, it’s hard to picture how, exactly, that freedom might look. Many black communists ...
Tabloid War, Class War
Respectability is overrated. Or so said Gawker, the influential, controversial, and luridly entertaining news and gossip site that was forced to close in 2016. Covering stories that other media ...
Policing Backpage and the Backpages
We tend to think of the 21st century and its digitally-mediated, commodified, sexualized reality as a brave new world, but we’ve been here before ...
Martin Luther King Jr. and Workers’ Rights in Baltimore
In 1968, municipal sanitation workers angered by poor wages and dangerous working conditions . . .
Striking Resemblances
Kadin Henningsen, a graduate student and teaching assistant at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), went on strike this past February with 2,500 of his coworkers to protect their ...
The Big Picture: Violence and Free Speech
On August 11 and 12, white nationalists came to march in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I live and work. The rally exposed many things, among them some of the challenges that Trumpism poses for ...
The Big Picture: The Devastated House of Labor
American workers are heterogeneous politically, as well as racially, ethnically, and educationally. Unions are equally mixed. Some unions focus primarily on the narrow economic interests of their ...
Is Our Work Done?
The answer depends, of course, on our definition of work. I’m writing this late at night. It’s Sunday and I’ve cooked some soup, marked some exams. I hardly know what counts as work these days. The ...
The University and the Station: A Brontë Bicentenary in Taiwan
It takes a circuitous taxi ride winding up Lianhai Road to reach Taiwan’s …
Virtual Roundtable on
“Description in the Novel”
This roundtable on description in the novel took place on May 3, 2016, at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. Concluding the inaugural year of the Novel Theory Seminar, the ...
Workplace Romances
Do what you love. Most American 20- or 30-somethings have heard this helpful tidbit of career counseling at one time or another in the course of our lives. Like many adages, this one is dangerous: it ...
Who Builds Anything In This Country?
Colson Whitehead, you may have heard, has written a new novel. In The Underground Railroad, he has created a sympathetic protagonist, Cora, through whom readers can experience the surreal depredations of 19th-century …
