“Could the Pandemic Wind Up Fixing What’s Broken About Work in America?”
“Historically, major crises have tended to empower workers. The coronavirus is already changing things, for better and for worse.”
Category: Uncategorized
Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace
At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)
The discussion about the [mostly failed?] solidarity between the professional managerial class and the working class is especially interested!
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What is Work during a Pandemic?
Work in the Time of Coronavirus
As the coronavirus pandemic spreads across the world and across the United States, as we are all told to practice “social distancing,” we are reminded that the way we work has everything to do with how we interact as humans and how infections spread through society. In our return episode after our February break, we discuss the spread of coronavirus, what it’s meant for healthcare workers, gig economy workers, the rich, and other frontline employees, what it says about the climate crisis, and more.We also hear from Debra L. Ness, President of the National Partnership for Women and Families, about the need for paid sick days.
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We Can [Still] Do It!
RIP Original Rosie the Riveter
A daughter of privilege who worked on an assembly line during World War II, she became a principal benefactor of public television, her name intoned on a host of programs.
“The Concept Creep of Emotional Labor” (Atlantic Monthly)
“One of the biggest shifts is that much of the conversation about emotional labor has left its original sphere of the workplace and moved to the home. It’s been used to refer to everything from keeping mental to-do lists to writing Christmas cards to remembering to call your in-laws on their birthdays, and to express indignation that most of these things, most of the time, are done by women, without men realizing it. There’s no doubt that the unpaid, expected, and unacknowledged work of keeping households and relationships running smoothly falls disproportionately on women. But that doesn’t make it emotional labor. Organizing to-do lists and planning family Christmases are just labor.”
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Emotional Labor + Gender Equality
.More Gender Equality at Work vs. Less Gender Equality at Home?
“A study finds broad support for gender equality, but a disparity in people’s views of gender roles in public and private…”
“For years there were these more urgent obstacles of class to navigate before I could afford the luxury of parsing my sexuality. Now that I’m a writer, now that I’m a professor, now that I’m 37 and still happily single — the fact that I’m gay is one of the least queer things about me.”