Washington Post
Washington Post
A potentially hidden benefit of large numbers of people working from home.
labor
Robin Rendle
Robin RendleBut really the baseline of web design is so low because there’s a lack of tenderness, care, and empathy. It’s because we don’t see the making of a website as a worthy profession. It’s because we hope to squeeze the last bit of juice from the orange by mulching people in between modals and pop ups and cookie banners.Harsh but fair. I don’t think this will improve as people expect automation to handle web design in the near future. Web development is a human process.
PetaPixel
PetaPixel“National Geographic will continue to publish a monthly magazine that is dedicated to exceptional multi-platform storytelling with cultural impact. Staffing changes will not change our ability to do this work, but rather give us more flexibility to tell different stories and meet our audiences where they are across our many platforms. Any insinuation that the recent changes will negatively impact the magazine, or the quality of our storytelling, is simply incorrect,” a National Geographic spokesperson told PetaPixel.The staff reductions will continue until flexibility (the reason people still buy paper magazines) improves.
The Verge
The VergeMost of the subreddits have pledged to go private — preventing outside access — for 48 hours, though some, like the 26 million-member community r/videos, have said they’ll remain private indefinitely.Volunteer labor isn’t an infinite resource. Reddit needs to maintain that resource with an imminent IPO, but it sounds like the current CEO doesn’t think it’s necessary.
See also: this summary by Cyber Yuki (click Show More).
Daily Beast
Daily Beast Coupled with the Writers Guild strike and the arguably reckless pace at which companies are willing to adopt a mostly unproven, experimental, and demonstrably harmful technology, the world seems to be falling headfirst into a labor struggle the likes of which it hasn’t seen in quite a while.The answers here are to vote for labor-friendly politicians and unionize. Good evergreen advice but also frustratingly vague for a specific looming threat.
API Evangelist
API Evangelist"This makes me wonder what it would be like if I decided to take all my API evangelism superpowers and unionize all of the public API developers out there and ask them to stop working for free. Do not sign up for any new APIs. Do not work for free. I don’t care how interesting an API is, your time is too valuable."The it’s just business! argument doesn’t ring true when companies expect free public work to build private value.
TIME
TIME"But the need for humans to label data for AI systems remains, at least for now. 'They’re impressive, but ChatGPT and other generative models are not magic – they rely on massive supply chains of human labor and scraped data, much of which is unattributed and used without consent,' Andrew Strait, an AI ethicist, recently wrote on Twitter. 'These are serious, foundational problems that I do not see OpenAI addressing.'"Warning: this article is disturbing. Companies shouldn't be able to cause people psychological damage to get funding.
CNN
CNN"The likelihood that Congress will impose a deal along the lines of the presidential panel’s recommendations, or the tentative agreements, means that management has little incentive to agree to union demands."Pretty wild that congress can just force a labor contract for rail workers. Knowing that congress will side with management means negotiating was never meaningful.
latimes.com
latimes.com"Not surprisingly, then, after Goldman Sachs demanded employees return full-time to the office, the company announced it would raise its starting pay for first-year analysts by nearly 30%. In this new era, if you want employees in the office full time, you have to pay for it."This is a positive development in work life especially with covid variant uncertainty. Being more distributed can also make an organization more resilient.
CBS News
CBS News"Based on her research on how many long COVID patients stop working or scale back their hours, Bach estimated that about 1.1 million workers have dropped out of full-time work due to long COVID at any given time, while about 2.1 million may have cut their hours due to their symptoms. All together, that equates to about 1.6 million full-time workers who are missing from the economy, according to Bach. "Astonishing numbers.
Washington Monthly
Washington Monthly"The main reason for the big increase in total wage and salary income is that 5,675,000 Americans who were unemployed when this year began had found new jobs by November. With support from the rounds of pandemic stimulus enacted in December 2000 and January 2021, the jobless rate fell from 6.3 percent last January to 4.2 percent in November, or by one-third over 11 months. Following the Great Recession, it took six years for the jobless rate to fall by one-third."Democrats can't get a message out. Even if all mass media outlets are owned by Republicans (they are) there should be a way to interrupt the media cycle with this kind of news. Instead we just hear about how terrible the economy is over and over.
wirecutterunion.com
wirecutterunion.com"Wirecutter continues to bring in record revenue for the Times, which is sitting on over $1 billion in cash. Yet our members have seen next to no financial benefit from their vital contributions to this success. Times management has offered paltry guaranteed wage increases of only 0.5%, despite soaring inflation and cash flows."I'm a big fan of Wirecutter and I'm sad that I won't be able to use the site this holiday season. It sounds like the people who produce it are not being fairly compensated for a stellar product.