For Forbes, I dug into a disturbing trend: workers being asked to sign “Training Repayment Agreements” to repay the (putative, highly inflated, and sometimes completely fabricated) cost of their on-the-job training if they quit or are fired within a set time period. In some cases, the TRAs take 3 years or longer to expire, and can involve $70,000 or more in debt.
We need to do a better job of supporting parents, whether they’re working, in school, or taking care of children full-time.
At the federal minimum wage, paying for child care for one child would take the first 26 hours of wages in a 40 hour week (if it’s an infant, the first 32 hours of wages). All 50 states have some amount of federally-funded assistance to help parents afford child care, but in many states these programs have long wait lists, or have extremely limited eligibility. In Iowa, parents lose all assistance at 145% of the federal poverty line (an income of around $25,000 per year for a parent with one child). My piece for TalkPoverty explores what this means for children, parents, employers and the community.
In personal news, I’m now in Oregon. Tomorrow I’ll be heading to Crater Lake National Park. My next stops after that are Sacramento and then the Bay Area.
In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith imagined a pin factory with ten workers, and predicted that capital owners would be on the factory floor doing manual labor alongside their employees. Instead, Amazon packs thousands of workers into each of its warehouses, and some of those workers reportedly pee into plastic bottles for fear of getting disciplined if they “waste time” on bathroom breaks. Meanwhile, Jeff Bezos is a millionaire, 151,000 times over.
In my latest essay for The Outline, I talk about how the custom that job candidates should send thank-you notes to their interviewers fits into a long history of workers being placed socially and culturally beneath management.
This piece was a lot of fun to write. I’ve been very inspired by philosopher Elizabeth Anderson recently, and I’m excited to keep exploring her ideas.
In a recent working paper for the Federal Reserve of Boston, Anat Bracha and Mary Burke find that 26% of gig economy workers would accept a lower hourly wage to be able to work hours at a formal job instead of in the informal economy — even if the formal job didn’t come with benefits. While informal and ‘gig’ jobs are sometimes presented as offering greater flexibility and autonomy, Bracha and Burke’s findings strongly suggest that many would gladly ditch gig work in favor of greater predictability.
Their working paper also finds that the census districts with the highest rate of informal and gig labor force participation have the lowest rates of wage growth. One likely reason why? In places with a lot of gig workers, there are a lot of people who would like to work more paid hours — and that competition to find work drives wages down. Importantly, they find that wage growth is much more negatively tied to gig labor force participation in census districts than it is negatively tied to the unemployment rate.
All-in-all, their work suggests that our low “headline” unemployment rate of 3.7% may be misleading — people who would have previously been counted as unemployed now have more opportunities to pick up hours delivering food, driving passengers or walking dogs.
Obviously for many people, that’s better than not earning any money, but we’re probably not at “full employment” yet when so many people wouldn’t count themselves as “fully employed.” That may indicate the Fed is moving too quickly in raising rates.