The job is broken. Can we fix it? - News 24

“We often only begin to understand things after they have fallen apart. This is why, in addition to being a global catastrophe, the pandemic has been a large-scale philosophical experiment,” said Jonathan Malesic, author of The End of Burnout: Why Work Is Wearing Us Out and How to Build a Better Lifewritten in this month’s issue of Highlight.

What has collapsed, of course, is work, and what American workers, policymakers and employers can now see clearly are the countless truths the pandemic has laid bare: that productivity doesn’t really require a daily, air-polluting hour-long commute to a soulless place. downtown office building; that a fair and just society should not endanger the poorest and most vulnerable Americans in the name of capitalism; that the entire economy could simply be sustained by a rapidly shrinking sea of people – child care workers – earning around $13 an hour, with no benefits.

In this month’s Future of Work issue, Highlight and Recode have teamed up to explore the precariousness faced by workers for whom the Great Resignation has offered little in the way of increased power or security. We look beyond what is broken in their working lives, asking policy experts and workers themselves: what could make work better?

In our cover story, Rani Molla and Emily Stewart talk to those whose jobs, in this supposedly revolutionary time for workers’ power, haven’t changed for the better. For many who don’t have the luxury of working from home — farmers, food servers, truck drivers, teachers, home health aides, housekeepers, bank tellers and others — slightly higher salaries mask more difficult and dangerous working conditions which they believe will only continue into the so-called future of work.

The pandemic has also shown Americans just how much the economy depends on child care and how incredibly fragile this industry is. Turnover is high. Making ends meet is impossible. The very people who need child care to be able to work are often those who cannot afford it. Vox follows a caregiver through a joyful yet exhausting day to gain insight into the work that keeps other Americans doing their jobs.

Although Malesic has become a well-known voice calling for a work overhaul – he has called it “bad business” for many – he has discovered, perhaps surprisingly, that many Americans want to find meaning in their work, although this significance has recently come with stress and exploitation. In this issue, he explores what it would take to create a future in which we are not so dependent on work to live and instead can be freed to derive satisfaction from it.

In the past 50 years, perhaps no employer has transformed consumer expectations like e-commerce giant Amazon. These changes have also begun to alter the nature of work, not only for the 1.1 million people Amazon employs directly, but also for its vast network of contractors – and for people working for the many companies that want to imitate Amazon’s methods of creating its workforce. and hyper-efficient workflows.

Finally, the Future of Work issue examines Generation Z and their penchant for posting fearlessly about capitalism, labor and employer behavior online, and we ask journalist and author Eyal Press about the worst jobs exploiters of the country and on the complicity of the rest of us when others have to do our “dirty work” for us.