#Labor and Jobs

[10bmnews]

Can More Military Spending Revive an Economy? This British Town Hopes So.

On a wet Wednesday morning in April, Ashley Holroyd had a steady but slow stream of customers into his coffee shop in Barrow-in-Furness, an industrial town in northwest England. The cafe, Coffee D’Ash, had been open for only about six months, and it barely filled the cavernous space. Despite the empty storefronts on the same street, Mr. Holroyd is certain he has a prime location. BAE Systems,…

[lavendermaelk]

im getting laid off!

the multi-billion (multi-trillion?) dollar shit hole of a tourist attraction decided that it doesn’t want to pay 10 people to give the company a reported 22 million dollar sum of ad revenue. Right before we were going to get folded into the existing union contract here.

I might be writing more, i might finally learn how to drive now that i don’t have an obligation to work for assholes rn. we’ll see.

[youthchronical]

Trump’s Large-Scale Layoff Plans So Far: What to Know

Resignations. Retirements. Firings. And now large-scale layoffs, as agencies faced a Thursday deadline to turn in their plans for executing the next phase of President Trump’s goal of significantly reducing the government payroll. Agencies were given guidance and a timeline last month to submit outlines for “reductions in force” — a bureaucratic term meaning shrinking of an organization. Many…

[comme-des-chatons]

Technology should be allowed to revolutionize every field.

[continent-of-wild-endeavor]

Job interview tip I got from a tiktok but it's genius:

If you were unemployed for a while, they're going to ask if you can explain the gap in your resume. Unless you were actually doing something cool & relevant, this is hard to answer in a way that makes you sound like a good corporate cog. So here's the best and infallible answer -

No you cannot, because you signed an NDA.

You now sound mysterious, desirable, worldly, experienced. They can't even really ask you more about it! Perfect.

[jcmarchi]

Has remote work changed how people travel in the U.S?

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/has-remote-work-changed-how-people-travel-in-the-u-s/

Has remote work changed how people travel in the U.S?

The prevalence of remote work since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic has significantly changed urban transportation patterns in the U.S., according to new study led by MIT researchers.

The research finds significant variation between the effects of remote work on vehicle miles driven and on mass-transit ridership across the U.S.

“A 1 percent decrease in onsite workers leads to a roughly 1 percent reduction in [automobile] vehicle miles driven, but a 2.3 percent reduction in mass transit ridership,” says Yunhan Zheng SM ’21, PhD ’24, an MIT postdoc who is co-author of a the study.

“This is one of the first studies that identifies the causal effect of remote work on vehicle miles traveled and transit ridership across the U.S.,” adds Jinhua Zhao, an MIT professor and another co-author of the paper.

By accounting for many of the nuances of the issue, across the lower 48 states and the District of Columbia as well as 217 metropolitan areas, the scholars believe they have arrived at a robust conclusion demonstrating the effects of working from home on larger mobility patterns.

The paper, “Impacts of remote work on vehicle miles traveled and transit ridership in the USA,” appears today in the journal Nature Cities. The authors are Zheng, a doctoral graduate of MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a postdoc at the Singapore–MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART); Shenhao Wang PhD ’20, an assistant professor at the University of Florida; Lun Liu, an assistant professor at Peking University; Jim Aloisi, a lecturer in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP); and Zhao, the Professor of Cities and Transportation, founder of the MIT Mobility Initiative, and director of MIT’s JTL Urban Mobility Lab and Transit Lab.

The researchers gathered data on the prevalence of remote work from multiple sources, including Google location data, travel data from the U.S. Federal Highway Administration and the National Transit Database, and the monthly U.S. Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (run jointly by Stanford University, the University of Chicago, ITAM, and MIT).

The study reveals significant variation among U.S. states when it comes to how much the rise of remote work has affected mileage driven.

“The impact of a 1 percent change in remote work on the reduction of vehicle miles traveled in New York state is only about one-quarter of that in Texas,” Zheng observes. “There is real variation there.”

At the same time, remote work has had the biggest effect on mass-transit revenues in places with widely used systems, with New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, and Philadelphia making up the top five hardest-hit metro areas.

The overall effect is surprisingly consistent over time, from early 2020 through late 2022.

“In terms of the temporal variation, we found that the effect is quite consistent across our whole study period,” Zheng says. “It’s not just significant in the early stage of the pandemic, when remote work was a necessity for many. The magnitude remains consistent into the later period, when many people have the flexibility to choose where they want to work. We think this may have long-term implications.”

Additionally, the study estimates the impact that still larger numbers of remote workers could have on the environment and mass transit.

“On a national basis, we estimate that a 10 percent decrease in the number of onsite workers compared to prepandemic levels will reduce the annual total vehicle-related CO2 emissions by 191.8 million metric tons,” Wang says.

The study also projects that across the 217 metropolitan areas in the study, a 10 percent decrease in the number of onsite workers, compared to prepandemic levels, would lead to an annual loss of 2.4 billion transit trips and $3.7 billion in fare revenue — equal to roughly 27 percent of the annual transit ridership and fare revenue in 2019.

“The substantial influence of remote work on transit ridership highlights the need for transit agencies to adapt their services accordingly, investing in services tailored to noncommuting trips and implementing more flexible schedules to better accommodate the new demand patterns,” Zhao says.

The research received support from the MIT Energy Initiative; the Barr Foundation; the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister’s Office, Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise program; the Research Opportunity Seed Fund 2023 from the University of Florida; and the Beijing Social Science Foundation.

[trans-axolotl]

nothing makes me more insane than the phrase "selling your body" btw. like was i not also selling my body at every other job i've had where i had to be on my feet all day, lifting boxes, working in a warehouse, etc. why is it that sex work is uniquely labeled as "selling your body" while every other job is sorted into another category, no matter how much that job might have a physical impact on your body. lmao.

[raydhd]

[mandareeboo]

Listen being off your meds do be like that.

[rotzaprachim]

so much of the problem with the discussion of gender in fantasy (and historical and fantasy - historical) is that it assumes a very simplistic gender binary where Woman = sit inside all day and embroider in enormous floofy skirt / Men = stab things with stabby sword and I cannot highlight enough how that is such a TINY fragment of the jobs people of ANY gender actually held in the medieval era, even among the nobility

[eelhound]

"Scandinavian countries maintain what sociologists call 'low power distance' cultures, where extreme wealth disparities and conspicuous consumption are regarded with suspicion rather than admiration. Status anxiety still exists, but the structural features of the economy take the edge off, making it easier for other prosocial values to emerge. It becomes possible to locate the value of solidarity over competition, social cohesion over social rank, efficiency over theatrical displays of work commitment, and leisure over performance.

By contrast, the United States has a culture of competitive individualism fostered by our winner-take-all economic system. Here, things that might otherwise be considered entitlements are almost always commodities instead. Every element of a decent life, from health care to shelter to education, is sold on the private market. The richer the person, the higher the bid, the better the living. Relaxation is a failure to grow wealth, which is in turn a failure to live well. It’s a remarkable perversion: capitalism has actually weaponized the concept of 'the good life' against the notion of doing what we want with our time.

When essential components of a dignified life are collectively guaranteed rather than individually bought and sold, 'the good life' ceases to be a function of wealth or a reward contingent upon endless work. Instead, it becomes a baseline expectation rooted in human dignity and social citizenship.

The Scandinavian countries got this way through sustained class struggle. Workers’ movements wrested control of productivity gains from capital, refusing to accept that increased efficiency should only benefit shareholders and executives. Ending unnecessary toil requires expanding economic democracy, not just relying on market rationality."

- Meagan Day, from "We Shouldn’t Have to Work This Hard." Jacobin, 23 March 2025.

[captainjonnitkessler]

Spent four hours this afternoon doing unpaid labor for my union's women's committee, trying to promote an event for solidarity between workers. Posted it on my city's subreddit and the first four responses are people bitching that we used AI on the poster and are "stealing artists jobs" - a poster which was, again, created by a member of my union, unpaid on her own time, for a social media post. Because you know, if she hadn't used AI we would have spent hundreds of dollars paying an artist instead of using, like, a stock photo.

Could the anti-AI people focus. For like a second. On literally anything that matters.

[youthchronical]

Trump’s Large-Scale Layoffs Plans So Far: What to Know

Resignations. Retirements. Firings. And now large-scale layoffs, as agencies faced a Thursday deadline to turn in their plans for executing the next phase of President Trump’s goal of significantly reducing the government payroll. Agencies were given guidance and a timeline last month to submit outlines for “reductions in force” — a bureaucratic term meaning shrinking of an organization. Many…