| Most private-sector employees in the United States work under what are called at-will employment contracts, which means that they can get fired at any time without explanation or cause. Not to be dramatic about it, but this describes a fairly tyrannical set of circumstances: In exchange for showing up to work every day and doing whatever it is you do, your boss promises you essentially nothing in return. There’s no stability, no real means to plan for the long term, no guarantee that you’ll have your employer-sponsored health insurance at the end of a given month. It’s a bad situation, and one that millions of people find themselves in every day.
This unilateral power of the boss also tends to conceal all kinds of terrible behavior, buffing out the edges of racism, sexual harassment, and transphobia until you might be able to squint and call them something like “culture fit” or “attitude problems.” This leaves a lot of people in a position where they’re pretty sure they were mistreated or fired for reasons that are ostensibly illegal, but the burden of proof and cost of entry on a given legal challenge is generally too high for most people. (Aimee Stephens, whose case before the Supreme Court affirmed that sexual orientation and gender identity are protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, waited seven years for her case to wind its way through the courts and did not live to witness her historic victory.) |
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| So when I think about the precarity and danger most people face at work, either because of who they are or the things they say or believe, this is what I think of: at-will employment, contract work, nebulous “permalance” jobs that offer no real protections even as they closely resemble full-time gigs, institutional policies and non-disclosure agreements that prevent workers from speaking out about the conditions of their labor. But an open letter published in Harper’s this week that was ostensibly about exactly this—media and academic institutions meting out “swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought”—had nothing to say about the most common means through which marginalized workers are punished by their bosses. What a tell! A truly disqualifying omission, particularly coming from well-compensated and thin-skinned columnists at legacy publications and a millionaire many times over. I can’t bring myself to write any more about the letter or its bad-faith regurgitations about “cancel culture.” Just read Osita instead, whose clarity on the subject—presciently published a day before the letter itself—should be the last thing anyone needs to say about it, but life is never that fair.
Goodbye to this week!
—Katie McDonough, deputy editor |
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Reproductive Coercion Wins at the Supreme Court
While we’re on the subject of the tyranny of bosses, the high court has just handed them a new way to make invasive decisions for you. As Melissa writes, “While this may still appear to be another chapter in the culture war, it is, more accurately, a strategy to deny people in the United States full bodily autonomy. That’s always been the fight.” |
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Trump’s Reopening Agenda Has Upended International Students’ Futures
Felipe De La Hoz spoke with a bunch of students whose lives have been thrown into more uncertainty and chaos by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which announced a rule change earlier this week that would force students whose institutions have gone online-only in the fall to either transfer schools or leave the country. “A lot of the discussions I’ve been having with people are like, ‘What are the actual timelines? Is there going to be an injunction, is this going to go the same way as the Muslim ban?’” one student told him. “Do we have months to years, or are we packing up right now?’” |
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Kill the Tipped Minimum Wage
As Bryce Covert lays out, the tipped minimum wage—just $2.13 an hour under the Fair Labor Standards Act—was impossible for many workers to live on before the pandemic. But as Covid has essentially vaporized the restaurant industry, the realities faced by servers and other tipped workers have become that much more dire. “This has been the most frustrating and scary time for me,” a woman working at a bar in Michigan told Bryce. “We have zero control.” |
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| I loved reading my colleague Megan Evershed on collapsing time, both in grief and in a pandemic. “This idea—that grief initiates a new shaping—speaks to the way time loses its ordinary mold during periods of bereavement,” she writes in her consideration of the novel Scorpionfish by Natalie Bakopoulos and the poetry collection Obit by Victoria Chang. “Under grief’s influence, Chang writes, ‘Time is enlarged, blurry.’ Mira, in Scorpionfish, echoes her: ‘Since my parents had died everything blurred together.’ Normal signposts for hours and days are uprooted, obliterated.” |
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