[NJFAC] worker reaction to insecure employment

'It felt like the Hunger Games had started': Employees are 'loud working' in an effort to secure their jobs

By Madison Hoff , Jacob Zinkula ,and Juliana Kaplan

It's time to get loud about work.

After the era of quiet quitting — workers showing up, doing their jobs, and not much beyond that — the job market's pendulum has shifted. Job-hopping is harder; layoffs feel like a constant threat even as mass job cuts haven't yet hit the bulk of the economy.

And for the employees who now feel more stuck in place, some are now "loud working" — trying to ensure their work is visible and gets noticed. They hope that showing off to their bosses and colleagues will help them get promotions and avoid layoffs.

Other people are "loud working" by focusing on building their personal brands online — showcasing their work rather than letting it speak for itself. Some hope that in an uncertain economy, visibility will improve their career prospects — and help them dominate LinkedIn or other platforms' algorithms.

Vicki Salemi, a career expert with the jobs site Monster, said that loud working can involve making sure that holding on to one's current job doesn't lead to stagnation. Salemi said employees have to be more visible and be more vocal about their achievements, rather than just keeping their heads down and focusing on completing tasks.

"Leaving may feel risky, so workers may concentrate more energy on demonstrating their value internally where they already are," she said.

Working louder, not harder

Abhinav Bohra, an applied scientist at Amazon, said one strategy that he believes helped him earn multiple promotions at the company was learning to "read what the room wants."....

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June Zaccone
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[NJFAC] Solution to America’s Care Crisis: Employee ownership

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/worker-coops-elder-care-dementia/ The Dignifying Solution to America’s Care Crisis:  Employee ownership turns care work jobs into good jobs—and leads to better patient outcomes. Excerpt: Even in this politically polarized time, worker ownership is embraced by people across the political spectrum as a solution to unprecedented wealth inequality. Nearly three-quarters of all respondents (including 74 percent of Democrats, 72 percent of Republicans, and 67 percent of independents) in a national survey said they would rather work for an employee-owned company than for shareholders or the government. “Americans disagree about a lot of things, but this is not one of them,” says Joseph Blasi, the director of the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, one of the most enthusiastic backers of co-ops and employee stock-ownership plans (ESOPs) in Congress, is the lead sponsor of the Employee Ownership Financing Act, which would create a loan program to expand financing options for workers seeking to buy the businesses they work for. At a Senate committee meeting last year on employee ownership, while talking about ways to make the formation of ESOPs easier, Ohio Republican Senator Jon Husted said, “ESOPs are one of the most virtuous forms of capitalism in America.” Still, Adria Scharf, a researcher who works with Blasi at Rutgers, cautions that “we can’t overburden the worker-cooperative structure and expect it to solve all the systemic problems.” Indeed, increased public funding will be key to addressing America’s care crisis. The last significant effort to transform the funding landscape was in 2021, when President Joe Biden proposed the Build Back Better bill, which would have stabilized and strengthened the home-care sector. As the sector now waits for another big push at national reform, local efforts show what is possible. “These precious organizations are just hidden in the shadows, and they are so different,” Scharf says. “They’re so beautiful.” Peggy Powell knows that cooperatives represent a tiny fraction of the larger sector, but she doesn’t see scale as the only measure of significance. “Coming out of working-class roots, coming out of roots where you know you have very little control over many things in your life…putting one foot in front of the other is the victory,” she says. Her daughter Adria is still fighting for full-scale transformation. “We need access to capital, technical assistance, co-op-friendly policy, robust and strong cooperative networks, and investment in leadership and development pipelines for workers and worker-owners in the cooperative sector,” she says. “Worker-owned home-care service delivery in the US,” she adds, “is the cornerstone of a far more equitable and caring economy.” I'm sharing this from The Nation: The Dignifying Solution to America's Care Crisis

Thanks to a GoodJobs member for this article. jz

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[NJFAC] New jobs in 140 years of data: Why the AI displacement fear is overstated

New jobs in 140 years of data: Why the AI displacement fear is overstated — and what to worry about instead

William Skoglund  Jakob Molinder   Kerstin Enflo 18 Sep 2026

Forecasts of AI-driven job destruction rest on counting automatable tasks. But labour markets hire, pay, and fire whole occupations, not tasks – and occupations have proved far more durable than task exposure implies. Drawing on 140 years of Swedish census and register data, this column shows that roughly seven in ten workers today are in occupations whose core functions already existed in the late-nineteenth century. The mass-unemployment fear is overstated; the subtler question is whether today’s technological wave still generates the durable, specialised new work that earlier ones did.

....

This is not a Swedish peculiarity. Replicating the approach on US data, we find that occupations new since 1940 account for only about 9% of 2019 employment. That sits in apparent tension with Autor et al. (2024), whose title-based ‘new frontiers’ approach attributes a majority of current US employment to specialties introduced since 1940. The gap is methodological: their measure infers employment from the share of new micro-titles, whereas ours counts the people actually in each occupation. Tellingly, when Autor et al. (2026) move to person-level census data, the picture shifts decisively toward persistence – they find 18.3% of workers in 2011–2023 employed in work introduced since 1970, far below the title-share estimates and much closer to ours. Measured in people rather than titles, the occupational structure is old.

....

Where Durable New Work Actually Comes From

If occupations persist, where does new work come from? To understand this, we consider two distinct sources. Some new occupations are Schumpeterian – created directly by a new technology (electricians, computer programmers). Others are Smithian – created by the division of labour as markets grow and organisations get more complex (accountants, specialists, logistics workers).1 The general merchant of the colonial economy splits into shopkeepers, brokers and bankers not because trade is new, but because scale makes finer division of labour pay (Chandler 1978).

The crucial finding is that durable, well-paid employment accumulates overwhelmingly on the Smithian side. Smithian occupations are far more likely to survive: in our data, more specialised occupations are roughly half as likely to fall into decline, whereas occupations born in the most recent technological waves are several times more likely than incumbents to vanish – the punch-card operator being the textbook case. (It is membership in a recent technological wave, not a high ‘technology score’ as such, that carries the elevated risk.) The mechanism is a chain: technology creates scale, scale creates specialisation, and specialisation creates durable labour demand. We argue that the Schumpeterian sector raises productivity and enlarges the market but the employment it ultimately underwrites appears mostly elsewhere; as Smithian specialisation within enduring functions. This is also why the displacement fear might be overstated. The historical record shows that despite significant automation and technological change, occupations are strikingly persistent. And economic growth can still fuel the expansion of new Smithian jobs.

....

What It Means for the AI Debate

So the genuine question is not the one dominating the headlines. It is not whether AI will displace workers from tasks – occupations, the unit the market prices, have historically repeatedly absorbed that kind of shock. It is whether the current technological wave will still do what earlier waves did: generate enough productivity and scale to spin off durable, specialised, well-paid new work. Earlier general-purpose technologies reliably converted innovation into broad employment through the division of labour. The digital wave, so far, has not visibly repeated the feat.

....

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June Zaccone
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[NJFAC] The Dignifying Solution to America's Care Crisis [and good jobs]

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/worker-coops-elder-care-dementia/ The Dignifying Solution to America’s Care Crisis:  Employee ownership turns care work jobs into good jobs—and leads to better patient outcomes. Excerpt: Even in this politically polarized time, worker ownership is embraced by people across the political spectrum as a solution to unprecedented wealth inequality. Nearly three-quarters of all respondents (including 74 percent of Democrats, 72 percent of Republicans, and 67 percent of independents) in a national survey said they would rather work for an employee-owned company than for shareholders or the government. “Americans disagree about a lot of things, but this is not one of them,” says Joseph Blasi, the director of the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Employee Ownership and Profit Sharing. Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, one of the most enthusiastic backers of co-ops and employee stock-ownership plans (ESOPs) in Congress, is the lead sponsor of the Employee Ownership Financing Act, which would create a loan program to expand financing options for workers seeking to buy the businesses they work for. At a Senate committee meeting last year on employee ownership, while talking about ways to make the formation of ESOPs easier, Ohio Republican Senator Jon Husted said, “ESOPs are one of the most virtuous forms of capitalism in America.” Still, Adria Scharf, a researcher who works with Blasi at Rutgers, cautions that “we can’t overburden the worker-cooperative structure and expect it to solve all the systemic problems.” Indeed, increased public funding will be key to addressing America’s care crisis. The last significant effort to transform the funding landscape was in 2021, when President Joe Biden proposed the Build Back Better bill, which would have stabilized and strengthened the home-care sector. As the sector now waits for another big push at national reform, local efforts show what is possible. “These precious organizations are just hidden in the shadows, and they are so different,” Scharf says. “They’re so beautiful.” Peggy Powell knows that cooperatives represent a tiny fraction of the larger sector, but she doesn’t see scale as the only measure of significance. “Coming out of working-class roots, coming out of roots where you know you have very little control over many things in your life…putting one foot in front of the other is the victory,” she says. Her daughter Adria is still fighting for full-scale transformation. “We need access to capital, technical assistance, co-op-friendly policy, robust and strong cooperative networks, and investment in leadership and development pipelines for workers and worker-owners in the cooperative sector,” she says. “Worker-owned home-care service delivery in the US,” she adds, “is the cornerstone of a far more equitable and caring economy.” Thanks to a listserv member for forwarding this post. jz I'm sharing this from The Nation: The Dignifying Solution to America's Care Crisis

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[NJFAC] rising "functionally unemployed"

The official jobless rate is so low the Fed thinks the economy is at full employment. But a gauge of the ‘functionally unemployed’ keeps climbing Fortune

....

The official unemployment is so low that Federal Reserve policymakers see it as a signal the economy is at or near full employment. Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh said as much during his speech in Jackson Hole, Wyo., on Friday.

As a result, the Fed's attention is now fixed on fighting inflation, instead of the other part of its dual mandate, namely supporting the labor market.

 

But the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity doesn't have such a rosy view on the workforce. It has a True Rate of Unemployment that measures the "functionally unemployed," who include the jobless, those involuntarily working part-time, and those earning a poverty wage.

That score saw its fourth consecutive increase in July, contrasting with the official jobless rate that has been steadily declining this year. The share of the labor market that's functionally unemployed is now at 24.9% and has climbed 1.3 percentage points since March.

Similarly, LISEP's measure of the percentage of the working-age population not functionally employed—including those who dropped out of the labor force—hit 53.8%, up 0.8 percentage points since the start of the year.

"Functional unemployment is moving higher while workforce participation is moving lower. If this continues, it would suggest the labor market is losing strength despite what we may see in the headline unemployment numbers," LISEP Chairman Gene Ludwig said in a release on Aug. 20."

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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[NJFAC] more than one-third of U.S. workers are "disposable"

Concierges, adjunct professors, potato chip tasters: US employers are relying more and more on ‘disposable’ workers Paul Osterman August 11, 2026

When I leave my Boston condo every day, I say good morning to the concierge, who works for a contracting company providing staff to residential buildings. When I conduct an interview in a nearby building, the people who clean that office at night are contractors. The person who serves me my lunch sandwich is a part-timer with no career prospects in that job.

When my best intentions to eat well are for naught and I gorge on Doritos, I remember that the tasters PepsiCo hires to test the chips’ addictiveness are contractors.

These are all examples of what I call “disposable jobs.” People who have them work at an employer’s site, but their employer makes no commitment to them regarding career prospects or job security. My research shows that employers treat more than 1 in 3 U.S. workers as disposable. That comes to just under 57 million full- or part-time workers out of the nation’s workforce of 162 million.

I am a labor economist. In my new book, “Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment,” I explain why this is happening, what forms it takes, how common it is, what the consequences are for people and for society, and what can be done about it.....

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June Zaccone
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[NJFAC] Necessary new jobs decline with shrinking labor force

The labor market could become so backward that the economy will have to shed jobs to keep unemployment steady Jason Ma, Fortune, 8/1/26

...a report from Dallas Fed economists earlier this year found that the breakeven rate of employment growth, or the number of net new jobs needed each month to keep the unemployment rate steady, actually went slightly negative during the summer and fall of 2025.

That means payrolls can be stagnant or shrink, and the unemployment rate will hold steady instead climb. Such a phenomenon may not be an anomaly but instead become the norm.

On Thursday, Oxford Economics estimated the breakeven rate is currently about 50,000 new jobs per month, down from more than 200,000 in 2022 and 2023, when immigration surged.

But with Trump returning to the White House, restrictive immigration policies have slashed the supply of foreign-born labor over the past year and a half. Separately, labor force participation has fallen as the population ages.

As a result, the breakeven rate will fall to zero next year and turn slightly negative in 2028, according to economists Matthew Martin and Bernard Yaros.....

AND MORE ON THE LABOR MARKET:

We Are Mildly Horrified by This AI Startup That Coerced People Into Getting Tattoos of Its Logo in Exchange for a Job Interview  "If you're reaching out to us to apply for a job, you might want to take notes."  Joe Wilkins, Futurisn, Aug 1, 2026

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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