Thinking About Working #15
Written by Noah Leavitt, Director of the Career and Community Engagement Center
May Day edition
May Day offers an opportunity to examine the state of workers in late Spring 2023. (Perhaps consider this piece a bookend to the year’s first Thinking About Working: Labor Day Edition, when we explored the late summer 2022 jobs landscape and what lay ahead.)
Encyclopedia Britannica teaches us that “in 1889 an international federation of socialist groups and trade unions designated May 1 as a day in support of workers, in commemoration of the Haymarket Riot in Chicago (1886).” In reaction, “five years later, U.S. President Grover Cleveland, uneasy with the socialist origins of Workers’ Day, signed legislation to make Labor Day—already held in some states on the first Monday of September—the official U.S. holiday in honour of workers.”
Thus, in many parts of the world May Day is a significant celebration. Not so much in the United States, although many labor unions and other organizations supporting the rights of workers utilize the day to showcase the condition of workers in our country. (Occasionally, Whitman students have used May 1 to honor workers who help our college function smoothly. In 2013, FGWC President sophomore Ashley Hansack “was inspired to organize a May Day campaign by her memories of May Day celebrations in her hometown [Los Angeles].”)
When we look around at the state of workers in 2023, we quickly discover a complex and seemingly inconsistent reality:
- The always-insightful George Anders, Senior Editor at LinkedIn, recently posted that despite “nearly 10 million” open job positions in the United States, many employers are not able to bring in enough workers to fill positions.
- As a possible response, some states are looking at loosening up child labor laws, “even as federal officials and news investigations suggest that many minors working in manufacturing, meatpacking and construction jobs are being exploited or hurt” (April 18 USA Today). Just this morning, the news is filled with stories like this one about how the federal government, facing drastic worker shortages, is removing long-standing drug screening rules, something that would have been virtually unimaginable just a few years ago.
- Remote work has been good for some, but for new employees, especially women and minorities, it may prevent access to upward mobility, as this recent New York Times research describes.
- The strong economy this spring has helped often underrepresented sectors of the workforce. Last month Axios reported, “the labor market is seeing more equitable employment outcomes across racial groups than it has in years” and Reuters specified that the recent U.S. jobs report showed “Record-low Black unemployment.“ Yet, at the same time, colorism has insidious effects in the workplace, especially for women (Harvard Business Review) and feelings of being discriminated against, particularly because of one’s race, sex or age, correlates with a higher risk for developing high blood pressure according to the American Heart Association.
- Of course, there is hardly a professional sector that at some point this year (since we considered last September, in the words of Professor Janet Davis during Convocation, “whether AI will write your thesis.”) has not worried about robotization of work. Probably one of the greatest areas of challenge for workers has been the ability of algorithms to take over more and more responsibilities of the workforce, with increasing power and speed ahead. A recent headline—one of hundreds this spring with the same broad question: “Tinkering With ChatGPT, Workers Wonder: Will This Take My Job?“
- Speaking of writing and writers, Hollywood film and television writers could strike tomorrow if their demands aren’t met during contract negotiations with the industry’s largest production companies. According to CBC, the last time the writers’ union staged a strike in 2007–2008, it “ground television production to a halt.“
- Speaking of unions, right-of-center GIS describes American labor in decline, observing, “union membership in the U.S. is at the lowest rate in history, owing to forces including globalization, technology and the rise of the service sector,“ while left-of-center New York Times spotlights President of the American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten as “the most dangerous person in the world” because of her influence over school closures and culture wars, among other hot topics. (To be clear, the paper was quoting former CIA director Mike Pompeo.)
- Even our very own Walla Walla Union-Bulletin showcases the mixed messages, yesterday running a Bloomberg News story noting, “U.S. consumer confidence dropped this month to the lowest since July on more pessimistic views about the economic outlook, even as current conditions improved…” (italics added). In the print edition, immediately adjacent to that story is this one that finds “Walla Walla County unemployment is trending downward from earlier this year.”
- Close to home (and to campus), for new graduates looking to move right into the workforce, the situation seems fairly promising—not dire but also not the booming economy that analysts forecast several months ago. A recent CNBC story noted, “Employers plan to hire just 3.9% more college grads in 2023 than they did in 2022, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers spring job outlook. That’s down sharply from a projection of a 14.7% hiring increase when employers were surveyed in the fall.”
Yes, even with a job, all is not rosy this May Day. President Biden, in his statement last week proclaiming April 28, 2023, as Workers Memorial Day, first celebrated in 1970, stated, “We have more to do. For starters, the United States is still one of the only countries in the world that does not guarantee paid sick leave, forcing too many workers to have to choose between a paycheck and caring for a sick or injured loved one or for themselves.”
So, in many respects when it comes to conditions of employees, la lucha continua, in government, in workplaces, in the media, and in homes around the United States.
My colleagues in the Career and Community Engagement Center (CCEC) have done important work this year adding to our online resources so that new professionals can have a clear understanding of their rights in the workplace.
In closing, in the same way that in last year’s Labor Day column I encouraged readers to take the opportunity to invest five minutes in thinking about what the holiday means to you and what that answer means for your larger ideas about working, I invite you to similarly pause today to consider what kinds of rights and benefits you think workers deserve and whether you are considering workplaces that offer you those.
Stay tuned in two weeks for the final Thinking About Working of this year, Commencement Edition!
Here’s to a strong finish, everyone!