When the Workday Never Really Ends When the Workday Never Really Ends
Flexible scheduling is creating an on-call nightmare for working people.
Oct 15, 2014 / Blog / Michelle Chen
If Airport Ebola Screening Makes You Feel Safer, You Should Know What Workers Are Saying If Airport Ebola Screening Makes You Feel Safer, You Should Know What Workers Are Saying
Some airport workers have not been trained on handling exposures which could put them at risk of Ebola, hepatitis B and HIV infection.
Oct 12, 2014 / Blog / Michelle Chen
Supreme Court Case Shows How Amazon Legally Cheats Workers Supreme Court Case Shows How Amazon Legally Cheats Workers
Amazon’s relentless cost-cutting hits workers hardest.
Oct 10, 2014 / Blog / Michelle Chen
Fighting Hong Kong’s Inequality Crisis Fighting Hong Kong’s Inequality Crisis
Though the territory’s street protests have largely died down, the pro-democracy movement proved it was in for the long haul.
Oct 8, 2014 / Editorial / Michelle Chen
‘Welfare-to-Work’ Has Failed, So New York City Is Trying Something New ‘Welfare-to-Work’ Has Failed, So New York City Is Trying Something New
Human Resources Administration announces changes to a system long critiqued by advocates.
Oct 8, 2014 / Blog / Michelle Chen
Are New York’s Sex Workers Getting Their Fair Day in Court? Are New York’s Sex Workers Getting Their Fair Day in Court?
The courts want to offer sex workers “compassion”—but maybe agency would be more useful.
Oct 6, 2014 / Blog / Michelle Chen
At Least 2,500 Migrants Have Died Trying to Reach Europe This Year At Least 2,500 Migrants Have Died Trying to Reach Europe This Year
In the face of Europe's reinforced borders and continued neglect, thousands of refugees are drowning at sea.
Oct 3, 2014 / Blog / Michelle Chen
10,000 Workers Strike in Support of Hong Kong’s Protests 10,000 Workers Strike in Support of Hong Kong’s Protests
Can the protests go beyond calls for greater electoral transparency, to embrace a truly social democratic agenda?
Oct 1, 2014 / Blog / Michelle Chen
Minority Report Minority Report
Sometimes it feels like we’re living in an era in which information has finally become “free”—unlimited media access, twenty-four-hour wellness tracking, endless dating possibilities. But there’s nothing inherently progressive about Big Data. A new report shows that when Big Data creeps into our workplaces and our financial lives, it may simply create new ways of reinforcing old racial and economic injustices. The report, “Civil Rights, Big Data, and Our Algorithmic Future,” by the think tank Robinson + Yu, notes that technological advances, the declining cost of data storage, and the intensified surveillance climate of post-9/11 America have spurred massive data collection. This accumulation of private information by corporations and government has created troubling new issues in the areas of labor rights, privacy and ethics. Consider the influence of Big Data on hiring practices. Hiring algorithms are often seen as an “objective,” meritocratic assessment, free of irrational prejudice or biases. But the report warns that because “[d]igital indicators of race, religion, or sexual preference can easily be observed or inferred online,” the mining of social media and Google-search data can reinforce systemic discrimination. The result may be a perpetuation of an unjust status quo: disproportionately white, upper-class, elite-educated and culturally homogeneous. Sloppy résumé scans end up excluding people based on superficial criteria—where they live, for example, a metric bound to reflect already-existing housing discrimination. Big Data manipulation allows these subtle individual slights to be expanded to new orders of magnitude with monstrous efficiency. Since the algorithm reflects social patterns, researcher David Robinson tells The Nation, “any time someone is the victim of old-fashioned human discrimination, that discrimination is likely to be reflected in some of the data points that these new algorithms measure. Culturally speaking, there is a real tendency to defer to decisions that come from computers—which means if we’re not careful, it is reasonable to expect that computers will sanitize biased inputs into neutral-seeming outputs.” Read Next: David Auerbach on data profiling and microtargeting
Oct 1, 2014 / Editorial / Michelle Chen
Federal Affirmative Action Guidelines for Construction Haven’t Been Updated in 30 Years Federal Affirmative Action Guidelines for Construction Haven’t Been Updated in 30 Years
Why are we setting diversity goals based on the 1980 census?
Oct 1, 2014 / Blog / Michelle Chen