This Labor Day, we were thinking a lot about the essential workers in our lives: both our close friends and family members, as well as the workers we interact with in our daily routines. This short diary comic by Chicana cartoonist Fifi Martinez captures some of the struggles that these workers continue to face.
Graduate students at the University of Michigan—one of the few universities in the U.S. with a grad student union—are on strike for safer working and learning conditions. Could it spark a strike wave among the vast number of university workers and educators without tenure?
In a completely discrete labor sector, it already feels like months have passed since NBA players (as well as a number of other league sports teams) refused to work during yet another wave of protests against police killings of Black people, when in reality it’s been fewer than two weeks. Greg Morton’s detailed history of labor struggles within the NBA is an absolute must-read that helped us understand the context of this historic strike.
This Twitter thread on the roots of online disinformation—and the Black women who were exposing them years before “fake news,” Pizzagate, or QAnon—provides an important perspective on whose work counts, and whose experience is considered expertise.
Longtime Texas-adjacent POME fave Anne Helen Petersen has a Substack newsletter, and this week’s Sunday/Labor Day edition ruminates on how the public’s worship of librarians in an austerity economy actually ends up pushing way more work onto librarians than is fair, or even possible.
If you’re spending a lot of time wondering why you keep feeling like you’ve been run over by a truck even though you haven’t been sick (and hopefully haven’t actually been run over by a truck), this Medium essay explaining surge capacity and ambiguous loss may help you understand why the pandemic makes us all so damn tired. Click through to solve the mystery, stay for some management tips that don’t feel too preachy or unrealistic.
Closing out with a visual of the energy we’re bringing to this week:
