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+24 +3
Efficiency up, turnover down: Sweden experiments with six-hour working day
A trial of shorter days for nurses at a Gothenburg care home is inspiring others across Scandinavia to cut back, but the cost of improving staff wellbeing is high
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+25 +5
Corporate mindfulness is bullsh*t: Zen or no Zen, you’re working harder and being paid less
Mindfulness matters, but make no mistake: Corporations are co-opting the idea to disguise the ways they kill us
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+21 +3
What's It Like to Work at a Company With No Bosses?
Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, the online shoe and clothing store, lives in a trailer park in downtown Las Vegas. The Airstream Park, as it's called, occupies about half a city block, surrounded by a tall fence crowned with barbed wire and punctuated with palm trees. When I arrived in April, Adirondack chairs, picnic tables, and a colorful assortment of portable seating encircled a pair of fire pits.
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+23 +4
European country rules against smoking weed in lunch breaks - but watching porn is OK
Employees cannot be sacked for watching porn during their lunch breaks if it does not impact upon their ability to do their work, Italy’s highest court has ruled. According to Italian media reports, the Court of Cassation ruled against major car manufacturer Fiat after it sacked a factory worker in Termini Imerese, a town in Sicily. Bosses had caught the man watching adult films at work, but he argued that his viewing was limited to...
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+22 +1
Being Hung Over at Work Costs the U.S. $77 Billion a Year
Drinking too much has well-known personal costs—headaches, nausea, and regrettable 4 a.m. text messages. The Centers for Disease Control has put a figure on how much it costs the American economy: $249 billion. That includes spending on health care as well as the economic toll of lost productivity, car crashes, crime, and deaths attributable to excessive alcohol consumption.
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+14 +4
How to Make a Country Rich
If you were setting out to make a country rich, what kind of mindsets and ideas would be most likely to achieve your goals? We invent a country, Richland, and try to imagine the psychology of its inhabitants.
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+39 +7
The Life and Death of an Amazon Warehouse Temp
What the future of low-wage work really looks like.
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+29 +2
Secret CIA documents show the 9 best ways to annoy your boss
Your annoying colleagues might actually be CIA spies, according to recently-released documents from the US agency. A previously secret document titled “Simple Sabotage Field Manual: Strategic Services” details the various ways that spies should work to bring down companies that they are placed in. But the sabotage techniques sound very similar to those encountered in many offices today.
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+23 +3
Life and death under austerity
In times of economic trouble, governments can choose to cut public services to save money. But at what cost? Mary O’Hara meets those on the sharp end of austerity in the UK to find out what it means for mental health.
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+33 +7
The history of the eight-hour working day
In 1890, the US government began tracking workers' hours. The average workweek for full-time manufacturing employees was a whopping 100 hours. Seventy-five years ago, on October 24, 1940, the eight-hour day and 40-hour workweek became standard practice in a range of industries. It was a long, drawn-out battle between workers and government officials. We take a look back at the history of the 40-hour working week, as well as how it's evolved in the last few years:
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+23 +2
Calling it a day: 72-year employee of Gadsden's Goodyear plant retires
"Mister Sid" has finally called it a day. Sidney Richardson, 90, retired last week from Gadsden's Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. plant, 72 years after he was hired. Richardson was the longest-serving hourly Goodyear employee for the corporation worldwide. More than 9,000 employees have been hired at the plant since Richardson, as attested by his time clock card - No. 0912. New employee cards have passed the 10,000 mark. He was the only remaining employee with a "zero" number.
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+19 +2
With “Convoy,” tech billionaires build another castle at another narrow in the stream
Founders of Amazon, eBay and Uber join forces to "disrupt" the trucking industry. with the goal of doing to the trucking industry what Uber has done for taxis. Here's what that means. By Mark Ames.
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+26 +1
Why The New Economy Really Is A Social Economy
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+35 +8
Large Companies Game H-1B Visa Program, Costing the U.S. Jobs
Critics say a program meant to help American firms hire foreigners with special skills is instead being dominated by outsourcing companies that move jobs offshore. By Julia Preston.
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+8 +1
The Strange, True Story of How a [Partner] at McKinsey Made Millions of Dollars off His Maid
In 2009, Anil Kumar was arrested for his role in a lucrative insider-trading ring. That was not his biggest crime. By Nilita Vachani.
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+20 +2
How to Minimize Procrastination
3 Learning Lists. By Emil Wallnér.
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+29 +4
'Poverty pay' leads Walmart employees to skip lunch – or steal it from coworkers
Walmart employees are so poor that they are skipping lunch, sharing it or, in some cases, stealing it from their coworkers, some of the company’s workers claimed on Thursday while announcing a fast in protest of the company’s wages. Starting Friday morning, over 100 Walmart associates who are members of Our Walmart, a workers organization, and about a 1,000 supporters will begin a fast to shine light on what they describe as Walmart’s “poverty pay”.
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+25 +1
The Simple Technique To Fit A 40-Hour Workweek Into 16.7 Hours
This incredibly simple time management system changed my workday. By Chris Winfield.
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+18 +5
Mr. and Mrs. B
When Alexander Chee was a struggling young writer, working as a cater-waiter for William F. and Pat Buckley.
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+19 +4
One journalist’s journey from ESPN to shining shoes
For the bulk of his professional life, Jeff Bradley has spent his summers at a Major League ballpark. He had high-profile beats covering baseball for ESPN The Magazine and the Newark Star-Ledger. But last summer was different. Since being let go by the Star-Ledger Bradley worked as a clubhouse attendant at a country club near his home in New Jersey. He shined shoes, vacuumed the carpet and kept the bathrooms clean.
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