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Practical Survival

Where can you afford to live?  The Economic Policy Institute is a non-profit, non-partisan economic research organization that advocates for workplace rights and minimum wage laws. The EPI has developed a calculator to help you determine cost of living by entering information about your family size (number of adults and children) and county, state or metro area. Calculator figures either monthly or annual expenses and allows you to simultaneously compare different areas. This tool is especially helpful when you need to make a relocation decision.

Resources for Freelancers

Tools to help you with marketing and productivity

Where to find work, promote your business, and manage your finances  

More tools to make you more efficient and manage your money

Information on your self-employment taxes from the IRS

Workplace Rights

The National Employment Lawyers Association is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that is dedicated to workplace rights. Its attorney-members exclusively represent employees. The site has a wealth of information about your rights at work as well as tools to help you find a lawyer in your area that handles your particular legal issue. 

Other Worker Rights Groups

Other Books of Interest

Underemployment reviews the academic literature on this topic in the disciplines of economics and psychology. The authors conclude that underemployment is a persistent and pervasive problem about which we are only beginning to understand. Although Underemployment is academic, it is understandable for most adults who read at a college level. 

The Education-Jobs Gap is the result of a study of underemployed college graduates in late 1990s Canada. It is also readable for lay audiences. It tells the story of underemployment through both numbers and human stories from the underemployed. As Livingston ironically notes,  “the common response of so many people to conditions of their own underemployment is to seek still more education.” 

Lab Rats proposes that the despair of modern work is the result of four factors: the squeezing of worker wages, insecurity (which helps to suppress wage demands), constant change (which is compared to living inside a hurricane that never ends), and dehumanization.  Dan Lyons began this research after a less-than-two-year stint at the software startup HubSpot. Lyons places most of the blame for these negative workplace trends on Silicon Valley and high tech industries, but traditional businesses are starting to adopt many of the same practices.  In Lyon’s poignant analysis of modern work, you won’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Losing Your Job and Finding Yourself offers the hopeful suggestion that losing a job may actually be a good thing–a message that many who have been laid off or downsized need to hear when their self-esteem has been shattered. However, this is not the “Be Happy” platitudes that are designed to keep working people obedient and uncritical, but rather the practical realization that most jobs don’t serve us or even utilize our best strengths and talents.  Unconventional job search advice as well as blueprint for rebuilding your life into something better. 

Bait and Switch is Barbara Ehrenreich’s first-hand boots-on-the-ground story of her own experimental (and ultimately futile) job search in pre-Great Recession America. Her story corroborates findings from the research that employment data is biased toward the positive and fails to capture the real struggles of persons looking for decent work. In essence, the system is designed to make job-seekers feel like they are the failures and not the job market. 

Labor and Monopoly Capital is Harry Braverman’s foundational text on labor degradation theory. Labor degradation theory explains the how and why that jobs in almost every occupation are deliberately designed to be bifurcated into good jobs and bad jobs. This bifurcation permits both greater expropriation of profit while at the same time disempowers individual workers. Because most jobs are deliberately designed this way, there will always be more bad jobs than good jobs, thus raising the aggregate education level of workers does not necessarily result in better jobs. 

In Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs, Peter Cappelli suggests that overly prescriptive skill requirements and sorting algorithms that are purposely designed to eliminate too many job applications are the real reason employers can’t find “qualified” workers. Cappelli, a professor of management at the Wharton School of Business, is someone you would expect to be sympathetic to the needs of management over workers, yet he thoroughly debunks the skills gap alarmists who seem to have captured the jobs policy agenda. 

The End of Jobs proposes that the destruction of traditional, permanent jobs is actually a good thing because people will be more free to do the work they want to do, control their time, and construct a work life that is rewarding and meaningful. Suggests an alternative way of framing the “jobs problem.”

The Trap: Selling Out Just to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America argues that extreme bifurcation of the labor market creates a moral hazard. Daniel Brook tells personal stories illustrating the mental logistics exercised by basically decent individuals of various occupations as they are pressured by circumstance to compromise their personal values.

The Social Costs of Underemployment is another academic-oriented yet readable book about how underemployment hurts not just the underemployed, but also families and communities. It corroborates other empirical data and arguments that our employment statistics are not appropriately capturing and describing the problem.

David Kusnet’s Love the Work, Hate the Job and Richard Werre’s I Love My Work But I Hate My Job are both excellent non-economic descriptions of a newer form of labor degradation. In essence, it is not the work itself that is being deconstructed, it is the operation of systems that emphasize quantitative production at the expense of everything else, increasing precarity (even professional work is becoming more contingent and temporary), and the abuse of hierarchical power relationships.