Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
On the opening day of Trump Plaza in Atlantic City in 1984, Donald Trump stood in a dark topcoat on the casino floor celebrating his new investment as the “finest building in the city and possibly the nation.” Thirty years later, the Trump Plaza folded, leaving some 1,000 employees without jobs. Trump, meanwhile, was on…
Entry Text NEW YORK — Carl Stubbs, 63, stood outside New York City Council chambers Wednesday in anticipation of the council’s vote on the Fair Chance Act — a bill that would delay when many of the city’s private sector employers can ask job applicants about their criminal history. “I feel [that] being black, having…
What it’s actually like to be a Black employee at a tech company My fingertips danced with delight as I frantically typed away at my computer. “I just saw a new Black person! Does anyone know who it is?” I circulated the email to the “Blackbirds,” Twitter’s internal group for Black employees. In my three…
For years, everyone involved with investing has wanted to know: When will the Federal Reserve raise interest rates? But there’s another important consideration that isn’t asked nearly enough: Can the Fed raise interest rates? That query is more than academic. With the US economy looking increasingly strong, some still think the Federal Reserve could act…
Colleges give prospective students very little information about how much money they can expect to earn in the job market. In part that’s because colleges may not want people to know, and in part it’s because such information is difficult and expensive to gather. Colleges are good at tracking down rich alumni to hit up…
This story first appeared on The Fiscal Times. When it comes to company loyalty, money matters to millennials. Twenty-nine percent of millennials say that a higher salary is the biggest contributor to their loyalty, according to data released Tuesday by the Staples Advantage Workplace Index. That compares to 20 percent of the overall workforce who place…
The unemployment rate is low by any historical standard at 5.1 percent. Businesses are complaining of worker shortages in industries like health care, construction and trucking. Household-name companies like Walmart and McDonald’s have announced increases to their pay for low-wage workers. Add those together, and it would seem to point to 2015 as the year…
If you know your argument that restaurant owners universally revile the idea of an increased minimum wage is complete bullshit, that’s still OK! You can just make shit up, as one of the main restaurant industry lobbyists recently did. Lobbyist-mercenary and aspiring Nazgul Richard Berman recently launched Faces of 15, a shill website devoted to…
Screenshot via financial icon Rihanna’s “Pour It Up” music video If you type “will millennials…” into Google, the first suggestion is “will millennials ever be able to retire?” It’s a question that trumps almost any other conversation about millennial life. We’re the generation least likely to be on track for retirement and most likely to…
Uber’s Travis Kalanick. Photo: Heisenberg Media/Wikimedia Commons An employment lawsuit against Uber can now proceed as a class action after a judge certified a class of 160,000 Uber drivers in California. Four drivers brought suit against Uber in 2013 alleging worker misclassification—according to them, they are employees of Uber, even if the company treats…