THE LABOR ISSUE

And Pushing Back with Tact!

Welcome to Mess & Noise. Last time, I crowd-sourced ideas for saving the Democratic Party and whaddya know: AOC asked the same question a week later. If you’re new here, I also write about parenting in the attention economy, how grief is embarrassing, and why “overscheduling” your kids has become an economic necessity. Paid subscribers will receive an extra monthly letter beginning March 26.

In this issue

• What’s happening with college-educated workers & job seekers

• Business news for workers and consumers

• V1 of my new mini-book, Pushing Back with Tact: How to Disagree at Work, Get Along, and Get Things Done

It’s a weird time for workers. The professional managerial class has taken a beating since 2023 and the media refused to talk about it (presumably because of the election — what good that did!)

The prominence of ghost jobs, a third of Gen Z living with their parents, and most exquisitely this first-person account from a self-described Femcel who can’t get a job with her UCLA degree, all signal the bottom rung of the career track has fallen out too.

The same way consumer spending is concentrated in the upper 10% of U.S. incomes, the privilege of gainful employment is frothing to the top as well.

I’m not sure what happens from here but it doesn’t look great! Melanie Ehrenkranz launched Laid Off in August, a newsletter about — you guessed it.

Readership has already grown to 6,500. It’s an encouraging data point for independent writers, but a bitter reminder that we’re all independent now that we don’t have jobs.

My plane crash-style mosaic of people featured in Laid Off. (My design skills are worse than a plane crash.)

With the spectacle of Doge wiping out the federal workforce and private sector CEOs following suit in a circle jerk of “efficiency,” we probably haven’t reached the nadir of the knowledge worker recession yet.

Workers actually dropped the ball over the last decade-and-a-half, when business was more booming. Or rather, we fell for a con. Our original sin was failing to consider ourselves “labor” in the first place.

We were led to believe we’re ninjas or rockstars, high-performers, “very talented,” drivers — because we had college degrees and the natural energy of people in their 20s and 30s (plus Adderall prescriptions/Red Bull addictions). Therefore, we were better than the guy sitting next to us.

In pursuit of individual excellence, we relented our power as workers among workers and these tech CEOs got away with a lot.

Cory Doctorow articulated this in part two of his Enshittification speech last year. Five months after that prescient address, techno-feudalism and fascism have arrived, our rockstar work has been scraped for automation, and every industry’s been enshittified.

Luckily, these things go in cycles. Once the middle class is fully gutted there won’t be anyone to buy the shitty products sold through The Magnificent 7’s platforms.

The AI bubble will burst, and if the pattern of history holds, the vibe will be torches and pitchforks before there’s a period of regrowth and people get hired for email jobs again.

At that point you’ll be reminded of how lucky you are to be at work. You’ll receive implicit (or outright explicit) messages from your bosses about how many people would line up outside the door to take your brand strategist or junior engineer job if you get too greedy and ask for more. And when things get better and the job market tilts to the worker side, you’ll suddenly be anointed as an indispensable rockstar.

Then it will be easy to forget this absurd moment and attribute the positive turn to your personal grit and “high agency,” rather than forces beyond your control and dumb luck.

So here’s something to remember: your colleagues are not your competition. You’re part of a collective force — the only force that can stop founders/owners “from going bad” as Doctorow put it.

Don’t let that $11 Matcha Latte Life distract you — in this oligarchy, we’re all Johnny Lunchbucket and an organized workforce is our only hope for countering the political and economic disaster that’s mutating globally by the day.

On that note: Here’s a new book about pushing back at work!

I’m dangerous on Canva. Not in a good way.

I’ve been working on (but mostly off) this project for the past two years and V1 is finally done. I interviewed lots of people who informed the guide’s most important lessons: pushing for change in your workplace, advocating for your ideas, and handling conflict when it inevitably comes for you at work.

Many people I spoke to also read this newsletter, so thank you, thank you, omg, thanks.

I’m sharing this version first so anyone here can comment, ask questions, and ping me with feedback if they’re so moved. Once folks tell me what I missed or got wrong, I’ll release a revised PDF/eReader version to download. So let it rip, dear reader!

News & Recs

• Meet the world’s 24 super billionaires.

• GDP “flashes stunning negative indicator,” signaling an economy in reverse. I like how that headline makes it sound like the GDP was spotted on the red carpet wearing a glittering negative indicator!

• Mark Cuban offers to fund laid off 18F workers starting their own consulting firms. Mark, lemme tell you about content strategy!

• Amazon orders everyone back to the office but doesn’t have enough seating for them.

• Starbucks told all corporate employees to stay home and await news on whether they’re one of 1,100 workers being laid off.

• Tesla and SpaceX relied on undocumented workers just like the everyone else.

• Wells Fargo accused of preventing a union election.

• Meta fires 20 employees amid a memo leak investigation, after it announced layoffs to accommodate AI spending.

• Microsoft pulls back on AI spending.

• HP, GrubHub, and Autodesk laid off about 3,500 workers last week. That brings tech sector job losses up to 18,397 so far in 2025, according to Fast Company. It was 152,472 in 2024 and 264,220 in 2023.

📣 Shout-outs to new subscribers! 📣

Hellos and welcomes to Dawn U., Christie S., Lolly W., John J., Christine W., Frederick W., Andrew E., Tina H., Shy R., Charlotte S., Shastina F., and Alexa R.!

I posted a cranky note that brought a few folks over, but it’s a pretty good summary of what you can expect here:

That’s it for this one. Thanks for being here!