The Way We Work Now

The Way We Work Now is a series chronicling how people’s lives and careers have fundamentally changed because of the pandemic.

Jacob Nguyen, 27, is a horticulturist for an interior landscaping company in the New York City area. He spoke with Mai Tran about tending to the indoor plants left behind in empty office buildings after employees moved to fully remote work.

I was doing plant care for about a year before the pandemic. Normally, I have a list of sites and offices I go to that are all located in one part of the city. I would check in…

For the past few decades, unions have been under attack. Thanks in large part to laws that undermine labor organizations and make it hard for workers to organize, unions have suffered steep membership declines (just 10% of Americans now belong to one). As a result, wages have stagnated for union and non-union members alike, and the income inequality gap has widened. That’s not to say interest has totally waned: Nearly half of Americans would like to be part of a union and have a voice on issues such as job security, benefits, and compensation.

Enter the Protecting the Right to…

Andrew Cuomo has never tried to hide who he is: The New York governor is a famous bully. He’ll publicly berate and scream at a reporter for asking a simple question about school closures. He’ll grab a female acquaintance by the face in front of cameras. His feud with New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has been called the nastiest and pettiest dispute in politics; at one point, Cuomo stuck de Blasio with a $485 million Metropolitan Transportation Authority bill just to make his rival’s life harder.

Stories from Cuomo’s early career tend to include the phrase “relentless personal vendetta”…

Ask someone about the worst job they ever had and you’re likely in for a story. A babysitting gig from hell. A Steinbeck-esque tale about toiling in a fish-canning factory. Workplace bullying. Sexual harassment. Safety violations. Unreasonable demands. Unpaid overtime.

I’ve had some bad jobs, but to be honest, I’m not even sure my worst job qualifies as a job since I didn’t get paid. In the most generous terms, I bartered my time for passage into higher education. In the harshest terms, you might call it indentured servitude.

College was sold to millennials as a necessity — the operative…

How I Got Radicalized

Welcome to “How I Got Radicalized,” a series from GEN that tells the story of a cultural moment that made you drastically rethink how society works.

I don’t remember the first time I encountered a stress ball, that timeless fidget tool, but I’ll always remember the one that I found in my parents’ basement late last year. It’s sitting beside me as I type, a squishy, blue-green orb the size of a tangerine. As a tireless tchotchke-hoarder kid, these little squishies were my favorite part of any back-to-school welcome package. In high school, they were the prized take-home freebie from…

The Way We Work Now

The Way We Work Now is a series chronicling how people’s lives and careers have fundamentally changed because of the pandemic.

Brian Kelly, 47, is an emergency responder for the Environmental Protection Agency and member of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 704 based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He spoke with Mai Tran about the shifting dynamic of working on environmental protections under the Trump administration compared to what Joe Biden proposes for his presidency.

I have been doing environmental work for 24 years, more than half my life; 18 of those years I have been working for the…

Past midnight, or at 2 a.m. on the weekends, our fast-food place closes its doors and we use the next hour to clean up and put everything back in its place. Recently, we got an additional task, sorting through the trash to meet new recycling requirements: plastic in the yellow trash can, food in the red one. “We grill burgers, not the Earth” was the gist of the initiative, an effort to address the fast-food industry’s impact on the planet.

We’ve been working overtime ever since. The stacking of task on top of task takes its toll. No amount of…

I was 16 when I got my first job at a McDonald’s in upstate New York. It was the fall of 2014; I was paid $8 an hour. It was around this time that I started thinking of my purchases in terms of time. A gallon of milk was around $3, slightly less than half an hour of labor. The cost of the average meal at McDonald’s was around $7, meaning that when a customer ordered a large Big Mac meal, they were spending what would take me just under an hour to earn. …