A new era for WAW

Welcome back to Words About Work, a newsletter that I have put on hiatus one-too-many times in the last year, lmao. Between the rigors of my staff job and my subsequent layoff (sigh), severance negotiations, and quick move back to LA, I have been swamped with distractions that made writing next to impossible. I have posted some breaking news threads to my Bluesky in the interim, but those are only one small piece of the work that I do, and I rarely, if ever, get paid from such work. I do it because it's important, however, and will continue to do that type of reporting for as long as I do this job, but this newsletter is really meant to be the main vehicle for much of my work.

With that in mind, here's what to expect from me over the coming months:

Unemployed in America: A New Series

Tomorrow, the first installment of my new series, Unemployed in America, will be going up on the site and to your inboxes. Here's what you can expect from this weekly series:

Two weeks ago, I put out a call on social media for folks who have been experiencing under- or unemployment to send me a message. Having just recently experienced a layoff myself, the once-foreign experience of having been shoved off a cliff into uncertainty became suddenly very real. It was a clarifying experience, one that many of us have had the misfortune to explore for ourselves. We all see the statistics on social media, or hear of X-number of people being rendered obsolete in news headlines--1000 employees laid off from MajorCorp, Merger in the works--but what about the human cost of these slash-and-burn policies?

Social media is awash with the desperate voices of the chronically unemployed--spreadsheets full of hundreds of applications sent, months spent looking daily for something, anything, that can help them pay the bills; unemployment checks barely covering rent, SNAP benefits drying up, and the deeply felt crisis of confidence when capable, smart, enterprising workers of all ages are suddenly stricken from the payrolls.

According the numbers, unemployment rates appear very low; anecdotally, however, workers across this country have struggled mightily to find gainful employment in an economy that seems incapable of pulling itself back from the brink. Social media is awash with the desperate voices of the chronically unemployed--spreadsheets full of hundreds of applications sent, months spent looking daily for something, anything, that can help them pay the bills; unemployment checks barely covering rent, SNAP benefits drying up, and the deeply felt crisis of confidence when capable, smart, enterprising workers of all ages are suddenly stricken from the payrolls.

My hope with this series is to share these voices with my readers. There is a human cost to the crisis that is unfolding across the United States, spurred on by this fickle administration, and the administrations before it. By shedding some light on the people who are currently attempting to find their way out of it, I hope to add something meaningful to the conversation. This series will likely become a multimedia series, with written, audio, and video versions of installments coming in the next few months.

You can expect those installments to hit your inbox every Wednesday.

If you would like to share your story with me for this series, please get in touch. I'll repost the call for voices here:

Are you one of the thousands who were laid off this year? Have you been on the job market for months without so much as an interview? Were you forced to rebuild your life around an unemployment check? I’d love to talk to you for a new series of stories I’m working on. Send me a DM/Signal/email.

Last Week in Labor, Version 2.0

The weekly labor digest will be back up and running by Friday. In the interest of making that digest more accessible to all, I will be introducing an audio recording of each week's list of headlines starting right around mid-August. Subscribers can expect to see that included on future posts within the coming weeks.

I have a few ideas about how to create more of a multimedia version of the digest, but those are barely formed and I won't make any promises until I've worked out a plan for such a project.

Monthly round-ups of my recent reporting

At the end of each month, I'll be putting together a monthly round-up of my recent reporting, as a way to keep track of what I've been doing, where. In addition to this newsletter, I also intend to rebuild my freelance career, so you'll have to watch my socials for new pieces coming out across the digital media ecosystem. (Or wait for the monthly round-up, if that's what you prefer, lol).

New, paid subscriber-only posts and content

There is, as I always intended, a solid chunk of work that I write here that will always remain free to access. The digests, my round-ups, and other reporting will never be paywalled in the interest of informing my readership. I would hope that my readers will still see the value in supporting that work, and choose to subscribe or donate to this project, as it quite literally helps me pay my bills. I don't have the benefit of any institutional backing to keep my work running at this juncture, and the media industry is just as a saturated with wonderfully talented people competing for too-few jobs as anywhere else. I'm grateful that I have a platform like this to put my work, however.

With that being said, I am working on projects, newsletter posts, opinion pieces, and many other things, that I want to paywall as a special thank-you to my paid subscribers. Perks of sending me the little bit of cash you have to spare to help me continue working. I am in the beginning stages of developing a podcast, as well; early episodes, bonus episodes, and other fun things will go out first to subscribers before being released publicly. I'm still in the early development stages of that podcast, but keep an eye out, you should see some updates in the coming months.

In the meantime, I hope that what I've been working on over the last couple months is worth a subscription. It means so much to me that folks think my work is worth paying for, I'll never get used to that feeling.

Anyway, there's the update.

Thanks for your support and solidarity,

Mel B.

Featured image taken by Sean Beckner-Carmitchel, Independent MMJ. Follow his work here, here, and here.