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    How TV Writing Became a Dead-End Job

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    The writers say Hollywood studios are increasingly limiting their roles in television productions, highlighting a trend for white-collar workers.For the six years he worked on “The Mentalist,” beginning in 2009, Jordan Harper’s job was far more than a writing gig. He and his colleagues in the writers’ room of the weekly CBS drama were heavily involved in production. They weighed in on costumes and props, lingered on the set, provided feedback to actors and directors. The job lasted most of a year.But by 2018, when he worked on “Hightown,” a drama for Starz, the business of television writing had changed substantially. The writers spent about 20 weeks cranking out scripts, at which point most of their contracts ended, leaving many to scramble for additional work. The job of overseeing the filming and editing fell largely to the showrunner, the writer-producer in charge of a series.“On a show like ‘The Mentalist,’ we’d all go to set,” Mr. Harper said. “Now the other writers are cut free. Only the showrunner and possibly one other writer are kept on board.”The separation between writing and production, increasingly common in the streaming era, is one issue at the heart of the strike begun in May by roughly 11,500 Hollywood writers. They say the new approach requires more frequent job changes, making their work less steady, and has lowered writers’ earnings. Mr. Harper estimated that his income was less than half what it was seven years ago.While their union, the Writers Guild of America, has sought guarantees that each show will employ a minimum number of writers through the production process, the major studios have said such proposals are “incompatible with the creative nature of our industry.” The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of Hollywood studios, declined to comment further.SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union that went on strike last week, said its members had also felt the effects of the streaming era. While many acting jobs had long been shorter than those of writers, the union’s executive director, Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, said studios’ “extreme level of efficiency management” had led shows to break roles into smaller chunks and compress character story lines.But Hollywood is far from the only industry to have presided over such changes, which reflect a longer-term pattern: the fracturing of work into “many smaller, more degraded, poorly paid jobs,” as the labor historian Jason Resnikoff has put it.In recent decades, the shift has affected highly trained white-collar workers as well. Large law firms have relatively fewer equity partners and more lawyers off the standard partner track, according to data from ALM, the legal media and intelligence company. Universities employ fewer tenured professors as a share of their faculty and more untenured instructors. Large tech companies hire relatively fewer engineers, while raising armies of temps and contractors to test software, label web pages and do low-level programming.Over time, said Dr. Resnikoff, an assistant professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, “you get this tiered work force of prestige workers and lesser workers” — fewer officers, more grunts. The writers’ experience shows how destabilizing that change can be.The strategy of breaking up complex jobs into simpler, lower-paid tasks has roots in meatpacking and manufacturing. At the turn of the 20th century, automobiles were produced largely in artisanal fashion by small teams of highly skilled “all around” mechanics who helped assemble a variety of components and systems — ignition, axles, transmission.By 1914, Ford Motor had repeatedly divided and subdivided these jobs, spreading more than 150 men across a vast assembly line. The workers typically performed a few simple tasks over and over.For decades, making television shows was similar in some ways to the early days of automaking: A team of writers would be involved in all parts of the production. Many of those who wrote scripts were also on set, and they often helped edit and polish the show into its final form.The “all around” approach had multiple benefits, writers say. Not least: It improved the quality of the show. “You can write a voice in your head, but if you don’t hear it,” said Erica Weiss, a co-showrunner of the CBS series “The Red Line,” “you don’t actually know if it works.”Ms. Weiss said having her writers on the set allowed them to rework lines after the actors’ table read, or rewrite a scene if it was suddenly moved indoors.She and other writers and showrunners said the system also taught young writers how to oversee a show — essentially grooming apprentices to become the master craftspeople of their day.But it is increasingly rare for writers to be on set. As in manufacturing, the job of making television shows is being broken down into more discrete tasks.In most streaming shows, the writers’ contracts expire before the filming begins. And even many cable and network shows now seek to separate writing from production. “It was a good experience, but I didn’t get to go to set,” said Mae Smith, a writer on the final season of the Showtime series “Billions.” “There wasn’t money to pay for me to go, even for an established, seven-season show.”Showtime did not respond to a request for comment. Industry analysts point out that studios have felt a growing need to rein in spending amid the decline of traditional television and pressure from investors to focus on profitability over subscriber growth.In addition to the possible effect on a show’s quality, this shift has affected the livelihoods of writers, who end up working fewer weeks a year. Guild data shows that the typical writer on a network series worked 38 weeks during the season that ended last year, versus 24 weeks on a streaming series — and only 14 weeks if a show had yet to receive a go-ahead. About half of writers now work in streaming, for which almost no original content was made just over a decade ago.Members of the Writers Guild of America have been on strike since May.Mark Abramson for The New York TimesMany have seen their weekly pay dwindle as well. Chris Keyser, a co-chair of the Writers Guild’s negotiating committee, said studios had traditionally paid writers well above the minimum weekly rate negotiated by the union as compensation for their role as producers — that is, for creating a dramatic universe, not just completing narrow assignments.But as studios have severed writing from production, they have pushed writers’ pay closer to the weekly minimum, essentially rolling back compensation for producing. According to the guild, roughly half of writers were paid the weekly minimum rate last year — about $4,000 to $4,500 for a junior writer on a show that has received a go-ahead and about $7,250 for a more senior writer — up from one-third in 2014.Writers also receive residual payments — a type of royalty — when an episode they write is reused, as when it is licensed into syndication, but say opportunities for residuals have narrowed because streamers typically don’t license or sell their shows. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers said in its statement that the writers’ most recent contract had increased residual payments substantially.(Actors receive residuals, too, and say their pay has suffered in other ways: The streaming era creates longer gaps between seasons, during which regular characters aren’t paid but often can’t commit to other projects.)The combination of these changes has upended the writing profession. With writing jobs ending more quickly, even established writers must look for new ones more frequently, throwing them into competition with their less-experienced colleagues. And because more writing jobs pay the minimum, studios have a financial incentive to hire more-established writers over less-established ones, preventing their ascent.“They can get a highly experienced writer for the same price or just a little more,” said Mr. Harper, who considers himself fortunate to have enjoyed success in the industry.Writers also say studios have found ways to limit the duration of their jobs beyond walling them off from production.Many junior writers are hired for a writers’ room only to be “rolled off” before the room ends, leaving a smaller group to finish the season’s scripts, said Bianca Sams, who has worked on shows including the CBS series “Training Day” and the CW program “Charmed.”“If they have to pay you weekly, at a certain point it becomes expensive to keep people,” Ms. Sams said. (The wages of junior writers are tied more closely to weeks of work rather than episodes.)The studios have chafed at writers’ description of their work as “gig” jobs, saying that most are guaranteed a certain number of weeks or episodes, and that they receive substantial health and pension benefits.But many writers fear that the long-term trend is for studios to break up their jobs into ever-smaller pieces that are stitched together by a single showrunner — the way a project manager might knit together software from the work of a variety of programmers. Some worry that eventually writers may be asked to simply rewrite chatbot-generated drafts.“I think the endgame is creating material in the cheapest, most piecemeal, automated way possible,” said Zayd Dohrn, a Writers Guild member who oversees the screen and stage master’s degree program at Northwestern University, “and having one layer of high-level creatives take the cheaply generated material and turn it into something.”He added, “It’s the way coders write code — in the most drone-like way.” More

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    U.S. Economy Adds 209,000 Jobs in June as Pace of Hiring Cools

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    Hiring slowed last month, a sign that the Federal Reserve’s inflation-fighting campaign is taking hold. But with rising wages and low unemployment, the labor market remains resilient.The U.S. labor market showed signs of continued cooling last month but extended a two-and-a-half-year streak of job growth, the Labor Department said Friday.U.S. employers added 209,000 jobs, seasonally adjusted, and the unemployment rate fell to 3.6 percent from 3.7 percent in May as joblessness remained near lows not seen in more than half a century.June was the 30th consecutive month of job growth, but the gain was down from a revised 306,000 in May and was the lowest since the streak began.Wages, as measured by average hourly earnings for workers, rose 0.4 percent from the previous month and 4.4 percent from June 2022. Those increases matched the May trend but exceeded expectations, a potential point of concern for Federal Reserve officials, who have tried to rein in wages and prices by ratcheting up interest rates.Still, the response to the report from economists, investors and labor market analysts was generally positive. The resilience of the job market has bolstered hopes that inflation can be brought under control while the economy continues to grow.The year-over-year gain in wages exceeded that of prices for the first time since 2021Year-over-year percentage change in earnings vs. inflation More

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    Fed Rate Increases Hinge on Strength of Jobs and Economy

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    Federal Reserve policymakers are debating how much further they need to raise interest rates to ensure that inflation speedily returns to a normal pace, and that calculus is likely to depend heavily on the job market’s strength.Officials will closely watch the employment report on Friday, the last reading on job growth that they will receive before their July 25-26 meeting, for a hint at how much momentum remains in the American economy.Fed officials have been surprised by the economy’s staying power 16 months into their push to slow it down by raising interest rates, which makes borrowing money more expensive. While growth is slower, the housing market has begun to stabilize and the job market has remained abnormally strong with plentiful opportunities and solid pay growth. Fed officials worry that if wage growth remains unusually rapid, it could make it difficult to bring elevated inflation fully back to their 2 percent goal.That resilience — and the stubbornness of quick inflation, particularly for services — is why policymakers expect to continue raising interest rates, which they have already lifted above 5 percent for the first time in about 15 years. Officials have ratcheted up rates in smaller increments this year than last year, and they skipped a rate move at their June meeting for the first time in 11 gatherings. But several policymakers have been clear that even as the pace moderates, they still expect to raise interest rates further.“It can make sense to skip a meeting and move more gradually,” Lorie K. Logan, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said during a speech this week, while noting that it is important for officials to now follow up by continuing to lift rates.She added that “inflation and the labor market evolving more or less as expected wouldn’t really change the outlook.”Fed officials predicted in June that they would raise interest rates twice more this year — assuming they move in quarter-point increments — and that the labor market would soften, but only slightly. They saw the unemployment rate rising to 4.1 percent from 3.7 percent currently.Investors widely expect Fed officials to raise interest rates at their July meeting, and the strength of the labor market could help to shape the outlook after that. While policymakers will not release new economic projections until September, Wall Street will monitor how policymakers are reacting to economic developments to gauge whether another move this year is likely. More

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    Job Openings Dipped in May, a Sign of Continued Cooling

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    The NewsJob openings fell in May while the number of workers quitting their jobs increased, the Labor Department reported Thursday.There were 9.8 million job openings in May, down from 10.3 million in April, according to the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, known as JOLTS. The report shows that the labor market is maintaining ample opportunities for workers, but that it is losing momentum.“This is a labor market that is moderating, where things are cooling down, but is still hot,” said Nick Bunker, the director of North American economic research at the job search website Indeed.The quits rate, which is often used to gauge a worker’s confidence in the job market, increased in May, particularly in the health care, social assistance and construction industries. A rise in quitting often signals workers’ confidence that they will be able to find other work, often better paying. But fewer workers are quitting their jobs than were doing so last year at the height of what was called the “great resignation.”Layoffs were relatively steady after decreasing in previous months, a sign that employers are hesitant to let go of workers.College students waiting to speak with representatives of tech companies at a job fair in Atlanta.Alex Slitz/Associated PressWhy It Matters: The Fed’s next move on interest rates is unclear.Policymakers at the Federal Reserve have worried about the strength of the labor market as they continue to tackle stubbornly high inflation.The Fed chose to leave interest rates unchanged in its June meeting after 10 consecutive increases. The JOLTS report is one of several factors that will inform the Fed’s next decision on rates.Some economists worry that the Fed will push interest rates too high and set off a recession.But the JOLTS report as well as previous economic temperature checks have led others to believe that a “soft landing” — an outcome in which inflation eases to the Fed’s goal of 2 percent without a recession — is within reach. The biggest question is whether wage growth can continue to cool as workers switch jobs, said Aaron Terrazas, chief economist at the career site Glassdoor.“A tight labor market does not necessarily have to be inflationary,” he said.Background: A cooling labor market retains underlying strength.The labor market has remained resilient amid the Fed’s efforts to slow down the economy but has shown signs of cooling in recent months. Job openings were down for three consecutive months until April.Initial jobless claims during the week that ended Saturday, also released by the Labor Department on Thursday, nudged higher from the week before, though the four-week trend shows initial claims declining.Although job openings are cooling, the reading of 9.8 million in May is high compared with prepandemic levels. In 2019, for example, the monthly totals hovered around seven million.“To some degree, I worry we’ve become desensitized to numbers that were once upon a time eye-popping,” Mr. Terrazas said.What’s Next: The June jobs report comes Friday.The June employment report — another indicator closely watched by the Fed — will be released by the Labor Department on Friday. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg expect the report to show a gain of 225,000, down from the initial reading of 339,000 for May.The unemployment rate jumped to 3.7 percent in May, from 3.4 percent a month earlier. Although still historically low, the rate was the highest since October and exceeded analysts’ expectations.Fed policymakers will hold their next meeting July 25-26. More

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    The ‘Great Resignation’ Is Over. Can Workers’ Power Endure?

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    The furious pace of job-switching in recent years has led to big gains for low-wage workers. But the pendulum could be swinging back toward employers.Tens of millions of Americans have changed jobs over the past two years, a tidal wave of quitting that reflected — and helped create — a rare moment of worker power as employees demanded higher pay, and as employers, short on staff, often gave it to them.But the “great resignation,” as it came to be known, appears to be ending. The rate at which workers voluntarily quit their jobs has fallen sharply in recent months — though it edged up in May — and is only modestly above where it was before the pandemic disrupted the U.S. labor market. In some industries where turnover was highest, like hospitality and retail businesses, quitting has fallen back to prepandemic levels.Quits Are High, But Falling

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    Voluntary quits per 100 workers
    Note: Data is seasonally adjustedSource: Labor DepartmentBy The New York TimesNow the question is whether the gains that workers made during the great resignation will outlive the moment — or whether employers will regain leverage, particularly if, as many forecasters expect, the economy slips into a recession sometime in the next year.Already, the pendulum may be swinging back toward employers. Wage growth has slowed, especially in the low-paying service jobs where it surged as turnover peaked in late 2021 and early 2022. Employers, though still complaining of labor shortages, report that it has gotten easier to hire and retain workers. And those who do change jobs are no longer receiving the supersize raises that became the norm in recent years, according to data from the payroll processing firm ADP.“You don’t see the signs saying $1,000 signing bonus anymore,” said Nela Richardson, ADP’s chief economist.Ms. Richardson compared the labor market to a game of musical chairs: When the economy began to recover from pandemic shutdowns, workers were able to move between jobs freely. But with recession warnings in the air, they are becoming nervous about getting caught without a job when fewer are available.“Everyone knows the music is about to stop,” Ms. Richardson said. “That is going to lead people to stay put a bit longer.”Aubrey Moya joined the great resignation about a year and a half ago, when she decided she had had enough of the low wages and backbreaking work of waiting tables. Her husband, a welder, was making good money — he, too, had changed jobs in search of better pay — and they decided it was time for her to start the photography business she had long dreamed of. Ms. Moya, 38, became one of the millions of Americans to start a small business during the pandemic.Today, though, Ms. Moya is questioning whether her dream is sustainable. Her husband is making less money, and living costs have risen. Her customers, stung by inflation, aren’t splurging on the boudoir photo sessions she specializes in. She is nervous about making payments on her Fort Worth studio.“There was a moment of empowerment,” she said. “There was a moment of ‘We’re not going back, and we’re not going to take this anymore,’ but the truth is yes, we are, because how else are we going to pay the bills?”But Ms. Moya isn’t going back to waiting tables just yet. And some economists think workers are likely to hold on to some of the gains they have made in recent years.“There are good reasons to think that at least a chunk of the changes that we’ve seen in the low-wage labor market will prove lasting,” said Arindrajit Dube, a University of Massachusetts professor who has studied the pandemic economy.The great resignation was often portrayed as a phenomenon of people quitting work altogether, but the data tells a different story. Most of them quit to take other, typically better-paying jobs — or, like Ms. Moya, to start businesses. And while turnover increased in virtually all industries, it was concentrated in low-wage services, where workers have generally had little leverage.For those workers, the rapid reopening of the in-person economy in 2021 provided a rare opportunity: Restaurants, hotels and stores needed tens of thousands of employees when many people still shunned jobs requiring face-to-face interaction with the public. And even as concerns about the coronavirus faded, demand for workers continued to outstrip supply, partly because many people who had left the service industry weren’t eager to return.The result was a surge in wages for workers at the bottom of the earnings ladder. Average hourly earnings for rank-and-file restaurant and hotel workers rose 28 percent from the end of 2020 to the end of 2022, far outpacing both inflation and overall wage growth.In a recent paper, Mr. Dube and two co-authors found that the earnings gap between workers at the top of the income scale and those at the bottom, after widening for four decades, began to narrow: In just two years, the economy undid about a quarter of the increase in inequality since 1980. Much of that progress, they found, came from workers’ increased ability — and willingness — to change jobs.Pay is no longer rising faster for low-wage workers than for other groups. But importantly in Mr. Dube’s view, low-wage workers have not lost ground over the past two years, making wage gains that more or less keep up with inflation and higher earners. That suggests that turnover could be declining not only because workers are becoming more cautious but also because employers have had to raise pay and improve conditions enough that their workers aren’t desperate to leave.The strong labor market gave Danny Cron, a restaurant server, the confidence to keep changing jobs until he found one that worked for him.Yasara Gunawardena for The New York TimesDanny Cron, a restaurant server in Los Angeles, has changed jobs twice since going back to work after pandemic restrictions lifted. He initially went to work at a dive bar, where his hours were “brutal” and the most lucrative shifts were reserved for servers who sold the most margaritas. He quit to work at a large chain restaurant, which offered better hours but little scheduling flexibility — a problem for Mr. Cron, an aspiring actor.So last year, Mr. Cron, 28, quit again, for a job at Blue Ribbon, an upscale sushi restaurant, where he makes more money and which is more accommodating of his acting schedule. The strong postpandemic labor market, he said, gave him the confidence to keep changing jobs until he found one that worked for him.“I knew there were a plethora of other jobs to be had, so I felt less attached to any one job out of necessity,” Mr. Cron wrote in an email.But now that he has a job he likes, he said, he feels little urge to keep searching — partly because he senses that the job market has softened, but mostly because he is happy where he is.“Looking for a new job is a lot of work, and training for a new job is a lot of work,” he said. “So when you find a good serving job, you’re not going to give that up.”The labor market remains strong, with unemployment below 4 percent and job growth continuing, albeit more slowly than in 2021 or 2022. But even optimists like Mr. Dube concede that workers like Mr. Cron could lose leverage if companies start cutting jobs en masse.“It’s very tenuous,” said Kathryn Anne Edwards, a labor economist and policy consultant who has studied the role of quitting in wage growth. A recession, she said, could wipe away gains made by hourly workers over the past few years.Still, some workers say one thing has changed in a more lasting way: their behavior. After being lauded as “essential workers” early in the pandemic — and given bonuses, paid sick time and other perks — many people in hospitality, retail and similar jobs say they were disappointed to see companies roll back benefits as the emergency abated. The great resignation, they say, was partly a reaction to that experience: They were no longer willing to work for companies that didn’t value them.Amanda Shealer, who manages a store near Hickory, N.C., said her boss had recently told her that she needed to find more ways to accommodate hourly workers because they would otherwise leave for jobs elsewhere. Her response: “So will I.”“If I don’t feel like I’m being supported and I don’t feel like you’re taking my concerns seriously and you guys just continue to dump more and more to me, I can do the same thing,” Ms. Shealer, 40, said. “You don’t have the loyalty to a company anymore, because the companies don’t have the loyalty to you.” More

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    Ex-Prisoners Face Headwinds as Job Seekers, Even as Openings Abound

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    An estimated 60 percent of those leaving prison are unemployed a year later. But after a push for “second-chance hiring,” some programs show promise.The U.S. unemployment rate is hovering near lows unseen since the 1960s. A few months ago, there were roughly two job openings for every unemployed person in the country. Many standard economic models suggest that almost everyone who wants a job has a job.Yet the broad group of Americans with records of imprisonment or arrests — a population disproportionately male and Black — have remarkably high jobless rates. Over 60 percent of those leaving prison are unemployed a year later, seeking work but not finding it.That harsh reality has endured even as the social upheaval after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 gave a boost to a “second-chance hiring” movement in corporate America aimed at hiring candidates with criminal records. And the gap exists even as unemployment for minority groups overall is near record lows.Many states have “ban the box” laws barring initial job applications from asking if candidates have a criminal history. But a prison record can block progress after interviews or background checks — especially for convictions more serious than nonviolent drug offenses, which have undergone a more sympathetic public reappraisal in recent years.For economic policymakers, a persistent demand for labor paired with a persistent lack of work for many former prisoners presents an awkward conundrum: A wide swath of citizens have re-entered society — after a quadrupling of the U.S. incarceration rate over 40 years — but the nation’s economic engine is not sure what to with them.“These are people that are trying to compete in the legal labor market,” said Shawn D. Bushway, an economist and criminologist at the RAND Corporation, who estimates that 64 percent of unemployed men have been arrested and that 46 percent have been convicted. “You can’t say, ‘Well, these people are just lazy’ or ‘These people really don’t really want to work.’”In a research paper, Mr. Bushway and his co-authors found that when former prisoners do land a job, “they earn significantly less than their counterparts without criminal history records, making the middle class ever less reachable for unemployed men” in this cohort.One challenge is a longstanding presumption that people with criminal records are more likely to be difficult, untrustworthy or unreliable employees. DeAnna Hoskins, the president of JustLeadershipUSA, a nonprofit group focused on decreasing incarceration, said she challenged that concern as overblown. Moreover, she said, locking former prisoners out of the job market can foster “survival crime” by people looking to make ends meet.One way shown to stem recidivism — a relapse into criminal behavior — is deepening investments in prison education so former prisoners re-enter society with more demonstrable, valuable skills.According to a RAND analysis, incarcerated people who take part in education programs are 43 percent less likely than others to be incarcerated again, and for every dollar spent on prison education, the government saves $4 to $5 in reimprisonment costs.Last year, a chapter of the White House Council of Economic Advisers’ Economic Report of the President was dedicated, in part, to “substantial evidence of labor force discrimination against formerly incarcerated people.” The Biden administration announced that the Justice and Labor Departments would devote $145 million over two years to job training and re-entry services for federal prisoners.Mr. Bushway pointed to another approach: broader government-sponsored jobs programs for those leaving incarceration. Such programs existed more widely at the federal level before the tough-on-crime movement of the 1980s, providing incentives like wage subsidies for businesses hiring workers with criminal records.But Mr. Bushway and Ms. Hoskins said any consequential changes were likely to need support from and coordination with states and cities. Some small but ambitious efforts are underway.Training and CounselingJabarre Jarrett is a full-time web developer for Persevere, a nonprofit group, and hopes to build enough experience to land a more senior role in the private sector.Whitten Sabbatini for The New York TimesIn May 2016, Jabarre Jarrett of Ripley, Tenn., a small town about 15 miles east of the Mississippi River, got a call from his sister. She told Mr. Jarrett, then 27, that her boyfriend had assaulted her. Frustrated and angry, Mr. Jarrett drove to see her. A verbal altercation with the man, who was armed, turned physical, and Mr. Jarrett, also armed, fatally shot him.Mr. Jarrett pleaded guilty to a manslaughter charge and was given a 12-year sentence. Released in 2021 after his term was reduced for good conduct, he found that he was still paying for his crime, in a literal sense.Housing was hard to get. Mr. Jarrett owed child support. And despite a vibrant labor market, he struggled to piece together a living, finding employers hesitant to offer him full-time work that paid enough to cover his bills.“One night somebody from my past called me, man, and they offered me an opportunity to get back in the game,” he said — with options like “running scams, selling drugs, you name it.”One reason he resisted, Mr. Jarrett said, was his decision a few weeks earlier to sign up for a program called Persevere, out of curiosity.Persevere, a nonprofit group funded by federal grants, private donations and state partnerships, focuses on halting recidivism in part through technical job training, offering software development courses to those recently freed from prison and those within three years of release. It pairs that effort with “wraparound services” — including mentorship, transportation, temporary housing and access to basic necessities — to address financial and mental health needs.For Mr. Jarrett, that network helped solidify a life change. When he got off the phone call with the old friend, he called a mental health counselor at Persevere.“I said, ‘Man, is this real?’” he recalled. “I told him, ‘I got child support, I just lost another job, and somebody offered me an opportunity to make money right now, and I want to turn it down so bad, but I don’t have no hope.’” The counselor talked him through the moment and discussed less risky ways to get through the next months.In September, after his yearlong training period, Mr. Jarrett became a full-time web developer for Persevere itself, making about $55,000 a year — a stroke of luck, he said, until he builds enough experience for a more senior role at a private-sector employer.Persevere is relatively small (active in six states) and rare in its design. Yet its program claims extraordinary success compared with conventional approaches.By many measures, over 60 percent of formerly incarcerated people are arrested or convicted again. Executives at Persevere report recidivism in the single digits among participants who complete its program, with 93 percent placed in jobs and a 85 percent retention rate, defined as still working a year later.“We’re working with regular people who made a very big mistake, so anything that I can do to help them live a fruitful, peaceful, good life is what I want to do,” said Julie Landers, a program manager at Persevere in the Atlanta area.If neither employers nor governments “roll the dice” on the millions sentenced for serious crimes, Ms. Landers argued, “we’re going to get what we’ve always gotten” — cycles of poverty and criminality — “and that’s the definition of insanity.”Pushing for ChangeDant’e Cottingham works full time for EX-incarcerated People Organizing, lobbying local businesses in Wisconsin to warm up to second-chance hiring.Akilah Townsend for The New York TimesDant’e Cottingham got a life sentence at 17 for first-degree intentional homicide in the killing of another man and served 27 years. While in prison, he completed a paralegal program. As a job seeker afterward, he battled the stigma of a criminal record — an obstacle he is trying to help others overcome.While working at a couple of minimum-wage restaurant jobs in Wisconsin after his release last year, he volunteered as an organizer for EXPO — EX-incarcerated People Organizing — a nonprofit group, mainly funded by grants and donations, that aims to “restore formerly incarcerated people to full participation in the life of our communities.”Now he works full time for the group, meeting with local businesses to persuade them to take on people with criminal records. He also works for another group, Project WisHope, as a peer support specialist, using his experience to counsel currently and formerly incarcerated people.It can still feel like a minor victory “just getting somebody an interview,” Mr. Cottingham said, with only two or three companies typically showing preliminary interest in anyone with a serious record.“I run into some doors, but I keep talking, I keep trying, I keep setting up meetings to have the discussion,” he said. “It’s not easy, though.”Ed Hennings, who started a Milwaukee-based trucking company in 2016, sees things from two perspectives: as a formerly imprisoned person and as an employer.Mr. Hennings served 20 years in prison for reckless homicide in a confrontation he and his uncle had with another man. Even though he mostly hires formerly incarcerated men — at least 20 so far — he candidly tells some candidates that he has limited “wiggle room to decipher whether you changed or not.” Still, Mr. Hennings, 51, is quick to add that he has been frustrated by employers that use those circumstances as a blanket excuse.“I understand that it takes a little more work to try to decipher all of that, but I know from hiring people myself that you just have to be on your judgment game,” he said. “There are some people that come home that are just not ready to change — true enough — but there’s a large portion that are ready to change, given the opportunity.”In addition to greater educational opportunities before release, he thinks giving employers incentives like subsidies to do what they otherwise would not may be among the few solutions that stick, even though it is a tough political hurdle.“It’s hard for them not to look at you a certain way and still hard for them to get over that stigma,” Mr. Hennings said. “And that’s part of the conditioning and culture of American society.” More

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    Affirmative Action Ruling May Upend Diversity Hiring Policies, Too

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    The Supreme Court decision on college admissions could lead companies to alter recruitment and promotion practices to pre-empt legal challenges.As a legal matter, the Supreme Court’s rejection of race-conscious admissions in higher education does not in itself impede employers from pursuing diversity in the workplace.That, at least, is the conclusion of lawyers, diversity experts and political activists across the spectrum — from conservatives who say robust affirmative action programs are already illegal to liberals who argue that they are on firm legal ground.But many experts argue that as a practical matter, the ruling will discourage corporations from putting in place ambitious diversity policies in hiring and promotion — or prompt them to rein in existing policies — by encouraging lawsuits under the existing legal standard.After the decision on Thursday affecting college admissions, law firms encouraged companies to review their diversity policies.“I do worry about corporate counsels who see their main job as keeping organizations from getting sued — I do worry about hyper-compliance,” said Alvin B. Tillery Jr., director of the Center for the Study of Diversity and Democracy at Northwestern University, who advises employers on diversity policies.Programs to foster the hiring and promotion of African Americans and other minority workers have been prominent in corporate America in recent years, especially in the reckoning over race after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.Even before the ruling in the college cases, corporations were feeling legal pressure over their diversity efforts. Over the past two years, a lawyer representing a free-market group has sent letters to American Airlines, McDonald’s and many other corporations demanding that they undo hiring policies that the group says are illegal.The free-market group, the National Center for Public Policy Research, acknowledged that the outcome on Thursday did not bear directly on its fight against affirmative-action in corporate America. “Today’s decision is not relevant; it dealt with a special carve-out for education,” said Scott Shepard, a fellow at the center.Mr. Shepard claimed victory nonetheless, arguing that the ruling would help deter employers who might be tempted overstep the law. “It couldn’t be clearer after the decision that fudging it at the edges” is not allowed, he said.(American Airlines and McDonald’s did not respond to requests for comment about their hiring and promotion policies.)Charlotte A. Burrows, who was designated chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by President Biden, was also quick to declare that nothing had changed. She said the decision “does not address employer efforts to foster diverse and inclusive work forces or to engage the talents of all qualified workers, regardless of their background.”Some companies in the cross hairs of conservative groups underscored the point. “Novartis’s D.E.I. programs are narrowly tailored, fair, equitable and comply with existing law,” the drugmaker said in a statement, referring to diversity, equity and inclusion. Novartis, too, has received a letter from a lawyer representing Mr. Shepard’s group, demanding that it change its policy on hiring law firms.The Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action was largely silent on employment-related questions.Kenny Holston/The New York TimesBeyond government contractors, affirmative action policies in the private sector are largely voluntary and governed by state and federal civil rights law. These laws prohibit employers from basing hiring or promotion decisions on a characteristic like race or gender, whether in favor of a candidate or against.The exception, said Jason Schwartz, a partner at the law firm Gibson Dunn, is that companies can take race into account if members of a racial minority were previously excluded from a job category — say, an investment bank recruiting Black bankers after it excluded Black people from such jobs for decades. In some cases, employers can also take into account the historical exclusion of a minority group from an industry — like Black and Latino people in the software industry.In principle, the logic of the Supreme Court’s ruling on college admissions could threaten some of these programs, like those intended to address industrywide discrimination. But even here, the legal case may be a stretch because the way employers typically make decisions about hiring and promotion differs from the way colleges make admissions decisions.“What seems to bother the court is that the admissions programs at issue treated race as a plus without regard to the individual student,” Pauline Kim, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in employment law, said in an email. But “employment decisions are more often individualized decisions,” focusing on the fit between a candidate and a job, she said.The more meaningful effect of the court’s decision is likely to be greater pressure on policies that were already on questionable legal ground. Those could include leadership acceleration programs or internship programs that are open only to members of underrepresented minority groups.Many companies may also find themselves vulnerable over policies that comply with civil rights law on paper but violate it in practice, said Mike Delikat, a partner at Orrick who specializes in employment law. For example, a company’s policy may encourage recruiters to seek a more diverse pool of candidates, from which hiring decisions are made without regard to race. But if recruiters carry out the policy in a way that effectively creates a racial quota, he said, that is illegal.“The devil is in the details,” Mr. Delikat said. “Were they interpreting that to mean, ‘Come back with 25 percent of the internship class that has to be from an underrepresented group, and if not you get dinged as a bad recruiter’?”The college admissions cases before the Supreme Court were largely silent on these employment-related questions. Nonetheless, Mr. Delikat said, his firm has been counseling clients ever since the court agreed to hear the cases that they should ensure that their policies are airtight because an increase in litigation is likely.That is partly because of the growing attack from the political right on corporate policies aimed at diversity in hiring and other social and environmental goals.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has signed legislation to limit diversity training in the workplace.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesGov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is seeking the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has deplored “the woke mind virus” and proclaimed Florida “the state where woke goes to die.” The state has enacted legislation to limit diversity training in the workplace and has restricted state pension funds from basing investments on “woke environmental, social and corporate governance” considerations.Conservative legal groups have also mobilized on this front. A group run by Stephen Miller, a White House adviser in the Trump administration, contended in letters to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that the diversity and inclusion policies of several large companies were illegal and asked the commission to investigate. (Mr. Miller’s group did not respond to a request for comment about those cases.)The National Center for Public Policy Research, which is challenging corporate diversity policies, has sued Starbucks directors and officers after they refused to undo the company’s diversity and inclusion policies in response to a letter demanding that they do so. (Starbucks did not respond to a request for comment for this article, but its directors told the group that it was “not in the best interest of Starbucks to accept the demand and retract the policies.”)Mr. Shepard, the fellow at the center, said more lawsuits were “reasonably likely” if other companies did not accede to demands to rein in their diversity and inclusion policies.One modest way to do so, said David Lopez, a former general counsel for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, is to design policies that are race neutral but nonetheless likely to promote diversity — such as giving weight to whether a candidate has overcome significant obstacles.Mr. Lopez noted that, in the Supreme Court’s majority opinion, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. argued that a university could take into account the effect on a candidate of having overcome racial discrimination, as long as the school didn’t consider the candidate’s race per se.But Dr. Tillery of Northwestern said making such changes to business diversity programs could be an overreaction to the ruling. While the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 generally precludes basing individual hiring and promotion decisions explicitly on race, it allows employers to remove obstacles that prevent companies from having a more diverse work force. Examples include training managers and recruiters to ensure that they aren’t unconsciously discriminating against racial minorities, or advertising jobs on certain campuses to increase the universe of potential applicants.In the end, companies appear to face a greater threat of litigation over discrimination against members of minority groups than from litigation over discrimination against white people. According to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, there were about 2,350 charges of that latter form of discrimination in employment in 2021, among about 21,000 race-based charges overall.“There’s an inherent interest in picking your poison,” Dr. Tillery said. “Is it a lawsuit from Stephen Miller’s right-wing group that doesn’t live in the real world? Or is it a lawsuit from someone who says you’re discriminating against your work force and can tweet about how sexist or racist you are?”He added, “I’ll take the Stephen Miller poison any day.”J. Edward Moreno More

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    U.S. Added 339,000 Jobs in May Despite Economic Clouds

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    Employers added 339,000 workers in May, the Labor Department said, though the report also offered signs of shakiness.American employers added an unanticipated barrage of workers in May, reaffirming the labor market’s vigor.Defying expectations of a slowdown, payrolls grew by 339,000 on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department said on Friday. The increase, the largest since January, suggested that the job market was still piping hot despite a swirl of economic headwinds.But below the surface, the report also offered evidence of softening. The unemployment rate, while still historically low, jumped to 3.7 percent, the highest level since October. In a sign that the pressure to entice workers with pay increases is lifting, wage growth eased.The dissonance offered a somewhat muddled picture that complicates the calculus for the Federal Reserve, which has been raising interest rates for more than a year to temper the labor market’s momentum and rein in price increases. Fed officials have indicated that the jobs report will be an important factor as they decide whether to raise interest rates again.“We’re still seeing a labor market that’s gradually cooling,” said Sarah House, an economist at Wells Fargo. “But it’s at a glacial place.”President Biden hailed the report, saying in a statement that “today is a good day for the American economy and American workers.” The S&P 500 index rose more than 1.4 percent as the data portrayed an economic engine that was running strong but not overheating.Looming over the report is the debt ceiling deal approved by Congress, though economists largely expect the spending caps and cuts to have only marginal impact on the labor market going forward.The hiring numbers suggest that employers remain eager for workers even in the face of high interest rates and economic uncertainty. Many are still bringing on employees to meet consumer demand, especially for services. The only major sectors to lose jobs were manufacturing and information.A slight reversal for manufacturing in MayChange in jobs in May 2023, by sector More