Public sector employees are prohibited from striking, so they will sometimes call out en masse citing sickness - called catching the “blue flu” (named for police departments that would call out sick to put pressure on cities during collective bargaining). abcnews.go.com/US/delays-sa...

"Every aspect of it seeks to dictate decisions that have traditionally been left to each university — a degree of control over higher education that is characteristic of authoritarian countries." www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/o...

For example, making a digital platform increasingly awful for gig workers. #labor onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Opening day! Here we go, Big Red! @scjohnsoncollege.bsky.social

Promising way to crowdsource data on academic journal decision timelines. I'm uploading my data. You can too!

🚨 I’m excited to announce that, “The Enshittification of Work: Platform Decay and Labour Conditions in the Gig Economy” is now available online ! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

This is an important “long view” contribution to the gig economy/platform work scholarship. Congrats @maffie.bsky.social! I recognize many of the decay/degradation mechanisms you describe. They’re why so many seasoned gig workers have left these platforms, when possible.

🚨 I’m excited to announce that, “The Enshittification of Work: Platform Decay and Labour Conditions in the Gig Economy” is now available online ! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Len Sherman and team from Columbia business school have just released this excellent report on Uber's pricing and pay which reflects many of the same trends we observed: len-sherman.medium.com/how-uber-bec...

The US could see a 30-40% decline in new international student enrollment, resulting in nearly $7 billion in lost revenue and more than 60,000 fewer American jobs. https://www.nafsa.org/fall-2025-international-student-enrollment-outlook-and-economic-impact

A new era of government censorship has begun. It started with the silencing of scientific speech, when the admin blocked release of research on bird flu. But MAGA has also cracked down on other wrongthink—on race, geography (!), and of course Trump himself www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

You should never follow any of these color charts. They are all stupid. I'll show you why. 🧵

NEW PAPER Oil, shipping, tariffs: We are back in a world of cost shocks. Our AI/LLM analysis of 138,962 corporate earnings calls shows how economy-wide cost shocks let large firms raise prices & increase profits—triggering sellers' inflation. 🧵 Open access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

An AI slop factory apparently tried to rewrite our article about AI not replacing workers en masse, but hit the paywall... so just summarised the paywall. If this is the robot that takes my job I'll be v embarrassed

Editing an article about the enshittification of online services in Wiley's online proofing system is strangely validating.

Tell me you’ve never attended a faculty meeting without telling me you’ve never attended a faculty meeting.

“These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor,” President Kennedy sardonically remarked to his aide Dave Powers: “If we listen to them and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.” time.com/5899754/jfk-...

New paper out today, accepted at #FAccT2025, led by Jake Stein and me: "Not Even Nice Work If You Can Get It; A Longitudinal Study of Uber's Algorithmic Pay and Pricing" arxiv.org/abs/2506.15278 Over the last 3 years, we've been working with @workerinfox.bsky.social to audit Uber's algorithms. 1/

🚨 Paper acceptance! Keep your eyes out for, "The Enshittification of Work: Platform Decay and Labor Conditions in the Gig Economy". Out soon in the British Journal of Industrial Relations.

Current tech industry status:

Paging r/MaliciousCompliance

Coauthor update: (1) User dashboard and (2) call for paid study participants. (1) Coauthor now displays your publishing stats against the population in our database, letting you know where you are more / less successful at publishing compared to our population of users.

What do tax cuts for the rich do? They increase inequality. They have no effect on economic growth or unemployment. "Our results provide strong evidence against the influential political–economic idea that tax cuts for the rich ‘trickle down’ to boost the wider economy."

"This paper studies whether working from home (WFH) affects workers' performance in public sector jobs... we find that WFH increases productivity by 12%." @afenizia.bsky.social Evidence that administrations that reject WFH harm efficiency. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....

🚨 Exciting new research in Human Resource Management! In this article, my coauthor Tashlin Lakhani and I explore strategic human resource management in the gig economy. 🚗 Check it out here: doi.org/10.1002/hrm....

Fascinating new research on strategic HR and competitive dynamics in the gig economy from Mike Maffie and Tash Lakhani! Nice research design too, taking advantage of a change in Uber policies. Shows the value of having data collection projects active out in the field at a critical moment.

🚨 Exciting new research in Human Resource Management! In this article, my coauthor Tashlin Lakhani and I explore strategic human resource management in the gig economy. 🚗 Check it out here: doi.org/10.1002/hrm....

Small colleges have taken the lead -- but they are now joined by 6 of 8 Ivies: Cornell, Penn, Princeton, Yale, Brown, and -- yes -- Harvard. And, finally, by a handful of big publics: U. of Washington, Wisconsin, Rutgers, SUNY Buffalo and Stony Brook, UC Riverside, UVa, UMD.

The main effect of tariff insanity: Uncertainty poisoning supply networks, degrading a lot of relationships at once. That scar tissue will linger for a long time. 1/

Beyond other losses, like out-of-state students at state schools, international students pay more and universities have come to rely on their tuition dollars. Eliminating them will only further mess up colleges’ already messed up budgets. I wrote about this detail in a broader context last week:

The NCAA tournament is a great place for colleges and universities to advertise important scientific discoveries at their institutions.

At the start of covid, I remember a strange cycle where what you thought was impossible would become reality two weeks later. "We'll never send students home" became "of course that's what will happen" in a matter of days. I am starting to see the same cycle unfold in American universities.

Just wow! Gonna test today

Hang together or hang separately.

The informal knowledge gap around journals' turnaround times systematically penalizes disadvantaged and early-career scholars. I highly recommend using and promoting this tool to help close that gap. 👇

This is 100% bullshit. There are no algorithms. Musk and his incel clown posse are not forensic accountants and do not know how to audit. Discovering fraud is a labor-intensive project that can never be done by looking at payments alone. This is just a thinly-veiled rationale to gut Social Security.

As promised, here is a bit more on my new book, The Welfare Workforce, now available fully open-access from @cambridgeuppolisci.bsky.social 🧵 1/11

Whoever creates a version of "TSA PreCheck" for the IRB will forever be my academic hero.

“I think you’ll see professors investigated and terminated. I think you’re going to see students punished, and I think you’re going to see a preemptive action on those fronts,” he [Will Creeley] said. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/o...

Tiktok's message praising the incoming administration is an interesting development in the way platform companies use their relationship with consumers to shape their political environment. npr.org/2025/01/18/n...

I’m so happy to announce that my book is now published and available open-access! (🧵coming soon, too :)

How do customers' abusive behavior of frontline workers play out? Michael Maffie @cornelluniversity.bsky.social shows how the “five-star” evaluation system enables different forms of customer abuse & how workers resist this configuration of control. doi.org/10.1177/0019...

America Airlines: even if we invent a time machine, we’ll still get you to your destination several hours late.

Our special section drawn from the Festschrift papers in honor of Thomas [email protected] & edited by Rose Batt @cornellilr.bsky.social, Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, Ann Frost & John Paul MacDuffie @uofpenn.bsky.social is out! doi.org/10.1177/0019...

Bluesky academics, lets get to know each other! Quote this & tell me: 1) a project you are working on & 2) an odd idea/theory you aren’t working on but keep thinking about 1) increasing transparency in academic publishing. coauthor.fly.dev 2) an escalation ladder for labor conflict.

9/ Musk made his endorsement of Trump on July 13, 2024. The analysis suggests that Musk did more than merely give verbal support for Trump, but also changed X's algorithm on the same date to systematically promote his own and other prominent pro-Republican acounts. /end

"Which journals have a fast turnaround time?" is a frequent question in academia. Most of the time, people answer based on anecdotes (or grudges). My lab at Cornell decided to build a Chrome plugin, what we are calling Coauthor, to crowdsource an answer: coauthor.fly.dev #AcademicSky

Ithaca, NY.

As this is really helping me getting a network, here are some people doing research on industrial relations and trade unions Feel free to suggest more @etui.bsky.social @mhermans.bsky.social @melaniesimms.bsky.social @johnwbudd.bsky.social @kurtvandaele.bsky.social go.bsky.app/8W2BZMR

Woah. NLRB rules captive audience meetings are illegal. www.nlrb.gov/news-outreac...