By Nicholas Croce, September 6, 2021 On this Labor Day, a call to academics studying work… to get to work. After taking a break from doctoral studies four months ago, I’ve come to the conclusion that academics, specifically those interested in the workforce, labor, and precarity, need to get to work. And no, I am not implying that academics aren’t working hard enough: for sure, keeping university classes going during this pandemic is a herculean labor. Nor do I mean to say that professors and social science researchers should drop their academic jobs and get into other segments of the workforce, per se. After four months of precarious work arrangements, tedious and dehumanizing interactions with welfare, and dealing with the psychosocial impacts of socioeconomic precarity, I am moved to write—no, I am moved to scream, to shout it from the ground up into the heights of academe—that anyone studying modern work needs to get out and experience it, today. The structure and mechani
I sit down to write as someone different. Four years ago, in April 2013, I left Tel Aviv - Yafo to return back to the United States. At the time, I was not feeling well. I came down with a bad case of something — the doctor in Jerusalem said laryngitis. I was living in a small apartment off Sderot Yerushalayim in Yafo. Life was good despite that nasty bout of laryngitis, living in a dark and damp studio apartment, and being detached from that City — Jerusalem — which had intrigued and sustained and nudged my soul since that first night on the Mount of Olives. How could I have realized it then, but I was on the cusp of a major shift in my life; isn't it funny how we are so bad at noticing times of transition? The years that followed my return to the United States have been the quickest and fullest so far in my twenty-five years doing this thing we call "life." Here I sit in Jerusalem, in what feels like forever and just a minute all at once, trying to see if I have gaine