My, let's say, "temporary forced unpaid leave" from the New York Observer is looking more and more permanent! (I assume I'm not supposed to say anything about that. Oh well! One never is—the suggestion of retaliation for lack of silence regarding working conditions is just one of the means by which millionaires and PR men control today's utterly disposable workers. See also: the great silence that greeted Gawker Media's suspension of health insurance reimbursement for all of its non-employee employees. While that suspension brought the company closer to the letter of federal law—their non-employee contractors suspiciously resembled employees!—it also had the downside of, you know, not providing its workers with health insurance anymore. Not a peep about it anywhere. Update: I hear the new Gawker scheme is interesting, and also not entirely what I was told previously: That there is now a cash bonus for some or all staff that they may use to pay all or part of health insurance? Innaresting!) The funny thing is—I'm a loyalist at heart! Treat me right and, like anyone else, I'm your lapdog forever. But come on. The media industry, particularly the "new media industry"—the standards of which are right now, in this age of layoffs, leaching into the "old media" industry—exists in this world as if the age of unionization had never even occurred. For one thing, the owners know that the disposable workforce is too swollen; there's always someone younger and hungrier (and with more student debt) coming down the stairs behind you, to steal the immortal formulation of "Showgirls." Anyway, all this is to say, I'm still hanging out with the delightful folk at Radar this week while I scheme some schemes.
You should try to make this Radar gig semi-permanent, thus uniting my fave internet scribe with my fave dead tree mag.
