During a talk at SXSW yesterday, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez got an audience question about automation and jobs and answered by saying, "We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work. We should be excited by that. But the reason we’re not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem." Read the rest

Goodwill Industries, purveyors of thrift-stores, are currently the second largest provider of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), and on track to become the leader, through their GCF Global Online Portal, which provides free courses in English, Spanish and Portuguese with an emphasis on job skills: "reading, math and understanding money and personal finance to computer, email and Internet basics to digital skills and mastering widely-used tools such as Microsoft Office and QuickBooks," which then dovetail into a job-placement service the charity runs. (via Naked Capitalism) Read the rest

Blizzard/Activision posted $7.5b in net revenues for 2018, and announced that it would lay off 800 of the employees who made those revenues possible, but fear not! The last time the company did a mass layoff (600 people in 2012), it generously rehired those people as temps, doing the same jobs for less pay, with no security or benefits. Read the rest

My colleague Elliot Harmon writes: " EFF is looking for a new addition to our activism team. This job is a big one: you’ll be joining EFF’s efforts to end warrantless spying by the NSA and other federal government agencies, as well as to fight for restrictions on the use of surveillance technologies by local law enforcement agencies. And it’s the perfect time for you to start: Section 215—the law that the NSA relied on for decades to collect Americans’ phone call records—is set to expire at the end of 2019. Between now and then, we expect a major legislative fight over its reauthorization. We need someone activating the public to demand that lawmakers respect their right to private communications." Read the rest

Scratch creator Mitchel Resnick -- head of the MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindgergarten Group -- writes, "Until now, Scratch has been developed by my research group at the MIT Media Lab. In the coming year, the Scratch Team will be moving out of MIT into a separate nonprofit organization (the Scratch Foundation). We’re looking to hire a new Executive Director to help build this organization and develop strategies to sustain Scratch as a free, creative platform." Read the rest

ORG -- the UK Open Rights Group (disclosure: I am a co-founder and volunteers on its advisory board) is hiring a Data and Democracy Project Officer: "responsible for delivering our work on preserving democratic integrity in the digital age. This role has two main areas of focus: 1) electronic voting and 2) the use of data in political campaigns. The Data and Democracy Project Officer will work closely with ORG’s Scotland Director, the Policy Director and the Executive Director." Read the rest

Are you a PhD with interest in "the intersection of digital technology and public life, including experts in computer science, sociology, economics, law, political science, public policy, information studies, communication, and other related disciplines?" Princeton's CITP has three open job postings for 10-month residences starting Sept 1, 2019. Read the rest

Sumana writes, "SecureDrop (previously) (originally coded by Aaron Swartz) is an open source whistleblower submission system that media organizations can install to securely accept documents from anonymous sources. Its parent nonprofit, the Freedom of the Press Foundation (previously), is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to join the team and:" Read the rest

America has some of the weakest anti-pregnancy-discrimination rules in the world (the federal statute says that companies only have to give pregnant people lighter duties if they make similar accommodations for those "similar in their ability or inability to work); and this has produced an epidemic of workplace miscarriages among women who have frequently begged their supervisors for lighter duties, even presenting doctor's written notes with their pleas. Read the rest

The Trump administration is very proud of the US's historically low unemployment figures (lowest in 50 years), but statistics are deceiving, especially labor statistics. Read the rest

Some parts of machine learning are incredibly esoteric and hard to grasp, surprising even seasoned computer science pros; other parts of it are just the same problems that programmers have contended with since the earliest days of computation. The problem Amazon had with its machine-learning-based system for screening job applicants was the latter. Read the rest

First, Disney announced that all its salaried workers would get a raise to $15/hour (with more raises to come); then Bernie Sanders announced legislation named after Jeff Bezos that would send companies an invoice for any food, housing or other subsidy their sub-starvation-wage employees received. Read the rest

When the private equity raiders who took over Toys R Us, saddled it up with debt, extracted $200,000,000 and then crashed it, they took the employee severance fund with them, but that wasn't the final indignity the titans of finance inflicted on the workforce before turning them out on the unemployment line. Read the rest

Patagonia has long given its employees election day off, but now they're calling on other employers to follow suit. The good eggs at Adafruit heard the message: they're giving all their employees a day off to go and vote. Read the rest

When Erin Winick was a sophomore, she got a summer internship at a company where her manager offered her the opportunity to use her passion for 3D printing to streamline the company's mold-making process; but when she started consulting with "Gary," a 34-year veteran of the company who was responsible for the complex molding process, she realized that she was about to put him out of a job. Read the rest

Ren from Code for Canada writes, "We launched last year and, among other things, fund "fellows'--i.e. tech-savvy, civic-minded professionals who get embedded in government agencies for 10 months (ed: at a pro-rated salary equivalent to CAD75,000/year) and help make services more efficient, intuitive, and accessible. We are now accepting applications for our second cohort of fellows! If you know of any great coders, big data nerds, designers, or project managers who might be interested the application link is here." Read the rest

Ibrahim Diallo was eight months into a three year contract with a big company when its systems abruptly decided that he was fired: first it told his recruiter that he'd been let go, then it stopped accepting his pass for the parking and the turnstyles, then his logins stopped working, and at each turn, his supervisor, and that person's boss, and the HR people, were at a loss to explain or reverse the steady, automated disappearance of Ibrahim from the company. Read the rest