Google's "Project Maven" is supplying machine-learning tools to the Pentagon to support drone strikes; the project has been hugely divisive within Google, with employees pointing out that the company is wildly profitable and doesn't need to compromise on its ethics to keep its doors open; that the drone program is a system of extrajudicial killing far from the battlefield; and that the firm's long-term health depends on its ability to win and retain the trust of users around the world, which will be harder if Google becomes a de facto wing of the US military. Read the rest

One of the cases that the Supreme Court heard this season was NLRB v. Murphy Oil USA, Inc. which rolls up several cases where employers are hoping to establish that they can force prospective employees to sign a mandatory arbitration waiver as a condition of employment; if they prevail, the majority of workplaces in America will likely adopt the practice. Read the rest

Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber made a landmark contribution to the debate about inequality, money, and wealth with his massive 2012 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years (a book that helped inspire my 2017 novel Walkaway). Read the rest

Multiple Facebookers and ex-Facebookers risked lawsuits by revealing the company's longstanding problem with employees who abuse their access to Facebook's databases to stalk Facebook users, and its longstanding practice of binding all concerned to nondisclosure, keeping it a secret from the people who were stalked by its employees. Read the rest

My wife -- whose father is a TV director who'd worked for the BBC -- learned as a little girl that the British spy agency MI5 secretly vetted people who applied for work at the BBC and denoted possible subversives by putting a doodle of a Christmas tree on their personnel files; people who were thus blacklisted were discriminated against within the Beeb. Read the rest

I was a teenaged page at the North York Central Library in suburban Toronto, working in the Business and Urban Affairs section, shelving books, taping together newspapers while we waited for their microfilm versions to arrive, and fiddling around with the newly installed (and poorly documented) computerised catalogue/lending system -- I worked there with many other would-be writers, like Nalo Hopkinson, who was a public service clerk a few floors down. Read the rest

Lanetix is your basic shitty tech company, where your two weeks of annual paid leave is subject to often-withheld managerial approval, where bosses threaten engineers with getting canned if they participate in private Slack channels where they discuss working conditions, and where high-performing software engineers who object to bad management are summarily fired. Read the rest

Ohio State sociologist Natasha Quadlin set out to study the effect of high academic achievement on women's employment, so she created 2,106 fictional job applicants, half male, half female, across a spectrum of GPAs and college majors, and submitted them via common recruiting sites. Read the rest

Are you "an experienced writer who loves to help readers understand new technology and innovative ideas—and why they matter?" Ars Technica is hiring. Read the rest

It's been less than a year since a public-spirited hacker broke into the servers of Florida stalkerware vendor Retina-X, wiping out all the photos and data the company's customers had stolen from other peoples' phones (including their kids' phones) by installing the spying apps Phonesheriff on them. Read the rest

In Labor Market Concentration, a new working paper from economists at U Penn, U Navarra and the Roosevelt Institute, researchers analyze a large US government data-set to determine how many workers live in markets where there is effective only one or two employers, a situation called "monoposony" (when a single buyer has a monopoly). Read the rest

Under a new rule proposed by the Department of Labor, restaurants can take servers' tips and "pool" them in order to disperse some to dishwashers, bussers, etc: but it doesn't actually require them to do so, and, instead, allows employers to pocket some or all of the wait-staff's tips. Read the rest

Tom Colella worked for 20 years as an Instrument Electrical Tradesperson for Aroona Alliance in Western Australia, until he was fired in on Sept 20, 2016 for sneaking off to play golf every Wednesday afternoon and hiding his absences from his employer by putting the PDA that he was obliged to carry -- in order to track his movements -- in a mylar potato-chip bag that acted as a Faraday cage and prevented it from receiving GPS signals and other location-identifying beacons and storing or communicating his location for his employer. Read the rest

The programs Obama established to retrain coal miners are going begging in Pennsylvania, undersubscribed because the out-of-work miners they were established to help are convinced that Donald Trump wasn't bullshitting when he promised to bring back coal. Read the rest

Three CBP officers are facing criminal charges stemming from 2016 and 2017 incidents in which two newly hired CBP employees were locked in a small room, thrown on a table referred to as a "rape table" and then forced to endure a "simulated sex act" in which the senior officers ground their genitals against them. Read the rest

California says that non-compete agreements are unenforceable, and that's been a huge factor in the state's growth -- in particular, it's the most likely reason that California's tech economy zoomed past the Route 128 tech economy of Massachusetts -- the land where talent goes to die. Read the rest

When Stephanie Russell-Kraft signed up to work for Law360, she naively entered into a probably unenforceable noncompete "agreement" that asserted that by looking at court filings for interesting news stories, she'd be privy to "critical and sensitive proprietary information" -- but she didn't really think about it until Law360 used her signature on the agreement to get her fired from her second industry job, with Reuters, costing her a generous compensation package that included overtime and health insurance. Read the rest