On the Future of Work, a Reporter Looks Back

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When my mom met my dad, she had three requirements for their relationship: She would never get married, have children or leave New York. She held firm to two of those terms. But it’s her “no children” rule that I like to revisit — something I distinctly admire in the person who taught me most about how to live.

Shaped by her bookshelves full of 1970s feminist thinking, my mother, Shifra, initially thought that having kids would narrow her life’s focus. There was too much she wanted to do for the world, too many injustices she felt should have her undivided attention, too much organizing work she believed in that didn’t involve passing on her DNA.

Talking with my mom about these beliefs taught me at a young age that conversations about work are necessarily personal. Examining work means examining identity — what shapes a person and occupies their time, what might consume them as fully as family. We spend so many hours of our life at work, yet often the best measure of its value isn’t assessed in hours. We measure it in convictions, trade-offs and what we’re able to do for the people around us. Talking about work means looking squarely at our ambitions — and that doesn’t just have to mean getting ahead, but deciding what we want to achieve with the blunt force of our energy and our time.

In 2021, I started covering the workplace for The New York Times. I wanted my work to feel human, bringing intimacy to a beat that can feel technical. My beat is called the future of work, but I think of it generally as workplace culture: the shaky feeling of starting a career during coronavirus lockdowns, the dread of realizing your work is so entwined with social media that your personal life is a potential source of income, the breath of relief that comes with leaving an abusive workplace.

Last year, Porsha Sharon, a server at a Michigan fast food pizza joint, put it to me starkly as she prepared to quit her job and begin a new role as an assistant at a law firm. She had endured customers insulting her and mocking her mask, as her feet swelled through long shifts. “The last generation, they were miserable in their jobs but they stayed because that’s what they were supposed to do,” she said. “We’re not like that, and I love that for us. We’re like, ‘This job is overworking me, I’m getting sick because my body is shutting down, and I’m over it.’”

I started my beat by reading writers who have detailed the day-to-day rhythm of workers’ lives. I read “Nickel and Dimed,” in which Barbara Ehrenreich tries to experience firsthand what it’s like to work as a waitress taking meatloaf orders or a housekeeper scrubbing kitchen floors. I read Angela Garbes, who wrote about the underpaid and sacred work of child care. I read Studs Terkel, who showed the unexpected profundity that emerged when you ask people about their workdays.

This is an especially dramatic period to be asking people how they occupy their time. There’s a reason that my slippery, somewhat amorphous beat came into being in 2021. Many reporters at The Times do the relentless and essential work of tracking particular industries and companies — retail and media, TikTok and Amazon. My beat cuts across these areas to examine the ways the workplace is changing, a shift that has ratcheted up to a breathless pace during the pandemic.

When the whole world tipped sideways — cities in lockdown, hospitals jammed — workplaces went with it. Over the last three and a half years, record numbers of people quit their jobs, many of them to pursue positions that were more highly paid. Thousands of people went on strike, including automobile makers, Hollywood writers and health care professionals. Unions reached their highest approval rating since 1965. Some 50 million people started working from home at one point, and now, many of them are fighting with managers to keep some of that flexibility.

One narrative broadly applied on social media, on storefront signs, in angst about so-called “quiet quitting” and even by Kim Kardashian was that “nobody wants to work.” (To which America’s former labor secretary replied: “No one wants to be exploited anymore.”)

But what I saw at the center of so many labor battles was people reimagining what their work could be. What from one view looked like anti-ambition could, from a different vantage point, appear as new forms of ambition. Ms. Sharon, who quit her pizzeria job, found a new one that treated her well and where she felt she had more to learn. What could be more ambitious than that?

Unsurprisingly, given what I learned from my mom, I found that those new forms of ambition extended to people’s homes and families, too.

In July, I visited Ylonda Sherrod, an AT&T call center worker who lives in Gulfport, Miss. Ms. Sherrod became involved in her union, the Communications Workers of America, shortly after joining AT&T. She has been active in telling her employer how its use of artificial intelligence is making workers’ lives more difficult, and she was recently invited by her union to meet with the White House’s Office of Public Engagement about A.I.

Over dinner at LongHorn Steakhouse, I asked Ms. Sherrod’s son, Malik — she calls him her “broke best friend” — how he felt when he learned his mom was meeting with top leaders in Washington.

“My dad told me about it first, and I said, ‘You’re lying,’” Malik said. “Then my mom came home smiling.”

Malik explained that watching his mom’s ambitions grow has expanded his own sense of what is possible. Gazing shyly across the table, he told me: “I feel like I can go to the White House now, too.”

There’s a strange kind of magical thinking that emerges, sometimes, in covering not a specific company or industry, but rather the forces of change remaking them all. My beat, after all, is called “the future of work,” which is to say a point in time that we haven’t yet reached. It’s looking within the banal realm of a 9-to-5 job and discovering the startling and the unfamiliar — new power struggles, new communities, new technologies and the disruption they leave in their wake.

Spending a workday covering work, I also get to look for the unfamiliar within my own 9-to-5. I often get messages from co-workers about what’s on their minds — fears about whether A.I. is coming for their jobs, nostalgia about the office friendships that used to define their lives — and they ask: “Could this be a story?” Sometimes those messages, which read like diary snippets, do spark the beginnings of an article. As I learned from my mother, there are stories about work to be found far away, but also much closer to home.