Workin’ It: A Crash Course Via Podcasts ahead of Festival 21

I’m embarrassingly late to the party, but I recently discovered that NPR’s Serial is in fact not the only great podcast out there. And now I’m obsessed with listening to podcasts whenever possible.

Lately I’ve decided to put my addiction to good use. Since we're creating a Festival 21 Town Hall Idea event about work as both obstacle and opportunity, I started listening to podcasts about work in order to spur thought on related issues we might discuss. Here are a few recommendations to help you get prepped for the Festival:

Reveal's "Decoding Discrimination in America’s Temp Industry" from the Center of Investigative Reporting:
This podcast reminds us how terribly far we still have to go in battling job discrimination, and specifically where jobs have been most in demand and vulnerable since the 2008 recession: temp agencies. Reveal’s team does excellent investigative reporting, and here they present the topic through three short stories, chock full of interviews. These offer important conversations for a diverse community such as our own in New Haven, and will be a good lead-up to the June 11 Urban Onshoring talk from Majora Carter, as well as the June 18 Town Hall.

“All the Single Ladies” from the Center for American Progress:
This episode took place in honor of Equal Pay Day (April 12), a day which marks how far into the year women must work to earn the same amount men did the previous year. (This holiday’s meaning shocked me.) I was particularly interested in listening to this since Anne-Marie Slaughter will be speaking about gender equality in the U.S. at the June 11 Ideas event The Care Economy. The first part of the podcast is an interview with Sarah Jane Glynn, Director of Women’s Economic Policy at the Center for American Progress, who gives hard, and hard-to-swallow, facts about how much less women make than men, why that is, which women suffers the most, and what policy changes could help. Following this is an interview with Rebecca Traister, author of All the Single Ladies (2016), a book that traces the history of the unmarried American female. Only in recent years, she argues, have substantially more females been able to remain single and still survive independently—but she warns that decisions in upcoming elections could harm this independence.

Hidden Brain's “How to Build a Better Job” from National Public Radio:
This relatively short podcast approaches work not from a social or economic perspective but a psychological one, and offers the most uplifting view on the subject. Host Shankar Vedantam interviews Yale psychologist Amy Wrzesniewski about the radically different ways people view their jobs—a way to pay the bills, versus a deep-rooted calling—and how that perspective changes how good at them they are. Wrzesniewski argues that happiness and productivity at work is not necessarily about finding the perfect job but more about “crafting” your job in order to make it more meaningful to you.

Enjoy!

-Alex Ripp, Ideas Program Manager