Workers, Get Ready for the Great Rebalancing
This may be the year when employer-employee power dynamics begin to normalize
2 min
American workers’ wild ride is coming to an end.
After three whiplash-inducing years of, first, professional vulnerability and, then, perceived invincibility, many people are returning to more typical levels of career security and leverage.
Call it the Great Rebalancing of the employer-employee relationship.
“We’re clearly headed there,” says Heidi Shierholz, president of the Economic Policy Institute.
Not long ago, at the pandemic’s onset, things were so bad that people lost jobs in record numbers as the U.S. unemployment rate reached 14.7%. Then things got so good that workers resigned in record numbers. There was a catchy name for this trend, I believe.
Adding to the volatility, savings swelled and shrivelled with the stock market, causing some people to lurch between hope for an early retirement and fear of working forever. Raises that made some feel flush were offset by inflation, in many cases.
The “quiet quitters” who reduced their on-the-job efforts while feeling untouchable last year may now be angling to fill key roles when their companies freeze or cut head counts.
Ms. Shierholz says that workers are still in good shape, overall, but certain key metrics are trending down toward normal ranges. December’s hourly earnings increase of 4.6% from a year earlier was the smallest rise since mid-2021, and the 223,000 additional jobs were the fewest per month in two years.
To complain about such decreases would be akin to griping if Yankees slugger Aaron Judge were to hit only 50 home runs this year, after smacking an American League-record 62 last season. It’s unrealistic to expect new peaks all the time, and it’s worth remembering what 2020 was like. (Mr. Judge, beset by injuries, hit 9 homers that year, by the way.)
Francesco Carucci, a California software developer, says he knew that his pay package was “wildly inflated” when he joined Meta Platforms Inc. last January. He says Facebook’s parent company tripled the total compensation that he earned at his previous employer, amid a hiring spree in a historically tight labor market.
Then Meta laid off Mr. Carucci late last year in a round of 11,000 job cuts. Being aware of his bloated comp didn’t dull the sting of losing it, he says, and he got an additional reality check this month when he accepted an offer that is worth half of the one he received a year ago.
Still, he says his new pay is reasonable—more than what he made a few years ago—and the interview and negotiation process was more in line with what he has usually experienced over a 25-year career. He adds that he’s trying not to take the layoff personally. He views it instead as part of a natural and inevitable correction to the job market.
Others would do well to practice the same attitude. Andy Challenger, senior vice president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which helps companies manage layoffs and provides career coaching to the dismissed, tells me that business is picking back up after two of the slowest years in the firm’s history. He offers a blunt translation of what that means: “We know that there are a lot more layoffs coming.”
Ominous as that sounds, Mr. Challenger says the prospects of finding new work are generally good. Job openings, while shrinking, still outnumber the unemployed by several million, according to federal data. He expects that gap to narrow as the year goes on and advises job seekers to redouble their urgency.
“It’s not a time to lay back and feel too comfortable about the tight labor market,” he says. “Even if you’re getting lots of messages from recruiters today, that can dry up pretty quickly as things turn.”
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For Central Element, the start of work at Pearl represents another step in the company’s growing eastern suburbs pipeline.
All three vehicles will form part of a broader charitable initiative benefiting Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, the American Red Cross and Starlight Children’s Foundation
Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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A divide has opened in the tech job market between those with artificial-intelligence skills and everyone else.
