Most private-sector employees in the United States work under what are called at-will employment contracts, which means that they can get fired at any time without explanation or cause. Not to be dramatic about it, but this describes a fairly tyrannical set of circumstances: In exchange for showing up to work every day and doing whatever it is you do, your boss promises you essentially nothing in return. There’s no stability, no real means to plan for the long term, no guarantee that you’ll have your employer-sponsored health insurance at the end of a given month. It’s a bad situation, and one that millions of people find themselves in every day.
 
This unilateral power of the boss also tends to conceal all kinds of terrible behavior, buffing out the edges of racism, sexual harassment, and transphobia until you might be able to squint and call them something like “culture fit” or “attitude problems.” This leaves a lot of people in a position where they’re pretty sure they were mistreated or fired for reasons that are ostensibly illegal, but the burden of proof and cost of entry on a given legal challenge is generally too high for most people. (Aimee Stephens, whose case before the Supreme Court affirmed that sexual orientation and gender identity are protected under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, waited seven years for her case to wind its way through the courts and did not live to witness her historic victory.)

So when I think about the precarity and danger most people face at work, either because of who they are or the things they say or believe, this is what I think of: at-will employment, contract work, nebulous “permalance” jobs that offer no real protections even as they closely resemble full-time gigs, institutional policies and non-disclosure agreements that prevent workers from speaking out about the conditions of their labor. But an open letter published in Harper’s this week that was ostensibly about exactly this—media and academic institutions meting out “swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought”—had nothing to say about the most common means through which marginalized workers are punished by their bosses. What a tell! A truly disqualifying omission, particularly coming from well-compensated and thin-skinned columnists at legacy publications and a millionaire many times over. I can’t bring myself to write any more about the letter or its bad-faith regurgitations about “cancel culture.” Just read Osita instead, whose clarity on the subject—presciently published a day before the letter itself—should be the last thing anyone needs to say about it, but life is never that fair.
 
Goodbye to this week!

—Katie McDonough, deputy editor