American workers who have more flexibility and security in their jobs also have better mental health, according to a study of 2021 survey data from over 18,000 nationally representative working Americans.
The study, published Monday in JAMA Network Open, may not be surprising to those who have faced return-to-office mandates and rounds of layoffs amid the pandemic. But, it offers clear data on just how important job flexibility and security are to the health and well-being of workers.
For the study, job flexibility was assessed in terms of ease of adjusting work schedules, advance notice of scheduling changes, and whether schedules were changed by employers often. People who reported greater flexibility in their job had 26 percent lower odds of serious psychological distress, which was measured on a validated, widely used questionnaire that assesses depression, nervousness, hopelessness, and worthlessness, among other forms of distress. Greater job flexibility was also linked to 13 percent lower odds of experiencing daily anxiety, 11 percent lower odds of experiencing weekly anxiety, and 9 percent lower odds of experiencing anxiety a few times a year.
Job security also appeared to be a boon for mental health. Workers were asked how likely they thought that they may lose their job or get laid off in the next 12 months. Those who reported feeling more secure in their positions had 25 percent lower odds of serious psychological distress. Job security was also associated with 27 percent lower odds of experiencing daily anxiety and 21 percent lower odds of experiencing weekly anxiety.
The study, led by Monica Wang of Boston University's School of Public Health, also looked at how job flexibility and security affected job absenteeism, finding mixed results. Both job flexibility and security were linked to fewer days where workers reported working while they were sick—suggesting that flexibility and security enabled workers to make use of sick leave when they needed it. In line with that finding, more job flexibility led to more days where workers reported being absent due to illness in the three months prior to the survey. Greater job security, on the other hand, led to fewer absences over the previous three and 12 months.
It's unclear why that would be the case, but the researchers speculated that "Job security may lead to lower work absenteeism due to higher work satisfaction, decreased job-related stress, and financial security," they wrote.
Overall, the study's findings indicate "the substantive impact that flexible and secure jobs can have on mental health in the short-term and long-term," the researchers conclude.
They do note limitations of the study, the main one being that the study identifies associations and can't determine that job flexibility and security directly caused mental health outcomes and the work absence findings. Still, they suggest that workplace policies could improve the mental health of employees. This includes flexible scheduling, leave policies, and working arrangements, including remote and hybrid options, which can all allow workers to accommodate personal and family needs. For improving job security, the researchers recommend longer-term contracts and long-term strategies to invest in employees, such as "uptraining," skill development, and advancement opportunities.
Guernica, a small but prestigious online literary magazine, was thrown into turmoil in recent days after publishing — and then retracting — a personal essay about coexistence and war in the Middle East by an Israeli writer, leading to multiple resignations by its volunteer staff members, who said that they objected to its publication.
In an essay titled “From the Edges of a Broken World,” Joanna Chen, a translator of Hebrew and Arabic poetry and prose, had written about her experiences trying to bridge the divide with Palestinians, including by volunteering to drive Palestinian children from the West Bank to receive care at Israeli hospitals, and how her efforts to find common ground faltered after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack and Israel’s subsequent attacks on Gaza.
It was replaced on Guernica’s webpage with a note, attributed to “admin,” stating: “Guernica regrets having published this piece, and has retracted it,” and promising further explanation. Since the essay was published, at least 10 members of the magazine’s all-volunteer staff have resigned, including its former co-publisher, Madhuri Sastry, who on social media wrote that the essay “attempts to soften the violence of colonialism and genocide” and called for a cultural boycott of Israeli institutions.
Chen said in an email that she believed her critics had misunderstood “the meaning of my essay, which is about holding on to empathy when there is no human decency in sight.” . . .
April Zhu, who resigned as a senior editor, wrote that she believed the article “fails or refuses to trace the shape of power — in this case, a violent, imperialist, colonial power — that makes the systematic and historic dehumanization of Palestinians (the tacit precondition for why she may feel a need at all to affirm ‘shared humanity’) a non-issue.”
It’s an evocative and moving piece of writing, which conveys deep sympathy for all the victims of the Israel-Hamas war.
I suppose it’s inevitable that it would cause various trained parrots to squawk about “colonialism” and “genocide,” as if the mere invocation of those words justify censoring the work of an Israeli writer, because after all she is a colonialist oppressor by definition, even if she regularly risks her own personal safety to help get life-saving medical treatment to Palestinian children.
To combat such reflexive stupidities is among a writer’s many obligations.
Liam Kerr is co-founder of WelcomePAC, which supports candidates who win the middle to strengthen a coherent, welcoming faction of the Democratic Party that protects democracy and governs effectively. He writes the WelcomeStack newsletter.
When you hear “Blue Dog,” the progressive left wants you to think of a bloated old white guy stuffing his face with lobbyist appetizers. But while that archetype may fit into the DC happy hour scene, the new Blue Dogs stand out — both in how they vote, and in who votes for them.
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Mary Peltola, and Jared Golden are outliers. A quick Google Image search reveals they do not fit the caricature of a pot bellied old white guy either: Jared Golden is a sinewy, tattooed millennial, typically sans suit, who grew up in rural Maine and left college after 9/11 to enlist in the Marine infantry, deploying to combat zones in Afghanistan and Iraq. Peltola is a gun-collecting Alaska Native who began commercial fishing when she was six years old and was the captain of her own boat at 14. And MGP is a 35 year old Latina mom who co-owns and operates an auto repair and machine shop with her husband (they also built their own house).
They look like normal thirty and forty somethings. Fit, cool, thirty and forty1 somethings — but normal people nonetheless. There’s a line of thinking that this is how candidates can overperform: just send out some moderate vibes, maybe a few poll-tested messages and a good ad.
Electoral outliers
Whatever they’re doing, it is working. Democrats only represent five districts where Trump won a majority.
And three of them are these Blue Dog co-chairs, all of whom represent very Trumpy districts. There are two additional longtime Democrats in districts that Trump won by fewer than three points.2 Meanwhile, Trump won the Blue Dog chair districts by 4 (MGP), 6 (Golden), and 10 (Peltola). They ran 5%, 12%, and 20% ahead of Biden.
They are outliers.
OK so these three look pretty cool, and they’re winning a bunch of Trump voters. The good vibes help, for sure. But it isn’t just that they seem like Barack Obama circa 2009. They vote like the type of Democrats who once gave Obama sixty votes in the Senate.
This chart shows how often House members vote with Joe Biden, compared to the presidential margin in their district.
The Matthew Effect of legislative and electoral outliers
MGP and Peltola are both in their first term. Golden, meanwhile, has been increasing his margins each cycle — growing from a narrow 2018 win to a six-point win in 2022. And of the dozens of Democrats who entered the House after the 2018 blue wave, he’s the only one still standing in a Trump district.
It is probably not a coincidence that Golden breaks from Biden more. Consider the 2022 elections. Golden went in with a voting record that would allow him to credibly distance himself from Biden; he voted with Biden 88% of the time. Compare this to those who lost:
Tom O’Halleran (100%)
Cindy Axne (100%)
Tom Malinowski (99%)
Sean Patrick Maloney (100%)
Elaine Luria (99%)
Al Lawson (100%)
In the book Outliers, catchphrase enthusiast Malcolm Gladwell describes the “Matthew Effect.” Named for the biblical character for whom interest compounds, the most memorable example is of the NHL players who are disproportionately born in January. Because New Year’s is the cutoff date for youth hockey, the players born early in the year have a big advantage in the younger years where ten months of physical development makes a big difference. The associated confidence and experience of being a better four-year-old hockey player trickle all the way up into the NHL.
There appears to be a similar potential advantage for Trump-district Democrats. To be a Blue Dog in a Red District means starting off from an entirely different place - everyone knows you need to win over Republicans, and that your race is probably a long shot. So you have the runway of potential authenticity and confidence. If you are a relative long shot — Nate Silver gave MGP a 2% chance of winning in 2022 — then The Groups aren’t all over you. You can be true to yourself and true to your district’s voters.3
Why is Jared Golden the only one who flipped a House seat in 2018 and stayed in a Trump-won district? There’s been some redistricting and runs for higher office. There have also been losses. All the while, Golden continues to gain. Slow Boring readers know why: Democrats have moved far to the left over the past decade.
Having a normal, decent, attractive person on the ballot is a good thing. But they can’t just seem cool, or meet people where they are physically. They have to meet them where they are on issues. And that means voting off the party line. This is not rocket science, although the political science research demonstrates that moderates do better in elections. And the elections analysts at Split-Ticket.org show this extends to caucuses — GOP Problem Solvers and Blue Dogs are the two most overperforming, gaining 1.2 to 3.2 percent on average.4
Democrats should stop conceding democracy and try harder to win elections
These three raise a natural question: if winning requires being an outlier, and voting like an outlier, how can that scale? Once you have a bunch of outliers clustered together, that’s more like a pack.
Adam Frisch ran a similar campaign to MGP, showing up with authenticity. And like MGP, he put a “safe” seat in play. Same with Will Rollins in CA-41, who — you guessed it — the Blue Dogs have also endorsed this cycle. In WI-3, against January 6th incumbent Derrick van Orden, Blue Dog-endorsed Becca Cooke seems pretty cool, too.
Last cycle, when we at WelcomePAC tried supporting several of those candidates, we encountered a problem: It is difficult to get people to solve a problem they do not believe exists. Democrats conceding winnable races in districts like these throughout the country is hard to believe. How many seats are uncontested that are more potentially competitive than Jared Golden’s?
In 2022, there were 14 seats more-Democratic than Golden’s that were effectively conceded (the Democrat spent less than $1m). For this cycle, there are 14 where the challenger did not enter the year with even $200k on-hand. Three didn’t even have any declared challenger at all. In our quarterly Conceding Democracy reports, we analyze FEC reports. How is it possible, nine years after Trump came down the escalator, that Democrats cannot even get $200k into these districts in a $10B congressional spending cycle?
Running candidates in R+3 to R+6 seats isn’t just good to give Republicans a scare. It is the terrain on which future outliers can thrive.
So yes, Democrats need to field more candidates. But, as Slow Boring readers now, they also need to try harder to win elections that they are already competing in. And yes, those candidates should have moderate vibes. But to get electoral outliers, you need more than vibes: you need to legislate differently. To recall another Slow Boring classic, polarization is a choice. A choice that elites have made. In our hyper-polarized environment, those who overcome manufactured polarization – The Depolarizers – are worthy of significant attention.
Someone smart will point out that Mary Peltola is technically 50, but as a forty something who hangs out with other forty somethings, the point still stands.
Electoral reform advocates also point out that the three Blue Dog chairs were all elected in states that employ an election system different from the first-past-the-post plurality common in most states. In ME-2, an independent candidate received 11% of the vote the midterm before Golden was first elected on the second round of a Ranked Choice Voting election. While all three use different systems, each eliminates spoiler votes – and thus forces candidates to cast their nets more broadly.
While the GOP Problem Solvers and Blue Dogs overperform, the Squad and “MAGA Squad” underperform by even more: 5.5 and 7.3 points below expected, respectively.
Glassdoor, where employees go to leave anonymous reviews of employers, has recently begun adding real names to user profiles without users' consent, a Glassdoor user named Monica was shocked to discover last week.
"Time to delete your Glassdoor account and data," Monica, a Midwest-based software professional, warned other Glassdoor users in a blog. (Ars will only refer to Monica by her first name so that she can speak freely about her experience using Glassdoor to review employers.)
Monica joined Glassdoor about 10 years ago, she said, leaving a few reviews for her employers, taking advantage of other employees' reviews when considering new opportunities, and hoping to help others survey their job options. This month, though, she abruptly deleted her account after she contacted Glassdoor support to request help removing information from her account. She never expected that instead of removing information, Glassdoor's support team would take the real name that she provided in her support email and add it to her Glassdoor profile—despite Monica repeatedly and explicitly not consenting to Glassdoor storing her real name.
There is literally no point to Glassdoor if the reviewing employees fear that their employers could retaliate. I'm sure that Glassdoor's advertisers THINK this is better for business, but they are killing the website's only distinguishing feature.