Activity

It was Microsoft, with its famous employee stock-option plan, that developed and fostered the mythology of Silicon Gold, but it is also Microsoft that has done the most to dismantle it. The golden era of the geeks has come and gone, and today’s high-tech jobs are as unstable as any other. Part-time…

Some service-sector companies have made much of the fact that they offer stock options or “profit-sharing” to low-level employees, among them Wal-Mart, which calls its clerks “sales associates” Borders, which refers to them as “co-owners” and Starbucks, which prefers the term “partners.” Many emplo…

Starbucks has been the most innovative in the modern art of supple scheduling. The company has created a software program called Star Labor that allows head office maximum control over the schedules of its clerks down to the minute. With Star Labor, gone is anything as blunt and imprecise as a day …

But while many workers are indeed drawn to flexible work arrangements, their definition of what constitutes “flexibility” is dramatically different from the one favored by service-sector bosses. For instance, while studies have shown that working mothers define flexibility as “having the ability to…

In sharp contrast to the days when corporate employees took pride in their company’s growth, seeing it as the result of a successful group effort, many clerks have come to see themselves as being in direct competition with their employers’ expansion dreams. “If Borders opened thirty-eight new store…