The New Job Market
Jack Swigert’s actual words, transmitted from Apollo 13 on April 13, 1970, were: “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.” Past tense. The oxygen tank had already exploded. The crisis was already in motion. What the astronauts were doing was narrating a catastrophe that had begun before they had language for it. The modern job market arrived the same way. The crisis had been accumulating for years — the hollowing of middle-wage work, the thinning of the implicit contract between employer and employee, the acceleration that started with the transistor in 1947 and has not paused since. Most people discovered it the way you discover a slow leak: not at the moment it started, but at the moment it became impossible to ignore. …