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Party Down: Charmingly Low-Budget Workplace Satire From the Makers of Veronica Mars

Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen The Guardian
The show never leaves the workplace. The complexities of these characters’ lives and relationships are teased out within the confines of their job, blurring the boundaries between personal and professional to create an almost claustrophobic intimacy. It’s also strangely prescient of the current, increasingly precarious gig economy.

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“Lunch Ladies” Are Tired of Being Underpaid and Overlooked

Nora De La COur Jacobin
Cafeteria staff make learning and healthy development possible by providing balanced meals to kids who otherwise might not get them. In return, they bring home some of the lowest earnings of the generally underpaid K–12 workforce.

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The Kitchen Network: America's underground Chinese restaurant workers

Lauren Hilgers The New Yorker
There are more than forty thousand Chinese restaurants across the country—nearly three times the number of McDonald’s outlets. The restaurants, connected by Chinese-run bus companies to New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, make up an underground network—supported by employment agencies, immigrant hostels, and expensive asylum lawyers—that reaches back to villages and cities in China, which are being abandoned for an ideal of American life that is not quite real.

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College Cafeteria Workers Win Back Health Care Benefits

Laura Reston Boston Globe
After months of activism by Sodexo employees, the company has decided to change the way it calculates hours for full-time jobs and allow several thousand workers back on the company health care plan.
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