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Michael Maffie

@maffie.bsky.social
1.6K followers 1.1K following 120 posts

Assistant Professor | Labor Relations, Platform Work | Developer, Coauthor Project (coauthor.fly.dev)

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Reposted by Michael Maffie
Dan Garisto @dangaristo.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
New: The National Science Foundation is preparing to claw back some $500 million in funds from some of its core science programs in physics, math, computer science, and engineering in order to fund a project from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
nature.com
NSF plans cuts to core science programmes to fund White House initiative
A proposed clawback of already distributed research funds comes as the US agency’s budget is already squeezed and it struggling to clear a backlog of grant applications.
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Konstantin Bogatyrev @bogatyrev.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
Thanks for sharing, Will! Personal stats are important, but please consider also submitting data to coauthor.fly.dev
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Anna Stansbury @annastansbury.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
📢New WP: Minimum Wages and Workplace Injuries Using California state and local minimum wage increases 2000-2019, we find minimum wage hikes increase workplace injury rates for low-wage workers. A plausible mechanism is work intensification 🧵 w/ @rjisungpark.bsky.social & Michael Davies
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Steven P Vallas @spvallas.bsky.social · 10/03/2026
Labor scholars and students of the platform economy will want to check out my review of Kathleen Thelen's new book, *Attention Shoppers! American Retail Capitalism and the Origins of the Amazon Economy* Herewith the link: www.wipsociology.org Recommended!
wipsociology.org
Work in Progress
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The New York Times @nytimes.com · 24/02/2026
In @nytopinion.nytimes.com “There are several interesting candidates in the campaign for the 12th District,” our columnist Michelle Goldberg writes. “But only Bores gives voters the opportunity to defeat the tech oligarchs unleashing tsunamis of cash to buy political submission.”
nyti.ms
Opinion | New York Democrats Have a Chance to Vote Against the A.I. Oligarchs
There’s a huge political opportunity for the party that can stand up for human beings in the face of A.I.
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Jeremy Berg @jeremymberg.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
NSF Update Funding curve overall. A little bit of progress in the past week, but only a little bit. Now by Directorate... 1/11
A line curve showing number of awards for fiscal year 2026 compared to fiscal years 2021-2025 across NSF. The fiscal year 2026 curve lies well below curves for other fiscal years.
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Reposted by Michael Maffie
Isabel M. Perera @isabelmperera.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
Great new tool from @maffie.bsky.social ! Let’s make academic publishing more transparent 🙌
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Michael Maffie @maffie.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
Coauthor update: we're now on Firefox! 🦊 Help make the academic publishing world a little more transparent by using our research lab's plugin. It's automatic: once you sign in, the software takes care of the rest. The app will even calculate your publishing stats for you! coauthor.fly.dev
coauthor.fly.dev
Coauthor
Share your manuscript peer review experiences and discover fair and efficient journals to publish your work in.
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Konstantin Bogatyrev @bogatyrev.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
Very interesting! It would be fantastic if we started aggregating such information across scholars and time periods to get a better sense of processing times. The information asymmetries are real. Some tools like @maffie.bsky.social's plugin can be of use if people start submitting data there.
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Michael Maffie @maffie.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
LLMs have robbed so much joy from grading. I used to love when students would turn in a polished, thoughtful final paper. Now I wonder if I'm actually reading their work...and start looking for the em dashes.
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Michael Maffie @maffie.bsky.social · 24/11/2025
The last time the US passed legislation expanding union rights for private sector employees, the color television was not yet sold in stores. Could AI lead to the first expansion of private sector labor rights in nearly 100 years? 1/ www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...
washingtonpost.com
The future of white-collar work may be unionized
Law firms, banks and tech companies are seeing an uptick in employees choosing to join unions.
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Michael Maffie @maffie.bsky.social · 01/11/2025
Public sector employees are prohibited from striking, so they will sometimes call out en masse citing sickness - called catching the “blue flu” (named for police departments that would call out sick to put pressure on cities during collective bargaining). abcnews.go.com/US/delays-sa...
abcnews.go.com
80% of NYC-area air traffic controllers absent amid 'surge' in callouts: FAA
Staffing shortages snarled flights at a slew of major airports on Friday.
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Michael Maffie @maffie.bsky.social · 03/10/2025
"Every aspect of it seeks to dictate decisions that have traditionally been left to each university — a degree of control over higher education that is characteristic of authoritarian countries." www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | Trump’s ‘Compact’ With Universities Is Just Extortion
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Michael Maffie @maffie.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
For example, making a digital platform increasingly awful for gig workers. #labor onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
The Enshittification of Work: Platform Decay and Labour Conditions in the Gig Economy
This study investigates the mechanisms by which gig platforms degrade labour conditions over time, building on the concept of platform decay, or ‘enshittification’, initially developed in the context...
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Michael Maffie @maffie.bsky.social · 25/08/2025
Opening day! Here we go, Big Red! @scjohnsoncollege.bsky.social
A statue of Touchdown the bear, Cornell University’s mascot, wearing a red scarf.
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Joshua Goodman @joshua-goodman.com · 13/08/2025
Promising way to crowdsource data on academic journal decision timelines. I'm uploading my data. You can too!
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Michael Maffie @maffie.bsky.social · 05/08/2025
🚨 I’m excited to announce that, “The Enshittification of Work: Platform Decay and Labour Conditions in the Gig Economy” is now available online ! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
The Enshittification of Work: Platform Decay and Labour Conditions in the Gig Economy
This study investigates the mechanisms by which gig platforms degrade labour conditions over time, building on the concept of platform decay, or ‘enshittification’, initially developed in the context...
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Reposted by Michael Maffie
Niels van Doorn @nielsvdoorn.bsky.social · 05/08/2025
This is an important “long view” contribution to the gig economy/platform work scholarship. Congrats @maffie.bsky.social! I recognize many of the decay/degradation mechanisms you describe. They’re why so many seasoned gig workers have left these platforms, when possible.
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Michael Maffie @maffie.bsky.social · 05/08/2025
🚨 I’m excited to announce that, “The Enshittification of Work: Platform Decay and Labour Conditions in the Gig Economy” is now available online ! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
The Enshittification of Work: Platform Decay and Labour Conditions in the Gig Economy
This study investigates the mechanisms by which gig platforms degrade labour conditions over time, building on the concept of platform decay, or ‘enshittification’, initially developed in the context...
0208
Reposted by Michael Maffie
Reuben Binns @rdbinns.bsky.social · 24/06/2025
Len Sherman and team from Columbia business school have just released this excellent report on Uber's pricing and pay which reflects many of the same trends we observed: len-sherman.medium.com/how-uber-bec...
len-sherman.medium.com
How Uber Became A Cash-Generating Machine
Uber has achieved one of the most impressive turnarounds in recent corporate history — a $12 billion swing in free cash flow over the past…
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Steve Herman @w7voa.journa.host.ap.brid.gy · 03/08/2025
The US could see a 30-40% decline in new international student enrollment, resulting in nearly $7 billion in lost revenue and more than 60,000 fewer American jobs. www.nafsa.org/fall-2025-internation…
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Catherine Rampell @crampell.bsky.social · 31/01/2025
A new era of government censorship has begun. It started with the silencing of scientific speech, when the admin blocked release of research on bird flu. But MAGA has also cracked down on other wrongthink—on race, geography (!), and of course Trump himself www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...
washingtonpost.com
Opinion | A new era of government censorship has dawned
Donald Trump fancies himself a champion of free speech. Oh, really?
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Reposted by Michael Maffie
derek guy @dieworkwear.bsky.social · 25/07/2025
You should never follow any of these color charts. They are all stupid. I'll show you why. 🧵
Someone on Twitter posted a color chart for how to combine different shirts and pants.
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Reposted by Michael Maffie
Isabella M. Weber @isabellamweber.bsky.social · 17/06/2025
NEW PAPER Oil, shipping, tariffs: We are back in a world of cost shocks. Our AI/LLM analysis of 138,962 corporate earnings calls shows how economy-wide cost shocks let large firms raise prices & increase profits—triggering sellers' inflation. 🧵 Open access: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
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Clara Murray @claradoodle.bsky.social · 24/07/2025
An AI slop factory apparently tried to rewrite our article about AI not replacing workers en masse, but hit the paywall... so just summarised the paywall. If this is the robot that takes my job I'll be v embarrassed
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Michael Maffie @maffie.bsky.social · 22/07/2025
Editing an article about the enshittification of online services in Wiley's online proofing system is strangely validating.
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Michael Maffie @maffie.bsky.social · 16/07/2025
Tell me you’ve never attended a faculty meeting without telling me you’ve never attended a faculty meeting.
An excerpt from a New York Times article where the author claims that contrarianism is unnatural to human beings
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Michael Maffie @maffie.bsky.social · 22/06/2025
“These brass hats have one great advantage in their favor,” President Kennedy sardonically remarked to his aide Dave Powers: “If we listen to them and do what they want us to do, none of us will be alive later to tell them that they were wrong.” time.com/5899754/jfk-...
time.com
Inside JFK's Key Decisions During the Cuban Missile Crisis
No other event offers as relevant lessons about presidential leadership in the nuclear age as those thirteen days in October.
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Reposted by Michael Maffie
Reuben Binns @rdbinns.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
New paper out today, accepted at #FAccT2025, led by Jake Stein and me: "Not Even Nice Work If You Can Get It; A Longitudinal Study of Uber's Algorithmic Pay and Pricing" arxiv.org/abs/2506.15278 Over the last 3 years, we've been working with @workerinfox.bsky.social to audit Uber's algorithms. 1/
arxiv.org
Not Even Nice Work If You Can Get It; A Longitudinal Study of Uber's Algorithmic Pay and Pricing
Ride-sharing platforms like Uber market themselves as enabling `flexibility' for their workforce, meaning that drivers are expected to anticipate when and where the algorithm will allocate them jobs, ...
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Michael Maffie @maffie.bsky.social · 18/06/2025
🚨 Paper acceptance! Keep your eyes out for, "The Enshittification of Work: Platform Decay and Labor Conditions in the Gig Economy". Out soon in the British Journal of Industrial Relations.
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Lorin Hochstein @norootcause.surfingcomplexity.com · 05/06/2025
Current tech industry status:
Waylon Smithers from the Simpsons opening a crate labeled “Robot workers: 100% loyal” while Mr. Burns looks on.
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Michael Maffie @maffie.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
Paging r/MaliciousCompliance
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Michael Maffie @maffie.bsky.social · 26/05/2025
Coauthor update: (1) User dashboard and (2) call for paid study participants. (1) Coauthor now displays your publishing stats against the population in our database, letting you know where you are more / less successful at publishing compared to our population of users.
the coauthor dashboard displays users publishing statistics in each journal in which they've published compared to the general population of users.
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John Holbein @johnholbein1.bsky.social · 22/05/2025
What do tax cuts for the rich do? They increase inequality. They have no effect on economic growth or unemployment. "Our results provide strong evidence against the influential political–economic idea that tax cuts for the rich ‘trickle down’ to boost the wider economy."
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Aaron Sojourner @aaronsojourner.org · 28/04/2025
"This paper studies whether working from home (WFH) affects workers' performance in public sector jobs... we find that WFH increases productivity by 12%." @afenizia.bsky.social Evidence that administrations that reject WFH harm efficiency. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Not Incentivized Yet Efficient: Working From Home in the Public Sector
51 Pages Posted: 21 Oct 2024 Last revised: 20 Feb 2025
Alessandra Fenizia
The George Washington University

Tom Kirchmaier
London School of Economics - Centre for Economic Performance

Date Written: January 14, 2025

Abstract
This paper studies whether working from home (WFH) affects workers' performance in public sector jobs. Studying public sector initiatives allows us to establish baseline estimates on the impact of WFH net of incentives. Exploiting novel administrative data and plausibly exogenous variation in work location, we find that WFH increases productivity by 12%. These productivity gains are primarily driven by reduced distractions. They are not explained by differences in quality, shift length, or task allocation. The productivity gains more than double when tasks are assigned by the supervisor.

Keywords: working from home, productivity, public sector
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Michael Maffie @maffie.bsky.social · 23/04/2025
🚨 Exciting new research in Human Resource Management! In this article, my coauthor Tashlin Lakhani and I explore strategic human resource management in the gig economy. 🚗 Check it out here: doi.org/10.1002/hrm....
doi.org
Human Resource Management in New Service Arrangements: Extending the Ability, Motivation, Opportunity Framework Into the Gig Economy
This article investigates how human resource (HR) practices affect organizational outcomes in one of the newest areas of service work: the gig economy. Combining theory on multi-sided markets and str....
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ilralex.bsky.social @ilralex.bsky.social · 23/04/2025
Fascinating new research on strategic HR and competitive dynamics in the gig economy from Mike Maffie and Tash Lakhani! Nice research design too, taking advantage of a change in Uber policies. Shows the value of having data collection projects active out in the field at a critical moment.
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Michael Maffie @maffie.bsky.social · 23/04/2025
🚨 Exciting new research in Human Resource Management! In this article, my coauthor Tashlin Lakhani and I explore strategic human resource management in the gig economy. 🚗 Check it out here: doi.org/10.1002/hrm....
doi.org
Human Resource Management in New Service Arrangements: Extending the Ability, Motivation, Opportunity Framework Into the Gig Economy
This article investigates how human resource (HR) practices affect organizational outcomes in one of the newest areas of service work: the gig economy. Combining theory on multi-sided markets and str....
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Beth Popp Berman @epopppp.bsky.social · 22/04/2025
Small colleges have taken the lead -- but they are now joined by 6 of 8 Ivies: Cornell, Penn, Princeton, Yale, Brown, and -- yes -- Harvard. And, finally, by a handful of big publics: U. of Washington, Wisconsin, Rutgers, SUNY Buffalo and Stony Brook, UC Riverside, UVa, UMD.
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Ben Golub @bengolub.bsky.social · 07/04/2025
The main effect of tariff insanity: Uncertainty poisoning supply networks, degrading a lot of relationships at once. That scar tissue will linger for a long time. 1/
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Michael Maffie @maffie.bsky.social · 22/03/2025
The NCAA tournament is a great place for colleges and universities to advertise important scientific discoveries at their institutions.
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Michael Maffie @maffie.bsky.social · 21/03/2025
At the start of covid, I remember a strange cycle where what you thought was impossible would become reality two weeks later. "We'll never send students home" became "of course that's what will happen" in a matter of days. I am starting to see the same cycle unfold in American universities.
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Georgy Tarasenko @tarasenkogeorgy.bsky.social · 18/12/2024
Just wow! Gonna test today
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Aaron Sojourner @aaronsojourner.org · 15/03/2025
Hang together or hang separately.
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Alberto López Ortega @bertous.bsky.social · 19/12/2024
The informal knowledge gap around journals' turnaround times systematically penalizes disadvantaged and early-career scholars. I highly recommend using and promoting this tool to help close that gap. 👇
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Corey Rayburn Yung @coreyryung.bsky.social · 02/03/2025
This is 100% bullshit. There are no algorithms. Musk and his incel clown posse are not forensic accountants and do not know how to audit. Discovering fraud is a labor-intensive project that can never be done by looking at payments alone. This is just a thinly-veiled rationale to gut Social Security.
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Isabel M. Perera @isabelmperera.bsky.social · 06/02/2025
As promised, here is a bit more on my new book, The Welfare Workforce, now available fully open-access from @cambridgeuppolisci.bsky.social 🧵 1/11
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Michael Maffie @maffie.bsky.social · 05/02/2025
Whoever creates a version of "TSA PreCheck" for the IRB will forever be my academic hero.
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Michael Maffie @maffie.bsky.social · 24/01/2025
“I think you’ll see professors investigated and terminated. I think you’re going to see students punished, and I think you’re going to see a preemptive action on those fronts,” he [Will Creeley] said. www.nytimes.com/2025/01/24/o...
nytimes.com
Opinion | Harvard Has Already Capitulated to Trump’s War on Academia (Gift Article)
The administration is trying to assert political control over American higher education.
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