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My friend Dave is a native New Yorker. We’ve been close since law school when he hosted my legal services talk show ( LawTalk) and we worked together on the end-of-year Law Revue comedy show. In the Law Revue, Dave did a terrific Frank Sinatra singing about how the law school renovation had prompted a highly inconvenient removal of the entire library to Bridgeport, CT (to the tune of New York, New York: Bridgeport, Bridgeport) and played a cool-as-a-cucumber Vinnie Barbarino in a parody of Welcome Back, Kotter, except our law school Sweathogs were goofing around in Professor Stephen Carter’s intellectual property class (Welcome Back, Carter). Now Dave lives near me in L.A. Our kids are the same age and we get together to gripe about Trump and the New York Times in equal measure.
Last week Dave was in the pharmacy line at CVS. His daughter Anya, a high school junior, was on a spring break college tour and called him from Fordham. Dave happened to be wearing a T-shirt that said The Bronx and took this selfie to send to Anya:
Then something unexpected happened, even for L.A. The guy next to him in line turned to him and said: “Bro, I'd be happy to get in the picture. It's cool that you're a fan.” Dave had no idea who the guy was, but being an agreeable sort, took a second selfie with his fabulist-famous pharma friend.
We don’t know who this guy is and are marginally curious. So if you recognize Dave’s bro, please let me know. Dave seriously considered asking for his signature, then adding: “and below your signature, could you please write your name in ALL CAPS?”
***
These sorts of encounters are less likely to happen in New York, New York, a more serious place where only famous people think they’re famous. That is, except at the New York Times, where – as Dave and I like to kvetch – journalists think they’re celebrities because they write for the paper of record.
With great power comes great responsibility. But on the issues of greatest concern here, the Times doesn’t always get it right, from romanticized coverage of failing colleges, to blithely assuming college degrees produce a strong ROI because they once did, to articles on skills-based hiring that fail to explore whether it’s actually happening, to naming a trend from anecdotal evidence, like last week’s Student Debt Burdened Them, So They Moved Abroad and Stopped Paying which attempted to draw a line from two data points (#3 was a foreign student who moved back home).
But on the most fundamental issue, the paper of record has it wrong. I’m talking about workforce. Specifically, how the Times refuses to reference workforce as a single word. In article after article, op-ed after op-ed, even letters to the editor, workforce is always “work force.” No matter that workforce is in the dictionary and a valid Scrabble word. No matter that the Times reports on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce (one word). Outside the Committee name, in the paper of record, workforce is invariably two words: work force.
Although this may sound like nitpicking, it’s clearly a choice – and one that reveals a worldview. Workforce is a system. It’s our labor supply, our skills base, and our career infrastructure. Workforce is our capacity to match companies to talent and individuals to opportunity. It is, at once, our most fundamental economic resource, a social compact, and for millions of Americans, the difference between getting ahead and barely hanging on. It’s one very big thing. But to write it as two words is to treat it as something looser, smaller, less coherent: not a system under strain, but just another topic for the labor beat. Somewhere between work stoppages and work rules.
By splitting the word, the Times splits the issue, separating symptoms from system. “Work force” is a collection of problems. Underemployment becomes a human-interest story, broken career pathways an education story, talent shortages a business story, AI’s threat to entry-level work a tech story, and our failure to build earn-and-learn infrastructure becomes a policy story nobody cares about. We fail to see the forest for the trees. Which explains the paper of record’s spotty coverage of these symptoms and failure to cover the system causing them.
The truth is that workforce connects all these stories. It is not one issue among many. It is THE issue underlying so many of America’s problems. It’s one word because it’s one system. And because decision-makers aren’t seeing it, they’re not governing it. Which explains fragmented policies: student debt here, higher education accountability there, Department of Education here, Department of Labor there, immigration changes somewhere else – none of which fix the real problem. Ironic, isn’t it, that the inequality-obsessed New York Times is failing to cover the system that produces it?
Why is the Times so wrong on workforce? The star journalists and editors there fall into two categories. If they graduated from college in the past decade, they probably attended elite colleges where workforce was an afterthought; the aforementioned problems unlikely to affect them. If they’re more advanced in age, they graduated into a different economy – one where a college degree meant career launch wasn’t a question of if, but rather when and what – literally a sign of the Times. As far as I can tell, most of the good people there check both boxes: older graduates of Ivy + schools. A recent study found that of the eight colleges most common among Times staffers, six are Ivy League colleges; the other two are Northwestern and Berkeley.
The New York Times’ effect on man also impacts higher education. Because higher education’s paper of record, The Chronicle of Higher Education, also gets it wrong. While not as egregious as the Times, the Chronicle’s treatment is more annoying: “work-force.” The hyphenated treatment of workforce – reflected in headlines here, here, and here, in countless articles, and in last week’s webinar where attendees were repeatedly bludgeoned with a hyphen – reveals the same malady as the Times’ bifurcation and reflects the ivory tower attitude that workforce isn’t something colleges and universities should lose sleep over.
In the higher education media landscape, the Chronicle is the outlier outlet. Every other publication – Inside Higher Ed, Higher Ed Dive, Times Higher Education, The Hechinger Report, The74, and Community College Daily – all less ivory-tower-minded than the Chronicle, emphatically employs workforce: no space or hyphen. And at this week’s ASU-GSV conference, all workforce sessions were on the 4th floor of the San Diego Grand Hyatt in an area labeled “The Force.” (There is only one Force, and that’s workforce.) Of course, most Chronicle journalists attended Ivy + schools, like the moderator of last week’s “work-force” forum (Johns Hopkins then Columbia). And most would give their eye teeth (actually two words) to work at the New York Times.
***
You can tell a lot about someone whether they write workforce as one word or two. At Achieve, we choose one. As in Achieve Workforce I, the $180M fund we announced in 2021 and have since deployed to acquire eight companies across tech services and healthcare services. All in sectors with talent shortages. All in sectors with no clear career pathways for job seekers without relevant work experience and technical skills. In each one we built apprenticeship programs to provide earn-and-learn career pathways. The resulting new talent helped companies address shortages and meet client demand. As such, Workforce I has sought to address workforce challenges at the level of the career launcher, the company, and the country. Because workforce is a system, the only way to fix it is systemically. That’s what we’ve been working on at Achieve.
The market has validated that when you treat workforce as a system, you don’t just write about it differently, you allocate capital differently. Achieve has already announced three exits from Workforce I, including the recent agreement to sell Optimum Healthcare IT to Infosys for $465M.
This week we announced Achieve Workforce Fund II, a new $450M fund intended to acquire approximately ten more companies in sectors with talent shortages and build more apprenticeship programs in light of AI’s impact on the workforce. We couldn’t be more pleased with the support we’ve received from the LP community – both from investors who care a great deal about workforce issues and investors who couldn’t care less whether workforce is bifurcated or hyphenated.
So while
We can try to understand
The New York Times' effect on man
Achieve is going to be busy over the next few years and not overly preoccupied with spaces or hyphens. By deploying capital to help build the earn-and-learn infrastructure America lacks, we’ll be making real progress on workforce. Which means Dave’s bro might be able to stop hanging around CVS and launch a real career. And that:
Whether you’re a brother or whether you’re a mother
You’re stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive