【推荐1】In 1970, before he became a blues legend, Stevie Ray Vaughan was working as a dishwasher in Dallas. One of his jobs was cleaning out the trash bin. To do it, Vaughan had to stand on some large wooden barrels, which were for the kitchen crew to dump hot grease(油脂). One day, while he was cleaning, the top of a barrel suddenly gave and he fell in.

Luckily for Vaughan, it had been a while since the last grease dump, so the stuff had cooled and he was able to safely climb out of the barrel. However, the next day, Vaughan’s boss fired him for breaking the barrel. The young man could have been severely injured, and he lost his job for his trouble.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. National surveys suggest that burns, cuts, falls and other injuries are extremely common in the fast food industry, where underpaid people are placed under intense pressure to work quickly.

Then there’s wage theft—employers trying to avoid paying workers what they’re legally entitled to. According to the Economic Policy Institute, federal and state agencies recovered $933 million for victims of wage theft in 2012 alone and that’s just for the workers who successfully pursued their cases.

People with power—employers, managers and owners of businesses big and small—quite often do mistreat their workers. And they do it because there are no consequences to fear and workers often can’t leave a job without putting their livelihood at risk. So they daren’t speak out their voice.

So we also need social institutions—a universal basic income, wage allowance, a job guarantee, truly universal health care and more—that give workers an alternative to depend on in the market for income. And we need a strong labor movement that can credibly punish employers if they don’t give workers a fair share and press the government to enforce the law.

【推荐3】Offline research has given rise to what’s called the “Social Brain Hypothesis”. This says that our brain’s ability to process multiple relationships creates a natural group size for humans of 100-200 people. This size is also constrained (限制) by the time required to maintain relationships — we only have so much time to devote to meeting or talking to people.

It has been suggested that social media might overcome the time constraints because posts and pictures allow us to talk to many more people at the same time even if the interaction is not direct. So psychologist Professor Robin Dunbar carried out two surveys of more than 3,300 people to see whether using the Internet really means we can have more friends.

What he found was that even among regular social media users, the average number of friends they had on Facebook was 155 in the first survey and 183 in the second, right in the bracket (范围) predicted by the “Social Brain Hypothesis”.

The first survey group, made up of regular social media users, considered only 28% of their Facebook friends to be “genuine” friends. When asked specifically how many people they would turn to for support in a crisis and how many they would turn to for sympathy, on average those groups were just 4 and 14 friends respectively, matching the offline findings of the “Social Brain Hypothesis”.

While a few people did have much larger groups of online “ friends ” on Facebook, they had similar sized support and sympathy groups to others. This suggests that when social media seem to allow someone to have more friends, it is because looser acquaintances are being included in the “friend” category, and partly because social media sites tend not to differentiate between close and more distant relationships — even though we clearly distinguish between friends and acquaintances in the offline world.

Professor Robin Dunbar explained, “social media certainly help to slow down the natural rate of decline in relationship quality that would set in once we cannot readily meet friends face to face. But no amount of social media will prevent a friend from eventually becoming just another acquaintance if you don’t meet face to face from time to time. There is something vital for face-to-face interaction that is crucial for maintaining friendships. Seeing the white of their eyes from time to time seems to be crucial to the way we maintain friendships.”