Work is changing faster than our ways of describing it.
Every month, official statistics tell the country how many people are working and how many are looking for work. Those numbers are carefully produced and enormously important. They are also, by design, a summary. They compress millions of particular situations into a handful of rates.
State of Work exists to keep a record of the particulars: the layoff that came by calendar invite, the schedule that quietly shrank, the new job that pays a third less than the old one, the search that is now in its eighth month. It invites people to describe what is happening to them, in their own words, and organizes those accounts so they can be read together.
The numbers tell one story. People tell another. Both are true, and both are needed.
What headline measures aren’t built to capture
The most widely reported unemployment rate counts people who have no job and have actively looked for one recently. Someone working twenty hours who needs forty is counted as employed. So is someone who has accepted a role far below their experience and pay. Someone who has stopped looking altogether is not counted as unemployed at all.
Other measures — including broader federal measures and independent ones such as the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity’s True Rate of Unemployment — count more of these situations, and arrive at very different figures. That gap is not a flaw in any one measure. It reflects a real question: what does it mean to be doing all right at work?
Even the broadest statistic can’t tell you how long someone has been searching, what they gave up, or how a closure changed a town. That is the space State of Work is designed to document.
Why we ask people directly
A firsthand account carries detail no survey question anticipates. It records sequence (laid off, then searching, then underemployed), texture (how the news was delivered), and consequence (what changed at home). Collected in a consistent structure, many accounts begin to reveal patterns — by place, by industry, over time — that are otherwise invisible.
We are careful about what those patterns can and can’t mean. People choose to take part, so State of Work is not a representative sample, and it never produces a rate for the country. Every account is presented as what it is: a self-reported experience. Read more in our methodology.
A record designed to grow
At launch, State of Work is mostly an invitation. As participation grows, it is designed to offer:
- Aggregate views by state, metro area, industry, occupation, and kind of experience — published only where enough people have contributed to protect privacy.
- A browsable collection of reviewed, de-identified written excerpts.
- The Voices of Work, an audio archive of people describing their experiences, published only with explicit permission.
- Regular research notes and editorial reporting drawn from the record.
- The ability for participants to return and update their accounts, so the record can follow how a person’s situation changes — from a layoff, through a search, to whatever comes next.
State of Work is created and operated by Avren.
Avren develops technology that helps people organize their own accounts and supporting information into structured records. We started State of Work because the experiences people bring to that kind of work are rarely visible in public conversations about the economy, and we think they should be.
We want to be specific about how the two relate:
- Taking part never requires using Avren’s product. You can contribute, explore and listen without an Avren account.
- Your contribution is not used to market to you. Information you share with State of Work is not transferred to Avren’s commercial product or used for advertising.
- One optional mention. After you contribute, we briefly mention what Avren does, with an unchecked option to learn more. Nothing happens unless you choose it, and contact details are requested separately with their own consent.
- Editorial independence. What State of Work publishes is decided by its editorial standards, not by Avren’s commercial interests.
Avren does not provide legal advice, and nothing on State of Work should be read as legal advice.
Get in touch
For privacy questions or requests relating to your contribution, contact legal@helloavren.com.