The Uncertain Hour
ਚੈਨਲ ਵਿਸਥਾਰ
The Uncertain Hour
Each season, we explain the weird, complicated and often unequal American economy — and why some people get ahead and some get left behind. Host Krissy Clark dives into obscure policies and forgotten histories to explain why America is like it is. The latest season examines the “welfare-to-work ind...
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52 ਐਪੀਸੋਡ
Integration Generation (bonus episode from “Unlocking the Gates”)
In a new collaboration between Marketplace and APM Studios called “Unlocking the Gates,” host Lee Hawkins investigates how a secret nighttime business...
The $80 Million Acre (from “How We Survive”)
This week, we’re dropping into your feeds to tell you about another podcast we make here at Marketplace that we think Uncertain Hour listeners will li...
Chapter 6: The Welfare to Temp Work Pipeline
Since the 1990s, most cash welfare recipients have been required to get a job or do mandated “work activities” to receive their monthly check. These r...
Chapter 5: Profits and Perverse Incentives
Antoine Dukes is a natural born salesman. And when he started working for a for-profit welfare company, he figured it was a good way to put his skills...
Chapter 4: The Battle of Newburgh
In 1961, city officials in Newburgh, New York, declared war on their poorest residents by proclaiming, without evidence, that the city was overrun by...
Chapter 3: Race and rumor
In the 1950s, a rumor that people were moving to Newburgh, NY to live off welfare riled up the city. When city leaders essentially declare war on welf...
Chapter 2: The compliance machine
A single mother of two in Chicago was working and taking classes to become an addiction counselor when her life fell apart. The father of her youngest...
Chapter 1: The dream
When a struggling mother of two in Milwaukee hits hard times, she turns to a local welfare office for help — a welfare office outsourced to a private,...
Season 6: The Welfare-to-Work Industrial Complex
There is a growing chorus of politicians who argue that there’s a simple solution to help all kinds of problems, including poverty, labor shortages an...
25 years after welfare reform, let’s revisit “the magic bureaucrat”
It’s been 25 years since our country upended its welfare system – and so we’re looking back at our very first episode.
We spent that first seaso...
My boss is an app
The gig-app workforce has arrived at our doorstep. But Silicon Valley’s innovations in hiring are only the latest round of this long-running battle ov...
Inside baseball
In minor league baseball, professional athletes train, suit up and play for wages that would be illegal in most sectors. Players live in crowded apart...
Big Boss, Little Boss
After Jimmy Nicks’ job was subcontracted, he took both companies to court — the subcontractor he worked for and its client, Koch Foods. The “little bo...
To catch a chicken
When chicken catcher Jimmy Nicks’ job was subcontracted, virtually overnight, he started doing the same job for a new boss — only without the pay, pro...
The liquid workforce
Over a quarter of the world’s largest employers don’t just make or sell products — they also rent out workers. Let’s talk about how we got here.
...
“To suffer or permit to work”
This week we’re finally going to tell you what happened to Jerry Vazquez — and how his story relates to the 1930s case of a hotel chambermaid. Jerry a...
Who’s the boss?
Jerry Vazquez was in the cleaning business now, and his clients liked him. They’d leave him notes, some with smiley faces drawn in. But, he says, he w...
Congratulations! You’re an entrepreneur now
Jerry Vazquez always dreamed of working for himself. So when he saw a notice in the PennySaver advertising janitorial franchises, he decided to go all...
‘The Uncertain Hour’ is back!
Employment as we know it is changing. The kinds of jobs where one person works for one employer for years — with health insurance, sick days, paid vac...
Answering your “History of Now” questions
We’ve spent the past five weeks trying to make sense of this moment, where the inequalities of our society have been suddenly set in high relief. In t...
Without a home in a pandemic
On any given night last year, half a million people in the United States were experiencing homelessness, and more than 60% of them were staying in eme...
There are cracks in the foundation of our housing system
The COVID-19 pandemic arrived at a moment when the gap between rich and poor in this country had hit a record high. One place that inequality is most...
Unemployment benefits are hard to get. That’s on purpose.
Millions of Americans who are out of work don’t receive unemployment benefits. That’s by design. Today, we’ll look at the history of the United States...
An unequal history of quarantines
As long as there’s been such a thing as quarantine, each person’s experience under it has depended largely on their economic status. On this week’s sh...
You’re an essential worker. Do you get essential protections?
Chicken is America’s most popular meat. But chicken supply chains — in fact, many of our food supply chains — are in danger of breaking down. Part of...
A History of Now: The Trailer
There’s not much more uncertain than our current moment. Our day-to-day lives and our economy have been upended by the coronavirus pandemic. On this s...
A new piece of the opioid crisis origin story, revealed
We just found the answer to a really big question that’s been bugging us for years, about why the opioid crisis has hit some places so hard while othe...
George Bush’s infamous crack speech, 30 years later
On this day, 30 years ago, President George H.W. Bush gave his first address from the Oval Office. Bush held up a baggie of crack he said had been sei...
Kicking the habit
Many people in Wise County agree that they can’t jail their way out of a drug epidemic, but there’s a lot less agreement on what to do instead. And we...
Supply
It’s not easy being an undercover cop in a county of just 40,000 people. But drugs were making it hard for Bucky Culbertson to run his business, so he...
Welcome to Wise County
It’s the deadliest drug epidemic our country has ever faced. We go to ground zero, where “nothing changes except for the drug.”
Sentencing
The drug bust and the trial were a “farce,” but the full force of the law still came down on Keith Jackson — and thousands of people like him. That di...
What happened to Keith?
One day, early in the semester, Keith Jackson didn’t show up to class. He’d been arrested for selling crack, but for his classmates, that wasn’t the s...
George H.W. Bush and his baggie of crack
It was the perfect political prop: drugs seized by government agents right across the street from the White House, just in time for a big presidential...
The Uncertain Hour Season 3: Inside America’s Drug War
Thirty years ago, President George H.W. Bush held up a baggie of crack on live TV, and said it had been seized right in front of the White House. The...
“A mosquito in a nudist colony”
President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress rolled back a gun regulation last year that would have restricted some people with mental disabilit...
Law and Odor: a crime story about orchids, pig smell, refineries and you
There are lots of different ways to commit a crime. Some of them are obscure — it’s a crime to sell Swiss cheese without holes, for example. Some deal...
Who’s regulating whom?
The U.S. Constitution doesn’t mention corporations once. But if you want to talk about federal regulations, you have to talk about private enterprise,...
Your regulations questions, answered
We’re working on the next batch of episodes for season two, but this week we’re taking a quick break over the holidays to bring you a sort of reporter...
The sentence that helped set off the opioid crisis
When OxyContin went to market in 1996, sales reps from Purdue Pharma hit one point particularly hard: Compared to other prescription opioids, this new...