Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Sen. Susan Collins, (R) of Maine (c.) leaves a meeting with Senate Republicans on Sept. 19, 2017, on Capitol Hill in Washington.

Asked to imagine the US Senate without Sen. Susan Collins (R) of Maine, Sen. Chris Coons (D) of Delaware tilts his head back and places his hand on his chest – a gesture of both respect and sadness. “The Senate loses something big when it loses members who have been here a long time – who have great sense, who are well liked and widely respected, and who want to get things done,” he says.

He was speaking not only about Senator Collins, who is expected to announce this week whether she will run for governor of her home state, but also about retiring Sen. Bob Corker (R) of Tennessee, the plain-speaking chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who became embroiled in a tweet feud with President Trump over the weekend, and of Sen. John McCain (R) of Arizona – an institution unto himself, who is still working while having treatment for cancer but who has called his prognosis “very poor.” Last week, Senator McCain told reporters he was feeling good and then joked, “really good until I ran into you all.”

Collins, Corker, and McCain are three Republican pragmatists who regularly work across the aisle. Their exits – along with the potential loss of several endangered Democrats up for reelection in red states – would all but complete the hollowing out of the Senate’s political center. It’s a trend that’s been going on for more than a decade on both sides, says Jennifer Duffy of the independent Cook Political Report: “There’s virtually no middle left in the Senate.”

The power of the center

Ironically, the center is a powerful place to be for Republicans these days. With a slim majority of 52, it takes only a few wayward votes to make or break the president’s agenda. Collins was one of three Republicans to sink GOP efforts to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act. Spontaneous applause broke out in the Bangor airport when she returned home after the vote. McCain, who insisted on a more considered, collaborative approach to health care, was another consequential “no” vote.

A tax overhaul, the next big GOP agenda item, is now in danger. Senator Corker has made it clear he will not support the Republican tax plan if it adds “one penny” to the deficit.

Corker has also become a prominent voice of concern over the president’s tweets and rhetoric. He questioned Mr. Trump’s “stability” and “competence” in the wake of Trump’s comments about the violence in Charlottesville, Va., in August, and last week he told reporters that only a handful key officials are separating the country from “chaos.”

This sparked a Twitter lashing from the president over the weekend, saying Corker “didn’t have the guts” to run for reelection, with Corker shooting back that the White House is akin to an “adult day care center” where someone “missed their shift.” In a New York Times interview on Sunday, Corker said the president’s reckless threats could put the United States on “the path to World War III.”

Although a lame duck, Corker will be a crucial player in the upcoming debate about the president’s likely decertification of Iran from compliance with a nuclear deal, and in any Senate confirmations of ambassadors or a new secretary of State.

The power these senators hold by not always toeing the party line is not lost on them. As Collins weighs whether to run for governor, she is well aware of the influence she wields on key issues – from taxes and spending to North Korea and the Senate’s Russia investigation to health care.

“One of my colleagues who is trying to get me to stay in the Senate told me I am the pivotal player on a lot of important issues,” Collins told WCSH of Portland last week. Her mother agrees and thinks she should stay.

But 20 years is a long time to commute to an ever-more partisan Washington, where it’s become harder and harder to get anything done. And Collins has been asking herself how she can best help the people of Maine. A leaked internal memo shows her in a strong position to win a GOP primary, despite Republican Gov. Paul LePage’s sharp criticism of her stand on health care as “shameful.” Her job approval among Mainers is at a staggering 75 percent, making her the overwhelming favorite in a general election.

'Shoring up' the middle?

The thought of Collins returning to Maine sent Sen. Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota – one of those endangered red-state Democrats – to her phone, where she texted her friend a simple plea: “Don’t do it.” The junior senator from Maine, Independent Angus King, who caucuses with Democrats and was once Maine’s governor himself, has also urged her to stay, pointing to her seniority as a plus for the state.

“The middle – it needs shoring up,” says Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) of Missouri, another red-state Democrat facing a tough reelection battle. Compromise is necessary, she says, and it’s what the Founding Fathers intended, “so when people leave here that get that part of the job ... it hurts the institution and it hurts the American people.”

Not everyone agrees that the departure of Collins, Corker, and McCain would snuff out the last flames of bipartisanship in the Senate. On a pleasant, sunny day last week, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R) of Louisiana sat on a bench on the Capitol grounds and went through some mitigating factors.

To begin with, Corker and McCain head committees that are traditionally bipartisan in nature (McCain chairs the Armed Services Committee). Those committees can be expected to continue to work on a bipartisan basis, says Senator Cassidy, who was the co-author of “Graham-Cassidy,” the GOP health-care bill that failed last month. Earlier, he worked on a health-care bill with Collins that he thought might attract bipartisan support. It didn’t.

While these three lawmakers are known for seeking common ground – a “good thing,” says Senator Cassidy – he maintains that approach is not as rare as some might think: “For example, I’ve spoken to three Democratic senators today about collaborating on pieces of legislation.”

It’s also impossible to predict what a new Senate’s makeup might look like or how individual lawmakers will behave once they’re in the office. Maine has a long tradition of sending independent-minded senators to Washington, but its internal politics are changing. Indeed, part of Collins’s calculation is whether Governor LePage or she would name her replacement. Collins favors a scenario in which she could name her successor, who would serve until voters decided in the 2020 election.

“Being a governor is kind of fun. You get a lot done,” says Duffy, weighing some of Collins’s likely considerations. “If she stays [in the Senate], she’s frustrated. She has a target on her back all the time.” The reward for that frustration, however, is power, at a time of great national consequence.

Thierry Gouegnon/Reuters

Suporters of Alexander Cummings, presidential candidate of the Alternative National Congress (ANC), attend a meeting during their party's presidential campaign rally at the Antoinette Tubman Stadium in Monrovia, Liberia, Oct. 07, 2017.

It was the biggest party in town, in more ways than one.

On a recent afternoon in the run-up to Liberia’s Oct. 10 presidential election, supporters of the country’s ruling Unity Party spilled out onto the streets outside its low-slung green headquarters, their fists full of party handouts. Somewhere deep in the crowd, someone had strapped a giant speaker to the back of a pickup truck, and cranked the volume up to full.

“You nah bring Taylor here uh,” the crowd sang in Liberian English, hoisting drinks and banners skyward. “You nah bring Taylor back here.”

The “Taylor” in question was Charles Taylor, the one-time warlord and president of Liberia now serving 50 years in a British prison for crimes against humanity. And the message of the song was clear – voters wanted nothing to do with him.

That would be a neat ending to a tragic story – a war-scarred nation ready to close the book on its violent past and look to the future.

And indeed, when Liberians head to the polls Tuesday, it will by all accounts mark a chapter break in the country’s volatile history. A decade after the end of a brutal civil war, one democratically elected president, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, is about to willingly step aside for another – something that has never before happened in the lifetime of most of the population.

History presses down hard on Liberia and its politics. The trauma of 10 years of civil war still smarts – but now lies beneath a dozen years of attempts at rebuilding and reconciliation under President Sirleaf, which have brought new, fresher frustrations. With no clear roadmap for the next era of Liberian democracy, many voters are looking backward for clues about how to forge the path ahead – and digging into candidates' histories just as much as the country's.

Heavy past, heavy present

“At least under Taylor people ate well – it’s our current leaders who have really failed us,” says Anthony Wilson, a security guard queueing to enter a rally on the opposite side of town, this one for the opposition party Coalition for Democratic Change.

His sentiment echoes one shared by many here: the past was heavy, they say, but so is the present. War may be gone, but Liberia remains among the world’s poorest countries. Just 2 percent of people here have access to electricity. Only half can read.

But there is one place that post-war Liberia has thrived – peaceful elections. It has held two so far since the end of the civil war, both won by “Ma Ellen,” as Sirleaf is known. And this year is shaping up to be a third.

“This campaign so far has been stable because Liberians want it to be stable,” says Dan Saryee, a political analyst and the former director of the Liberia Democracy Institute. This, he notes, in spite of the fact that “we have so many of the social factors” – poverty, unemployment, corruption – “that in other places have triggered crisis.”  

Thierry Gouegnon/Reuters

Supporters of former soccer player and presidential candidate of Congress for Democratic Change (CDC) George Weah attend a presidential campaign rally at the Antoinette Tubman Stadium in Monrovia, Liberia, Oct. 6.

But the political back-and-forth on Mr. Taylor’s legacy also shows how the country’s violent history still shadows its young democracy.

Few of the 20 presidential hopefuls – indeed few Liberians generally – emerged unscarred from the two civil wars that dragged across the 1990s and left the country in ruins. One of those candidates, Prince Johnson, is the warlord who in 1990 infamously sipped a beer as he oversaw the killing of then-president Samuel Doe – which helped set off the civil war. Several others, meanwhile, had intimate professional and personal connections to the infamous Mr. Taylor. A leading vice-presidential candidate, Jewel Howard Taylor, is actually his ex-wife.

“Charles Taylor is still a powerful card to play,” says Ibrahim Al-Bakri Nyei, a PhD candidate in political science at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and a Liberian political analyst. “There’s nostalgia there in part because so many people have been disaffected by the [Sirleaf] regime.”

To many, indeed, Sirleaf represents another era of Liberia’s history that they cannot forget – its century-long domination by the descendants of the former American slaves who founded Liberia in the mid-1800s. Though Sirleaf herself isn’t Americo-Liberian, as that group is known, she grew up within that community, going on to become a Harvard-educated World Bank technocrat with a smooth, almost southern American accent.

But under her watch, Liberia’s economy stagnated and corruption often flourished. Many Liberians came to feel she was no different than many politicians who came before her – rich and self-interested, coldly oblivious to the struggles of the common people.

“Under her we have suffered a lot, but in her life she has never suffered,” says Nancy Matthew, who sells fish at a stall in downtown Monrovia. Instead, Ms. Matthew says, she plans to vote for George Weah, a former soccer star who was once named world player of the year by FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association).

Sizing up the candidates

Mr. Weah, now bookish and fatherly-looking in his middle age, grew up in a shack settlement in the capital, a background that has earned him significant street credit among the masses of unemployed Liberian youth.

“The opposition says George Weah doesn’t know how to read and write well, but maybe we’ve given too many chances to people who know how to read and write,” shouted one of his supporters at a recent rally, to a whooping cheer of assent.

In Liberia, like much of Africa, many political parties share wobbly and broadly similar policy platforms, so the personal histories of candidates like Weah loom particularly large for voters, many of whom make their choice without the aid of established party loyalties. They also make their choices without much help from political slogans. A selection of this year’s offerings, all from different candidates, include “hope is alive,” “hope for change,” “changing is coming,” and “hold on, change is coming.”

That has left many to size up their candidate the way one might a first date, a kind of gut-check reaction to the stories they tell about themselves.

Weah, for example, has not introduced a single bill since being elected to Liberia’s senate in 2015. But to his crowd, he is a benevolent philanthropist whose hands are clean of Liberia’s often corrupt politics.

“I have never promised Liberians and then failed them,” he said to a roaring crowd of more than 10,000 at his final rally in Monrovia, so packed that some young men hung from the stadium’s rafters to get a glimpse of their idol. He was nearly drowned out by chants of “Weah! Weah!”

'Generational change' ahead?

Then there is the Unity Party’s Joseph Boakai, the current vice president. In supporters’ eyes, he is politically pious – a man who for two terms toiled loyally behind a million-watt president with a larger-than-life international presence.

“From the day he started in government, he has never shown bad character or been involved in scandal,” says Kumba Kpetu, who says she has voted in every election since all Liberian women won the right to vote in 1955.

But that same president has now declined to actively endorse her deputy, has not campaigned for him, and told reporters in a recent interview that she thought it was time for “generational change” in Liberian politics. (“Sleepy Boakai,” as he’s been branded, is 72.)

“She doesn’t owe me an explanation,” he said in a recent interview with The Christian Science Monitor and others. “She hasn’t told anyone that I’m a failure.”

Faint praise, perhaps, but in the shifting sands of Liberian politics, analysts say Mr. Boakai may also benefit from his distance from the increasingly unpopular Sirleaf.

As the election approaches, however, there is little way to gauge the support each candidate enjoys – save by the glut of political rallies that fill downtown Monrovia like sprawling block parties, at times heavier on the party than the political. Weah and Boakai held them, as did Alexander Cummings – a former Coca-Cola executive and rapidly rising political star – and Charles Brumskine, a lawyer and former president pro tempore of the Liberian Senate who was once a close Taylor confidante.

If no candidate wins more than 50 percent of the vote Tuesday – a likely scenario – the top two contenders will go to a runoff in early November. And then the party will begin all over again.

Tecee Boley contributed reporting.

Ann Hermes/Staff

Jose Barbosa works on an electric vehicle that relies on pedaling and solar power at Organic Transit in Durham, N.C.

The revival of the great American job machine has very tangible implications for Osvaldo De Los Santos. It means that when he was recently unemployed, the time he spent without work lasted only a month. And his new job came with an increase in pay and better opportunities to use his skills, which range from plumbing to carpentry.

“I think I’ve found the right fit for now,” says Mr. De Los Santos, who works for a commercial maintenance business near Raleigh, N.C.

A similar tale of progress holds true for lots of others here in North Carolina. Michelle Bulla, a Coast Guard veteran who fell on hard times, now has a job in Winston-Salem coaching other military vets on how to find work. Ryan Gillespie, a young graduate of Appalachian State University, has just been hired to put his mechanical skills to use for a Durham, N.C.-based company making solar-electric vehicles. For Antwain and Andrea Goode, an improving economy is helping them build a consulting business they launched last year to provide leadership training.

“We are hitting a stride where we are growing,” Ms. Goode says.

These personal narratives are emblematic of a larger story: The United States is finally getting close to what economists call “full employment.” That doesn’t mean that everyone who wants a job has one, but the country has definitely reached an inflection point: It has now created enough new jobs to make up for the huge losses suffered in the 2007-09 Great Recession, according to The Hamilton Project, an economic research group in Washington.

Yet not everyone feels like waving pompoms. People are working longer hours than prior generations did. A sizable number are doing it for less money. Even many who are in well-paying positions face stress over things such as child care or potential layoffs.

The result is a split-screen economy, where workers are both seeing advancement and feeling persistent anxieties. It adds up to rising expectations, but also the risk of political turmoil if those anxieties aren’t addressed.

“The job market has improved in the sense that the unemployment rate has gone down,” says Arne Kalleberg, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sociologist who studies workplace issues. But both on the political left and right, he says, “the 2016 election indicated the enormous amount of insecurity and concern on the part of large swaths of the American population.”

Beneath all this is a shift in the culture of work. Americans know the world of the old-style social contract has eroded – the model in which employers delivered middle-class pay, pensions, and a high degree of job security in the era of Levittown and the GI Bill of Rights. 

In the rapidly changing economy of the 21st century, workers are more likely to switch jobs – particularly Millennials – and the bonds between employees and companies are much more tenuous. Yet the desire for financial security hasn’t gone away.

As a result, a new model may be emer­ging, hastened by the improving economy. As the job market tightens, many employers are creating more perquisites and positive work environments for workers. Foosball tables are back. Paychecks are rising. Yet still uncertain is how far the transformation in the workplace will go – the extent to which it will include such things as job training, family leave, and retirement help, benefits that will be dictated by politicians as much as corporate chieftains. 

North Carolina provides a window into how all these forces are playing out. It straddles the old economy of tobacco farming, textiles, and furnituremaking and the new economy of university-bred start-ups and social media boutiques. As in much of America, the official unemployment rates in major cities here are low, yet they mask wide disparities in income and job opportunities – sometimes in towns just a few miles apart.

Ann Hermes/Staff

Michelle Bulla works with veteran Logan Kibler at a Goodwill center in Winston-Salem that offers skills training to military veterans.

For a benchmark of how tight today’s job market is just ask Clay Harris, the affable founder and chief operating officer of a burgeoning tech-support services company. Mr. Harris runs WorkSmart out of a cinnamon-brick building near the University of North Carolina, where he went to school. He’s in one of the industries where skilled workers have been in short supply for a good while. But Harris says he’s noticed the scramble to fill positions becoming even more intense. 

One employee was recently able to leave for another company in Manhattan at nearly double the salary. Another quit simply by walking out the door at lunchtime, with no notice. (Harris telephoned him and recalls the reply being, “Oh, I had to start a new job.”)

Half an hour down the highway near Raleigh, another fast-growing company, The Select Group, has also noticed the changes. The firm operates a nationwide business that matches tech consultants with talent-hungry clients. One consultant recently got six job offers within 72 hours of being listed as available, says Zach Earls, the company’s vice president of sales.

Not every industry is desperate for skilled workers, but the job market is becoming more competitive for people other than software coders and network analysts. In Winston-Salem, Virgil Cobb says he’s struggled lately to find reliable workers for his concrete-and-steel contracting business.

Nationwide, some 35 percent of small-business owners said there were jobs they couldn’t fill during July, the highest reading since 2001 in the National Federation of Independent Business survey.

So, the question looms: Is the economy really at full employment? Probably not, but it’s getting close enough that the Federal Reserve has been in the news for moving to tighten the money supply. 

August’s unemployment stood at 4.4 percent, which is low by historical standards. True, there were times in the late 1990s and mid-1960s when the jobless rate dipped below 4 percent. In 1953, it hit an all-time low of 2.5 percent. Yet the economy is considered relatively strong today – April’s 4.3 percent jobless rate, notably, was the lowest level in 16 years.

The real test of whether the economy is advancing, though, may revolve around whether more people are being drawn from the fringes of the labor market back into the workforce. For years, the so-called labor force participation rate has been stagnant or declining – reflecting the dark side of the split-screen economy. The low rate has been driven by baby boomers retiring, but also by a weak post-recession recovery and the large pool of people whose skills don’t match today’s workforce needs.

Yet the participation rate has turned a corner and risen, even if modestly. It stands at 62.9 percent of all Americans age 16 and up; late in 2015 it was 62.4 percent.

Those returning to the workforce include people like Michelle Bulla, whose experience illustrates how personal challenges can push people to the sidelines. After about a decade of service in the US Coast Guard, she began an even longer period of struggle as she fell into drug abuse, sought to care for her mom, and then had to cope with her mother’s death in 2002. Ms. Bulla had some jobs during this time, but getting her life together seemed out of reach.

“I was at my lowest of lows,” she recalls. “I was checking myself in for detox. I remember the exact date.” It was Aug. 7, 2010.

Something happened that day that gave her a new sense of purpose and a new drive to drop drugs: Bulla discovered she was pregnant.

“He saved my life,” she says of her son, Dante. The way forward since then hasn’t been simple. The road has run through a drug treatment center in Virginia, a layoff from a job in 2014, and a move back near her hometown of Winston-
Salem. She signed up for government support – a program called Work First – and began volunteering at Goodwill Industries of Northwest North Carolina. Now she’s found a steady job at the same Goodwill center, allowing her to leave all government assistance behind.

Bulla’s story is hardly unusual: Statistics show that millions of Americans are not working because they are struggling with drug abuse. Some employers have said that as many as half of their job applicants do not clear drug tests. In congressional testimony this summer, Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen cited opioid use as a specific reason for the decline in the labor force participation rate.

Bulla’s new job, as she describes it, is to now give “tough love” to other military vets seeking help. In the room where she works, on a lower level of the sprawling Goodwill building, pushpins on a world map show the places where these men and women have served, from Iraq to South Korea to Germany. She says she knows firsthand that what they need is not simply a job: “To get back into life again, that’s the challenge.”

Ann Hermes/Staff

Construction is under way in downtown Winston-Salem, N.C., a city once dominated by Big Tobacco; it now has an Innovation Quarter that attracts high-end, new economy jobs.

On a warm September evening, Bailey Park in Winston-Salem is abuzz with adults chatting and children playing. It’s a movie night in the park, which is located pretty much at the intersection of this city’s past and future.

As a salmon-colored sunset fades into twilight, the hulks of old tobacco warehouses and processing plants loom just a few blocks away, topped by water tanks once used in making cigarettes. Resident Larry Coza recalls walking these streets in past years and feeling like he was in a ghost town. “This was desolate,” he says.

What does a free outdoor movie have to do with the job market? A lot, actually. Building a full-employment economy is something that happens one locality at a time. A downtown where people enjoy going to eat, hearing a concert, or walking in a park is also a magnet for businesses to put down roots. As parents and kids settle in nearby to watch “Back to the Future,” Mr. Coza puts it this way: “Success breeds success.”

Local leaders from the public and private sectors have put considerable effort toward making the spiral here an upward one. 

“One of the biggest changes from 10 or 20 years ago is our central city, [where now] people want to go to hang out,” says Allan Younger, one of those leaders, who runs the small business center at Forsyth Technical Community College.

This neighborhood is known as Innovation Quarter, a magnet for high-end jobs. But here, as in cities across America, a challenge is how to ensure that opportunities ripple beyond a top tier of highly educated workers. In other words, the quest for full employment is not just about having enough jobs, but also about the quality of those jobs.

One sign of the challenge is that the jobless rate in Winston-Salem stands at 4.3 percent, yet the US Census Bureau estimates poverty here at 25 percent, compared with about 15 percent in Raleigh.

Economic disparities vary widely both within states and across the country. A recent study by the Economic Innovation Group, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization, found that the vast majority of new jobs in the US are clustered in the country’s most well-off places. From 2011 through 2015, only 1 of every 4 new jobs was created in the bottom 60 percent of ZIP Codes.

To some extent, a growing economy is a natural solution for many of the inequities, if the growth can be sustained. (Organic Transit, the company that just hired college grad Ryan Gillespie, is weighing Winston-Salem as the possible location for a new factory to build its solar-powered three-wheeled cycles. That could mean some decent jobs for less-skilled workers here.)

But historically, the US economy has experienced downs as well as ups. And today, even as many households become better off, Americans generally see inequality as a serious problem.

That’s why Mr. Kalleberg, the sociologist and author of a book titled “Good Jobs, Bad Jobs,” says a new contract is needed. He thinks it will require a three-way effort by government, business leaders, and workers. The impetus could come through labor unions or other channels – from the ballot box to occupational associations and grass-roots groups.

He points to Europe, where nations have been honing a “flexicurity” model, which accepts job insecurity but buffers it with shock absorbers – the income supports and retraining available to workers during bouts of unemployment.

The US has things such as unemployment insurance, and already some signs hint that a new framework of policies or supports may take shape. Recent polls, for instance, show rising public support for labor unions. A raft of states and localities have passed laws raising the minimum wage, requiring employers to offer paid family leave, or putting limits on the practice of making last-minute changes to employee work schedules. Employers and others are also increasingly providing workers with opportunities to develop and gain relevant skills in the workplace. 

The same Goodwill center where Bulla works, for instance, is offering free courses in various trades that local businesses are interested in, from nursing to welding. Antawn Hairston is one of the people who’s benefited from such local efforts to broaden the base of prosperity. He says that when he showed up at the Goodwill center nine years ago, he had experienced bouts of homelessness while doing jobs such as temp agency work.

Mr. Hairston knew he liked to cook, and culinary training at Goodwill got him ready to chop, sauté, and grill in professional kitchens. From there he found not just a job but a ladder upward. “Line cook. Lead line cook. Sous-chef.” He rattles off the path he’s climbed. And now he’s not just executive chef at a pizza restaurant that specializes in locally grown ingredients, he’s also becoming a co-owner of a food truck and helping to manage another restaurant.

“Now I’m stable,” he says. “People are always going to eat.”

Ann Hermes/Staff

Frederic Nails, Jr. hugs his stepmother, Janie Johnson, after speaking at the Business Advisory Council luncheon with Goodwill Industries of Northwest North Carolina in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

Antwain Goode feels passionate about his career, too. In fact, the birth of his consulting firm last year – just a few miles from where Bulla works – had less to do with simply seeking a new job than with wanting nothing less than a revolution in the American workplace. 

The change that this management PhD envisions is actually for others to find their own sense of mission – everyone from organization leaders to clerks or truck drivers. “If [people] don’t like the culture, if they don’t feel like they’re profiting, they will quickly leave.... All of a sudden you’re short 20 or 30 people,” he says, explaining why he sees companies starting to invest more in staff development.

Employers are thinking harder about how to attract and retain workers. This is partly because finding talented staff has become more difficult in a tightening economy. It’s also because many Millennials put such a premium on pursuing careers that hold meaning for them.

Yet even with companies’ new attentiveness toward their employees, many workers remain dissatisfied. According to Gallup, only 33 percent of US workers feel truly “engaged” while on the job. That’s up modestly from 26 percent in 2000 and 28 percent in 2009. Some 16 percent of workers are disengaged or unhappy in their jobs, while fully half the workforce is in a neutral zone, committed to essentially just showing up.

Another poll, by the payroll firm ADP, finds that nearly two-thirds of US workers are actively or passively looking for other jobs. Retaining talent remains a huge challenge. The ADP survey finds that part of the answer will be addressing work-life balance and paths for professional development.

“Workers are now expecting things from the workplace that are a little bit different,” says Jim Harter of Gallup. Yes, they’re eager for rising pay and solid benefits, but “now they’re [also] coming in wanting work to express who they are. They want a job that expresses their purpose.”

The Select Group in Raleigh tries to do that through a mix of fun, personal development, and an emphasis on collective mission. One step was creating a new job of chief experience officer – to both improve what workers get from their jobs and better cater to their clients.

“People really like feeling that the work they’re doing is making a difference,” says Mr. Earls, the company’s sales vice president. The firm tries to convey each worker’s value from Day 1 by cheering new hires as they bang a celebratory gong upon arrival. 

For Harris at WorkSmart, part of the answer is giving out modest monetary awards each month to employees who exemplify the firm’s core values, such as engaging with customers, not just tending to their computers. The firm has a foosball table in its main lobby. To build camaraderie off-site, there’s a company kickball team and other sports activities.

Still, workers today face more challenges than just wanting to feel a sense of purpose. They’re also confronting the real possibility of being replaced by a robot. Automation is disrupting industries as much as at any time since the birth of the Industrial Revolution. A recent report by the accountancy firm PwC, also known as Pricewaterhouse-
Coopers, estimates that 38 percent of current US jobs will be done by robots and artificial intelligence by the early 2030s.

Robbie Allen knows something about the march of machines. He’s founder of a company in Durham, Automated Insights, that deploys artificial intelligence called Wordsmith to automate the creation of news bulletins or product promotions at a fraction of the cost of a human writer.

He’s also heading back to school. As he sees it, legions of workers in today’s economy are at risk of being replaced by robots and computers over the next few decades.

“I jest that I’m getting my PhD to figure out what jobs will still be viable when my now 2-year-old son hits the workforce,” Mr. Allen says.

With technological change so prevalent, many workers are going to have to learn new skills throughout their careers to stay employed. Fred Nails is one of those people who’s felt the benefit of federal and local training programs. He’s had a job since February hanging drywall for a construction firm – a step up from the fast-food job he tried first after high school. He credits a federally funded Job Corps program, Goodwill, and his mom for helping him make the change. His work comes with health insurance, which also covers his young daughter.

“I’m just going to ride this wave right now and see where it takes me,” he says. For now, he’s found work that’s satisfying.

“Waking up every day and putting your all into eight hours ... and watching something build into something great is mind-blowing,” he says. “[I like being able to say] I helped build that!” 

Prime Minister Office/AP

Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, right, shakes hands with Hamas security officers in Gaza City Oct. 5, the last day of his visit to Gaza before leaving for the West Bank. The Hamas movement and President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah faction are holding reconciliation talks this week in Cairo.

The political and ideological tensions between Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah exploded into civil war a decade ago. There were clashes, shootouts, and execution-style killings in the streets. Rivals were even thrown off high-rise rooftops.

The internecine fighting that claimed some 600 lives by the spring of 2007 was replaced by a cold war and a division of power, with militant Islamist Hamas seizing power in the Gaza Strip, and Fatah, the dominant secular party of the Palestine Liberation Organization, ruling Palestinian areas in the West Bank.

Despite multiple efforts at reconciliation from a rotating cast of regional players, the sides have remained in deadlock.

But this week Egypt, eager to regain its place as a power broker in the Middle East, will be hosting another round of talks. Fatah officials traveled to Gaza last week for the first time in three years and held a joint cabinet meeting amid cheering crowds. There seems to be movement in the positions of both sides.

Hamas, which has both political and military wings but is considered a terror organization by much of the international community, in particular has made it clear it is ready for a measure of compromise, driven by its desire to relinquish the day-to-day burden of governing Gaza to the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority (PA).

Conditions in the seaside strip of 2 million people, among the world’s most densely populated and impoverished places, have long been dire. Lately they’re worse, with 40 percent unemployment, daily electricity blackouts, water shortages, and an infrastructure devastated by three wars with Israel in a six-year span – the last in 2014 – that has yet to be restored. Gazans are squeezed by blockades from both Israel and Egypt that make it difficult to import commodities or cross into either country for medical or personal needs.

And for Fatah, a decade of divided rule has helped perpetuate the Israeli government line that there is “no partner” with whom to discuss prospects for peace. For Palestinians on both sides of the geographic and political divide, reconciliation would mean that finally their government might speak with a single voice to get things done internally and help lead to the goal of statehood.

The toughest issue to resolve is the question of Hamas’ military arm. Hamas was founded as an armed resistance movement, and finding a formula that could lead its fighters to lay down their arms will be tricky at best and may even be set aside until after a basic reconciliation deal is reached. Hamas has thousands of fighters and commanders, predominately in the Al Qassam Brigades, which led the fighting with Israel and the armed battles with Fatah in 2006 and 2007.

The key players in this complex puzzle of reconciliation – Hamas, Fatah, Israel, and Egypt – have their own motivations for such a deal to work, or fail.

Adel Hana/AP

Gazans welcome the arrival of Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah following a press conference at the Beit Hanoun border crossing in the northern Gaza Strip on Oct. 2. Mr. Hamdallah was in Gaza in the latest attempt to end the 10-year rift between rival Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas.

Hamas

Hamas finds itself at a pivotal moment, under pressure from the deteriorating situation in Gaza, and searching for new economic benefactors amid the Middle East’s shifting geopolitical landscape.

Hamas had long relied on the support of Syria and Iran, but shifted its dependence to Qatar and Turkey in the aftermath of the 2011 Arab Spring. Qatar invested $1 billion to help restore infrastructure and other services in Gaza. But recently, several of its Gulf neighbors boycotted Qatar for what they charge is its support for extremist groups and Iran. Hamas now needs the diplomatic support of the Egyptians, who have been pushing for reconciliation talks.

In September, Hamas officially disbanded its civil government in a concession to the PA and tacit acknowledgement that day-to-day governing is not for them.

“Hamas has shown either no interest or no capability for acting like responsible local government,” says Howard Sumka, former USAID director for the West Bank and Gaza. “They have gone from one cycle to another of building up militarily and building up action against Israel. Things are defused for a while, and then there’s an effort at reconstruction. It’s a very depressing cycle.”

Earlier this year Hamas elected Yahya Sinwar as its new leader in Gaza. A founding member of Hamas’ military wing who spent 20 years in Israeli prison before being released in a 2011 prisoner swap, Mr. Sinwar has a reputation as a hardline but shrewd character capable of making tough, pragmatic decisions.

Assessments of Sinwar’s strategy differ. Some Gaza observers say he has decided Hamas should return to its resistance roots and become less involved in politics, letting the PA handle daily problems. But there is also a sense that after three wars with Israel that have brought more hardship to Gaza, he has decided to put military efforts on the back burner to focus instead on gaining a political foothold in the West Bank.

“That was a tough lesson for Hamas over the past 10 years. You can raise the slogan of resistance forever, but the outcome is a devastated population, infrastructure, and daily life,” says Prof. Mkhaimar Abusada, a professor of political science at Al-Azhar University in Gaza.

Hamas wants to focus on protecting Gaza from Israel, Professor Abusada says, and views Israel’s relatively free hand in Palestinian areas of the West Bank as a cautionary tale.

Fatah

PA President Mahmoud Abbas, the increasingly unpopular successor to late PLO founder Yasser Arafat, has spent the last decade in paralyzing limbo between the fissure with Hamas and the lack of progress in negotiations with Israel. The most recent talks with Israel were in 2014, and like most efforts to find some middle ground, broke down over continued building of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and disagreements over what Fatah-Hamas reconciliation might look like.

Fatah has a direct interest in having one government, one president, and speaking in one voice. Fatah officials also feel pressure from residents of both Gaza and the West Bank who blame both factions, alongside Israel, for their situation and believe unity will bring progress.

Mr. Abbas has likely decided that chances of a peace deal with the hardline Israeli government are more dim than ever, so focusing on rebuilding internally might be the best option.

Abbas’ decision to clamp down hard on Hamas by cutting the salaries of PA employees in Gaza and limiting electricity there has already resulted in Hamas concessions.

But he has made it clear he will not tolerate an armed Hamas or a situation in which Hamas controls forces on the ground in Gaza and Fatah focuses on the business of governing, in the model of Hezbollah in Lebanon.

“We, in the West Bank, operate according to a single law and a single authority,” Abbas said in an interview with Egyptian television Sunday. “I order to arrest anyone who holds weapons that is not under the auspices of the law, even if they are Fatah members, and that is what is meant to be.”

But Fatah also is likely feeling a bit trapped by the popular pressure to reconcile, because Fatah, like the Israelis, is concerned that with reconciliation, Hamas could eventually become dominant in the West Bank.

Israel

Hamas has long been Israel’s Public Enemy Number One, viewed as a terrorist organization bent on the destruction of the Jewish state. Aside from periodic rocket attacks on the south, Hamas has also been Israel’s adversary in three wars and carried out scores of attacks within Israel.

But for Israel, having “one address” in its relations with the PA is double-edged. It could make security and other coordination easier and lead to much desired “quiet” on the front with Gaza, but it also would make it more difficult for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to lean on his go-to stance that there is no partner to negotiate with as long as the Palestinians are divided.

And a PA with Hamas engaged as a full partner goes against long-standing Israeli policy that it does not engage with Hamas.

Mr. Netanyahu last week criticized the reconciliation efforts as “imaginary appeasement where the Palestinian side is reconciling at the expense of our existence.”

He said any partner in a peace process must recognize Israel as a Jewish state, which Hamas does not, and that for any deal to be recognized by Israel, Hamas’ military wing would have to be dismantled and Hamas would have to end its relations with Iran.

Egypt

Egypt, a member of a Sunni axis working to counter Iran, controlled Gaza until the 1967 Middle East war, and is well aware of the inherent instability of the current humanitarian situation in the seaside strip. It hopes a unity deal between Hamas and Fatah will help improve daily life there and in turn stave off any potential “trouble” that could seep across its borders.

President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is also looking to bolster his and Egypt’s profile as a pan-Arab leader and sees the mediator role as a way to help do that.

The central Egypt-Gaza border crossing at Rafah has been closed for most of the time since Mr. Sisi took power in 2013. Egypt hopes to leverage its influence on Hamas to pressure it to end its support for Islamic State militants in northern Sinai, who have repeatedly attacked Egyptian installations. Hamas has helped ISIS with weapons, money, training, and medical assistance, according to Alon Eviatar, an Israeli reserve lieutenant colonel.

Trying to encourage Hamas and Fatah ahead of the Cairo talks, Sisi termed them “preparation” for a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians. A deal would also be a win for Egypt as it tries to cement its warming ties with the United States, which is in favor of the PA extending its control over Gaza and supports a deal that would lessen the inflammatory tensions there.

Jessica Mendoza/Christian Science Monitor

Josselyn Silva (l.) and instructor Terese Bravo go over the credits Ms. Silva needs to complete her high school credential on Sept. 27, in San Francisco.

Where Shelia Hill comes from, people get shot for crossing the wrong street.

Visitacion Valley, a district that sits on the southeastern end of San Francisco near the San Mateo County line, has a history of substance abuse, drug dealing, and gang violence going back to the 1970s. It’s not unusual, Ms. Hill says, for young men in the neighborhood to kill each other because they come from rival gang territories – areas that could be just two blocks apart.  

“They can’t even go to the corner store without risking their life,” she says. “It’s crazy, but it’s real.”

Hill’s own salvation had been Five Keys Charter School, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that runs a community learning center in Visitacion, also known as Sunnydale for the avenue that winds through the neighborhood. Hill, 48, spent two years working to get her high school diploma through the program’s independent study plan. Today she’s a full-time teacher’s aide and community ambassador for Five Keys, helping to bring in students from neighborhoods like hers. But she knows that most Sunnydale residents have to put safety before any kind of education – much less a career that would pull them out of a life of violence.

So she was thrilled when she heard that Five Keys was converting an old city bus into a state-of-the-art classroom that would cater especially to divided neighborhoods.

“The bus can pull right up to the community and people who want their education, they can get on,” Hill says. “They don't have to let the barriers stop them no more.”

The bus, or mobile school, is the latest project to come out of Five Keys, an education management organization that the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department launched in 2003. The department at the time wanted to develop a more robust education program for inmates at the county jails but found it difficult to maintain close partnerships with local education agencies. So they started their own. It’s also just one example of how the school bus is being used to break down barriers and bring resources to students who need them most – from mobile science labs in Georgia to wifi in low-income neighborhoods in California and Texas, so that students can finish their homework. 

Jessica Mendoza/Christian Science Monitor

Shelia Hill stands on the curb outside the Self-Determination Bus, a new mobile classroom created by Five Keys Charter School, on Sept. 27, in San Francisco. Ms. Hill, a 2015 Five Keys graduate who now serves as community ambassador for the program, says bringing education to underserved neighborhoods could do wonders for students who – because of gang violence or disability – can't make it to a traditional classroom. 'The bus can pull right up to the community and people who want their education, they can get on,' she says. 'They don't have to let the barriers stop them no more.'

“We thought, ‘How cool would that be, if education became a pillar of the jail operations – if it’s integrated and not this afterthought?’ ” says Sunny Schwartz, then-program administrator for the sheriff’s office.

Since its inception, the program has expanded throughout the city and now offers a second chance for any student, 17 or over, who had dropped out of school and wants to get back on track.

Today half of all Five Keys students who come in for 12th grade and stay on the program for six months, graduate. Eighty-five percent pass their GED subtests, and 80 percent say they are either learning new things or the program is helping them achieve a life goal. Among those who were formerly incarcerated, only 40 percent relapse, compared to the state’s 65 percent recidivism rate. Five Keys also runs more than 70 accredited charter schools and programs for adults 18 and over in jails and communities across California, with 20 sites in San Francisco.

“But even with all of our community learning centers, you just can’t serve all the neighborhoods because of safety,” says executive director Steve Good. The Self-Determination Bus Project, he says, would bring Five Keys’s resources and years of expertise to those neighborhoods – and is a step toward closing that gap.

Creating a roving classroom

On a warm Wednesday in September, the mobile school sat parked outside the Five Keys learning center at 3120 Mission Street. The bus had once been part of the fleet that makes up the San Francisco Municipal Transit system. Muni donated two retired buses to the project: one is now used for parts, while the other has been given a total makeover.

Unlike the red-and-white behemoths that roam San Francisco’s city streets, the Self-Determination Bus is painted shades of green. Stamped across the sides are slogans like “I am committed” and “I am accountable.” Inside, the floor and ceilings are wood, and the space glows with a soft white light. Lime-green chairs append collapsible desks. At the back of the bus is a lounge with cushioned benches, throw pillows, and a small library. There’s free wifi and air conditioning.

The design involved feedback from community members as well as Five Keys teachers and students. The idea is based on research that suggests that classroom atmosphere affects student achievement.

“Creating an environment in my classroom where everyone felt safe, that was the most important thing,” says Josh Brough, a Five Keys instructor who spent four years teaching in Sunnydale. He recalls having to bike daily between two community centers that were separated by gang lines. Gunshots would sound outside his classroom. To counter that, he says, “I would put calming, happy reggae music all day long, get nice light coming in, get good air. Create that vibe.”

“Once I could get that accomplished – and I had to do it every day with different students – then it was time to start putting pen to paper,” he says.

Five Keys also equips the mobile school with the human resources that have helped its stationary learning centers succeed. Aboard the bus are a full-time instructor and a teacher’s assistant-cum-bus driver, there to help students get through the one-unit packets that are the hallmark of the Five Keys curriculum. Students are encouraged to go through the packets – subjects like government, algebra, and English – on their own time, and receive support and additional instruction at Five Keys classrooms when their schedules permit.

In short, the bus – which parks near community centers in high-risk neighborhoods at a set rotation every week – serves as a roving replica of Five Keys sites across the city.

“We determine what classes you actually need to take and how you’re going to have to work to get your diploma,” Mr. Good says.

Many adults going back to school often have kids and jobs to worry about, and the flexible schedule and bite-sized materials are a godsend, says Hill, who enrolled in Five Keys in late 2013, after she adopted a young boy whose mother was an addict. Until that point she had been a single mother who sold drugs and engaged in prostitution to pay the bills. School had not been a priority. “I was embarrassed because I couldn’t read,” Hill says. “I couldn’t even help my son with his homework. He was what, 7?”

It was Mr. Brough who got her to open up about her literacy skills. He started her on Dr. Seuss, but never made her feel like she was slow or incapable. “He showed compassion,” Hill says. “This is the kind of teachers they’ve got at Five Keys: they actually care.”

To bring that kind of learning environment to the communities that need them most could be life-changing, she adds. “This bus, I believe it’s going to save a lot of people.”  

Jessica Mendoza/Christian Science Monitor

Katie Leasau adjusts movable boards and collapsible tables aboard the new mobile classroom created by Five Keys Charter School on Sept. 27, in San Francisco. Ms. Leasau serves as bus driver and teacher's assistant on the bus, which is meant to cater to students who – because of gang violence or disability – can't make it to stationary Five Keys sites across the city.

What happens once the novelty wears off?

Getting the project on the road, however, has presented Five Keys with both old and new challenges. The organization doesn’t run its learning centers on a regular schedule with daily transportation. Most students, whose average age is about 25, find their own way to class.

So the group wasn’t prepared for the problems that come with running a city bus – like what to do when the generator broke down after a few weeks of beta testing, or when the bus wouldn’t travel well uphill. “That’s been the steepest learning curve, the mechanical issues,” says Dorick Scarpelli, director of the College Pathways and Workforce Development program at Five Keys. 

There’s also some concern that, once the novelty of getting on a bus to study wears off, instructors will still have to grapple with the problems facing all Five Keys locations – and adult education programs in gang-prone neighborhoods in general. How do you keep students calm when a passing car could mean a drive-by shooting? How do you help them overcome post-traumatic stress after they’ve seen their friend or family member shot on the corner across the street? 

“They have to deal with money, being hungry, being sick,” Brough says. “There’s still going to be barriers, beyond just getting on the bus.”

Still, the mobile school officially launched on Oct. 3 – a three-week delay. And Brough says that for those who live in neighborhoods like Sunnydale, having a bus that allows them to attend class without fear of crossing gang lines could ease the danger and stress of their daily lives. And while not every student who walks into a Five Keys classroom – or steps on the bus – will leave transformed, he says every one that does makes a difference to their families and communities.

“You break the cycle,” Brough says.

AP Photo

University of Chicago professor Richard Thaler talks with the media after winning the Nobel economics prize Oct. 9.

For more than two centuries, many people have tried to shake that peculiar branch of the tree of knowledge called economics. Perhaps no one has done it better recently than Richard Thaler, a University of Chicago professor who has challenged the traditional idea that free markets reflect the self-interests of rational individuals.

On Oct. 9 he was awarded the 2017 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for recognizing, as the Nobel committee put it, that “human behavior is very complex.” Economic models cannot be easily simplified and must be “more human” by admitting that theories based on self-interest are not always correct.

Indeed, the field of economics has long been overdue for a humility check. Mr. Thaler showed his own lack of hubris in his response to the question of how he would spend the $1.1 million that comes with the Nobel Prize: “I will try to spend it as irrationally as possible.”

In other fields of knowledge, the fact that people do not always act in their own self-interest is pretty obvious. Yet most economists still rely on Adam Smith’s 18th-century notion of markets being guided by “the invisible hand” of forces driven by people seeking their own well-being. What is often overlooked is that Smith himself was more complex. He also took a noble view of human behavior. In 1759 he wrote: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”

Thaler’s work largely focuses on why humans often do things contrary to their own good, such as not saving money for retirement. His theories have created a whole new field called behavioral economics, which looks for ways that either governments or companies can, by using suggestions and positive reinforcement, “nudge” people to take action in their long-term interests. One popular result of “nudge economics”: Many companies enroll new employees in a 401(k) plan without asking, giving them only the choice to opt out.

Even this new field is subject to a similar critique. Can bureaucrats and corporate officials operate any more rationally in trying to “nudge” people whom they deem too irrational? Perhaps behavioral economics is still too young to answer that question. 

In a paper from the Brookings Institution in Washington, scholars Richard Reeves and Dimitrios Halikias argue that trying to influence people’s actions is the wrong approach. They suggest that society and its economy are best developed through “self-efficacious” attributes of character, not paternalistic nudges to change behavior. A humane society, they write, “is one in which men and women possess the discipline, self-command and personal autonomy needed to live with a sense of purpose and direction.”

Other scholars even question the whole concept of modeling. “The very ways that economic models represent the world, the ways that they relate one individual to another, and the resulting changes in human nature that ensue are such that humans are depersonalized; transformed into individuals who are turned inward toward themselves and thus unable to grow into the image of God,” writes D. Glenn Butner Jr. of Sterling University in the Journal of Markets & Morality.

Unlike other Nobel Prizes, the one for economics has been given only since 1969. The field remains fluid in its theories. Perhaps a future prize can go to an economist who can take Thaler’s ideas even further and show how prosperity relies on traits of character in a society. Models of economics are best built on models of thought.