NYTimes hires Scheiber as labor/workplace reporter

Noam Scheiber has been hired by the New York Times to cover workplace and labor stories. He replaces Steve Greenhouse, who took a buyout last year.

Here is the announcement from Times business editor Dean Murphy:

Noam has one of the sharpest minds in the business, and he will bring intellectual curiosity, a deep understanding of economic policy, and a penchant for great story telling to a beat at the core of our report. As our own Michiko Kakutani noted in her review of Noam’s 2012 book about President Obama’s economics team, “Mr. Scheiber writes with ease and authority about complicated financial matters.”

Noam will look at unions and lower-skill workers, but also follow the labor market writ large. As he says, all workers, regardless of their skills, are becoming more exposed to market forces and he will cover this phenomenon as it ripples through the economy. Ahead of next year’s presidential election, Noam will pay particular attention to wages, income inequality and other labor issues likely to be flash points in the campaign. He will also contribute to the magazine.

At TNR, where he started as a researcher in 2000, Noam wrote about economics, tech and politics, with frequent forays into labor and workplace issues. He recently had a cover story about ageism in Silicon Valley, and shorter pieces about how a new sharing economy could turn most workers into temps, and how Americans might learn from Brazil about income inequality. In another provocative piece, “The Last Days of Big Law,” Noam looked at the crisis in the legal profession through the prism of Chicago-based Mayer Brown, where he was able to pry loose three year’s worth of detailed salary data for all the partners.

Noam has degrees in economics from Tulane and Oxford (he was a Rhodes Scholar), and also studied labor and industrial organization while getting his master’s at Oxford. He lives in Washington, where he will be based. He starts next month.