Hotel workers’ strike and the 2025 ASSA annual meeting – Update v6

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By Hannah Archambault, Jennifer Cohen, and Aaron Sojourner

 

12/24 update: Great news on the labor situation at ASSA hotels. The hotel workers and owners have reached agreements and the strike is over. Marriott & the UNITE HERE Local 2 reached agreement first, then Hyatt, and last Hilton.  The affected members at Marriott voted 99.8% to ratify new contract, at Hyatt the vote to ratify was unanimous, and at Hilton 99.4% voted to ratify.

With contracts in place, the workers agree not to strike and it’s back to business. Looking forward to seeing you in San Francisco. Happy holidays!

The ASSA official program should have all information accurately. LERA’s activities will occur in the originally planned Parc 55, rather than Hotel Spero. The associations that moved to the Marker will remain there.

 

12/17 update: we are collecting information about panels that are making contingency plans for alternative locations (and perhaps date/time) and will publicize the alternative arrangements if the strike doesn’t resolve by conference start. 

If you want your panel’s alternative arrangement added to this listing, have the panel organizer fill out this form. If you want to sign up for our email updates, use this form.

Many associations have moved their ASSA activities from original headquarters hotels and the ASSA has updated the official program to reflect this. In particular, activities of the following associations are now at the following hotels.

  • AFEE: Marker Hotel
  • ASE: Marker Hotel
  • ASHEcon: Clift Royal Sonesta Hotel
  • HES: Marker Hotel
  • IAFFE: Marker Hotel
  • LERA: Spero Hotel
  • URPE: Marker Hotel

Other associations are still planning to use the original headquarters hotels. Workers will likely still be striking. We see three main options for participants in those panels:

  1. Expect to cross a picket line,
  2. Arrange to send a pre-recorded video to be played for those in attendance, or
  3. Hold the panel at an alternative location.

Options 2 and 3 are not condoned by ASSA. 

Option 2: this option has appeal if some, but not most, panel participants won’t cross a picket line. We have heard indirectly that ASSA suggested option 2 to concerned individuals. ASSA has expressly said that they do not want people presenting remotely in hybrid mode.

Option 3: this has some appeal if most participants don’t want to cross a picket line. It raises two main issues. First, the panel needs to secure an alternative location. Some panel organizers have done this. We can provide leads on alternative locations to interested folks. Second, the official ASSA program will still list the panel’s official location, rather than the alternative location, so some audience members may not find the panel. 

We are collecting information about panels that are following option 3 and will publicize their alternative locations (and date-time, if applicable) if the strike doesn’t resolve by conference start. 

If you want your panel’s alternative arrangement added to this listing, have the panel organizer fill out this form. If you want to sign up for our email updates, use this form.

The ASSA has the power to delist a participant or panel from the official program that pursues options 2 or 3, which could jeopardize those individuals’ reimbursements depending on employer. We don’t think ASSA would do this because it would harm people. But they have that option.

 

12/6 update: Today, the Labor and Employment Relations Associations (LERA) emailed out the following:

“RE: LERA@ASSA Hotel and Meeting Space Update in Response to UNITE HERE Local 2 strikes in San Francisco

“LERA@ASSA Meeting Presenter/Participant,

“All of the San Francisco hotels involved in the upcoming ASSA/AEA Conference, Jan. 3-5, 2025, have either authorized a strike or are actively striking, including the LERA headquarters hotel, the Parc 55. As you know, LERA is 100% in support of collective bargaining, and we will not cross a picket line nor ask our members to do so.

“After gathering input from our stakeholders, and communicating our concerns with the ASSA, LERA has secured alternative meeting space at a nearby hotel, and we have moved our meeting sessions to the Hotel Spero. The hotel is listed as a fair hotel by UNITE HERE. It is also close to our original site, the Parc 55, and for any who wish to change their sleeping room accommodations to the new LERA headquarters hotel (there are other fair hotel options to consider as well), the ASSA has extended their deadline to alter your existing hotel room reservation in their system without penalty to December 12, 2024. If the Parc 55 hotel settles their contract with UNITE HERE, LERA would then be able to consider moving our meeting sessions back.

“Hotel Spero is outside of the ASSA’s room block, so if you choose to move your sleeping room reservation to this specific hotel, you would need to personally contact Hotel Spero and make your room reservation with them directly, then cancel your existing hotel reservation through the ASSA’s conference system, all prior to the ASSA’s extended deadline of Dec. 12. After that date, penalties will apply for altering an existing hotel room reservation in the ASSA’s system.

“LERA sessions will be conducted at: Hotel Spero, 405 Taylor Street, San Francisco, CA 94102… Please refer to the UNITE HERE Fair Hotel website for a comprehensive listing of your other fair hotel options in San Francisco.

“Plan to pick up your ASSA/AEA name badge and meeting materials from LERA staff at the Hotel Spero, and look for more details in the coming days. The program sessions, dates, and times remain unchanged.

“Thank you for your patience as we continue to finalize logistics, and we look forward to seeing and hearing from you in San Francisco.”

 

12/3 update: Lots of good news yesterday from ASSA. They:

  1. informed all registrants about the ongoing labor issues,
  2. extended the deadline for registration refunds from Dec. 3 to Dec. 12 to give people time to process the information and make an informed decision, 
  3. told allied associations that the associations could hold conference activities at alternative locations in San Francisco outside the originally planned 3 headquarters hotels, providing a realistic path for meaningful participation for the many participants unwilling to cross a picket line,
  4. stated they would seek protective language in future conference venue contracts that would guard the ASSA against the contingency of being locked into venues in the middle of labor disputes.

Each association will make its own decisions. AEA is planning to keep their sessions in locations now on strike or at risk of strike.

We look forward to seeing you (outside any picket lines) at ASSA 2025! The ASSA meeting is important. We want it to flourish. We appreciate the challenging situation facing the allied associations’ leaders and their work in navigating it.

Read below about the issues and how to make informed choices about your hotel reservation and other options you face. We updated the blog here given the new developments. The original blog text is archived here for reference.

Do you want to us to keep you informed of notable developments in the San Francisco hotel workers labor dispute and how it may affect activities for participants at ASSA 2025? We plan to stay on top of these issues and provide practical guidance going forward through tightly-curated email updates.  We aim to communicate as infrequently as possible while providing actionable news, analysis, and opportunities for conference participants. Sign up here.

____

Are you planning to attend the 2025 ASSA meetings in San Francisco? All ASSA activities have been planned for three ASSA headquarters hotels. Employees at two of these hotels – the Hilton San Francisco Union Square and the San Francisco Marriott Marquis – are on strike and asking people to not meet, eat, nor sleep in the hotels. At the third headquarters hotel – the Parc 55 by Hilton – employees voted to authorize their leaders to call a strike at any moment. 

Yesterday, ASSA stated that allied associations can move planned sessions to alternative physical locations in San Francisco at their own expense and ASSA will facilitate updating of location information within their program system. This means there is a path to meaningful participation in the conference without crossing picket lines.

Did you book your housing through ASSA? If so, then you are booked at a hotel where workers are either currently on strike, where they authorized a strike, or where the union says there’s a real risk employees will be on strike in early January. All the ASSA’s preferred hotels for housing are in one of these three categories, as detailed below. The hotel workers union has asked people not to patronize these hotels.

What can a social scientist do as we face a conflict between our desires to:

  • participate in the ASSA annual meeting in San Francisco taking place at hotels—both for meeting space and lodging—where workers currently are on strike or at risk of striking,
  • respect the people employed by the hotels and their request of each of us to not meet, sleep, or eat in striking hotels as part of their wider local and national campaign to lift the industry’s job quality?

This blog walks through background and different strategies available to each of us. 

Background on the dispute

To give a sense of the issues, here’s a San Francisco Examiner article and a local NBC news story on it and an industry press article describing recent contract settlements in Boston and San Jose alongside continuing disputes in San Francisco and Honolulu. Here’s a statement from the union. We couldn’t find a statement from the hotel owners’ association. Please let us know if you find one. 

This Econofact blog and this Journal of Economic Perspectives article give more general background about the research on labor relations and unions in economics.

The strike was authorized in a 94% in-favor vote by union members in August and started in September. The ASSA has remained quiet about the issue for months, so it snuck up on many people including us until recent weeks.

Corner “solutions”

One corner solution is to try to participate just the way you would have absent the strike. Try to ignore the hotel workers, cross their picket lines, and disregard their requests. 

We doubt you will be able to ignore them fully. Employees’ withdrawal of labor has led to deterioration in reported hotel service quality in struck hotels. Room cleaners, bellhops, check-in staff, restaurant staff, and other service workers and their family members will physically be marching between you and hotel doors. Picketing is an important way that federal law allows them to bargain collectively with their employer for better job quality. They will look you in the eye and loudly and clearly ask you to not enter the Hilton and Marriott headquarters hotels and many other hotels too, if they are on strike in early January.

The opposite corner solution is to cancel your plans to participate in the conference. The ASSA made official conference presentations fully in-person, though some sessions will be streamed online to attend remotely. The ASSA has extended the deadline to request a registration fee refund to December 12. If you don’t want to cross any picket lines, this option has some appeal.

There’s a possibility that Parc 55 employees, or even the other hotels’, are not on strike in early January. Hopefully, all the disputes are settled before then but we do not see signs of progress in negotiations. If a settlement isn’t reached by early January, it seems quite likely the union will have expanded the strike to Parc 55 by then.

Between the corners are other strategies.

Avoid sleeping in hotels with disputes by switching your reservation

The single action with the highest ratio of worker-supportive benefit to cost, in our view, is switching your hotel reservation. It focuses impact on hotel managers. Below are resources to make this easy.

You can cancel your existing ASSA hotel reservation without any financial penalty until Dec. 12. Find your reservation confirmation number on an email from ASSAsupport@cmrus.com containing the phrase “Thank you for using ASSA Housing to make your hotel reservation for the 2025 ASSA Annual Meeting.” Follow the instructions near the bottom there. That process also has a way to communicate the reason to ASSA. Also, call the two hotels. Tell management why you cancelled your reservation at the old hotel and why you made the reservation at the new hotel. 

The union is asking people to avoid staying at hotels where: 1) workers are on strike, 2) have a strike authorized, or 3) at the hotels they classify at-risk for a strike expansion. All the ASSA hotels are in one of these groups. Here are the ASSA headquarters and other preferred lodging hotels and their statuses:

  • ASSA headquarters hotels
    • Hilton San Francisco Union Square: on strike
    • Marriott Marquis: on strike
    • Parc 55: strike authorized
  • Other ASSA Preferred Lodging Hotels
    • Beacon Grand: at risk of strike
    • BEI San Francisco: at risk of strike
    • Clift Royal Sonesta San Francisco: at risk of strike
    • Grand Hyatt San Francisco Union Square: on strike
    • Hilton San Francisco Financial District: at risk of strike
    • Hyatt Regency San Francisco at Embarcadero: strike authorized
    • Hyatt Regency San Francisco Downtown SOMA: at risk of strike
    • InterContinental Mark Hopkins San Francisco: at risk of strike
    • InterContinental San Francisco: at risk of strike
    • Westin St Francis: on strike

Strike status information above is as of December 1 and comes from the union here and here. The Fair Hotel information is updated regularly and the UNITE HERE page is current as of December 1. These statuses can change. 

The hotel workers union encourages people to patronize these 11 nearby hotels where employees are unionized, there are no strikes, no strike authorizations, and no risk of dispute based on the information here. As of now, there is affordable availability at those 11 union-recommended locations. Aaron moved his reservation to one of them. Other options exist as well.

In an email this morning, ASSA noted that its system can help members make alternative hotel arrangements to avoid currently-struck hotels. That means moving from currently-struck hotels in the ASSA preferred group to other (strike authorized and at-risk) hotels within the group. The union is asking people not to book rooms at any of these hotels. The union would prefer people move to one of the 11 nearby hotels described in the prior paragraph.

On balance, all these moves are in a worker-supportive direction. Moving to one of the 11 rather than one of the other ASSA hotels is more “worker supportive” but less “ASSA supportive.”

Buy meals and coffee outside the hotels with disputes

Patronize other local establishments for meals, snacks, and coffee. Communicate this to management of the labor-dispute hotels if you want them to be sure to notice. If applicable, mention this intention in the same call when you tell them why you cancelled your hotel reservation.

Move events outside the hotels with disputes

The ASSA is in a tough position, having signed contracts many years ago with these venues. It would be prohibitively expensive for them to provide meeting rooms outside the disputed facilities. The contract ASSA signed lacks contingencies dealing with the degraded service hotels provide in the case of labor disputes. Yesterday, ASSA said they will seek to incorporate such contingencies in any future conference venue contracts.

The workers are asking us to skip all the events in hotels with strikes. We personally will do that. We will not cross their picket lines. Many other allied social science associations’ members have also expressed unwillingness to cross picket lines. Multiple associations together asked ASSA to allow them to move their panels to alternative locations in San Francisco or online. 

The ASSA leadership has stated that allied associations can move planned sessions to alternative physical locations and ASSA will facilitate updating of location information within their system. Presentations do have to be in-person. 

ASSA would prefer that sessions are held within the ASSA block of hotels. All of the ASSA block hotels are involved in labor disputes or negotiations on some level and could be pulled into strike action quickly. In deciding on event locations, associations and participants will have to balance multiple factors including ASSA preferences, ease of registrant access, strike activity risks, financial constraints, and their members’ preferences.

AEA is planning to keep their sessions in locations now on strike or at risk of strike.

Conclusion

We appreciate the ASSA leadership setting policies that enable meaningful participation without crossing picket lines and look forward to seeing you (outside the picket lines) at ASSA 2025! We will each choose which strategies above to use. Feel free to DM @aaronsojourner.org on Bluesky if you have questions.

Do you want to us to keep you informed of notable developments in the San Francisco hotel workers labor dispute and how it may affect activities for participants at ASSA 2025? We plan to stay on top of these issues and provide practical guidance going forward through tightly-curated email updates.  We aim to communicate as infrequently as possible while providing actionable news, analysis, and opportunities for conference participants. Sign up here.

Hotel workers’ strike and the 2025 ASSA annual meeting (v1 – 12/02/24 am)

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By Hannah Archambault, Jennifer Cohen, and Aaron Sojourner

 

Are you planning to attend the 2025 ASSA meetings in San Francisco? If so, then you are planning to attend events at a hotel where the employees either are currently on strike or where they have already voted to authorize their leadership to call a strike at any moment. All ASSA activities are planned for three ASSA headquarters hotels. Employees at two of these hotels – the Hilton San Francisco Union Square and the San Francisco Marriott Union Square – are on strike and asking people to not meet, eat, nor sleep in the hotels. At the third headquarters hotel – the Parc 55 by Hilton –employees voted to authorize their leaders to call a strike at any moment. 

Picking up your registration badge would require you to cross a picket line and to enter one of the hotels at which employees are striking, as of today.

Did you book your housing through ASSA? If so, then you are booked at a hotel where workers are either currently on strike, where they authorized a strike, or where the union says there’s a real risk employees will be on strike in early January. All the ASSA’s original preferred hotels for housing are in one of these three categories, as detailed below.

What can a social scientist do as we face a conflict between our desires to:

  • participate in the ASSA annual meeting in San Francisco taking place at hotels—both for meeting space and lodging—where workers currently are on strike or at risk of striking,
  • respect the people employed by the hotels and their request of each of us to not meet, sleep, or eat in striking hotels as part of their wider local and national campaign to lift the industry’s job quality?

This blog walks through background and different strategies available to each of us. It includes a link to a petition in its Conclusion.

For context, Hannah is assistant professor at Fresno State and a member of URPE’s Steering Committee. She is a member of the California Faculty Association and committed to justice for all workers and the working class. Jennifer has belonged to the AEA since 2017 and has been an URPE Steering Committee member since 2019. She worked with a nursing union, DENOSA, in South Africa. Her ongoing research focuses on women and work in the health care sector. She is affiliated with Miami University, the National Alliance for Direct Support Professionals, the Rutgers Program for Disability Research, and Ezintsha Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Aaron has belonged to AEA and LERA since 2009 and served as chair and in other roles on LERA@ASSA program committees. He started his career as an organizer for the carpenters union for five years. As a labor economist, his research includes labor unions. As a professor, he taught Labor Relations and Collective Bargaining at the University of Minnesota management school for over a decade. He served as senior economist for labor at CEA for a year. Aaron is speaking here in a personal capacity.

Background on the dispute

To give a sense of the issues, here’s a San Francisco Examiner article and a local NBC news story on it and an industry press article describing recent contract settlements in Boston and San Jose alongside continuing disputes in San Francisco and Honolulu. Here’s a statement from the union. We couldn’t find a statement from the hotel owners’ association. Please let us know if you find one. 

This Econofact blog and this Journal of Economic Perspectives article give more general background about the research on labor relations and unions in economics.

Corner “solutions”

One corner solution is to try to participate just the way you would have absent the strike. Try to ignore the hotel workers, cross their picket lines, and disregard their requests. 

We doubt you will be able to ignore them fully. Employees’ withdrawal of labor has led to deterioration in reported hotel service quality in struck hotels. Room cleaners, bell hops, check-in staff, restaurant staff, and other service workers and their family members will physically be marching between you and hotel doors. Picketing is an important way that federal law allows them to bargain collectively with their employer for better job quality. They will look you in the eye and loudly and clearly ask you to not enter the Hilton and Marriott headquarters hotels and many other hotels too, if they are on strike in early January.

The opposite corner solution is to cancel your plans to participate in the conference. The ASSA made official conference presentations fully in-person, though some sessions will be streamed online to attend remotely. The strike was authorized in a 94% in-favor vote by union members in August and started in September. The ASSA has remained quiet about the issue for months, so it snuck up on many people including us until recent weeks.

You can get a full refund of your ASSA registration fee if you cancel by this Tuesday, December 3. It would be good for ASSA to extend this deadline to Dec. 12 to allow time for people to catch up to the news and to align with the housing change deadline. If you have an ASSA hotel reservation, you must cancel it first (instructions below) and forward cancellation confirmation of your hotel room to assa@vanderbilt.edu along with your request for a conference registration refund. If you don’t want to cross any picket lines, this option has some appeal.

There’s a possibility that Parc 55 employees, or even the other hotels’, are not on strike in early January. Hopefully, all the disputes are settled before then but we do not see signs of progress in negotiations. If a settlement isn’t reached by early January, it seems quite likely the union will have expanded the strike to Parc 55 by then.

We and others are encouraging the ASSA to make a few small decisions specified in the Conclusion below, which would open space for participation in some conference activities without crossing a picket line. If ASSA does not do this by tomorrow at noon ET and we have to make a decision by ASSA’s Dec. 3 deadline, we are considering canceling our conference registrations by the ASSA’s deadline tomorrow for registration refunds. We don’t see how we can meaningfully participate in the conference under current conditions. This would disappoint us. The ASSA meeting is important. We want it to flourish. We respect and appreciate the allied associations’ leaders. It’s a difficult situation to navigate.

Between the corners are other strategies.

Avoid sleeping in hotels with disputes by switching your reservation

The single action with the highest ratio of worker-supportive benefit to cost, in my view, is switching your hotel reservation. It’s easy. It focuses impact on hotel managers. Below are resources to make this easy.

You can cancel your existing ASSA hotel reservation without any financial penalty until Dec. 12. Find your reservation confirmation number on an email from ASSAsupport@cmrus.com containing the phrase “Thank you for using ASSA Housing to make your hotel reservation for the 2025 ASSA Annual Meeting.” Follow the instructions near the bottom there. That process also has a way to communicate the reason to ASSA. Also, call the two hotels. Tell management why you cancelled your reservation at the old hotel and why you made the reservation at the new hotel. 

Here are the ASSA headquarters and other preferred lodging hotels and their statuses:

  • ASSA headquarters hotels
    • Hilton San Francisco Union Square: on strike
    • Marriott Marquis: on strike
    • Parc 55: strike authorized
  • Other ASSA original Preferred Lodging Hotels
    • Beacon Grand: at risk of strike
    • BEI San Francisco: at risk of strike
    • Clift Royal Sonesta San Francisco: at risk of strike
    • Grand Hyatt San Francisco Union Square: on strike
    • Hilton San Francisco Financial District: at risk of strike
    • Hyatt Regency San Francisco at Embarcadero: strike authorized
    • Hyatt Regency San Francisco Downtown SOMA: at risk of strike
    • InterContinental Mark Hopkins San Francisco: at risk of strike
    • InterContinental San Francisco: at risk of strike
    • Westin St Francis: on strike

Strike status information comes from the union here and here and is as of December 1.

The hotel workers union encourages people to patronize these 11 nearby hotels where employees are unionized, there are no strikes, no strike authorizations, and no risk of dispute based on the information here. As of now, there is affordable availability at those 11 union-recommended locations and Aaron just moved his reservation to one of them. Other options exist as well.

In an email this morning, AEA says ASSA can now help members make alternative hotel arrangements.  presumably outside the previously available hotels. We’re not sure which hotels they plan to send people to. Check against the list of 11 above if you’d like.

Buy meals and coffee outside the hotels with disputes

Patronize other local establishments for meals, snacks, and coffee. Communicate this to management of the labor-dispute hotels if you want them to be sure to notice. If applicable, mention this intention in the same call when you tell them why you cancelled your hotel reservation.

Move events outside the hotels with disputes

The ASSA signed contracts many years ago with these venues. It is in a tough position. It would be prohibitively expensive for them to provide meeting rooms outside the disputed facilities. The contract they signed lacks contingencies dealing with the degraded service hotels provide in the case of labor disputes. We hope you will join us in encouraging them to remedy this in future contracts, details below.

The workers are asking us to skip all the events in hotels with strikes. We will do that. We will not cross their picket line. We’re not sure if our employers will reimburse us if we travel but skip official panels. We may cancel altogether or will pay personally, if needed.

Multiple allied social science associations’ members have expressed unwillingness to cross picket lines. Multiple associations have together asked ASSA to allow them to move their panels to alternative locations in San Francisco or online. An ASSA spokesperson said they would delist such events from the official program, which would make it impossible for some presenters to get reimbursed and diminish scholars’ ability to use the presentation in their professional vitae.

One possibility would be for ASSA and/or constituent associations to hold events in alternative venues, ask individuals not to cancel conference registrations, and ask ASSA not to cancel or delist the event from the official program. Registrants could then meaningfully participate in the conference without crossing a picket line. This approach would respect the workers’ request, keep ASSA financially whole, and enable travel reimbursements. ASSA doesn’t verify specific individuals’ attendance at sessions, so this is not a policy change. It would require associations and individuals to make, finance, and communicate about alternative arrangements. ASSA could be helpful in that if it chooses.

Conclusion: Act ASAP?

Individually, we will each choose which strategies above to use. In addition, please consider signing your name to this petition to the ASSA asking them to do the following:

  1. Extend the deadline to request a registration fee refund from December 3 to December 12 to line up with the housing deadline to give registrants time to digest new information,
  2. Commit to not delist any session from the official catalog, including those occurring at alternative locations, unless the session’s organizing association requests delisting, and
  3. Commit to incorporate protective language into future venue contracts to enable ASSA to make alternative arrangements in the case of labor disputes during the conference.

If ASSA does 2, we see a path to our meaningful participation in the conference and will not cancel our conference registrations, hoping either for dispute resolution or off-site activities to attend. 3 also seems to have value.

The communications this morning from AEA to members and ASSA to registrants grew out of conversations we and many others have had with them around these issues. We hope for additional progress on these issues.

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A Quick Start Guide For Bluesky-Curious Epidemiology Lovers

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By Gregg Gonsalves & Aaron Sojourner

 

This Quick Start guide aims to help Epi lovers easily join Bluesky’s growing Epi community. The Bluesky User FAQ covers generic basics, like how to start an account. This guide orients you to Epi-specific resources and strategies. 

Add Follows

Your default feed becomes thick and interesting after you add many hundreds of Follows. Bluesky’s designers aim to give you the experience you prefer, not the one advertisers or management prefers. Unlike on X or Threads, Bluesky’s default feeds are your Follows. As discussed below, Starter Packs and Sky Follower Bridge make it easy to find great accounts to follow. Lists and Feeds help too, as well as offering alternative algorithmic feeds, like the Discover feed. Once you follow many accounts of interest, Bluesky feels more like classic Twitter than X does now.

Set a bio and avatar and post something before you start following people, so they have a signal of who you are and are more likely to follow you back.

Use Starter Packs to easily build a list of follows around themes that interest you. Any user can create a Starter Pack, a list of up to 150 accounts that they curate and recommend on some topic. Follow all the accounts in a pack with a single click and/or browse to select individually.

Two great Starter Packs are the:

  1. Epi Sky Chart pack by Jason Gantenberg that lifts up dozens of excellent epi & epi-adjacent accounts including Peter Tennant, Adam Kucharski,  Daniel Westreich, Sam Scarpino, Miguel Hernan, Joshua Salomon, Maria Glymour, Yonatan Grad, Sherri Rose, Paul Zivich, Matt Fox, Elizabeth Stuart, Chelsea Polis, Bill Miller, and Justin Lessler, and
  2. Global Health, Infectious Diseases, & Epi pack by Saloni Dattini that mixes scientists, journalists, and policy folks including Ellie Murray, Carl Zimmer, Helen Branswell, Kai Kuperschmidt, Angie Rasmussen, Kristian Andersen, Kit Yates, Aris Katzourakis, Flo DeBarre, Eddie Holmes, Marion Koopmans, Saskia Popescu, Jon Cohen, Bill Hanage, Tara C. Smith, Gavin Yamey, Madhu Pai, and Megan Ranney.

Other Starter Packs collect:

Prompt Bluesky’s excellent search function with “Starter Pack Epidemiology” or whatever else interests you to find more.

Find accounts you follow on X that are also on Bluesky using the Chrome extension Sky Follower Bridge. Choose those you want to follow here.

Add Algorithms

Feeds are algorithmic filters based on posts’ characteristics (date, language, hashtags, emoticons…). Any user can create and/or pin Feeds.

Enjoy the #EpiSky feed. If you Pin it, it will show up on your Home page’s Feed ribbon to the right of the “Following” and “Latest from Follows” Feeds.  Each post with “EpiSky”, “#EpiSky”, “epidemiology”  or “#epidemiology” gets displayed on this Feed. Academic Epi discussion is largely here. Add one of those tags to your post and #EpiSky subscribers will see it.

Browse the EpiSky Feed and you’ll discover interesting accounts.

Go to the Profile of someone whose tastes correlate with yours. Browse their Follows.

Adjacent communities use feeds like #IDSky, #SocSky, #EconSky and other tags like #PolicySky, #Causal, and #PublicHealth.

To find Feeds on any topic of interest to you, click “# Feeds” on the sidebar to go to the Feeds page. Scroll down past your Feeds. You’ll find a search bar there only for Feeds.

Bluesky also equips us each with tools to resist toxicity and to cultivate the community we each want. Use them. 

The Popular with Friends feed is useful for discovery. 

BlueSky for Scientists by Steve Harow & Mark Rubin gives more detail than this Quick Start guide.

Network Effects FTW!

This place has strong foundations. The community is small but growing quickly. The more people come, the better it gets. The main thing missing from Bluesky is you!

 

Bonus content

Multi-platform posting: to lower the cost of posting across multiple platforms, use a social media management service like Buffer. You can link accounts on up to 3 platforms (X, Bluesky, Threads, LinkedIn, Insta, TikTok…) for free. Compose once, customize for each site, and post 3 places. I’ve been using it. It’s slick and easy. Fedica and many others are also in this space but I don’t have experience with it.

Identity verification: anyone can start an account and have a username like NAME@bsky.social. If you want identity verification, it will be tied to control of a web domain. My Bluesky account is @aaronsojourner.org and so you know that the account is controlled by the same entity that controls aaronsojourner.org on the web, @nytimes.com on Bluesky is the same entity that controls nytimes.com, etc. If you own a web domain, no one can have a Bluesky account tied to it without your permission. If you want to have an account name tied to your employer’s domain, talk to your IT department.

Organizations: organizational accounts on Bluesky are managed like individual accounts. You’ll need to verify your account with an email from your organization. You can use Bluesky’s default domain or your own custom domain, as described above. Accounts are managed through a single login, as the organization, instead of by granting permissions to individuals (as with Facebook).
Organizational accounts interact with other accounts as individuals, without extra limitations or privileges. Research organizations find Bluesky particularly useful in disseminating new and featured pieces of research. Posting as an organization lends credibility to an affiliated individual’s research, as does reposting an individual’s tweet (post) or thread.
Small but active organizations can have an outsized presence on Bluesky. Many organizations have spread out their short-form social media presence, with some maintaining some presence on X while exploring alternatives and others trying several alternatives. Many organizations cross-post content to all media and may not actively engage with all. Those who actively engage on Bluesky – retweeting others, responding to threads with links to research, offering sources to reporters – will stand out and garner more engagement.
EconSky feed header

Quick Start Guide For Bluesky-Curious Econ Lovers

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This guide aims to help econ lovers easily join Bluesky’s growing economics community. The Bluesky User FAQ covers generic basics, like how to start an account. Narrowing in, this blog aims to orient you quickly to econ-specific resources & strategies. 

Add Follows

Your default feed becomes thick and interesting after you add many hundreds or thousands of Follows. Bluesky’s designers aim to give you the experience you prefer, not the one advertisers or management prefers. Unlike on X or Threads, Bluesky’s default feeds are your Follows. As discussed below, Starter Packs and Sky Follower Bridge make it easy to find great accounts to follow. Lists and Feeds help too, as well as offering alternative algorithmic feeds, like the Discover feed. Once you follow many accounts of interest, Bluesky feels more like classic Twitter than X does now.

Before you start following people, set a bio and avatar and post something. Like on X, you can pin a post to the top of your feed. These identifiers give new follows a signal of who you are. They are more likely to follow you back when notified of your follow than if you look like an anon rando account.

Use Starter Packs to easily build a list of follows around themes that interest you. Any user can create a Starter Pack, a list of up to 150 accounts that they curate and recommend on some topic. Follow all the accounts in a pack with a single click and/or browse to select individually.

I made four packs:

  • Pack 1 and Pack 2 of individual accounts actively posting econ: from academia, think tanks, and media including Daron Acemoglu, Andrew Baker, Michael Clemens, Nick Bunker, Brad DeLong, Arin Dube, Sue Dynarski, Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham, Austan Goolsbee, Kirabo Jackson, Seema Jayachandran, Heather Long, Erzo F.P. Luttmer, Paul Krugman, Rachael Meager, Joey Politano, Jesse Rothstein, Claudia Sahm, Ernie Tedeschi, David Wessel, Khoa Vu, and Gema Zamarro.
  • Econ institutions such as APPAM, AEA Journals & JOE, CEPR, CSWEP, the IO Society, IZA, JAERE, JOLE, JPE, JPubE, NBER, the Peterson Institute, QJE, REStud, the Royal Econ Society, Upjohn Institute, the Urban Econ Association, RAND, and some econ departments.
  • U.S. econ reporters and columnists: my favorites on here to stay on top of what’s happening in the economy and relevant policy.

Field-themed, mostly academic econ Starter Packs created by others collect:

Economists by non-field themes such identity, institution type, language, or geography:

Policy-oriented packs include economists and others — many in government, NGOs, and think tanks — producing, debating, and using econ policy analysis, are:

Gina Pieters’ thread tours through dozens of these packs from econ and related fields. Anna Goeddeke built a spreadsheet of econ starter packs.

Prompt Bluesky’s excellent search function with “Starter Pack economics” or whatever else interests you to find more. This searchable Directory of Starter Packs has many but not all packs.

Find accounts you follow on X that are also on Bluesky using the Chrome extension Sky Follower Bridge. Choose those you want to follow here.

Add Algorithms

Feeds are algorithmic filters based on posts’ characteristics: date, language, hashtags, emoticons…. In contrast, a List is a sets of accounts. Users can create and/or pin Feeds and Lists.

Enjoy the #EconSky feed. If you Pin it, it will show up on Home Page’s Feed ribbon to the right of the “Following” and “Latest from Follows” Feeds.  Each recent post containing “#EconSky” gets displayed on this Feed. Academic economics discussion centers here. Include “#EconSky” in a post and many #EconSky subscribers will see it.

Enjoy the #NumbersDay feed.  Each recent post with “#️⃣#️⃣”, “#GDP”, “#CPI”, “#JobsDay”, “#JOLTS”, and other real-time econ tags gets displayed on it. It tends to be a mix of academic, Wall Street, policy, and econ media folks’ posts.

Enjoy the Econ – Popular Posts feed, which gives econ-research related posts from the last 24 hours ranked on popularity. Accounts must opt in to be included.

Enjoy the #TeachEcon feed. Each recent post with “#TeachEcon”, “👩‍🏫👨‍🏫”, or “👨‍🏫👩‍🏫” gets displayed on this Feed.

Enjoy the #EconConf feed. Each recent post with “#EconConf”, or “#AEA”, “#AEA2025”, “#2025AEA”, “AEA25” or similar for APPAM, ASA, ASHE, LERA, SEA, and SOLE over the last week is displayed here. I will update the years over time. It’s a single feed for all big econ conferences rather than requiring many separate conference-specific feeds that would be active only one week a year.

Enjoy the #FundSocSci feed. Each post with “#FundSocSci” gets displayed. It’s for sharing or discussing social science funding opportunities.

For econ job market resources, buy-side postings are at JOE. Sell-side new-PhD intros can be posted or viewed on the #EconJMP feed. Buy- or sell-side folks interested in the pre-doc, RA, or post-doc market, use the #econ_ra feed.

Browse those feeds and you’ll discover interesting accounts.

Go to the Profile of someone whose tastes correlate with yours. Browse their Follows.

Adjacent communities use feeds like #FinSky, #PolicySky, #PoliSci, #EduSky, and #Sociology. 

To find Feeds on any topic of interest to you, click “# Feeds” on the sidebar to go to the Feeds page. Scroll down past your Feeds. You’ll find a search bar there only for Feeds.

For Lists, this Economists list collects 2,750+ economists’ accounts. If you Pin the list, it will show up on your home page and show the aggregated posts from all list members. Use the Browse tab to see the list’s accounts and choose any individuals to follow. Also, if you:

  1. are an economist,
  2. posted recently but it’s missing from the list’s feed (evidence you’re not now on the list), and
  3. want to be on the list, DM me and I’ll add you.

This Econ Reporters list has dozens of media accounts covering economic issues.

Let me know if I’m missing folks. DM or @ me with any questions or ideas. Or post them to #EconSky. 

Bluesky also equips us each with tools to resist toxicity and to cultivate the community we each want. Use them.

The Popular with Friends feed is useful for discovery. 

BlueSky for Scientists by Steve Harow & Mark Rubin gives more detail than this Quick Start guide. This complete guide to Bluesky goes into more detail than you need now but is a good reference.

Want bookmarks? The 📌 feed accomplishes that.

Want to know which Starter Packs and Lists include you? Put your account name into Clearsky.app. Note the tabs on the right edge. Third-party developers have developed many other tools too.

Network Effects FTW!

This place has strong foundations. The community is small but growing quickly. The more people come, the better it gets. The main thing missing from Bluesky is you!

 

Bonus content

Identity verification: anyone can start an account and have a username like @NAME.bsky.social. If you want identity verification, it will be tied to control of a web domain. My Bluesky account is @aaronsojourner.org and so you know that the account is controlled by the same entity that controls aaronsojourner.org on the web, @nytimes.com on Bluesky is the same entity that controls nytimes.com, etc. If you own a web domain, no one can have a Bluesky account tied to it without your permission. If you want to have an account name tied to your employer’s domain, talk to your IT department.

Multi-platform posting: to lower the cost of posting across multiple platforms, use a social media management service like Buffer. You can link accounts on up to 3 platforms (X, Bluesky, Threads, LinkedIn, Insta, TikTok…) for free. Compose once, customize for each site, and post 3 places. I’ve been using it. It’s slick and easy. Fedica and many others are also in this space but I don’t have experience with it.

Claimed versus Actual Posting Date/Time: posts are made at an actual time but can claim a different time. This is how BlueArk can post your old Twitter archive using original dates. The system records both the claimed and actual posting date-time. However, the native UI only shows the claimed time. If you subscribe to this Backdated labeler, it will add a flag onto posts where the claimed and actual posting date-time don’t agree. HT Olivier Simard-Casanova for point me to this solution (& others).
 
Organizations: organizational accounts on Bluesky are managed like individual accounts. You’ll need to verify your account with an email from your organization. You can use Bluesky’s default domain or your own custom domain, as described above. Accounts are managed through a single login, as the organization, instead of by granting permissions to individuals (as with Facebook).
Organizational accounts interact with other accounts as individuals, without extra limitations or privileges. Research organizations find Bluesky particularly useful in disseminating new and featured pieces of research. Posting as an organization lends credibility to an affiliated individual’s research, as does reposting an individual’s tweet (post) or thread.
Small but active organizations can have an outsized presence on Bluesky. Many organizations have spread out their short-form social media presence, with some maintaining some presence on X while exploring alternatives and others trying several alternatives. Many organizations cross-post content to all media and may not actively engage with all. Those who actively engage on Bluesky – retweeting others, responding to threads with links to research, offering sources to reporters – will stand out and garner more engagement.