Tom Blake

Tom Blake is Senior Correspondent: Labor, Wages & Automation at Just Right News, where he leads coverage of how Americans earn a living and what it costs to keep the country working. Born on January 18, 1982, in Detroit, Michigan and now based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Tom brings a ground-level view of the shop floor to an economy increasingly steered by code, capital, and policy. He reports across two core beats—Labor, Wages & Automation and The Price of Work—translating complex trends into clear stories anchored in data and the dignity of work. Tom’s lens was forged early. He grew up in a neighborhood where paychecks were measured in shifts and overtime, and where the hum of assembly lines set the calendar. He watched friends’ parents lose jobs when production moved away, met men and women who retrained midlife, and learned that “opportunity” means little without a path to keep a roof overhead. As a young adult, he took the long shifts others passed up—on loading docks, in machine shops, and behind the wheel—learning what it means to have your back and your budget tested by schedules you don’t control. Those experiences gave Tom a durable filter for separating rhetoric from reality. He covers labor and wages with a worker-first, results-driven perspective: reward productive work, respect those who take risks to create jobs, and be honest about the trade-offs of policy choices. He is skeptical of top-down mandates that sound compassionate but land as red tape for small businesses and shrinking paychecks for employees. At the same time, he insists that innovation and automation should expand ladders, not pull them up—championing apprenticeships, on-ramps to skilled trades, and transparent pathways for displaced workers. In Pittsburgh, Tom lives at the crossroads of industrial heritage and a fast-growing robotics corridor. His reporting often starts before dawn on factory floors and ends late in labs where engineers refine the machines changing those floors. He is known for pairing shoe-leather interviews with kitchen-table math, tracking how inflation, regulation, benefits design, and technology ripple through take-home pay, scheduling, and workforce stability. The Price of Work, Tom’s signature reporting series, asks a simple question with complicated answers: who pays, and who benefits, when policies, platforms, and algorithms set the terms of a day’s work? He’s profiled skilled tradespeople navigating new certification rules, warehouse crews working alongside autonomous systems, and small manufacturers balancing training budgets against razor-thin margins. Readers trust him to test big claims against the lived experience of people who clock in. Colleagues describe Tom as calm under deadline, relentless with numbers, and respectful in disagreement. He believes journalism should explain, not posture—and that the most reliable experts are often the ones who don’t have time for a panel because their shift starts at five. When he’s not reporting, he mentors young writers interested in the economy’s front lines and volunteers at community job fairs connecting employers with overlooked talent. Tom Blake writes from conviction: that every policy has a price, every paycheck tells a story, and the American promise works best when work itself is valued.