“It's kinda like a sick joke”: Young people, labor market experiences, and the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Young people struggle to enter a new capitalist economy characterized by job instability and devalued wages and labor. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this instability, since employment sectors hit hardest by the economic recession affected jobs where young people worked. We study racially marginalized young people's labor market experiences in the United States through in-depth interviews with seven participants conducted between 2019 and 2022, before and during the pandemic. Through coding and analysis, we develop themes of surviving, navigating the labor market, and glimpsing cracks in the capitalist wall. Interviews illustrate how racial capitalism pulls the rug out from under young people while offering illusions of stability through cobbled-together work, benefits, and housing. Young people describe tuning themselves to become better capitalists and shifting their mindset to survive. Even so, young people recognize the pandemic created opportunities to question the status quo and reevaluate their engagements within the current capitalist economy.