{"title":"Labor Unbound? Assessing the Current Surge in Labor Activism","authors":"S. Vallas, H. Johnston","doi":"10.1177/07308884231162929","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07308884231162929","url":null,"abstract":"Where will the current surge of labor activism lead? To address this question we examine two distinctive currents of labor struggle—one rooted in “new economy” firms and a second in the nation's logistics sector—where post-pandemic conditions have confronted workers with important opportunities and challenges. If the workers’ movement is to make enduring gains, it will need to foster organizational alliances that stretch across distinct sectors of the economy, build support among consumers and the broader public, and challenge culture war rhetoric through appeal to workers’ shared needs.","PeriodicalId":47716,"journal":{"name":"Work and Occupations","volume":"50 1","pages":"376 - 384"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44257157","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Measurement of Precarious Work and Market Conditions: Insights from the COVID-19 Disruption on Sample Selection.","authors":"Sigal Alon","doi":"10.1177/07308884221127636","DOIUrl":"10.1177/07308884221127636","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The precarious work construct combines employment instability and employment-contingent outcomes. Yet, I argue that confining the scope of the investigation to employed individuals creates a sample selection that disguises the heterogeneous nature of employment instability. The COVID-19 skyrocketing unemployment rate provides both a compelling motivation and a unique opportunity to revisit the construct of precarious work. Using pre-COVID and COVID-19 era data of the working-age population in Israel, the results demonstrate that by pushing less stable individuals out of employment, the COVID-19 recession strengthened the negative relationship between volatility and employment opportunities and accentuated sample selection. Because the selection into employment was not random, this introduces a bias into the measurement of precarious work, one that is more severe during a recession than in a full-employment market. The discussion highlights the broader significance of this lacuna and suggests a way to hone the conceptualization and operationalization of the precarious work construct.</p>","PeriodicalId":47716,"journal":{"name":"Work and Occupations","volume":"50 1","pages":"22-59"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9535454/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48562167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hye Jin Rho, Christine Riordan, Christian Lyhne Ibsen, J Ryan Lamare, Maite Tapia
{"title":"Do Workers Speak Up When Feeling Job Insecure? Examining Workers' Response to Precarity During the COVID-19 Pandemic.","authors":"Hye Jin Rho, Christine Riordan, Christian Lyhne Ibsen, J Ryan Lamare, Maite Tapia","doi":"10.1177/07308884221128481","DOIUrl":"10.1177/07308884221128481","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The COVID-19 pandemic inflicted unprecedented precarity upon workers, including concerns about job insecurity. We examine whether workers respond to job insecurity with voice, and assess the role of unions, managers, and employment arrangements in this relationship. Analyses of an original 2020 survey representative of Illinois and Michigan workers show that job insecurity is not significantly associated with voice. Further, while we find that union membership and confidence in organized labor are positively associated with voice, insecure workers are less likely to speak up than secure workers as confidence in organized labor increases. Last, we find that insecure nonstandard workers are less likely to use voice than their secure counterparts.</p>","PeriodicalId":47716,"journal":{"name":"Work and Occupations","volume":"50 1","pages":"97-129"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9720047/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43565006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Politics of Prevention: Polarization in How Workplace COVID-19 Safety Practices Shaped the Well-Being of Frontline Service Sector Workers.","authors":"Tyler Woods, Daniel Schneider, Kristen Harknett","doi":"10.1177/07308884221125821","DOIUrl":"10.1177/07308884221125821","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically reshaped the labor market, especially for service sector workers. Frontline service sector workers, already coping with precarious working conditions, faced proximate risks of COVID-19 transmission on the job and navigated new workplace safety measures, including masking, social distancing, and staying home while sick, all in a polarized political environment. We examine polarization in the effects of COVID-19 workplace safety measures on workers' feelings of safety and well-being. Specifically, we examine how support for former President Trump moderates the relationship between COVID-19 safety practices (masking, social distancing, staying home while sick) and workers' feelings of safety and well-being. To do so, we draw on novel data collected by The Shift Project from 2,039 service sector workers at 89 large firms during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that workplace safety measures are positively associated with workers' self-assessments of feeling safe and with mental health, but only for Biden voters.</p>","PeriodicalId":47716,"journal":{"name":"Work and Occupations","volume":"50 1","pages":"130-162"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9500428/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48245937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Gig Work and the Pandemic: Looking for Good Pay from Bad Jobs During the COVID-19 Crisis.","authors":"Jeremy Reynolds, Reilly Kincaid","doi":"10.1177/07308884221128511","DOIUrl":"10.1177/07308884221128511","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>COVID-19 led to work hour reductions and layoffs for many Americans with wage/salary jobs. Some gig work, however, which is usually considered precarious, remained available. We examine whether people doing gig microtasks right before the pandemic increased their microtask hours during COVID-19 and whether those changes helped them financially. Using data from workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform from February, March, and April of 2020, we find that roughly one third of existing workers increased their microtask hours. Increases were larger for people who lost household income or wage/salary hours. Spending more time on microtasks, however, did little to help workers financially. Furthermore, the people most reliant on microtasks before the pandemic had worse financial outcomes than others. In short, even though microtask work might seem like a good way for people to recoup lost income during the pandemic, it was of limited utility even for the experienced workers in our sample.</p>","PeriodicalId":47716,"journal":{"name":"Work and Occupations","volume":"50 1","pages":"60-96"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9520279/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45705405","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Precarious Employment and Well-Being: Insights from the COVID-19 Pandemic.","authors":"Quan D Mai, Lijun Song, Rachel Donnelly","doi":"10.1177/07308884221143063","DOIUrl":"10.1177/07308884221143063","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>While precarious employment is not a new concept, it has been brought to the center of scholarly and public discourse worldwide by the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. This essay delineates how precarious employment shapes well-being and situates that relationship in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The essay also provides an overview of how the nine articles boldly investigate how these two layers of global risk-precarious employment and the pandemic-interact to shape individuals' well-being. In addition to advancing theoretical and empirical knowledge by analyzing timely data from diverse sources and populations, these articles call for more efforts on worker protection reforms and government financial support.</p>","PeriodicalId":47716,"journal":{"name":"Work and Occupations","volume":"50 1","pages":"3-21"},"PeriodicalIF":4.4,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9726637/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44817401","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Alvarez, W. (2022). Everyday Dirty Work: Invisibility, Communication, and Immigrant Labor","authors":"Anna Milena Galazka","doi":"10.1177/07308884231151627","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07308884231151627","url":null,"abstract":"Indeed, the gendered and racialized aspects of status and authority in the medical profession (and healthcare work more broadly) receive little attention. In a similar vein, I was curious about the cardiologists’ refusal to attend bed management meetings. I wanted more analysis of how cardiologists’ need for interesting cases might demonstrate a tension between the profession’s self-interest and its duty to the public. Managing Medical Authority provokes important questions about the ongoing negotiation of professional authority among physicians in an everchanging landscape of corporatized healthcare. Given the recent resurgence of interest in the health professions within sociology, Managing Medical Authority is an exciting recent addition to this once-again burgeoning subfield.","PeriodicalId":47716,"journal":{"name":"Work and Occupations","volume":"50 1","pages":"580 - 582"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2023-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49066364","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Goldin, C. (2021). Career & Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity","authors":"Amy S. Wharton","doi":"10.1177/07308884221146324","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07308884221146324","url":null,"abstract":"staff, and students) is a much needed and welcome addition to the discussions around stigmatization. By sharing janitors’ accounts of abusive comments from customers, or their recollections of customers ignoring them altogether, Alvarez adds depth to claims of janitors’ communicative isolation and invisibility. Exploring the communication between individuals in service jobs and their clients is also important from the perspective of dirty work research. As some writers have argued (Malvini Redden & Scarduzio, 2018), attending to the communicative dimensions of worker–customer interactions is urgent for an enhanced appreciation of how work becomes more or less dirty (or clean). On this note, for a book with “dirty work” in the title, there is surprisingly little engagement with the dirty work scholarship. The janitorial work examined here is undeniably dirty, as workers’ narratives and some customers’ voices would suggest (see, e.g., pages 15 and 75); however, dirty work is only mentioned in passing. It is not unpacked with reference to the scholarship’s unique preoccupation with the negative impact of societal stigmatizing views on workers’ personal identities and how workers then manage this impact through symbolic and material coping techniques. Rather, the book is about everyday communication and its embedded stigma-reinforcing mechanisms, unfolding against the backdrop of the perceptions of janitorial work as dirty. Communication researchers will find Alvarez’s account of great interest. The book may also be of value to scholars working in the wider domain of social sciences and humanities, but also to practitioners and leaders in nonprofit, academic organizations that aspire to “walk the talk” of inclusivity.","PeriodicalId":47716,"journal":{"name":"Work and Occupations","volume":"50 1","pages":"582 - 584"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2022-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49314981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Intersections and Commonalities: Using Matching to Decompose Wage Gaps by Gender and Nativity in Germany","authors":"Maximilian Sprengholz, Maik Hamjediers","doi":"10.1177/07308884221141100","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07308884221141100","url":null,"abstract":"We investigate intersecting wage gaps by gender and nativity by comparing the wages between immigrant women, immigrant men, native women, and native men based on Western German survey data. Adding to the analytical diversity of the field, we do a full comparison of group wages to emphasize the relationality of privilege and disadvantage, and we use a nonparametric matching decomposition that is well suited to address unique group-specific experiences. We find that wage (dis)advantages associated with the dimensions of gender and nativity are nonadditive and result in distinct decomposition patterns for each pairwise comparison. After accounting for substantial group differences in work attachment, individual resources, and occupational segregation, unexplained wage gaps are generally small for comparisons between immigrant women, immigrant men, and native women, but large when either group is compared to native men. This finding suggests that the often presumed “double disadvantage” of immigrant women is rather a “double advantage” of native men.","PeriodicalId":47716,"journal":{"name":"Work and Occupations","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2022-12-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43690705","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sanford M. Jacoby (2021). Labor in the Age of Finance: Pensions, Politics, and Corporations from Deindustrialization to Dodd-Frank","authors":"N. DiTomaso","doi":"10.1177/07308884221120079","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/07308884221120079","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47716,"journal":{"name":"Work and Occupations","volume":"50 1","pages":"585 - 587"},"PeriodicalIF":2.9,"publicationDate":"2022-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48543198","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}