2022

When the pandemic hit in early 2020, many of us increasingly turned to gig workers to have meals, groceries and other household necessities delivered to our doorsteps.

The increased demand for these services during this period meant that online labor platforms were an alternative source of income for at least some of the workers who had been laid off as part of the resulting economic shutdowns. For other workers looking to reduce their exposure to the virus, online crowdwork platforms offered remote job opportunities that could be performed from the safety of their home.

During a period of unprecedent upheaval, risk and uncertainty, then, the gig economy provided some much-needed flexibility and convenience to many consumers and workers. These purported benefits remain core to platform firms’ marketing strategies as they seek to expand in a future post-pandemic economy.

Employment insecurity has emerged as a defining trait of the contemporary American economy, and it’s not just workers who fear job loss. Employment insecurity manifests at the community level as well. Shared concerns over an area’s ‘business climate’ and its relationship to employment growth inform virtually every area of local politics in the United States, often through the work of public economic development agencies operating in partnership with the private sector. Maintaining a favorable business climate to encourage job growth means limiting regulation, offering enticing tax breaks or publicly funded business infrastructure to potential employers, and promising a skilled and eager workforce (preferably one that is not unionized).

Large companies with the ability to relocate or grow their operations elsewhere exercise a great deal of power over their workers and the communities in which they do business.

Anyone who has worked with the public has likely dealt with irate customers. Abuse and aggression from customers is a common experience in ‘low wage service’ jobs. These are jobs that are customer facing, pay at or just above the minimum wage, and are precarious and unstable. Over the past 50 years the number of people Canada and the US working in low wage services has expanded so that it now surpasses the number of people working in manufacturing. Women and people who are racialized as non-white are more likely to be working in these jobs, as are LGBTQ+ people.

Given that LGBTQ+ people are frequently employed in low wage services, we decided to look at how gender and sexuality influence their experiences of customer abuse and aggression in a recent article in Work, Employment, and Society. As we expected, interviews with 30 LGBTQ+ service workers in Windsor and Sudbury, Ontario, revealed that LGBTQ+ people experienced customer abuse and aggression related to their gender identity and sexual orientation.

I was sitting in an open-ended police van with half a dozen policewomen, “hanging out” with them as they awaited orders to begin crowd control in that part of town.

A policeman came up to the back of our open-ended van and told us that it had to be taken somewhere else; we had to get off. The women grumbled good-naturedly as they began gathering their things and climbed out.

One of them, Ruqqaiya, began adjusting her headscarf so that she could also use it to cover her lower face. She then pulled out a black gown from her bag and began putting that on top of her uniform.

The “Great Resignation” has fueled growing conversations about the labor conditions facing American workers today. Millions of workers in this country, according to recent statistics, have left or are in the process of leaving jobs they have deemed unfulfilling in order to seek out something better. We are living in a moment where workers have both the ability and inclination to find new work if they are unhappy with their current job.

This moment—which is fundamentally about how workers think about jobs and strategize about their future employment—raises at least as many questions as it answers. For instance, how are workers who regularly face unpredictable schedules, pay, and changing employment status—sometimes called non-standard work conditions—able to manage job changes?

Over the last year, American workers quit their jobs at higher rates than ever before. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 4.5 million people quit in November 2021 – the most ever recorded since the BLS began publishing turnover data in December 2000. While the “Great Resignation” spans across the economy, quit rates were highest in the retail and food service industries, where workers have been resigning in droves since the beginning of last year.

Why are so many workers in retail and food service quitting their jobs? In addition to concerns over their risk of infection from COVID-19, many workers are quitting because they are dissatisfied with their poor working conditions and they hope to find better opportunities elsewhere. In particular, retail and restaurant workers report that frustration with inflexible and unpredictable hours is a primary motivation for quitting.

In a recent study, we investigate how and why unstable schedules might lead retail and food service workers to leave their jobs and assess if workers leaving these jobs are really able to find better opportunities after.

Over the past 25 years, much has been written about the role of disruptive innovations in the contemporary economy. Indeed, a great deal of attention has been paid to how nascent technological platforms, like Google, Amazon, Uber and Airbnb, have been disrupting existing industries.

Most of this research has focused on the market strategies that contribute to the success of disruptive firms. However, scholars have increasingly begun to highlight the important role that non-market and corporate political strategies  play in producing market disruption. Indeed, a growing body of research suggests that, to disrupt markets, start-ups must often pursue strategies to change existing laws and regulations, which scholars have referred to as regulatory entrepreneurship.

While informative, the research on regulatory entrepreneurship has mostly centered the corporate political strategies and tactics of the disruptive firms that seek to influence their political environments, leaving the work of regulators and lawmakers to manage that disruption relatively under-explored.

The forty unemployed professionals who made it to this meeting at Jump Start Job Club are prepared to chant. Arranged in folding chairs with Styrofoam cups in hand, their eyes are fixed on their lines, projected on a PowerPoint slide: “I’m not over-qualified, I’m absolutely qualified!”

The bubbly presenter orchestrates: “Let’s say it all together!”

The crowd looks like a twenty-year reunion of the characters in the movie Office Space: not its scheming anti-work hero, but the background cast, the characters who decided to stick with the company until the layoffs came around.

About 70% of U.S. moms can expect to be primary financial providers before their first child turns 18.

In a substantial number of families with children, mothers, whether single or partnered, are now the primary breadwinner. More than 40 percent of American mothers solely or primarily support their minor children through their own earnings in any given year.

For most of the 20th century, except in wartime, says historian Stephanie Coontz, women who were the primary source of their children’s income were generally unmarried, divorced, or widowed. But for the past two decades, the most rapid growth in breadwinning mothers has been among partnered women. As late as 2000, only 15 percent of primary-earning mothers were married. But by 2017, married women accounted for almost 40 percent of mothers whose earnings were the primary support for their families, based on the 1990-2000 Censuses and 2010-2017 American Community Surveys.

Gender segregation – the tendency of men and women to work in different kinds of jobs – is an enduring problem in the United States. Because jobs dominated by women tend to be paid less than those dominated by men, segregation contributes to gender inequality. Despite progress over time, the rate of desegregation has slowed in recent decades, and segregation remains a major contributor to the gender pay gap.

However, gender segregation may be worse than we thought. It turns out that the way we typically measure segregation – using occupations – conceals gender segregation based on job titles. Therefore, we know very little about how men and women might be segregated into different job titles within occupations, especially over time and at the national level.

My recent article in the American Sociological Review shows that occupations hide significant levels of gender segregation and that job title desegregation may be slowing relative to occupational desegregation.