Research Findings

At this point it has become common knowledge: leveraging your social capital will help you on the job market. We hear it from scholars, who illustrate the benefits that job candidates get from referrals; from career counselors, who encourage us to reach out personal contacts at companies where we hope to work; and online, where we are relentlessly reminded to expand our professional networks to advance our careers. To get a job, it often seems, you have to know someone.

Yet leveraging connections during the job search is at odds with another widespread belief, that hiring should be meritocratic, based on candidates’ qualifications rather than their connections. This gives rise to a tension. On the one hand, we want to maximize our chances of getting the job by getting a foot in the door. On the other, we feel committed to the principle of meritocracy and concerned that using connections may shade into nepotism.

In recent decades, terms such as “meritocracy” and “equality of opportunities” have gained significant political and social traction, while the globe has experienced recurring economic and social crises that widened the gap between the haves and have-nots. Amid this growing inequality, one must question whether true social mobility still exists. Can today’s youth, regardless of their background, genuinely aspire to climb the economic ladder, or are they bound by the socioeconomic status they were born into?

The Good, the Bad, and the Gig Economy

There are good jobs, which have fair wages, security, and a career ladder. There are bad jobs, which have none of these. 

And then there are “good bad jobs,” otherwise known as gig work.

Not long ago, labor scholars and activists fastened on Walmart’s labor practices as providing the most influential template for the “low road” approach toward employment generally. Since then, Amazon has in many ways surpassed Walmart, overtaking it in many retail markets, and bringing into play a whole new set of labor practices, many of which are equipped with powerful digital surveillance tools. This raises the question: What, precisely, do we know about the labor control mechanisms that workers encounter in Amazon’s warehouses? Despite journalistic forays and scattered but growing academic research, we have only a faint and tenuous outline of the company’s managerial regime, and of the workers’ responses to it.[1]

Imagine a small, rustic distillery tucked away in Utah’s Uinta mountains. The air is crisp with hints of fermenting grain and aging whiskey. Inside, a dedicated artisan tends to the copper still, crafting small batches of handmade spirits with care. Each bottle reflects the maker’s dedication and knowledge of the land.

This romantic image is likely what comes to mind when we hear “craft spirits.” We envision devoted producers pursuing their passion for making unique, quality products that stand in contrast to those mass-produced by big-name brands. It’s no wonder, then, that the craft spirits industry has seen such impressive growth in recent years.

But how accurately does this idealized image reflect the reality experienced by craft distillers? In a recent study, forthcoming in Qualitative Sociology, my colleague Eylül Yel and I shed new light on this question, revealing a landscape far more complex than this idealized vision suggests.

When I asked a Latin American street vendor in NYC if he has free time, he replied: “For what? This is my freedom, work is freedom. This is fun for me. Some people may pass by and think, ‘poor man selling churros in the street in such a cold weather’, but I do not feel like that, I feel good, I make money.”

Precarious work has increased globally in recent decades, influencing workers’ perceptions of their jobs. A defining feature of precarious work is the combination of bad working conditions with greater autonomy and flexibility. As a result, workers from various sectors, including freelance workers, platform workers, entrepreneurs, and street vendors highlight the benefits of working for themselves.

Interracial solidarity – the willingness of white workers to unite with racialized others, especially Black people, against capital – is a question that has haunted the institutionalized U.S. labor movement from its birth in the 1860s to the present day. We need only look to the white working class voters who support Donald Trump for just one example of this persistent challenge.

Unfortunately, the existing research is ill-equipped to explain the conditions that enable and constrain interracial labor solidarity. The relevant scholarly debate turns on an either/or question: did organized labor in the United States exclude or protect Black labor? On one side, scholars emphasize unions’ racially exclusionary practices. On the other side, scholars have focused on how some unions were largely inclusive. As readers, we are meant to make three inferences. First, while conservative whites were certainly racist, progressive whites recognized Black workers as their equals. Second, U.S. labor history’s protagonists were whites, while Black people were the passive beneficiaries or victims of white workers. Third, white progressives’ class analysis of capitalism was correct: employers do use racism to divide and weaken the working class.

Lots of media attention addresses the payment of subminimum wages to workers with disabilities employed in segregated workshops. In 2009, an Iowa Turkey farm was exposed for keeping dozens of men with intellectual disabilities in captivity for over thirty years, paying them $65 per month for decades of full-time manual labor. But a new study shows that programs trying to raise wages for workers with disabilities still place many in precarious, low-wage jobs due to the constraints of American disability policy.