Research Findings

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.

For the past decade, major technology companies have grappled with the underrepresentation of women in their industry, especially in technical roles like software engineering. Much of the conversation surrounding gender inequality in the tech industry focuses on the educational pipeline: specifically, the relatively low proportions of women graduating with computer science degrees.

In a new article in the American Journal of Sociology, I argue that women are not only underrepresented in these technical roles because they lack educational credentials but because they are not given the same opportunities as men to learn relevant skills on the job. 

In the gig economy, the customer isn’t king. They’re the emperor.

Workers on Uber, Lyft, TaskRabbit, Instacart, Fiverr, Upwork, and other labor platforms are at the mercy of algorithms that funnel jobs their way based on customer ratings. The better ratings, the better the assignments. By using customers for control, the platforms have ditched traditional management and gained tremendous efficiencies for themselves and for their customers. Who doesn’t love the ease of calling a rideshare to their exact location with a few taps on a cellphone, compared with standing on a street corner to hail a cab?

A large share of higher education media attention focuses on selective colleges and universities, from Congressional hearings featuring “Ivy-plus” university presidents to the “operation varsity blues” scandal. These institutions represent only a small subset of higher education, yet attention to them is well warranted. Enrollment at a high-status undergraduate institution is often a passport to lucrative careers or a prestigious graduate education.

Historians, sociologists and higher education scholars have called attention to the role of highly selective institutions as bastions of privilege. Two former presidents of such universities, William G. Bowen and Derek Bok, traced the flow of racially minoritized students through these institutions in their classic book The Shape of the River.

The paradoxical promotion advantages of men in jobs dominated by women

Management promotions come with pay raises and a voice in workplace decisions. It is well-known that men receive promotions more often than women – but men’s promotion advantages relative to their female colleagues grow with the share of women in jobs. Therefore, men ride an invisible “glass escalator” that fast-tracks them into managerial promotions, especially in jobs that employ more women.

In a recently published paper, we ask: Is the glass escalator the same in all workplaces, or does it slow in workplaces predominantly employing women?