Pub Date : 2022-09-22DOI: 10.1177/0160449X221128050
Andrene J. Castro
The teacher workforce has undergone macrostructural economic and political changes tied to privatization, deunionization, and deregulation. These forms of neoliberal restructuring have resulted in employment precarity or job insecurity for teachers, but have acutely impacted teachers of color. Drawing on the literature from economic sociology and the sociology of work, this conceptual paper outlines three defining features of precarity in teaching: (1) precarity as a process of neoliberalism; (2) precarity as a socioeconomic condition; and (3) precarity as an ontological experience. By applying these aspects of precarity, this article casts light on the historical and contemporaneous work experiences of teachers of color that render them at risk for job insecurity and social and economic vulnerability.
{"title":"Teachers of Color and Precarious Work: The Inequality of Job Security","authors":"Andrene J. Castro","doi":"10.1177/0160449X221128050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0160449X221128050","url":null,"abstract":"The teacher workforce has undergone macrostructural economic and political changes tied to privatization, deunionization, and deregulation. These forms of neoliberal restructuring have resulted in employment precarity or job insecurity for teachers, but have acutely impacted teachers of color. Drawing on the literature from economic sociology and the sociology of work, this conceptual paper outlines three defining features of precarity in teaching: (1) precarity as a process of neoliberalism; (2) precarity as a socioeconomic condition; and (3) precarity as an ontological experience. By applying these aspects of precarity, this article casts light on the historical and contemporaneous work experiences of teachers of color that render them at risk for job insecurity and social and economic vulnerability.","PeriodicalId":35267,"journal":{"name":"Labor Studies Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42522957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-07DOI: 10.1177/0160449x221121361
J. Trotter
African American labor and working-class history is a key fi eld of research, knowl-edge, and inspiration for building a stronger and more viable contemporary labor movement within and beyond the borders of the United States today. But Black labor history as an intellectual discipline is deeply rooted in the early twentieth-century struggle against the emergence of the White supremacist order in American society. Both lay and professional Jim Crow era White writers treated Black workers as intel-lectually “ inferior ” and incapable of adapting to the labor requirements of the industrial machine. Accordingly, they de fi ned Black workers as “ expendable ” and justi fi ed the employment of Black workers in the most precarious bottom rungs of the nation ’ s expanding urban industrial economy. The fi rst generation of African American labor historians — including Charles Abram L. Harris, Spiro, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others countered such racist perspectives on African American workers and prepared the groundwork for the rise of anti-racist treatments of Black workers during the mid to late twentieth century. Building upon but moving well beyond the insights of their early twentieth-century counterparts, recent scholars of Black labor history not only demonstrate how Black workers labored under the “ special handicaps of race and color, ” in addition to the prevailing obstacles that hampered the lives of all wage earners in capitalist America. They also address the challenges that Black workers encountered in building their own communities in the face of rising class, gender, and ideological divisions and con fl icts within their own ranks: fi rst during the transition from slavery to freedom and later during the Great Migration and the rise of the urban industrial working class.
{"title":"Special Issue “More Expendable than ‘Essential’: Black Workers’ Rights and Racial Class Struggles Under the COVID Crisis”","authors":"J. Trotter","doi":"10.1177/0160449x221121361","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0160449x221121361","url":null,"abstract":"African American labor and working-class history is a key fi eld of research, knowl-edge, and inspiration for building a stronger and more viable contemporary labor movement within and beyond the borders of the United States today. But Black labor history as an intellectual discipline is deeply rooted in the early twentieth-century struggle against the emergence of the White supremacist order in American society. Both lay and professional Jim Crow era White writers treated Black workers as intel-lectually “ inferior ” and incapable of adapting to the labor requirements of the industrial machine. Accordingly, they de fi ned Black workers as “ expendable ” and justi fi ed the employment of Black workers in the most precarious bottom rungs of the nation ’ s expanding urban industrial economy. The fi rst generation of African American labor historians — including Charles Abram L. Harris, Spiro, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others countered such racist perspectives on African American workers and prepared the groundwork for the rise of anti-racist treatments of Black workers during the mid to late twentieth century. Building upon but moving well beyond the insights of their early twentieth-century counterparts, recent scholars of Black labor history not only demonstrate how Black workers labored under the “ special handicaps of race and color, ” in addition to the prevailing obstacles that hampered the lives of all wage earners in capitalist America. They also address the challenges that Black workers encountered in building their own communities in the face of rising class, gender, and ideological divisions and con fl icts within their own ranks: fi rst during the transition from slavery to freedom and later during the Great Migration and the rise of the urban industrial working class.","PeriodicalId":35267,"journal":{"name":"Labor Studies Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47865818","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-09-01DOI: 10.1177/0160449X221110276
Andrew B Wolf
This article investigates the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in NYC as they were concentrated on immigrant workers and their communities, studying one group of immigrant workers, namely taxi drivers. Based on two years of ethnographic research with the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, a union of 24,000 taxi and app-based drivers in NYC, conducted before and during the pandemic, as well as formal interviews and an original survey of 1,002 union members, my research shows how drivers' precarious existence in the work-citizenship nexus informed their experiences of sustaining their families during the pandemic. COVID highlighted how the welfare state's increasing privatization of risk, the fissuring of the workplace, and the rise in employment precarity have generated an immigrant underclass. This manifested in immigrant drivers experiencing the pandemic through the lens of specific uncertainties-health, economic, bureaucratic, and immigration-that shaped their unequal access to pandemic support. This process in turn produced a boomerang effect, as immigrant drivers' weaker connection to state and social institutions made it harder to contain the virus in their communities, a development which ultimately puts society writ large at greater risk. This article advances our knowledge of precious employment by introducing the concept of uncertainties to explain the socio-cultural aspects of how crises of social reproduction are generated. It also extends our understanding of the decline of the welfare and regulatory state by showing how this process interacts with immigrant status.
{"title":"COVID and the Risky Immigrant Workplace: How Declining Employment Standards Socialized Risk and Made the COVID-19 Pandemic Worse.","authors":"Andrew B Wolf","doi":"10.1177/0160449X221110276","DOIUrl":"10.1177/0160449X221110276","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article investigates the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in NYC as they were concentrated on immigrant workers and their communities, studying one group of immigrant workers, namely taxi drivers. Based on two years of ethnographic research with the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, a union of 24,000 taxi and app-based drivers in NYC, conducted before and during the pandemic, as well as formal interviews and an original survey of 1,002 union members, my research shows how drivers' precarious existence in the work-citizenship nexus informed their experiences of sustaining their families during the pandemic. COVID highlighted how the welfare state's increasing privatization of risk, the fissuring of the workplace, and the rise in employment precarity have generated an immigrant underclass. This manifested in immigrant drivers experiencing the pandemic through the lens of specific uncertainties-health, economic, bureaucratic, and immigration-that shaped their unequal access to pandemic support. This process in turn produced a boomerang effect, as immigrant drivers' weaker connection to state and social institutions made it harder to contain the virus in their communities, a development which ultimately puts society writ large at greater risk. This article advances our knowledge of precious employment by introducing the concept of <i>uncertainties</i> to explain the socio-cultural aspects of how crises of social reproduction are generated. It also extends our understanding of the decline of the welfare and regulatory state by showing how this process interacts with immigrant status.</p>","PeriodicalId":35267,"journal":{"name":"Labor Studies Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9253681/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41411487","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-29DOI: 10.1177/0160449X221123524
B. Fletcher
The Black worker is an accumulation of years of struggle against white supremacy and economic injustice. The fight of the Black worker is not only a fight against racism, but is a fight to transform the agenda of the workers’ movement.
{"title":"Whither the Black Worker? By Bill Fletcher Jr.","authors":"B. Fletcher","doi":"10.1177/0160449X221123524","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0160449X221123524","url":null,"abstract":"The Black worker is an accumulation of years of struggle against white supremacy and economic injustice. The fight of the Black worker is not only a fight against racism, but is a fight to transform the agenda of the workers’ movement.","PeriodicalId":35267,"journal":{"name":"Labor Studies Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-08-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48809252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-29DOI: 10.1177/0160449x221109863
Ike Gittlen
{"title":"Book Review: On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union by Daisy Pitkin","authors":"Ike Gittlen","doi":"10.1177/0160449x221109863","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0160449x221109863","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35267,"journal":{"name":"Labor Studies Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43190334","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1177/0160449X221112060
Seth Kahn, Amy Lynch-Biniek
U.S. higher ed exploits precarity (the intersection of racism, misogyny, ableism, heteronormativity, classism, and job status) to position campus equity work as both essential and dangerous, inclusive and individual. Often left to the faculty who are already most threatened and “activists” who join out of “passion,” successes happen, laudably given the hegemonic regimes that call for the work and then threaten people who do it. Recasting equity efforts as care-work, that is, fundamental aspects of our labor as faculty, and recasting activism as organizing clarifies the labor of solidarity-building. Winning this argument helps constitute equity work as both a professional practice (i.e., mutually supported) and a mutual professional responsibility.
{"title":"From Activism to Organizing, From Caring to Care Work","authors":"Seth Kahn, Amy Lynch-Biniek","doi":"10.1177/0160449X221112060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0160449X221112060","url":null,"abstract":"U.S. higher ed exploits precarity (the intersection of racism, misogyny, ableism, heteronormativity, classism, and job status) to position campus equity work as both essential and dangerous, inclusive and individual. Often left to the faculty who are already most threatened and “activists” who join out of “passion,” successes happen, laudably given the hegemonic regimes that call for the work and then threaten people who do it. Recasting equity efforts as care-work, that is, fundamental aspects of our labor as faculty, and recasting activism as organizing clarifies the labor of solidarity-building. Winning this argument helps constitute equity work as both a professional practice (i.e., mutually supported) and a mutual professional responsibility.","PeriodicalId":35267,"journal":{"name":"Labor Studies Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44399125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1177/0160449X221108141
G. Rojas-García, Chris Tilly
The growing recognition that informal workers can organize successfully has generated debate over the determinants of effectiveness in such organizing. We contribute to this discussion by examining the cases of domestic and construction worker organizations in Mexico, using a power resources framework. Profiling these movements, the key obstacles they face, and their achievements, we undertake a threefold comparison. Within Mexico, we compare organizing both across the two sectors and over time. Additionally, we cross-nationally compare Mexican organizing in these sectors with U.S. comparators. We explain the disparate outcomes through changes in institutional opportunities and access to societal power (allies).
{"title":"The Politics of Informal Domestic and Construction Worker Organizing: Mexican Cases in Comparative Perspective","authors":"G. Rojas-García, Chris Tilly","doi":"10.1177/0160449X221108141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0160449X221108141","url":null,"abstract":"The growing recognition that informal workers can organize successfully has generated debate over the determinants of effectiveness in such organizing. We contribute to this discussion by examining the cases of domestic and construction worker organizations in Mexico, using a power resources framework. Profiling these movements, the key obstacles they face, and their achievements, we undertake a threefold comparison. Within Mexico, we compare organizing both across the two sectors and over time. Additionally, we cross-nationally compare Mexican organizing in these sectors with U.S. comparators. We explain the disparate outcomes through changes in institutional opportunities and access to societal power (allies).","PeriodicalId":35267,"journal":{"name":"Labor Studies Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45394618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-27DOI: 10.1177/0160449x221109862
Alex Miller
Chaplin’s Modern Times, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment). Not only do her glosses of scenes from these films and others undercut her denial; so do her sideways explorations of the substantial body of fiction by and about Italian workers, especially those set within factories. Pinkus teases many topics out of one image, repeated in variations in several films: a closeup of a hand on a calculator, which for Pinkus becomes the springboard to examinations of male/female and white/blue collar work roles, automation in the workplace, and how Olivetti, an early “tech” company, gets left behind by advances in cybernetics. The boomcomedies provide—at least in retrospect, Pinkus demonstrates—somefirst glimmers of the transition from mechanical to digital workplace technologies. Along the way she explores the rise and fall of Olivetti’s model of paternalist private social welfare in a nonunion but relatively enlightened workplace owned by a socialist employer. I don’t know how useful this smart, eclectic, quirky monograph might be for labor educators unless you’re teaching a graduate seminar on Italian mid-century labor history, or “Film at Work: The Italian Model.” But if you’re into Italian neorealist cinema and ever wondered what came afterward and why, this book is for you.
{"title":"Book Review: Fight Like Hell: The Untold Story of American Labor by Kim Kelly","authors":"Alex Miller","doi":"10.1177/0160449x221109862","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0160449x221109862","url":null,"abstract":"Chaplin’s Modern Times, Billy Wilder’s The Apartment). Not only do her glosses of scenes from these films and others undercut her denial; so do her sideways explorations of the substantial body of fiction by and about Italian workers, especially those set within factories. Pinkus teases many topics out of one image, repeated in variations in several films: a closeup of a hand on a calculator, which for Pinkus becomes the springboard to examinations of male/female and white/blue collar work roles, automation in the workplace, and how Olivetti, an early “tech” company, gets left behind by advances in cybernetics. The boomcomedies provide—at least in retrospect, Pinkus demonstrates—somefirst glimmers of the transition from mechanical to digital workplace technologies. Along the way she explores the rise and fall of Olivetti’s model of paternalist private social welfare in a nonunion but relatively enlightened workplace owned by a socialist employer. I don’t know how useful this smart, eclectic, quirky monograph might be for labor educators unless you’re teaching a graduate seminar on Italian mid-century labor history, or “Film at Work: The Italian Model.” But if you’re into Italian neorealist cinema and ever wondered what came afterward and why, this book is for you.","PeriodicalId":35267,"journal":{"name":"Labor Studies Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44783137","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-03DOI: 10.1177/0160449x221092018
F. Glass
{"title":"Book Review: Clocking Out: The Machinery of Life in 1960s Italian Cinema by Karen Pinkus","authors":"F. Glass","doi":"10.1177/0160449x221092018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0160449x221092018","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35267,"journal":{"name":"Labor Studies Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45060963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-01DOI: 10.1177/0160449X221096406
A. Hyde
{"title":"Legal Support for Union Democracy","authors":"A. Hyde","doi":"10.1177/0160449X221096406","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/0160449X221096406","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":35267,"journal":{"name":"Labor Studies Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43762155","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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