Work and Occupations最新文献

Unionized workers experience significant labor market advantages. Do these advantages transfer to financial markets, including credit and consumer markets? We argue that union coverage facilitates financial advantages in young adulthood by enhancing access to wealth-building credit and avoidance of costly financial coping strategies. We extend a conceptual model of financial advantage based on young adults' debt holdings to the case of early career union coverage using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1997 Cohort. Findings support the importance of labor market institutions in fostering financial advantages and underscore the role of credit and debt for life course inequality processes.

Transgender and nonbinary (TNB) people in the U.S. navigate significant employment and economic inequities. Gaps in knowledge about their workplace experiences limit our broader understanding of how social inequality is interactionally constructed through employment contexts. We conducted and analyzed interviews with 26 TNB young adults. Routine hiring processes and structural constraints made participants vulnerable to interactional stigmatization and subsequent discrimination, with deleterious consequences for employment as well as mental health. Participants deployed a variety of strategies to avoid or resist anticipated stigma, including exiting the workforce or changing careers. One's ability to avoid stigmatization at work was partially shaped by structural and managerial support, organizational form, and one's gender and gender conformity. Beyond contributing to economic inequality by limiting job and career options, our findings suggest that these social processes comprise minority stressors that diminish the well-being of TNB participants and exacerbate their economic marginalization. In contributing empirical insight into the experiences of TNB people, we demonstrate the salience of stigmatization and stigma avoidance strategies for social closure within organizations and thereby advance sociological understanding of the relational generation of inequality at work.

We use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 to identify group-based trajectories of unemployment risk as workers age in the United States. Our novel methodological approach reveals 73% of full-time workers spend much of their 20, 30, and 40 s with a relatively low risk of unemployment. The remaining sizable minority varies in the timing and relative degree of their unemployment risk. Eighteen percent experience early career unemployment risk into their early thirties, well after the transition to adulthood. Chronic unemployment characterizes the labor market experiences of the remaining 9%. When expanding the sample to all workers, we find two key differences: the overall prevalence of unemployment is greater each year for all groups and the distribution of respondents across groups differs, with fewer workers experiencing Lower unemployment and more workers experiencing Early Career or Higher unemployment. Unemployment risk is shaped by experiences of long-term unemployment in young adulthood and early labor market constraints. Moreover, while men and women appear equally at risk of Early career unemployment, men are particularly at risk of Higher unemployment. Black workers were significantly more likely to be at risk of Higher unemployment, but only slightly more likely to be at risk of Early career unemployment. Since Early career unemployment risk gives way to steadier work for most, this suggests that some men and some Black workers face disproportionately high levels of employment precarity. Our findings point to the importance of a life course approach for understanding the relationship between unemployment and labor market precarity.

Unequal sorting of men and women into higher and lower wage firms contributes significantly to the gender wage gap according to recent analysis of national labor markets. We confirm the importance of this between-firm gender segregation in wages and examine a second outcome of hours using unique employer-employee data from the service sector. We then examine what explains the relationship between firm gender composition and wages. In contrast to prevailing economic explanations that trace between-firm differences in wages to differences in firm surplus, we find evidence consistent with devaluation and potentially a gender-specific use of "low road" employment strategies.