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Over the last forty years, U.S. workers have faced stagnant or falling wages, growing wage inequality, and an increasing incidence of low and poverty-wage jobs. Young workers who lack advanced degrees and workers of color have been the hardest hit. In this issue of RSF, edited by economist David R. Howell and sociologist Arne L. Kalleberg, an interdisciplinary group of contributors analyze the state of job quality, especially for low-wage workers and those in nonstandard work arrangements. Howell and Kalleberg’s introductory article suggests that leading explanations for worsening job quality can be organized into three broad views of the labor market: a competitive market model; a contested markets model, where wage-setting takes place in firms that operate in imperfect markets and where employers have substantial bargaining power; and social-institutional approaches that underscore the importance of social, political, and structural forces.

As a result of technological changes and outsourcing, unpredictable and uncertain work schedules are now widespread. Contributors Cathy Yang Liu and Luísa Nazareno demonstrate that workers in nonstandard employment arrangements earn less and work fewer hours than full-time workers. Susan Lambert, Julia Henly, and Jaesung Kim demonstrate that in addition to the financial insecurity caused by precarious work schedules, those who experience shortfalls in hours are increasingly distrustful of societal institutions. Other contributors examine job quality for women and people of color. David S. Pedulla and Katariina Mueller-Gastell study the rates at which various groups of workers apply for nonstandard jobs, and find that black and Hispanic workers are overrepresented in such positions. Michael Schultz examines mobility out of low-wage work and finds that women and nonwhites are the most entrenched in such jobs. He shows that there is greater mobility out of low-wage work where unions foster the use of job ladders and pay scales.

The issue recommends a slate of policies for creating better jobs, including increasing the federal minimum wage; strengthening collective and individual bargaining, especially through unions; and widening access to health insurance, paid sick and family leave, and childcare. In the absence of family-friendly policies at the federal level, sociologists Rachel Dwyer and Erik Olin Wright propose investments in the “social and solidarity” economy, including NGOs, nonprofit organizations, social enterprises, and worker cooperatives.

Given the centrality of work to human welfare, enhancing the quality of jobs is of urgent concern to workers, employers, and society at large. This issue of RSF helps us better understand the reasons for and consequences of declining job quality and suggests policies that would protect the most vulnerable workers.
 

Modest real wage growth, rising wage inequality, and decreasing labor force participation among less-educated workers have been important labor market trends for several decades. Economists Erica Groshen and Harry Holzer, and a roster of labor market experts present new evidence on the prevalence, causes, and future of these challenges.

Contributors George Borjas and Richard Freeman analyze how the introduction of industrial robots and the influx of immigrants have affected jobs and earnings in the manufacturing industry. They find that the effects of robots are greater than those of immigrants in terms of depressing earnings and reducing employment, suggesting the need for policies that can help workers adjust to automation. Thomas Kochan and William Kimball note the lower density of unions and their declining impact on wages, even as surveys show strong worker preference for union representation and other forms of “voice” regarding wages, compensation, training, and other working conditions.

Informal work, which includes traditional activities like babysitting as well as newer ones like driving for an online platform, is an important means of helping families make ends meet. Katharine Abraham and Susan Houseman show that over a quarter of the workforce hold jobs aside from their main employment, and a higher share of less-educated, minority, low-income, and unemployed workers rely on informal work. Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger show a modest upward trend in the share of the U.S. workforce in alternative work arrangements over the last twenty years; they also demonstrate that current survey tools miss many instances of multiple job holding.

David Weil demonstrates how the rise of “the fissured workplace”--where businesses outsource key facets of their operations to staffing agencies and other third-party entities--contributes to wage inequality. Contracted workers have lower earnings and fewer opportunities for upward mobility. The U.S. is the only industrialized country that does not provide paid leave for new parents, and low-income families with children spend 30 percent or more of their incomes on childcare expenses. Elizabeth Doran, Ann Bartel, and Jane Waldfogel propose a payroll tax to support family-friendly policies, such as paid leave and child care, as well as modest employer mandates for scheduling control and flexibility.

Editors Groshen and Holzer provide evidence-based policy recommendations that include greater support for public higher education; adjusting federal wage and hour laws as well as those governing labor relations; limiting the effects of past incarceration on workers; and stronger youth employment programs and policies. American workers face many challenges, but there are many policies analyzed in this issue of RSF that hold promise for improving employment and earnings for American workers.

The Great Recession was the most disastrous economic upheaval in the U.S. since the Great Depression. Nearly nine million jobs were lost, median family incomes declined by about 8 percent, and the rate of long-term unemployment reached historic highs. Although the recession was officially declared over in June 2009, its effects on the labor market lingered long after. In this issue of RSF, edited by Arne L. Kalleberg and Till M. von Wachter, scholars analyze the longer-term impacts of the Great Recession on jobs, workers, and economic security.
 
Contributors explore a number of changes to the labor market and union density during and after the Great Recession. Jesse Rothstein investigates the factors contributing to persistently high unemployment and finds that reduced employer demand for workers was more important than labor mismatch—or unemployed workers lacking the appropriate skills for available jobs. Ruth Milkman and Stephanie Luce find increased hostility to unions among employers and steep job losses in traditionally unionized industries, both of which constricted organized labor during and after the Great Recession.
 
Other articles examine the effects of job loss on unemployed individuals’ mental health and family lives. Kelsey J. O’Connor finds that declining income and rising unemployment contributed to the lowest level of reported happiness in 2010, particularly for men, older people, and Hispanics. William Dickens and coauthors evaluate families’ ability to weather job losses during the Great Recession by relying on savings and find that most had insufficient wealth to buffer large earnings losses for more than a short period of time. Gokce Basbug and Ofer Sharone explore the extent to which the negative emotional toll of long-term unemployment is shaped by gender and marital status. They find that marriage tends to boost the well-being of both men and women during times of unemployment. Among married men, however, this benefit disappeared when controlling for household income, suggesting that the benefits of marriage are related more to additional income than to other forms of intangible or emotional support.
 
The duration and severity of the Great Recession sets it apart from earlier economic downturns and, as this issue shows, it has had long-term consequences for workers and their families.
 

This is the story of immigrant copper workers and their attempts to organize at the turn of the century in Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and El Paso, Texas. These Mexican and European laborers of widely varying backgrounds and languages had little social, economic, or political power. Yet they achieved some surprising successes in their struggles—all in the face of a racist society and the unbridled power of the mine owners.

Mellinger's book is the first regional history of these ordinary working people—miners, muckers, millhands, and smelter workers—who labored in the thousands of mountain and desert mining camps across the western heartland early in this century. These men, largely uneducated, frequently moving from camp to camp, subjected to harsh and dangerous conditions, often poorly paid, nevertheless came together for a common purpose.

They came from Mexico, from the U.S. Hispanic Southwest, and from several European countries, especially from Greece, Italy, the former Yugoslavia, and Spain. They were far from a homogeneous group. Yet, in part because they set aside ethnic differences to pursue cooperative labor action, they were able to make demands, plan strikes, carry them out, and sometimes actually win. They also won the aid of the Western Federation of Miners and the more radical Industrial Workers of the World. After initial rejection, they were eventually accepted by mainstream unionists.

Mellinger discusses towns, mines, camps, companies, and labor unions, but this book is largely about people. In order to reconstruct their mining-community lives, he has used little-known union and company records, personal interviews with old-time workers and their families, and a variety of regional sources that together have enabled him to reveal a complex and significant pattern of social, economic, and political change in the American West.

Race on the Line is the first book to address the convergence of race, gender, and technology in the telephone industry. Venus Green—a former Bell System employee and current labor historian—presents a hundred year history of telephone operators and their work processes, from the invention of the telephone in 1876 to the period immediately before the break-up of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1984. Green shows how, as technology changed from a manual process to a computerized one, sexual and racial stereotypes enabled management to manipulate both the workers and the workplace.
More than a simple story of the impact of technology, Race on the Line combines oral history, personal experience, and archival research to weave a complicated history of how skill is constructed and how its meanings change within a rapidly expanding industry. Green discusses how women faced an environment where male union leaders displayed economic as well as gender biases and where racism served as a persistent system of division. Separated into chronological sections, the study moves from the early years when the Bell company gave both male and female workers opportunities to advance; to the era of the “white lady” image of the company, when African American women were excluded from the industry and feminist working-class consciousness among white women was consequently inhibited; to the computer era, a time when black women had waged a successful struggle to integrate the telephone operating system but faced technological displacement and unrewarding work.
An important study of working-class American women during the twentieth century, this book will appeal to a wide audience, particularly students and scholars with interest in women’s history, labor history, African American history, the history of technology, and business history.

Rainbow at Midnight details the origins and evolution of working-class strategies for independence during and after World War II. Arguing that the 1940s may well have been the most revolutionary decade in U.S. history, George Lipsitz combines popular culture, politics, economics, and history to show how war mobilization transformed the working class and how that transformation brought issues of race, gender, and democracy to the forefront of American political culture. This book is a substantially revised and expanded work developed from the author's heralded 1981 Class and Culture in Cold War America.
 

In Reclaiming the Discarded Kathleen M. Millar offers an evocative ethnography of Jardim Gramacho, a sprawling garbage dump on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, where roughly two thousand self-employed workers known as catadores collect recyclable materials. While the figure of the scavenger sifting through garbage seems iconic of wageless life today, Millar shows how the work of reclaiming recyclables is more than a survival strategy or an informal labor practice. Rather, the stories of catadores show how this work is inseparable from conceptions of the good life and from human struggles to realize these visions within precarious conditions of urban poverty. By approaching the work of catadores as highly generative, Millar calls into question the category of informality, common conceptions of garbage, and the continued normativity of wage labor. In so doing, she illuminates how waste lies at the heart of relations of inequality and projects of social transformation.

Red Chicago is a social history of American Communism set within the context of Chicago's neighborhoods, industries, and radical traditions. Using local party records, oral histories, union records, party newspapers, and government documents, Randi Storch fills the gap between Leninist principles and the day-to-day activities of Chicago's rank-and-file Communists.

Uncovering rich new evidence from Moscow's former party archive, Storch argues that although the American Communist Party was an international organization strongly influenced by the Soviet Union, at the city level it was a more vibrant and flexible organization responsible to local needs and concerns. Thus, while working for a better welfare system, fairer unions, and racial equality, Chicago's Communists created a movement that at times departed from international party leaders' intentions. By focusing on the experience of Chicago's Communists, who included a large working-class, African American, and ethnic population, this study reexamines party members' actions as an integral part of the communities and industries in which they lived and worked.

Too often grouped together, the black radicalism movement has a history wholly separate from the international communist movement of the early twentieth century. In Red International and Black Caribbean Margaret Stevens sets out to correct this enduring misconception. Focusing on the period 1919-39, Stevens explores the political roots of a dozen Communist organizations and parties that were headquartered in New York City, Mexico, and the Caribbean. She describes the inner workings of the Red International—the revolutionary global political network established under the Communist International—in relation to struggles against racial and colonial oppression. In doing so, she also highlights how the significant victories and setbacks of black people fighting against racial oppression developed within the context of the global Communist movement.
 
Challenging dominant accounts, Red International and Black Caribbean debunks the “great men” narrative, emphasizes the role of women in their capacity as laborers, and paints the true struggles of black peasants and workers in Communist parties. 
 

International competition and variable economic conditions have brought the threat of layoffs to the doorsteps of workers and managers in all sectors of our economy. One response to this problem is Unemployment Insurance-Supported Work Sharing. This new and promising program reduces the human and economic costs of layoffs by providing partial unemployment benefits to employees who have their workweeks reduced as an alternative to layoffs. Fred Best provides a balanced and thorough assessment of this policy in the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Unemployment Insurance-Supported Work Sharing maintains the income and fringe benefits of all workers at near full-time levels, enabling firms to maintain the skills and working relations of their employees and preventing undue hardships among those who would otherwise lose their jobs.

Best summarizes the history and effectiveness of these programs in terms of their economic and human impacts on employers, employees, government, and the economy. He presents key insights on how worktime and worker management cooperation can become powerful tools for combating joblessness and increasing economic performance. This definitive account of an important experiment in work hours will be of critical importance to managers, workers, policymakers, economists, and those concerned with employment issues.

In the series Labor and Social Change, edited by Paula Rayman and Carmen Sirianni.

The Covid-19 pandemic has tragically exposed how today’s welfare state cannot properly protect its citizens. Despite the valiant efforts of public sector workers, from under-resourced hospitals to a shortage of housing and affordable social care, the pandemic has tragically shown how decades of neglect has caused hundreds to die. In this bold new book, leading policy analyst Ursula Huws shows how we can create a welfare state that is fair, affordable, and offers security for all.

Huws focuses on some of the key issues of our time – the gig economy, universal, free healthcare, and social care, to criticize the current state of welfare provision. Drawing on a lifetime of research on these topics, she clearly explains why we need to radically rethink how it could change. With positivity and rigor, she proposes new and original policy ideas, including critical discussions of Universal Basic Income and new legislation for universal workers' rights.

She also outlines a 'digital welfare state' for the 21st century. This would involve a repurposing of online platform technologies under public control to modernize and expand public services, and improve accessibility.

A job is no longer something we "do," but instead something we "are." As the boundaries between work and non-work have dissolved, we restructure ourselves and our lives using social ingenuity to get things done and be resourceful outside the official workday. 

 

In his provocative book, Resisting Work Peter Fleming insists that many jobs in the West are now regulated by a new matrix of power-biopower-where "life itself" is put to work through our ability to self-organize around formal rules. This neoliberal system of employment tries to absorb our life attributes--from our consumer tastes, "downtime," and sexuality--into employment so that questions of human capital and resources replace questions of employee, worker, and labor.  

 

Fleming then suggests that the corporation turns to communal life-what he calls "the common"-in order to reproduce itself and reinforce corporate culture.  Yet a resistance against this new definition of work is in effect, and Fleming shows how it may already be taking shape.

During the middle third of the 20th century, workers in most industrialized countries secured a substantial measure of job security, whether through legislation, contract or social practice. This “standard employment contract,” as it was known, became the foundation of an impressive array of rights and entitlements, including social insurance and pensions, protection against unsociable working conditions, and the right to bargain collectively. Recent changes in technology and the global economy, however, have dramatically eroded this traditional form of employment. Employers now value flexibility over stability, and increasingly hire employees for short-term or temporary work. Many countries have also repealed labor laws, relaxed employee protections, and reduced state-provided benefits. As the old system of worker protection declines, how can labor regulation be improved to protect workers? In Rethinking Workplace Regulation, nineteen leading scholars from ten countries and half a dozen disciplines present a sweeping tour of the latest policy experiments across the world that attempt to balance worker security and the new flexible employment paradigm. Edited by noted socio-legal scholars Katherine V.W. Stone and Harry Arthurs, Rethinking Workplace Regulation presents case studies on new forms of dispute resolution, job training programs, social insurance and collective representation that could serve as policy models in the contemporary industrialized world. The volume leads with an intriguing set of essays on legal attempts to update the employment contract. For example, Bruno Caruso reports on efforts in the European Union to “constitutionalize” employment and other contracts to better preserve protective principles for workers and to extend their legal impact. The volume then turns to the field of labor relations, where promising regulatory strategies have emerged. Sociologist Jelle Visser offers a fresh assessment of the Dutch version of the ‘flexicurity’ model, which attempts to balance the rise in nonstandard employment with improved social protection by indexing the minimum wage and strengthening rights of access to health insurance, pensions, and training. Sociologist Ida Regalia provides an engaging account of experimental local and regional “pacts” in Italy and France that allow several employers to share temporary workers, thereby providing workers job security within the group rather than with an individual firm. The volume also illustrates the power of governments to influence labor market institutions. Legal scholars John Howe and Michael Rawling discuss Australia's innovative legislation on supply chains that holds companies at the top of the supply chain responsible for employment law violations of their subcontractors. Contributors also analyze ways in which more general social policy is being renegotiated in light of the changing nature of work. Kendra Strauss, a geographer, offers a wide-ranging comparative analysis of pension systems and calls for a new model that offers “flexible pensions for flexible workers.” With its ambitious scope and broad inquiry, Rethinking Workplace Regulation illustrates the diverse innovations countries have developed to confront the policy challenges created by the changing nature of work. The experiments evaluated in this volume will provide inspiration and instruction for policymakers and advocates seeking to improve worker’s lives in this latest era of global capitalism.

Over the past thirty years, the government has spent approximately $1.5 billion on the Regional Educational Laboratories and $1.1 billion on the Research and Development Centers. After this large investment, these two research facilities still have been unable to find the best way to effectively help at-risk children thrive in school. Many people are slowly realizing that, unfortunately, our sizable investment in educational research and development has not been sufficient to produce the kind of information that policymakers and educators must have if they hope to meet the needs of these at-risk children.
Maris A. Vinovskis uses the research he has done over the past decade, along with the findings of other policymakers, to argue that the American public school system needs to gain functional reform if research institutions are to conduct more effective studies for policymakers. He examines here both recent reform policies as well as the history behind educational reform.
Vinovskis's vigorous investigation of the process of educational research and development in the United States will be of particular interest to individuals whose careers depend on continued federal funding. This book will also appeal to educators, policymakers, and public policy analysts and will be of unequaled value in understanding the formulation of new educational policies in the twenty-first century.
Maris A. Vinovskis is active on Capitol Hill and lectures throughout the country at such prestigious institutions as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Brookings Institution, and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He is Professor of History, University of Michigan.

'John Feffer is our 21st-century Jack London' - Mike Davis

In a post-Trump world, the right is still very much in power. Significantly more than half the world’s population currently lives under some form of right-wing populist or authoritarian rule. Today’s autocrats are, at first glance, a diverse band of brothers. But religious, economic, social and environmental differences aside, there is one thing that unites them - their hatred of the liberal, globalized world. This unity is their strength, and through control of government, civil society and the digital world they are working together across borders to stamp out the left.

In comparison, the liberal left commands only a few disconnected islands - Iceland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain and Uruguay. So far they have been on the defensive, campaigning on local issues in their own countries. This narrow focus underestimates the resilience and global connectivity of the right. In this book, John Feffer speaks to the world’s leading activists to show how international leftist campaigns must come together if they are to combat the rising tide of the right.

A global Green New Deal, progressive trans-European movements, grassroots campaigning on international issues with new and improved language and storytelling are all needed if we are to pull the planet back from the edge of catastrophe. This book is both a warning and an inspiration to activists terrified by the strengthening wall of far-right power.

Winner of the 2021 Sara A. Whaley Prize of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA)

A first-of-its-kind study of the working-class culture of resistance on the Honduran North Coast and the radical organizing that challenged US capital and foreign intervention at the onset of the Cold War, examining gender, race, and place.

On May 1, 1954, striking banana workers on the North Coast of Honduras brought the regional economy to a standstill, invigorating the Honduran labor movement and placing a series of demands on the US-controlled banana industry. Their actions ultimately galvanized a broader working-class struggle and reawakened long-suppressed leftist ideals. The first account of its kind in English, Roots of Resistance explores contemporary Honduran labor history through the story of the great banana strike of 1954 and centers the role of women in the narrative of the labor movement.

Drawing on extensive firsthand oral history and archival research, Suyapa G. Portillo Villeda examines the radical organizing that challenged US capital and foreign intervention in Honduras at the onset of the Cold War. She reveals the everyday acts of resistance that laid the groundwork for the 1954 strike and argues that these often-overlooked forms of resistance should inform analyses of present-day labor and community organizing. Roots of Resistance highlights the complexities of transnational company hierarchies, gender and race relations, and labor organizing that led to the banana workers' strike and how these dynamics continue to reverberate in Honduras today.