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This book shows that full employment has been rare in the United States in the last 150 years; excessive unemployment has been the norm. Against prominent economists who argue that unemployment is voluntary choice, it shows by analysis and many stories that being unemployed is painful and not something people choose lightly. It argues that hidden unemployment and a continuing labor surplus help explain why average real wages in 2019 are not much above their level of the early 1970s. The book locates consequential ideas about unemployment on a continuum between two opposing views. The free-market view holds that except for external shocks or government mistakes, significant unemployment is rare. People can always find jobs. But the historical record tells another story. For example, with mostly laissez-faire conditions, there were six major depressions from 1873 through 1933.The opposing view is that the business system naturally generates excessive unemployment, and at times depressions with catastrophic levels of joblessness. The book shows how the second model fits past and present facts. It also argues that the official unemployment rate, whose creation in the 1940s was an advance for economic policy, underestimates real unemployment and lessens the impetus for job-creation programs. And that’s a problem. Because many employers are happy with a labor surplus, and because tax cuts for the rich do not create many good jobs, this book argues that only direct job creation by the federal government—financed partly by taxes on the rich—will bring high-wage full employment.

This book investigates one of the great success stories of the twentieth century: the rise of the Japanese electronics industry. Contrary to mainstream interpretation, it discovers that behind the meteoric rise of Sony, Matsushita, Toshiba, and other electrical goods companies was neither the iron hand of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry nor a government-sponsored export-led growth policy, but rather an explosion of domestic consumer demand that began in the 1950s. This powerful consumer boom differed fundamentally from the one under way at the same time in the United States in that it began from widespread poverty and comparatively miserable living conditions. Beginning with a discussion of the prewar origins of the consumer engine that was to take off under the American Occupation, the book quickly turns its sights to the business leaders, inventors, laborers, and ordinary citizens who participated in the broadly successful effort to create new markets for expensive, unfamiliar new products. It relates these pressure-cooker years in Japan to the key themes of twentieth-century experience worldwide: the role of technology in promoting social change, the rise of mass consumer societies, and the construction of gender in advanced industrial economies.

Car workers’ union activism has long held a strong grip on popular memories of the post-war period. Working in the quintessential industry of modernity their labour militancy has been linked to narratives of economic decline and of rising working-class living standards. Yet despite their centrality to understanding of this period, car workers’ capacity for collective action has often been taken for granted, with mobilisation attributed to uncomplicated economic motivations or the last gasps of a declining “traditional class consciousness”, and the effects of the post-war settlement. This book looks at the changing forms of agency and subjectivity expressed by labour militancy, considering workplace activism in the motor industry as a specific historical creation of post-war Britain, rather than a reflection of “tradition”. It traces the origins of shop-floor organisations which first emerged in the 1950s, studying the processes by which workers built their union cultures, and exploring the capacity of car workers to generate new solidarities and collective values in this period. Focus then turns to the 1960s and 1970s and the social practices and cultural norms that resulted from this cultural assembling, looking to understand how worker activism shaped the agency of car workers in post-war Britain, influencing the forms that strike action took. Through a mixture of oral history interviews, letters, meeting minutes and periodicals, this book analyses the meanings workers attributed to industrial conflict, asking whether factory activism generated attitudes distinct from the dominant values of wider British society.

Building Power from Below analyzes the success of Walmart workers in Chile. Retail and warehouse workers have achieved the seemingly unachievable. They have organized Walmart. How do we explain workers’ success in Chile, the cradle of neoliberalism, in challenging the world’s largest and most antiunion corporation? Chilean workers have spent years building grass roots organizations committed to principles of union democracy. While both retail and warehouse workers have successful unions, they have built different organizations due to their industry, workforce, and political histories. The independent retail worker unions are best characterized by what I call flexible militancy. These unions have less structural power, but have significant associational and symbolic power. While they have made notable bread and butter gains, their most notable successes have been in fighting for respect and dignity on the job. Warehouse workers by contrast have significant structural power. Their unions are best characterized by what I call strategic democracy. Their structural power has offered them the opportunity to “map production” and build strategic capacity. They have been especially successful in economic gains. While the model in Chile cannot necessarily be reproduced in different countries, we can certainly gain insights from their approaches, tactics, and strategies.

Over the past few decades, shrimp has transformed from a luxury food to a kitchen staple. While shrimp-loving consumers have benefited from the lower cost of shrimp, domestic shrimp fishers have suffered, particularly in Louisiana. Most of the shrimp that we eat today is imported from shrimp farms in China, Vietnam, and Thailand. The flood of imported shrimp has sent dockside prices plummeting, and rising fuel costs have destroyed the profit margin for shrimp fishing as a domestic industry. This book portrays the struggles that Louisiana shrimp fishers endure to remain afloat in an industry beset by globalization. The book offers a portrait of shrimp fishers' lives just before the BP oil spill in 2010, which helps us better understand what has happened since the Deepwater Horizon disaster. It shows that shrimp fishers go through a careful calculation of noneconomic costs and benefits as they grapple to figure out what their next move will be. Many willingly forgo opportunities in other industries to fulfill what they perceive as their cultural calling. Others reluctantly leave fishing behind for more lucrative work, but they mourn the loss of a livelihood upon which community and family structures are built. In this account of the struggle to survive amid the waves of globalization, the book focuses the analysis at the intersection of livelihood, family, and community and casts a bright light upon the cultural importance of the work that we do.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were approximately 1.7 million home health aides and personal and home care aides in the United States as of 2008. These home care aides are rapidly becoming the backbone of America's system of long-term care, and their numbers continue to grow. Often referred to as frontline care providers or direct care workers, home care aides—disproportionately women of color—bathe, feed, and offer companionship to the elderly and disabled in the context of the home. This book draws on observations of and interviews with aides working in Ohio and California to explore the physical and emotional labor associated with the care of others. Aides experience material hardships and find themselves negotiating social norms and affective rules associated with both family and work. This has negative implications for workers who struggle to establish clear limits on their emotional labor in the intimate space of the home. Aides often find themselves giving more, staying longer, even paying out of pocket for patient medications or incidentals; in other words, they feel emotional obligations expected more often of family members than of employees. However, there are also positive outcomes: some aides form meaningful ties to elderly and disabled patients. This sense of connection allows them to establish a sense of dignity and social worth in a socially devalued job. The case of home care allows us to see the ways in which emotional labor can simultaneously have deleterious and empowering consequences for workers.

This is a pioneering look at the female face of corporate gaming. The book describes a world whose enormous profitability is dependent on the labor of women assigned stereotypically female occupations. But behind the neon lies another world, peopled by thousands of remarkable women who assert their humanity in the face of gaming empires' relentless quest for profits. The casino women profiled here generally fall into two groups. Geoconda Arguello Kline, typical of the first, arrived in the United States in the 1980s fleeing the war in Nicaragua. Finding work as a Las Vegas hotel maid, she overcame her initial fear of organizing and joined with others to build the preeminent grassroots union in the nation—the 60,000-member Culinary Union—becoming in time its president. In Las Vegas, “the hottest union city in America,” the collective actions of union activists have won economic and political power for tens of thousands of working Nevadans and their families. The story of these women's transformation and their success in creating a union able to face off against global gaming giants forms the centerpiece of this book. Another group of women, dealers and middle managers among them, did not act. Fearful of losing their jobs, they remained silent, declining to speak out when others were abused, and in the case of middle managers, taking on the corporations' goals as their own. The book appraises the cost of their silence and examines the factors that pushed some women into activism and led others to accept the status quo.

Over recent decades there has been growing interest in the ways in which citizens can take responsibility for their own destinies as civil society actors. One of the key sites that has been identified as having the capacity for nurturing, as well as for expressing active citizenship, has been the third sector. This book unpacks the contested notions of active citizenship and the third sector and identifies the claims about the varying ways in which the third sector promotes active citizenship. Drawing upon a range of empirical studies from across the globe, the book then explores the diverse responses to global and local economic and political pressures with a view to answering the questions: How far have  third sector organisations’ contributions to the promotion of active citizenship been affected  - or not - as a result of such factors? And how have third sector organisations in varying contexts been responding to ideological, political and structural challenges? The final section of the book explores opportunities and challenges for the future, identifying a range of ways in which new approaches are being spawned, both locally and beyond, for example, with the development of international networks supported by new digital technologies. The future for the third sector remains uncertain - and contestable, the authors conclude. But despite the challenges involved, they identify the third sector’s continuing  potential to promote active citizenship based upon values of equality, social solidarity, human rights and social justice.

This book readdresses the question of how full citizenship may be preserved and developed in the face of enduring labour market pressures. The book clarifies the relationship between changing labour markets, welfare policies and citizenship, discusses possible ways in which the spill-over effect from labour market marginality to loss of citizenship can be prevented, specifies this problem in relation to the young, older people, men and women and immigrants, offers theoretical and conceptual definitions of citizenship as a new, alternative approach to empirical analyses of labour market marginalisation and its consequences, and highlights the lessons to be learned from differing approaches in European countries.

As populations age around the world, increasing efforts are required from families and governments to secure care and support for older and disabled people. At the same time women and men are expected to increase and lengthen their participation in paid work, making combining caring and working a critical issue for social and employment policy and economic sustainability. This book widens the international debate, previously focused primarily on childcare, to explore the experiences of people of working age who support their partners, older relatives or a child with a disability or serious illness. The focus is on the situations of working carers in different welfare systems: Nordic (Finland, Sweden), liberal democratic (Australia, England) and East Asian (Japan, Taiwan). The book opens with two chapters which delineate the main features of the demographic, labour market and care challenges facing each of the six countries considered. It then presents in nine comparative chapters comparative analysis of the demand for care, the policy context in which family care is provided by people of working age and the personal and familial impact of doing so. These chapters each explore evidence from two countries, drawing on both existing datasets and new empirical material, highlighting what can be learned from individual experiences, considering the direction of policy change and the influences upon it, and summarising key outcomes for working carers. The editors’ concluding chapter considers convergence and differentiation in work - care reconciliation policy and practice, noting the influence of both common challenges and cultural preferences.

Being laid off can be a traumatic event. The unemployed worry about how they will pay their bills and find a new job. In the American economy's boom-and-bust business cycle since the 1980s, repeated layoffs have become part of working life. This book finds that the new culture of corporate employment, changes to the job search process, and dual-income marriage have reshaped how today's skilled workers view unemployment. Through interviews with seventy-five unemployed and underemployed high-tech white-collar workers in the Dallas area over the course of the 2000s, the book shows that they have embraced a new definition of employment in which all jobs are temporary and all workers are, or should be, independent “companies of one.” Following the experiences of individual jobseekers over time, the book explores the central role that organized networking events, working spouses, and neoliberal ideology play in forging and reinforcing a new individualist, pro-market response to the increasingly insecure nature of contemporary employment. It also explores how this new perspective is transforming traditional ideas about masculinity and the role of men as breadwinners. Sympathetic to the benefits that this “company of one” ideology can hold for its adherents, the book also details how it hides the true costs of an insecure workforce and makes collective and political responses to job loss and downward mobility unlikely.

Continuing professional development (CPD) has become a defining issue in twenty-first century social work. There is widespread consensus in favour of CPD. But what is it? Are there discernible international trends? What are the barriers to participating in CPD? What do social workers think about and want from CPD? This book seeks to answer these questions. Based on a survey and interviews with social work practitioners, Continuing Professional Development in social work offers a unique insight into the possibilities and challenges of CPD and the issues it presents for newly qualified and experienced social workers in practice. Combining the perspectives of social workers and their managers with international research, assures its global appeal. It offers possible directions for the future of post qualifying social work education, making it essential reading for practitioners, educators, managers and policy-makers.

Digital nomads are knowledge workers who actively seek a lifestyle of freedom, using technology to perform their work remotely, traveling far and wide, and moving as often as they like. They have left their local coffee shops behind and now proudly post their “office of the day” photos from exotic locales, but what do their lives really look like? This book takes readers into an expatriate digital nomad community in Bali, Indonesia, and presents new manifestations of classic questions about community, creativity, and the role of place in the modern human ecosystem. It explains why digital nomads leave their creative class cities behind, arguing that creative class workers, though successful, often feel that their “world class cities” and desirable jobs are anything but paradise. This book follows nomads’ work transitions into freelancing, entrepreneurship, and remote jobs. Then, it explains how digital nomads create a fluid but intimate place-based community abroad in the company of like-minded others. It shows why and how individuals blend in-person and online activity in their pursuit of community and freedom. This book provides insights into individuals’ efforts to live lives and create work identities that balance freedom, community, and creative fulfillment in the digital age, and it provides insights into a larger cultural discourse about the future of cities, work, and community.

This book focuses on policies, primarily in the United Kingdom, which are designed to facilitate the participation of disabled people in wage work. The book takes a critical approach to these policies by examining three main issues. First, the way in which eligibility rules and assessment procedures increasingly mean disabled people have responsibility for their own financial support as the legitimacy of their benefit receipt is questioned. Second, the book examines policies that are supposed to support disabled people into paid work. Problems with the supply side focus of policies upon employability are highlighted, as are those associated with demand side interventions in labour markets where the fear is that disabled workers will be less productive than other workers. The market-based nature of provision to ‘support’ people into wage work is highlighted as being particularly disadvantageous to disabled people. Third, the book examines the nature of ‘work’ in the agenda to get more disabled people into paid employment. It questions the narrow definition of work and productivity that frame policies, and which pose a challenge to disabled people as they are based on norms of productive capacity to which they are often unable to conform. Alternative ways of understanding and valuing the contribution that disabled people make are considered. The book argues that the focus upon increasing the participation of disabled people in wage work is problematic for the core demands of the disabled people movement, is counter to the social model of disability and means many disabled people face an increasingly precarious financial future.

Disenfranchised recounts the tumultuous events that have shaped and reshaped factory politics in China since the 1949 Revolution. The book develops a theoretical framework consisting of two dimensions—industrial citizenship and autonomy—to explain changing authority relations in workplaces and uses interviews with workers and managers to provide a shop-floor perspective. Under the work unit system, in place from the 1950s to the 1980s, lifetime job tenure and participatory institutions gave workers a strong form of industrial citizenship, but constraints on autonomous collective action made the system more paternalistic than democratic. Called “masters of the factory,” workers were pressed to participate actively in self-managing teams and employee congresses but only under the all-encompassing control of the factory party committee. Concerned that party cadres were becoming a “bureaucratic class,” Mao experimented with means to mobilize criticism from below, even inciting—during the Cultural Revolution—a worker insurgency that overthrew factory party committees. Unwilling to allow workers to establish permanent autonomous organizations, however, Mao never came up with institutionalized means of making factory leaders accountable to their subordinates. The final chapters recount the process of industrial restructuring, which has transformed work units into profit-oriented enterprises, eliminating industrial citizenship and reducing workers to hired hands dependent on precarious employment and subject to highly coercive discipline. The book closes with an overview of parallel developments around the globe, chronicling the rise and fall of an era of industrial citizenship.

The shift from manufacturing- to service-based economies has often been accompanied by the expansion of low-wage and insecure employment. Many consider the effects of this shift inevitable. This book contends that high pay and good working conditions are possible even for marginal service jobs. This outcome, however, depends on strong labor unions and encompassing collective bargaining institutions, which are necessary to give workers a voice in the decisions that affect the design of their jobs and the distribution of productivity gains. The book's conclusions are based on a comparative study of the changes that occurred in the organization of call center jobs in the United States and Germany following the liberalization of telecommunications markets. The research found that German managers more often took the “high road” than those in the United States, investing in skills and giving employees more control over their work. The book traces the difference to stronger institutional supports for workplace democracy in Germany. However, these democratic structures were increasingly precarious, as managers in both countries used outsourcing strategies to move jobs to workplaces with lower pay and weaker or no union representation. The book's findings show the importance of policy choices in closing off these escape routes, promoting broad access to good jobs in expanding service industries.

This book describes a new life stage, encore adulthood, sandwiched between conventional adulthood—traditional careers and childrearing—and conventional old age. A time of varied paths in work, retirement, family care, or civic engagement, this stage is made possible by medical advances and lifestyle changes improving population health and longevity. The encore adult years occur around ages 55 to 75, as Boomers begin to think about second acts. Twenty-first-century life in North America and Europe is changing in remarkable ways—characterized by the book’s four key themes: First are similarities in changes at both ends of adulthood, emerging adulthood and encore adulthood. Both Millennials and Boomers are without scripts for what’s next. Second, these times of rapid social, economic, and technological changes enable people to experiment, opening up opportunities for some to fashion new ways of working and living. Third, opportunities for renewal and heightened risks are unequally distributed; education, class, gender, race, and age expand or narrow life chances and life quality. Fourth is the distinctly gendered life courses of women and men, with financial, physical, and emotional well-being implications. The book is divided into three sections, each representing one of three research, policy, and action agendas: first is recognizing institutional inertia, and the outdatedness of contemporary career, retirement and life-course templates. Second is supporting Boomers’ time-shifting improvisations, their alternative pathways. Third is institutional work, including social innovations in language, customs, and policies opening up varied and customized career, retirement, and life-course paths.

Scientists struggle with balancing work and family life like everyone else, while simultaneously trying to live up to the image of the “ideal scientist.” Failing Families, Failing Science explores how the “greedy institution” of academic science is uniquely challenging and demanding, how gender and institutional structure shape science careers, and how science careers, in turn, shape family life.

American white-collar job seekers engage in the “chemistry game,” a set of job search practices premised on the idea that getting hired requires more than presenting one’s skills; it requires presenting oneself––the person behind the skills––and establishing interpersonal fit. The focus on chemistry is not inherent to white-collar job searching in advanced economies. Israeli workers looking for similar jobs under similar economic conditions engage in a very different “specs game,” which focuses on presenting one’s skills and credentials and requires masking the person behind the skills. These job-search games are the products of different labor market institutions, and they generate different unemployment experiences. Unemployed American white-collar workers are vulnerable to highly personalized forms of self-blame and often end up feeling deeply flawed, while unemployed Israeli workers often report feeling dehumanized and invisible. Losing at the chemistry game produces self-blame; losing at the specs game produces system-blame. American blue-collar job seekers engage in yet another distinct job search game, focused on displaying their diligence, which generates a distinct unemployment experience. Stepping back, the book shows that understanding the experience of unemployment requires looking beyond global economic forces or national cultures and closely examining the specific institutions that structure the day-to-day activities and strategies of job searching. At a broader level, this book develops a theory of the mechanisms that link the objective structures and subjective experiences.