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Chapter Three introduces the food retail and residential construction cases, and the dynamic Chicago economy in which employers remade these industries. Because traditional methods of economic analysis provide minimal information on these firms (they remain unstudied in large part because they frustrate efforts to use federal statistical data and information from industry trade presses), I also introduce a methodological discussion that outlines the evidence, assumptions and basis for making conclusions about these sectors.

Chapter Seven explores this disconnect and its implications. From a distance, the residential construction industry appears to operate in the manner suggested by economics textbooks: Contractors bid against one another for jobs, with the lowest price theoretically winning. But several factors, including subcontracting chains and information asymmetry mitigate against cost-based competition. Far from being necessarily cost-competitive, residential construction contains significant potential for job upgrading.

The Conclusion details broader implications of the concept of degraded work for scholars engaged in the problem of urban inequality. Defining working conditions, in addition to wages, as a central component of workplace inequality suggests several new lines of inquiry into the problem.

Chapter Two reviews the workplace practices of low-wage employers in order to sharpen the understanding of the problem at hand. Where the concept of low-wage work suggests marginal changes within an existing set of economic arrangements, my concept of degraded work denotes a more far-reaching set of transformations to working conditions and the day-to-day negotiation of power between employers and employees.

Chapter Five focuses on the new, thriving food retailers undersell chain supermarkets by 50% or more on many products, and they use low-cost, highly productive labor to move those goods. Employers draw these high productivity rates out of workers through a number of innovative strategies, most commonly the evasion of basic labor laws relating to wages, hours, working conditions and union organization.

Chapter Six examines the seeming paradox of the 2000s Chicago construction ‘boom.’ The volume of residential construction more than doubled between 2000 and 2006. Normally, industry expansion of this magnitude triggers substantial pay increases and concessions to labor. But the opposite occurred. Construction wages fell during the boom, and street-corner day labor hiring institutionalized multiple employment abuses.

Chapter One examines our current paralysis in the face of labor degradation. Deepening our understanding of labor degradation means reconceptualizing low-wage industries as active producers of inequality, rather than manifestations of a problem that originates in multinational firms.

Chapter Eight analyzes some of the most promising responses to the problem of degraded work, and provides a framework that makes clear the shared characteristics, and limits to, these approaches. It emphasizes the inadequate political will for remedying the problem at the national level, and emphasizes the value of an industry focus in shifting workers’ organizations onto terrain on which they are better-organized than are employers.

Chapter Four details the food retail industry’s evolution from a pseudo-Fordist competitive model based on unionized labor, economies of scale in purchasing and market expansion, and homogeneity among consumers. Even as scholars in Chicago and elsewhere have fretted over the emergence of “food desserts” in which urban populations lack access to food, big-box firms, neighborhood bodegas and a rapidly expanding set of mid-size supermarkets have pushed into areas of the city long abandoned by large, chain supermarkets.