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This chapter describes in greater detail the objective situation facing Americans in four major areas of financial threats: job insecurity, healthcare costs, retirement, and the cost of college. It analyzes the politics of such threats among the mass public. It examines the extent to which the people who consider such issues important are facing them in their own daily lives, as opposed to a situation in which their concerns are reflective of what others are facing. The data for this chapter are drawn from several sources, including time series data from Gallup beginning in the early 1950s as well as American National Election Study data from the past three decades that (broadly) match the time frame in which the objective situation in these four areas has become more insecure.

This chapter presents a summary of the dimensions of work quality discussed in the preceding chapters. These include skill levels and skill trends, employer training, task discretion, work-family balance, and job insecurity. It then considers their implications for the contrasting arguments about the determinants of work quality discussed in Chapter 1.

This chapter sets the stage for the remainder of the book by examining the types of political organizations most likely to mobilize individual citizens concerned about job insecurity, healthcare costs, retirement insecurity, and college costs. Part of this discussion involves identifying the types of barriers that must be overcome when forming such organizations. Another part involves identifying examples of organizations (including interest groups, parties, and campaigns) that are most likely to overcome them. This latter part of the discussion is situated historically, showing how the types of organizations most likely to mobilize people facing material concerns have changed over time. The chapter also describes how these groups seek to engage individual citizens in the cause, including depending upon them to devote time and money.

The dominant reality for office workers from Richmond to Roanoke was insecurity. The possibility of being laid off or simply eliminated as a result of corporate restructuring burrowed deeply into the subconscious of Virginia's workers in the new Gilded Age. It created an atmosphere of profound social anxiety, one that was no less intense because it happened in Virginia. There was nothing peculiarly southern about the economic forces that were transforming career-minded people into temporary, part-time, and contract workers. What happened to middle managers, secretaries, salespeople, and manufacturing supervisors in Virginia happened to those in Michigan, Ohio, and New York. The economic uncertainties of the new era bound the regions together in a collective experience of reduced hopes, limited expectations, and persistent fears. Yet the recession of 1990/1991 generated a depth of anguish in Virginia that set it apart from its southern counterparts.

Many people in the developing world and the great majority in the developed world have little or no knowledge of how people in low- and middle-income countries work. This chapter provides the answer, presenting specific information about their desire to work, long hours, low earnings per hour, job insecurity, low labor standards, and the like. The chapter concludes with the judgment that what developing countries have is an employment problem, not an unemployment problem, and that policies need to be designed accordingly.

This chapter describes sources of stress in the work environment, their adverse effects on the health of workers, and how they are influenced by economic globalization, political systems, laws, government policies, and the changing labor market. Models of occupational stress, in particular job strain and effort-reward imbalance, are presented. Additional occupational stressors are described, including long work hours, shift work, precarious work and job insecurity, work-family conflict and organizational injustice, including discrimination, harassment, and bullying. The health and safety consequences of exposure to occupational stressors are detailed, including musculoskeletal disorders, acute traumatic injuries, mental disorders (such as depression), health behaviors, and cardiovascular disease and its risk factors (including hypertension, obesity, diabetes, and the metabolic syndrome). Finally, there is a discussion of efforts on work reorganization and job redesign, workplace policies and programs, and laws and regulations designed to reduce occupational stress and improve the health and safety of workers.

This chapter examines the role of the federal government in promoting job security by ensuring that the economy is at full employment. It begins by providing a historical overview of the government's role in mitigating job insecurity before turning to a discussion of how unemployment affects job security. It then considers government measures aimed at protecting workers and their families from unemployment and its ripple effects, as well as ensuring workers against unfair dismissal. It also analyzes the trends in employment and unemployment and argues that job security is key to economic security. The chapter concludes by offering suggestions on how the government can ensure job security and full employment, such as by promoting “short-time compensation” or “work-sharing,” reforming the unemployment insurance system to make it more responsive to economic conditions, and implementing trade policies that promote quality jobs.

The resource squeeze and uncertainty exacerbated by marketization can lead to disorganization trends in employment relations and tight management control in the labor process. This chapter presents findings from interviews with managers, worker representatives, and front-line workers concerning worker voice, pay setting, job insecurity, performance management, professional autonomy, and staff–client interactions. Management control in the labor process is directly related to the quality of the service, since they include the amount of interaction (whether there is a speedup), its nature (whether it is narrowly focused on job outcomes), and its distribution (whether there is creaming and parking). We show that the extent to which these outcomes differ within countries depends on degrees of resource scarcity and uncertainty specific to each market segment.

This chapter discusses how psychosocial factors at work can impact on people's health, and how such factors have been conceptualised and measured by researchers in this field. Psychosocial factors are likely to have gained in relative importance for public health, at least in industrialised welfare states. Interest in the effects of the psychosocial work environment emerged during the 1960s when studies looked at the effects of long working hours or shift work. The scope of the research has since grown to include job insecurity, job demands, control and resources, perceived fairness and organisational justice, coping, leadership practices, threats of violence, and bullying and discrimination. The chapter also introduces stress theory and provides an overview of the major models of occupational stress used to date.

Mild optimism emerging around the living wage movement does not mean an absence of challenges and debates about a justice strategy built around protecting low-wage workers. Some lack confidence in a living wage movement because of threats and challenges facing low wage employment. This chapter discusses three of these in turn—threats of automation, non-enforceability of high minimums in an era of wage theft and work fragmentation, and the superior anti-poverty potential of basic income. Fears of automation understate the likely continuation of employment growth. Enforcement of higher minimum wage and better standards for low-wage employment are both realistic goals for regulation. And, finally, basic income in the liberal world is more likely to have partial coverage and low replacement rates—and fail to deal with ongoing dependence on low-wage employment for many.

Thus chapter analyzes labor and employment issues, emphasizing the constraints and opportunities that the administration has experienced in this area given the globalized nature of the economy. Undoubtedly, Michelle Bachelet has faced increased labor mobilization, due to widespread concerns with job insecurity, low wages, and unemployment. The central questions in this text are why labor issues have become very prominent under the Bachelet administration, and what has the administration done to solve them. Sehnbruch finds the answers to the problems in the nature of Chile's labor market; the labor policy consensus formed in 1990 that still exists today; and the factors that have made this consensus more fragile during the Bachelet administration. Her discussion of the labor market emphasizes the large proportion of the work force that is working without a contract and is not protected by labor laws, as well as the short duration of labor contracts.

There is a general perception that temporary jobs are of lower quality. However, predictions about the implications of changes in the macroeconomic situation and labour market institutions are not straightforward. The global economic crisis of 2008–2009 could have led to a further deterioration in the quality of jobs held by temporary workers due to increased employer power. However, an upward shift could have taken place in the quality of temporary jobs. These changes could also have affected particularly strongly those on shorter term contracts, accentuating or reducing the internal divide within the temporary workforce. This chapter evaluates these alternative scenarios drawing on the Skills and Employment Surveys carried out from 1992 to 2012. It finds that casual workers had the lowest job quality, while employees on fixed-term and permanent contracts shared comparable levels of job quality.

Chapter 6 addresses female employees’ struggles to keep their positions with the federal government. The number and percentage of women in the federal labor force grew fairly steadily throughout the 1860s, but insecurity and volatility characterized the federal civil service. During the Civil War and immediate postwar period, departments coped with unpredictable workloads through unsystematic, non-uniform, rapid expansions and contractions of their workforces resulting in short employment periods. At the same time, the press of new applicants was unrelenting. Because much of the basic work women did could be adequately done with relatively little training, some supervisors saw female employees as interchangeable. This atmosphere of uncertainty discouraged collective action and forced female federal employees to utilize aggressive strategies to retain and regain the positions they had become reliant upon. In their attempts to remain employed, women demonstrated strength and self-confidence that seemed to have been gained through their federal employment.

This chapter evaluates the relative merits of a Bourdieusian perspective on journalism and war reporting. It concentrates on the politics underlying the lived aspects of journalism that ‘just are’. It then turns to a reflexive appraisal of Bourdieusian political phenomenology. News values, ethics and journalistic dispositions do not emerge naturally out of the stuff of journalism, but they do have reason. Job insecurity can likewise be seen in terms of strategic positioning or distinction. The Bourdieusian approach to studying journalism clearly has its uses. Pierre Bourdieu is frequently categorised as adjacent to post-structuralist theory. A distinction needs to be drawn between a putative ideology, identity and culture of journalism. The interviews did not run to detailed life histories, but they did seek to establish why entering the journalistic field made sense to a respondent, why it seemed a logical or natural step to take.

Chapter 4 concentrates on new household formation and the tenure choices of younger age groups. Not only have the young experienced lower rates of home ownership than previous generations, but they are more likely to remain with parents for longer or share with those in a similar position. The UK is not alone and many other countries have experienced similar trends. Since younger households are now more likely to rent privately for longer, the chapter discusses whether this represents a change in preferences – renting is more flexible – or whether young households are constrained from entering home ownership by high housing costs, credit constraints, job insecurity, competition from the Buy to Let market, demand from older households and from those wanting second homes.