From Immaterial to Precarious Labor: Considering Restaurant Work in Stewart O’nan’s Last Night at the Lobster

2019 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 583-600
Author(s):  
John Macintosh
Keyword(s):  
Precarious Labor ◽  
Restaurant Work

Educational Downgrading: Adult Education and Downward Mobility

2021 ◽  
pp. 003804072098289
Author(s):  
Corey Moss-Pech ◽  
Steven H. Lopez ◽  
Laurie Michaels
Keyword(s):  
Labor Market ◽  
Adult Education ◽  
Educational Aspirations ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
The United States ◽  
Job Seekers ◽  
Downward Mobility ◽  
Precarious Labor ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Returning To School

Scholarship on adult education throughout the life course focuses on the relationship between education and upward mobility. Scholars rarely examine how adults’ educational aspirations or trajectories are affected by downward mobility or an increasingly precarious labor market. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with 21 job seekers in the post–Great Recession labor market in the United States, this article advances the concept of educational downgrading: returning to school in pursuit of a credential lower than the highest level of education one previously sought or attained. We explore three pathways to downgrading connected to downward mobility: occupational dead ends, career reversals, and educational inflation. In the process, we highlight how individuals adjust their practical educational aspirations as they navigate a contemporary economy in which careers are unstable and credentials are needed for many kinds of jobs across the occupational hierarchy.

Precarious Labor and the Contestation of Policymaking in Japan

2020 ◽  
pp. 90-108
Author(s):  
Saori Shibata
Keyword(s):  
Government Policy ◽  
Policy Outcomes ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Policy Options ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
The Public ◽  
Policy Goals ◽  
Precarious Labor ◽  
The Impact

This chapter examines the impact of Japan's precarious workers' movement on policymaking in Japan, highlighting three cases through which one can witness the effects of opposition mobilized by Japanese nonregular workers on policy outcomes. In each case, one witnesses political elites being forced to respond to successful mobilizations by precarious workers and organizations that have emerged to represent their interests. These mobilizations have served to attract public attention to the impact that neoliberal government policy has on precarious workers. When faced with criticism and opposition from the public, on each occasion governments were forced either to compromise on policy goals or proposals or to abolish or postpone policies to reduce criticism. While precarious workers were not always able to achieve all of their goals, collectively they have become an important actor that is able to gain concessions or raise significant obstacles to the implementation of neoliberal policy options so that their demands must be accommodated in some way.

Form and Essence of Precarization by Work: From Alienation to the Industrial Reserve Army at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century

2019 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iderley Colombini
Keyword(s):  
Financial Crisis ◽  
First Century ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Precarious Labor

The vast majority of analyses on precarious labor depart from a sense of exception, either in the 1970s and 1980s or from the financial crisis of 2007–8, where a stable (stable, regulated, unionized) pattern of work levels would cease to be the preponderant factor for the proliferation of a new precarious norm. This reduction of the precariousness of labor leads to a series of misconceptions that prevent the understanding of the new forms and particularities of the processes of domination and exploitation of capitalist sociability at the turn of the twenty-first century.

scholarly journals Labor Laid Waste: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Waste Work

2019 ◽  
Vol 95 ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Doherty ◽  
Kate Brown
Keyword(s):  
Human Capital ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Material Quality ◽  
Precarious Labor ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractWaste studies brings to labor history a suite of conceptual tools to think about precarious labor, human capital, migration, the material quality of labor in urban and rural infrastructures, and the porosity and interchangeability of workers’ bodies in the toxic environments in which they labor. In this introduction, we explore the conceptual insights that the study of waste offers for the field of labor history, and what, in turn, a focus on labor history affords to social science research on waste. We examine the relationship between surplus populations and surplus materials, the location of waste work at the ambiguous fulcrum of trash and value, and the significance of labor for the understanding of infrastructure.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document