Bad Jobs Research Articles

Downward flexibility: Who is willing to take an inferior job?

Most workers look forward to better jobs across their careers, but in an age of rising inequality and insecurity at work, some are willing to accept an inferior job in order to avoid joblessness. We use the Work Orientations III survey from the 2005 International Social Survey Programme to explore such ‘downward flexibility’ and develop several regression models specified for 19 OECD countries to test hypotheses and explore macro- and individual-level variations. Workers in liberal ‘labour market regimes’ are more tolerant of downward adaptations, in line with evidence that these regimes produce strongly institutionalized norms of flexibility. Tolerance of a worse job is also higher among those with weak labour market positions (low-income respondents, women and young people). Further macro-level analysis suggests that the ‘model’ country with the most downwardly flexible workers would be rich and unequal, with weak unions and low levels of social protection and industrial rights.

All Fun and Cool Clothes? Youth Workers’ Consumer Identity in Clothing Retail

Retail offers notoriously bad jobs that exist at the nexus of work and consumption. Previous brand-based retail studies assert that youth workers see the stores’ coolness and the employee discount as compensating for the low pay and variable schedules. The authors use interviews with 55 former and current young clothing retail workers to examine how they experience retail work in relation to their consumer identities. The authors find that while some workers identify with the brand, all workers criticize the poor working conditions. Workers draw on their consumer identities to understand what good service entails and sometimes to resist managers’ orders that they interpret as bad deals for shoppers. This article concludes that youth retail workers’ consumer identities do not compensate for the low pay and poor work conditions but instead help them navigate the interactive aspects of service work and find fulfillment on the job.

Exit Tales: How Precarious Workers Navigate Bad Jobs

Why do some workers quit undignified “bad jobs,” while others persist in them? We know a great deal about how people find employment, along with what they do at work. But we have few studies documenting the lived experience of quitting a bad job. Recent structural transformations, such as the demise of Fordism and the curtailment of welfare, have surely recalibrated the strategies by which precarious individuals navigate the labor market. This article, an ethnography that follows a single cohort of call center employees over nine months, documents four main pathways through which such workers leave versus stay in their jobs. It argues that the emergent class of precarious workers is not homogenous. Gender, race, and age intersect with class to shape how one experiences a given bad job.

Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: What's Trade Got to Do with it?

Using US local labor markets between 1990 and 2010, we analyze the heterogeneous impact of rising trade exposure on employment growth of 'good' and 'bad' jobs. Three salient findings emerge. First, rising local exposure to import competition, via falling US tariffs or rising Chinese import penetration, reduces (increases) employment growth of bad (good) jobs. Conversely, improved local access to export markets, via falling foreign tariffs, increases (reduces) employment growth of bad (good) jobs. Second, falling US tariff protection is substantially more important, economically and statistically, than rising Chinese import penetration. Third, globalization generates occupational polarization but not job polarization.

Sustainable Workplaces as Innovation

IntroductionACADEMIC RESEARCH AND POPULAR NEWS sources alike decry what has come to be called the (Chamberlain & Hodson, 2010; Williams, 2011; Morgan, 2013; Schwartz, 2014). As an environment, the toxic workplace includes an array of harmful working conditions ranging from hostile co-workers and insensitive bosses to chaotic and exploitative work environments. Awareness of the toxic workplace has become more pronounced since the great recession of 2008. As businesses downsized, there have been myriad reports that surviving employees are forced to work harder to offset the diminished worker population, and subjected to debilitating working conditions (Greenhouse, 2015, p. BU1; Sanger-Katz, 2015; Miller, 2015, p. A3). Worse, workers are trapped in bad jobs by a weak labor market.Yet, amid bad news on the labor front, here and there pockets of hopeful news have emerged. Some management scholars and a host of local and international social movement organizations are calling for action to promote more sustainable workplaces (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2007; Pfeffer, 2010; Spreitzer & Porath, 2012). They argue for conceptualizing sustainable workplaces in ways that go beyond eco-friendly environments to positive, regenerative environments for employees. Sustainable workplaces are viewed as an innovation, not so much of products or production processes, but as a change that entails decent treatment of employees (Ehnert & Harry, 2012).In this paper, we present an analysis of 60 interviews of small business owners that employed 1-100 employees. These firms were identified by local chambers of commerce, business organizations and business magazines as innovative businesses. Innovations included product, service and process types (Jurik, McGhee, & Bivona, 2010). In the course of interviews, we asked owners how they created innovative businesses. Over three-fourths of the 60 businesses credited the work environment that they had created for themselves and their employees. Upon a review of our findings and the growing body of literature on toxicity and its counterpart, sustainable work environments, we found that our sample of small businesses offered important insights into managerial strategies for building non-toxic work environments in small businesses. Some literature argues that sustainable work environments promote high employee work performance. Our data link such environments to business innovation.In the sections below, we discuss the literature on toxic and sustainable work environments followed by a discussion of our methodology and sample. We then present our analysis of owner narratives about the work environment. We found that 77% of owners stressed the importance of strategies in one or some combination of the following three realms: job dimensions, organizational level dynamics, and interpersonal interactions.Toxic vs. sustainable work environments: the literatureThe global recession that began in 2008 heightened the sense of insecurity, stress, and exhaustion that workers experience, and older terms such as burnout or rustout have reappeared in the literature (Docherty et al., 2007). Amid unemployment at rates not seen in decades, downsizing (even globally) is the new normal, and workers have been stretched to and beyond capacity. Yet, workers are afraid to complain about, much less leave, a bad job because there are so few jobs. The situation is so dire that research decries that Taylorism lives (Kira, 2002; Crowley et al., 2010; Witzel & Warner, 2015), and there are increasingly allusions to the (Chamberlain & Hudson 2010).Recent years have been a time of much bad news in the workplace. The academic literature is replete with research about incivility and rudeness, even outright bullying in the workplace (Hutton, 2006; Tracy et al., 2006; Johnson & Indvik, 2001). U.S. businesses seem to be so obsessed with short-term financial gain that there is little concern about job insecurity, ill-health due to job-related stress, or any sense of work-life balance for workers. …

Only If You Pay Me More: Field Experiments Support Compensating Wage Differentials Theory

Compensating wage differentials is Adam Smith’s idea that wage differences equalize differences in job and worker characteristics. Other than risk of death, however, no job characteristics have consistently been found to affect wages, likely because of problems with self-selection and unobservable job characteristics. We run experiments in an online labor market, randomizing offered pay and job characteristics, thereby overcoming both problems. We find, as predicted by our model, that increasing job disamenities significantly reduces both likelihood of working and amount of work supplied. Correspondingly, the wage increases necessary to compensate workers for worse job disamenities are substantial, supporting the theory.

Do Immigrants Work in Worse Jobs than U.S. Natives? Evidence from California

In the debate over immigration reform, a common assertion is that immigrants take jobs that U.S. natives do not want. Using data from the 2000 Census merged with O*NET data on occupation characteristics, I show that the jobs held by immigrants are more physically arduous than the jobs held by U.S. natives. However, data from the California Work and Health Survey on self‐reported physical job demands indicate that immigrants do not perceive their jobs as requiring more physical effort than U.S. natives. Immigrants thus have worse jobs than natives but do not view them as such.

Is any job better than no job? Labor market experiences and depressive symptoms in people living with HIV

The purpose of this study is to determine the relationship between the psychosocial work environment and labor market experiences (including unemployment) on mental health among adults living with HIV. We used data provided by 538 participants at clinical and community sites across Ontario, Canada. Generalized estimating equation models showed that employment was associated with lower depressive symptoms. For employed participants, adverse psychosocial work conditions, specifically job insecurity, psychological demands, and decision authority were associated with depressive symptoms. For the entire sample, the number of adverse psychosocial work conditions was associated with higher depressive symptoms while participants working in poor quality jobs reported similar levels of depressive symptoms than those who were unemployed or not in the labor force. This study showed that poor quality employment (as assessed by having a high number of adverse psychosocial work exposures) was associated with a similar level of depressive symptoms as unemployment, suggesting that “bad jobs” may not offer the same mental health benefits as “good jobs.” Policies to improve employment outcomes should take the quality of employment into account to maximize mental health benefits as better employment may lead to better mental health.

Discussion

Previous articleNext article FreeDiscussionPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreJonathan Parker began the discussion by inquiring whether the data used in Fatih Guvenen’s presentation was panel data, as opposed to repeated cross sections. He was concerned that, if the data did not follow a particular set of individuals over time, it would be subject to changing compositional effects during recessions. Fatih Guvenen clarified that he used two data sources, both from the Social Security Administration, and that the data followed the same individuals over time. The first data set runs from 1957 to 2010, and the shorter, more recent data sample runs from 1978 to 2012 and is a 100% sample of individuals with Social Security numbers.Bob Hall emphasized the importance of distinguishing between the employment-unemployment transition rate and the separation rate. The separation rate, because it also includes job-to-job transitions, is not nearly as cyclical as the employment-unemployment transition rate. He interpreted this as indicating that individuals who might have experienced a job-to-job transition during normal economic times instead experience an unemployment spell during recessions. He then argued that the changing mix of separations during recessions is what creates the spike in the employment-unemployment transition rate, not an increase in separations, and therefore this phenomena should not be referred to as “job destruction.” He acknowledged that there is a spike in separations during recessions, but that it was much smaller than the employment-unemployment transition rate spike. He also emphasized the desirability of thinking about both employment-unemployment and employment-nonparticipation transitions.Christopher Foote pointed out that their paper attempts to adjust for certain time aggregation issues. He and his coauthor followed Shimer (2005) in attempting to adjust for the possibility of rapid employment-unemployment-employment transitions. More careful adjustments, such as those done by Shimer (2012), were not feasible because of the limits of the occupation data.Narayana Kocherlakota expressed his sympathy for the argument Fatih Guvenen made in his presentation, that economists should consider wages and employment together. He pointed out that the manner in which wages and employment respond to a shock like the Great Recession will depend in part on the nature of the contract between the worker and the firm. Some kinds of jobs are going to offer a lot of insurance, in terms of wages, and other kinds of jobs are not going to offer that insurance.Finally, Christopher Foote thanked the discussants and emphasized one of the points made by Richard Rogerson in his presentation. In the data, there is a nonmonotonic pattern of the declines in labor-force participation rate across groups with different levels of education. Christopher Foote argued that in the earliest literature on job polarization, researchers equated middle-wage jobs with middle-skill jobs. He believes there is a tension between this kind of approach and the routine/nonroutine distinction used in other parts of that literature. He offered the example of an assembly-line worker, who can be trained to use a particular machine in a single day, and is not obviously more skilled than a restaurant cook, or someone else in an occupation categorized as low skill. Foote characterized the 1990s as a time when many unskilled, but relatively high-wage workers lost their jobs. He paraphrased Paul Willen as saying that there are “bad jobs at bad wages,” “bad jobs at good wages,” which involve compensating differentials, and “good jobs at good wages,” such as working at the Federal Reserve. Foote argued that because of compensating differentials, it is not surprising that many people who did not finish high school have middle-income wages, which is observed in the data. He noted that in their sensitivity analysis, the results become weaker when they drop people without a high school degree from the sample. His interpretation of this fact is that some high school dropouts show up in the data as middle-skill workers, emphasizing the point that one needs to distinguish between skills and wages. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by NBER Macroeconomics Annual Volume 292014 Sponsored by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/680635 Views: 174Total views on this site © 2015 by the National Bureau of Economic Research. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Bad Jobs as a Core Driver of Growing Social Inequality in the United States. Book Review: Kalleberg A. (2011) Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s to 2000s, New York: Russell Sage Foundation

This is a review of a masterpiece by a famous professor of labor sociology. Anyone looking for understanding current labor market processes needs to read this latest work by Arne L. Kalleberg, the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kalleberg focuses on the US and shares his deep understanding of a wide range of social and economic mechanisms of the labor market under globalization. The book gives a vivid description of the current labor market and provides an explanation for the changes that brought about the rise of precarious employment. The book sheds light on the reasons for the dramatic increase in polarization and inequality between jobs and both between and within occupations. Kalleberg argues that the US is in dire need of a new social contract to tackle the challenges that arise from a globalized division of labor, widening polarization in the quality of jobs, and the proliferation of precarious work. An example of such a new social contract is a “flexicurity” system, aspects of which exist today in some countries. Kalleberg claims that only a coordinated effort by government, business and labor can address the sources and consequences of the polarization in job quality and that only such an effort will be able to improve both the economic competitiveness of the US and the quality of jobs and lives of American citizens. Though the book itself is focused on the American labor market during the last forty years, this review attempts to place Kalleberg’s ideas into a global context.

Comment

Comment

Bad jobs and good workers: The hiring of ex-prisoners in a segmented economy

Scholarship focusing on barriers to the employment of ex-prisoners has paid little attention to the linkages between mass incarceration and the structural conditions of low wage labor. In contrast, this article considers how decisions to hire ex-prisoners occur in the context of a highly segregated labor market. The research is based upon interviews with employers who are willing to hire persons exiting prisons. These employers were queried about their motivations for hiring, perceptions of their employees with criminal records, and their beliefs about fairness and justice. The interviews show that a strong motivating factor for hiring was finding a “good worker to do a bad job”, but also that decisions were influenced by employers’ common sense norms derived from surviving at the bottom of the economy. Despite the willingness of employers to offer “second chances” and make small allowances, these factors were insufficient to counteract the obstacles to sustainable employment.

Optimal contracting with private military and security companies

Private military and security companies (PMSCs) have been gaining increasing media and scholarly attention particularly due to their indispensable role in the wars in Afghanistan 2001 and Iraq 2003. Nevertheless, theoretical insights into the agency problems inherent when hiring PMSCs and how to optimally incentivize them are scarce. We study the complex relationship between intervening state, host state, and PMSC, taking into account the diverging interests of all involved parties as well as potential agency problems. We develop a theoretical model to characterize a state's optimal choice whether to perform a task associated with an intervening mission itself, or hire a PMSC and optimally design the contract.We find that it might be optimal to hire PMSCs even if they are expected to do a worse job than the intervening state would do itself. Furthermore, the government's reputation in rewarding PMSCs for a good performance is crucial and might render it optimal to only deal with a limited number of PMSCs — who are not necessarily always the most efficient providers.

Firm Size and Labour Market Segmentation Theory: Evidence from Turkish Micro Data

Wage formation in the labor market is analyzed with different perspectives and methods by Orthodox and Heterodox economists. Especially one of the main theories of how wages determined on the firm and industry is the theory of Segmented Labour Markets (SLM) based on the Institutional Economics and New Institutional Economics. Labor market segmentation theory suggests that jobs and labor are divided into labor market segments. While jobs are divided into “good jobs” and “bad jobs”, labor market is stratified according to job and wage. In this study, by drawing on micro-data from Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat) Househould Labour Force Survey (HLS), we aim to analyze the theory of SLM in Turkey on the basis of firm size for the year of 2011. In this context, Binary Logistic Regression Analysis was used. According to the analyses results, findings indicate that according to the firm size Turkish labour market shows a stratified structure in terms of gender, age, education, marital status, main activity of workplace (sector), status of workplace and occupations (International Standard Classification of Occupations-ISCO-88).

Dissatisfied Union Workers: Sorting Revisited

AbstractA substantial literature argues that the reported job dissatisfaction of union members is spurious. It reflects either the sorting of dissatisfied workers into union membership or the sorting of union recognition into worse jobs. We contribute by presenting the first panel data estimates that hold constant first worker fixed effects and then worker in job fixed effects. The estimates demonstrate that covered union members typically report greater dissatisfaction even when accounting for sorting in both dimensions. At the same time, cross‐sectional evidence of less satisfied covered non‐members and uncovered members vanishes when accounting for sorting.

Mobility strategies, ‘mobility differentials’ and ‘transnational exit’: the experiences of precarious migrants in London’s hospitality jobs

This article explores the patterns of occupational and geographical mobility of migrant hospitality workers, drawing on participatory research in London. It focuses on the ways in which migrants strategize around temporary employment and move across different jobs and locations trying to improve their precarious lives. Combining labour process theory and the perspective of the autonomy of migration the author reviews the concept of ‘mobility power’ as a form of resistance to degrading work. The findings illustrate that, while certain categories of migrants remain trapped in temporary employment, others manage to move on occupationally, develop aspects of their lives beyond work and engage in new migration. The main argument is that, in contrast to mainstream accounts of migrants’ labour market incorporation, migrant temp workers use their transnational exit power to quit bad jobs and defy employers’ assumptions about their availability to work under poor conditions.

Upgraded to Bad Jobs: Low-Wage Black Women's Relative Status since 1970

Labor market changes complicate the analysis of black women's status relative to white women because education, occupational attainment, and race–gender are now less predictive of earnings. Low-wage black women's relative status has improved somewhat from 1970 to 2000, contrary to the well-documented decrease in relative status reported for all black women wage earners since 1980, but their dramatic occupational upgrading was not responsible for the trend. White-collar occupational positions formerly responsible for white women's relative earnings advantage no longer deliver that reward, as restructuring has produced a proliferation of bad jobs across occupational groups. This study argues that increasing exposure to precarious work is crucial to understanding changes in low-wage black women's relative economic status since 1970.

Misclassification: Workers in the Borderland

Today, nearly one-third of Americans in the labor force are in non-standard employment. The rise of non-standard employment, beginning in the mid-1970s, has occurred at the same time as the precarity of work has increased, and the number of bad jobs has grown as well. Independent contracting is one of the most common types of nonstandard employment. Genuine independent contractors make up a small proportion of the American workforce. Misclassifying employees as independent contractors is increasingly common; one-third of firms pay their misclassified independent contractors with for-service contracts or pay them off the books. Misclassification is common in nearly every low-wage sector. In construction, nearly 40% of workers are misclassified. Port trucking and warehousing, key sectors in the logistics industry, are other industries where misclassification has become ubiquitous. Local, state and federal agencies have been trying to identify and prosecute misclassification for the past fifteen years, but the laws defining independent contracting vary significantly, and court rulings have been inconsistent. The result is that millions of Americans work in a grey zone where their rights are unenforceable, their pay is low, their benefits nonexistent, and their career prospects dim. Independent contracting has been increasing in other regions of the world, with misclassification prevalent as well, although efforts to regulate employment standards vary from country to country.

Do Immigrants Work in Worse Jobs than U.S. Natives? Evidence from California

In the debate over immigration reform, it is frequently asserted that immigrants take jobs that U.S. natives do not want. Using data from the 2000 Census merged with O*NET data on occupation characteristics, I show that the jobs held by immigrants are more physically arduous than the jobs held by U.S. natives. However, data from the California Work and Health Survey on self-reported physical job demands indicate that immigrants do not perceive their jobs as requiring more physical effort than U.S. natives. Immigrants thus have worse jobs than natives but do not view them as such.

В условиях роста незащищённости на рынке труда и неравенства между хорошими и плохими работами: интервью с Арне Каллебергом

Arne Kalleberg was interviewed by Tatiana Karabchuk and Andrey Shevchuk, senior fellows at the Higher School of Economics. This interview was conducted during the international conference “Embeddedness and Beyond: Do Sociological Theories Meet Economic Realities?” (Moscow, 25-28 October 2012), where Prof. Kalleberg presented his new research “The Growth of Precarious Work: A Challenge for Economic Sociology”.In the interview Arne Kalleberg clarified the difference between job security and job stability and explained why it is better to draw a distinction between job security and employment security instead. Additionally, Prof. Kalleberg accounted for the growth of nonstandard employment and put this concept into historical context. Prof. Kalleberg stressed consequences of this tendency for both individuals and organizations. As a contribution to existing theoretical debate on this theme, Prof. Kalleberg suggested his own notion of “flexicurity”. Flexicurity is a meta-policy, combining greater flexibility for employers and protections for workers.Moreover, Prof. Kalleberg discussed his recent book “Good Jobs, Bad Jobs”, which addresses the problem of growing inequality and polarization in both economic and non-economic job characteristics. Prof. Kalleberg also shared with us his future research plans. His next research direction deals with the idea of precarious work and focuses on international comparisons. Finally, Prof. Kalleberg recommended some of the most relevant and interesting books in this research field.