Bad Jobs Research Articles

Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s to 2000s. By Arne L. Kalleberg. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011. Pp. xvi+292. $37.50.

<i>Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s to 2000s</i>. By Arne L. Kalleberg. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2011. Pp. xvi+292. $37.50.

Dualism, Job Polarization, and the Social Construction of Precarious Work

Publication of Arne Kalleberg’s Good Jobs, Bad Jobs provides a welcome opportunity to re-examine the theoretical and conceptual frameworks that scholars bring to bear on precarious employment. An exemplar of what was once called the “new structuralism,” Kalleberg’s book provides a rigorous, multidimensional analysis of the changes impinging on job stability and security. Although it identifies a vitally important trend toward a growing polarization in the distribution of job rewards, it does so in ways that illustrate the limits of the genre of research to which it belongs. Constrained to view the subjective experience of work as merely dependent variables, the book cannot explore how social, political, and cultural processes have both shaped and legitimated the rise of precarious employment. Drawing on recent studies of the popular business press and other media representations, we document the rise of a culture of enterprise that has idealized the uncertainties that have come to grip the labor market, defining the latter as a site on which individual agency can freely unfold. Only by addressing the interplay between job structures and such discursive and political developments can we hope to understand the rise of labor market precarity, let alone expand workers’ rights to protection against market uncertainty.

Job Quality and Precarious Work

In this article, the author engages with the authors of the articles in this Special Issue by clarifying some aspects of the arguments in Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s to 2000s; addressing selected matters of controversy; and highlighting central policy challenges raised by the rise of polarized and precarious employment systems. The author organizes his comments around several key themes raised by these authors: The causes of changes in job quality; the polarization model; cross-national differences in precarious work; and policy recommendations and the politics of job quality.

The Politics of Job Quality

In Good Jobs, Bad Jobs Arne Kalleberg provides an extremely useful portrait of job quality in America. This paper addresses the politics of job quality via a case study of weatherization jobs. Weatherization workers are typical of employees in many low wage jobs in America. The stimulus bill (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) substantially increased weatherization funding and a political struggle emerged over the quality of these jobs. We find that the variable strength of progressive coalitions, legislative politics and timing all contributed to the development of an uneven set of regulations at the federal and local level. Groups that are putative allies often worked at cross-purposes. More strikingly government at both the local and Federal level has been conservative and even timid about establishing job standards. There are also more positive lessons. Training standards are being formalized. This stands to benefit both homeowners and workers. While there have been conflicts, it is also true that interests that have been historically at each other’s throats notably unions and community groups–found a way to work together more constructively than in the past.

Are bad jobs inevitable?: trends, determinants and responses to job quality in the twenty-first century

This title focuses on job quality: debates, developments, issues and trends; workplace practice and interventions. Written by world-leading academics, it contains cutting-edge research. Job quality matters. It contributes to economic competitiveness, social cohesion and personal well-being. Focusing on 'bad jobs', this book outlines debates, developments, issues and trends in job quality whilst asking the question are bad jobs inevitable?. Bringing together an internationally renowned group of academics, the book defines and measures bad jobs; explains variation and change in job quality; and identifies workplace practices and broader non-workplace strategies for making bad jobs better.

Reducing Inequality and Insecurity

In Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, Arne Kalleberg examines the institutional changes in the United States that led to a polarization of income and job quality, a rising share of poor quality jobs, and the increasing precariousness of work across the educational spectrum. He proposes reversing these developments through a new social contract that builds on the design principles that underlie flexicurity policies in the Netherlands and Denmark—flexicurity with an American face. This article discusses the roots and promise of flexicurity to address the problems Kalleberg has identified. It also examines the limits to flexicurity and proposes additional policies to fulfill this promise.

Can We Restore Broadly Shared Prosperity?

Good Jobs, Bad Jobs and other Russell Sage publications greatly strengthen our knowledge of both the causes of low-wage work and what is required to improve jobs and economic opportunities. These multidisciplinary studies complement basic principles with detailed comparative fieldwork which shows that globalized product and labor market competition does not create immutable tradeoffs between the quality and quantity of jobs; although it won’t be easy in the American context, broadly shared prosperity can be restored by a combination of value-added competitiveness policies, collective bargaining, minimum and prevailing wages, human resource development, labor market policies, and social supports.

Book Review: Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s to 2000s

Book Review: Good Jobs, Bad Jobs: The Rise of Polarized and Precarious Employment Systems in the United States, 1970s to 2000s

A Bermuda triangle of policy? ‘Bad jobs’, skills policy and incentives to learn at the bottom end of the labour market

A focus of Government policy has been the need to ensure that those at the lower end of the labour market invest in their human capital through re-engaging with learning, which has been assumed to enable progress into better-paid employment. This article explores the problems created by ‘bad jobs’ and the evidence for the existence of a set of mutually reinforcing factors that reduces the incentives acting on individuals in such work, and in many cases their employers, to participate and invest in education and training. Each of these factors, on their own, would be sufficient to cause problems at the lower end of the labour market. Acting in concert, as a mutually reinforcing matrix, they produce powerful reasons why many individuals perceive that the incentives to engage in work-related learning are weak. More broadly, our argument suggests that the fundamental causes of low pay and low-quality employment have been misdiagnosed and the subsequent public policy solution of up-skilling interventions is relatively ill-fitted to achieving the desired policy goals. Imaginative re-thinking on how policy might help those in low-wage, dead-end jobs is necessary.

Minimum wage, on-the-job search and employment: On the sectoral and aggregate equilibrium effect of the mandatory minimum wage

We study the impact of a minimum wage in a segmented labor market in which workers are at different stages of their careers. At the end of a learning-by-doing period, workers paid the minimum wage quit “bad jobs” for better-paying “good jobs”, following an on-the-job search process with endogenous search intensity. A rise in the minimum wage reduces “bad jobs” creation and prompts workers to keep their “bad jobs” by reducing on-the-job search intensity. The ambiguous impact on unqualified employment replicates and explains the findings of several empirical studies. However, a minimum wage rise reduces overall employment and output.

Good jobs, bad jobs: the rise of polarized and precarious employment systems in the United States, 1970s and 2000s

Good jobs, bad jobs: the rise of polarized and precarious employment systems in the United States, 1970s and 2000s

'&lt;i&gt;Good&lt;/i&gt;' Jobs and the '&lt;i&gt;Bad&lt;/i&gt;' Jobs?: A Study of Job Satisfaction in an IT Unit

Job satisfaction has been defined as a pleasurable emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one’s job; an affective reaction to one’s job; and an attitude towards one’s job distinguishing a good (satisfying) job from a bad (not so satisfying) job. The taxonomy of a good job allows a start to be made on such questions as ‘In what respects are employees at the lower order jobs better or worse off than those of executives?’, ‘Who has the good jobs?’ and ‘How are good jobs being different from bad jobs?’. These questions are in tune with the measures of job satisfaction quality that probably seem to be useful predictors of future labor market behavior, and are measured herein with reference to a public sector IT organization. Based on the analysis of 93 responses obtained from employees and executives, we find evidence that the job satisfaction among the employees and the executives is very high but no evidence that both such classes of human resources attach same rewards from work based on the levels at which they serve. We also find no support for our proposition that job satisfaction rises in a close linear association with level of job in the organization hierarchy rather; jobs enabling financial expectations at whatever level these were set to be met, are considered to be more important.

Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, and the Great Recession: Lessons from Japan's Lost Decade

This paper provides novel evidence on the long-term effect of the Great Recession on the quality of jobs, in particular whether the Great Recession results in the replacement of good (characterized by high wage/benefit, job security, and opportunity for training and development) with bad (characterized by the lack of such attributes). Unfortunately there is not yet sufficiently long data from the recent Great Recession that enable researchers to study fully its long-term consequences for the labor market structure. To this end, we examine Japan's Lost Decade, the original Great Recession that occurred two decades ago. First, insofar as male workers are concerned, we find evidence against the popular narrative that during Japan's Lost Decade there was a significant shift of the composition of employment toward bad Second, we find that the composition of female workers shifted significantly toward bad and that such a shift occurred primarily through an increased use of a hybrid employment contract of nonstandard employment with indefinite contracts. Third, young women in Japan made considerable progress in shifting the composition of their employment toward good during Japan's growth decade preceding the Lost Decade. We find that such progress was entirely undone during the Great Recession. Obviously the Great Recession affects the quantity of jobs and policy makers ought to pay immediate attention to such quantity effects. However, the Great Recession may also have more long-term structural effects on the quality of jobs.

‘An acceptance that it’s just your lot I suppose’: reflections on turbulent transitions between work and welfare

Employment policies have conventionally focused on the transition from welfare to work. However many of those who leave out of work benefits for employment return to them again relatively quickly, meaning that some people perpetually cycle between work and welfare for much of their working lives. This article focuses on the individuals making these precarious labour market transitions and on the narratives that they use when reflecting on them. A broad agency-structure analytical framework is used to demonstrate the role of individual and more ‘involuntary’ structural factors in the production and reproduction of economic marginalisation. These findings have implications for the extent to which ‘bad jobs’ and ‘bad workers’ are viewed as determinants of labour market disadvantage and for how policies to combat workwelfare cycling are formulated and critiqued.

Why Do So Many Women End Up in ‘Bad Jobs’? A Cross-country Assessment for Developing Countries

This study addresses gender differentials in labour market outcomes in developing countries. There is emerging evidence that even though women in developing countries increasingly enter the labour force, they often end up in jobs with low pay, low security and limited social mobility. We find that in addition to well-established factors determining labour market outcomes (such as education and training, care obligations and barriers to asset accumulation), social institutions are statistically associated with a gender bias in activity patterns and in occupations by sector and status. Our findings suggest that addressing discriminatory social norms, traditions and laws against women is crucial in allowing women to take up more and better jobs.

The Effects of First Occupation on Long Term Health Status: Evidence from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study

In this paper, we use a longitudinal survey that has collected information for 50 years on a large cohort of Wisconsin high school graduates and their siblings to examine the long term impact of early occupational choice on health status. We find evidence that beginning a career in a blue collar occupation is correlated with several measures of poor health outcomes at ages 50-65. Since our dataset includes usually unobserved pre-labor market characteristics, including IQ and childhood health status, we can show that controlling for these variables is important for many results and suggests a high level of selection into occupation based on health and ability. We also provide evidence of gender differentials in the association between first occupation and later health. Then, we replace our basic measure of occupational categories with summary measures of job characteristics and find that employment at “bad jobs” at the beginning of an individual’s career predicts later health outcomes. Finally, we use sibling information in the dataset to show that unmeasured family background factors explain a large share of the effects of occupation on later health. Overall, the evidence points to limited, though heterogeneous, long term effects of health from blue collar employment.

The Effects of First Occupation on Long Term Health Status: Evidence from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study

In this paper, we use a longitudinal survey that has collected information for 50 years on a large cohort of Wisconsin high school graduates and their siblings to examine the long term impact of early occupational choice on health status. We find evidence that beginning a career in a blue collar occupation is correlated with several measures of poor health outcomes at ages 50–65. Since our dataset includes usually unobserved pre-labor market characteristics, including IQ and childhood health status, we can show that controlling for these variables is important for many results and suggests a high level of selection into occupation based on health and ability. We also provide evidence of gender differentials in the association between first occupation and later health. Then, we replace our basic measure of occupational categories with summary measures of job characteristics and find that employment at “bad jobs” at the beginning of an individual’s career predicts later health outcomes. Finally, we use sibling information in the dataset to show that unmeasured family background factors explain a large share of the effects of occupation on later health. Overall, the evidence points to limited, though heterogeneous, long term effects of health from blue collar employment.

Finding Job Isn't Direct Path to Better Mental Health

While employment is generally better than unemployment for mental health, the wrong job can be worse than no job. However, policy prescriptions for dealing with the impact of bad jobs are hard to come by.

Good jobs, bad jobs, and trade liberalization

How do labor markets adjust to trade liberalization? Leading models of intraindustry trade (Krugman (1981), Melitz (2003)) assume homogeneous workers and full employment, and thus predict that all workers win from trade liberalization, a conclusion at odds with the public debate. Our paper develops a new model that merges Melitz (2003) with Shapiro and Stiglitz (1984), so also links product market churning to labor market churning. Workers care about their jobs because the model features aggregate unemployment and jobs that pay different wages to identical workers. Simulations show that, for reasonable parameter values, as many as one-fourth of existing “good jobs” (those with above average wage) may be destroyed in a liberalization. This is true even as the model shows minimal impact on aggregate unemployment and quite substantial aggregate gains from trade.

Space Weather Model Moves Into Prime Time

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