Plant Closings: International Context and Social Costs
We know a great deal about global capital mobility in traditional industries, such as manufacturing, but very little about emerging capital mobility in the gig economy. Using the case of Canadian Foodora, a multinational platform that left Canada in 2020, I situate global capital mobility in the local labour market. Drawing upon interview data with former Foodora couriers and ethnographic data collected from a gig workers’ union, I investigate the social, economic and political subjectivities of gig workers activated by a global platform’s capital mobility. My findings reveal unexpected parallel effects caused by capital mobility in the gig economy and traditional industries. My research highlights how heterogeneity is salient for understanding divergent worker subjectivities. The economic and social impacts upon financially dependent gig workers and the emotional connections of devoted and organized gig workers challenge the dominant discourse that gig workers are simply part-timers and hence free from work commitments.
Coping refers to behavior that protects people from being psychologically harmed by problematic social experience, a behavior that importantly mediates the impact that societies have on their members. The protective function of coping behavior can be exercised in 3 ways: by eliminating or modifying conditions giving rise to problems; by perceptually controlling the meaning of experience in a manner that neutralizes its problematic character; and by keeping the emotional consequences of problems within manageable bounds. The efficacy of a number of concrete coping behaviors representing these 3 functions was evaluated. Results indicate that individuals' coping interventions are most effective when dealing with problems within the close interpersonal role areas of marriage and child-rearing and least effective when dealing with the more impersonal problems found in occupation. The effective coping modes are unequally distributed in society, with men, the educated, and the affluent making greater use of the efficacious mechanisms.
Variations in class ideology among 495 workers in a homogenous factory sample suggest that the experiences preceding and accompanying downward occupational mobility make the skidder more conservative than workers in his class of destination. Such conservatism is most widespread among older worklife skidders but is found also among young intergenerational skidders. Data support the following explanation: early or retrospective socialization in family, school, and/or white collar workgroup leads the status-deprived to deny failure and strive for success. Middle-class perspectives retain their force despite the working-class milieu. The later socialization and anticipatory socialization hypotheses are rejected. Conditions which might move the skidder to a more radical response are suggested. The study again stresses the need to take account of types of mobility and aspirations in research on the impact of mobility.
This paper is an empirical study of class consciousness among a random sample of textile workers in a small North Carolina
city. Following the theoretical-methodological assumption that one can profitably study working class consciousness during
relatively quiescent periods of capitalist development by examining its components, working class consciousness is operationalized
as the ordinal variable, “class conflict consciousness.” The social bases of class consciousness are investigated for the
sample as a whole and for subsamples divided according to race. Regression analysis identifies personal income, union membership,
race, and job dissatisfaction as significant predictors of class conflict consciousness. Comparative treatment of whites and
blacks reveals important differences, both in their degree of class conflict consciousness and their respective predictor
variables.
This study is concerned with the relationship between a worker's employment status and his degree of social integration, as indicated by his attitude toward the established economic order. Of seven independent variables, employment status was the weakest predictor of economic radicalism. Economic deprivation and educational level were the strongest.
This paper evaluates the thesis that manual workers in advanced capitalist societies increasingly are adopting middle-class modes of thought and behavior, and that blue-collar prosperity is responsible for this process. A review of the literature reveals substantial differences in earnings, market situations, life styles, working conditions, and politics of manual and non-manual workers. Furthermore, advocates of the embourgeoisement thesis usually rely on economic variables to explain workers' political responses, but the literature indicates that social relationships and the nature of blue-collar work are more important determinants. Consequently, we conclude that the degree of working-class affluence and embourgeoisement has been exaggerated.
Most American sociological research has conceptualized the occupational structure as a continuous prestige hierarchy. The research reported here questions the generality of that conceptualization by examining the relative importance of manual-nonmanual class differences and prestige differences for several attitudes and behaviors. First, the perception of "working class" and "middle class" more closely reflects a manual-nonmanual dichotomy than a continuous prestige scale. Voting behavior and party identification are also better predicted by the dichotomy. Second, the relevance of bounded class and continuous status models varies according to the issues involved. Thus, some interpersonal behaviors and individual satisfactions are patterned according to continuous prestige rankings while opinions on societal issues reflect dichotomous class differences. Third, individuals vary in their propensity to use class or status models according to social structural influences. For instance, a prestige orientation is fostered by small, traditional industries while the class dichotomy is more important in large, bureaucratic industries. The evidence also indicates that occupational prestige is more a middle-class concern, with little importance for manual workers.
Examines the social and psychological effects of job loss due to a plant closure for female and male workers in a single plant.
An analysis of literature on the effects of unemployment on physical and mental health.
Efforts to operationalize “ownership” in class formation research have emphasized diferences in power among ownership categories and have neglected the crucial question of whether an individual works for profit or for a wage. The importance of this variable is highlighted with data from the Boston taxi industry in which drivers differ little in control over their work but differ greatly in the way their work is compensated. In recent years, fleet owners have consciously manipulated these differences to displace a unionized labor force that drives for commissions with ostensibly self-employed drivers who rent their cabs by the shift.
This paper examines race and gender differences in class consciousness and union support among a random sample of textile workers in a small North Carolina city. Class consciousness is treated as an ordinal variable consisting of class verbalization, class action orientation, and endorsement of egalitarian change. Union support denotes a recognition of the union's instrumental role in improving work and working conditions. The analysis reveals that blacks are significantly more class conscious and prounion than whites. On the other hand, males and females tend to share similar levels of class consciousness and union support. Comparisons by race, within gender and by gender, within race, are provided for finer distinctions and extended discussion. A multiple classification analysis reveals that racial differences persist and that gender differences remain unimportant when the covariates of age, job dissatisfaction, education, income, and skill are considered.
When ideologies are stated as normative and general tenets, they tend to be accepted. This study hypothesized (1) that in an industrial community, the acceptance of the ideology of opportunity would decrease when its tenets were viewed as specific situations confronting persons of unequal economic rank, and (2) that endorsement of the tenets, expressed either in general or in situational terms, would be withheld more often by lower-income people than by those from higher-income strata. Confirmation of the hypotheses suggests that ideological adherence is greatest among those who profit most from the reiteration of the ideolgy.
Discusses perspectives on correlations between unemployment and mental health in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), noting that unemployment did not become a topic of social research in the FRG until the mid-1970's. In analyzing the association between unemployment and mental health with the micro approach, researchers in the FRG have mainly used interviews with unemployed workers and controls. Research in the FRG using this approach suggests the following: Physical and mental health should be regarded conceptually as multidimensional, mental health is more vulnerable than physical health in the initial phases of unemployment, and effects of unemployment interact with and are modified by social and financial living conditions. In the larger macro approach, the question to be addressed is whether employment characteristics (e.g., unemployment rate) and health characteristics (e.g., rates of morbidity and mortality) of populations (e.g., nations or states) are associated. In the FRG, unemployment has not been shown to exert an influence on total mortality or on suicide mortality. It is noted that, with regard to research on unemployment and mental health, the most convincing findings will be those for which evidence exists at both the micro and macro level. It is concluded that investigation of relationships among the economy, society, and mental health should be a major task of applied health service research in the FRG. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This article begins as a test of two types of explanation of working-class consciousness. The first focuses upon structural factors. The second identifies nonwork variables as the critical determinant of workers' consciousness. Based on information collected from manual workers in two plants in Edmonton, Canada, the present research finds that neither perspective emerges as a significant determinant of worker ideology. The second part of the article addresses this issue and offers an explanation of the failure to account for much of the variation in workers' ideological thinking.
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