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How Work Becomes Invisible: The Erosion of the Wage Floor for Workers with Disabilities
Abstract
How does work come to be constructed as a service to the worker? In the United States, the payment of subminimum wages to disabled workers has been legal since 1938 and was entrenched by 1986 legislation eliminating the previously mandated floor of 50 percent of the minimum wage. This article draws on primary historical materials to explain the passage of these amendments, which I analyze as a case of delaborization, a process through which work is mystified as such and reclassified as something else (e.g., service). I find that the managers of segregated workshops for disabled manual laborers rose to control disability employment policy in the aftermath of deinstitutionalization. Professionals mobilized disability stigma to frame the subminimum wage as a social welfare issue subject to their expertise and to lobby successfully for its entrenchment. Weaknesses in the disability–labor coalition enabled this seizure of jurisdiction. This research illuminates professional expertise, the withdrawal of labor unions, and identity-based stigma as major mechanisms driving delaborization, an important contemporary influence on the organization of work. The case of the subminimum wage thus develops sociological literatures on labor, disability, and politics.
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This article reports findings from the first set of qualitative data from a study aimed to further understand practices of decision support for people with cognitive disabilities and assess the impact of training supporters in an evidence-based practice framework. It poses questions about whether, using the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) as the benchmark, it is possible to identify purchase points for assessing the degree of shift from paternalism towards empowerment of the supported person. The study findings suggest that this is a highly difficult, nuanced and subjective task offering little on which to hang objectivity. Instead, we suggest CRPD realisation of the will, preferences and rights of the person supported may better be realised through training of supporters designed to enable greater participation by persons supported and greater reflection and deliberation on wise and effective ways of providing such support by supporters.
• Points of interest
• The meaning of terms like empowerment, paternalism and capacity building are very difficult to define with any precision
• Whether support actually helps someone with a cognitive disability to achieve their will or preferences is hard to assess
• There are no easy ways of ensuring that support for decision-making stays on the path set out in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities
• An alternative measure of meaningful participation in decision-making may be a better guide for assessing training of supporters
Compared with traditional industries, new changes have taken place in the labor process and manufacturing consent in cultural and creative industries. In entertainment labor, managers transform high-intensity labor into pleasant entertainment through relational work, emotional work, and sentimental work. In contrast to traditional industries, labor control in entertainment does not rely on organizational institutions or economic incentives but is based on supplemental cultural factors, such as relationships, emotion, and sentiment. At the same time, the logic of ideological operation behind manufacturing the consent of laborers is no longer according to the traditional Marxist-Althusserian interpretation in which managers shape a particular idea through the control of the labor process while concealing the real labor–capital relation with a false consciousness. It becomes a case of a Lacanian–Zizekist description: the laborer enters a realistic fantasy through specific experience and pursues his plus-de-jouir in ideological reality. In the end, the laborers devote their body and soul to work.
Gross domestic product (GDP) is one of the world’s most influential and widely cited economic indicators. However, outside of the industrialised, market-based context in which the indicator was first designed, GDP measurement suffers from a number of biases and blind spots. The article zooms in on one of these: the exclusion of unpaid household services from the production boundary of the System of National Accounts, the international standard underpinning GDP methodology. While GDP has expanded over time to include activities as diverse as financial services and the informal sector, the treatment of unpaid household services has remained unchanged. Why is this? I find that staff in the statistical departments of international organisations such the United Nations, International Monetary Fund and World Bank have a tremendous degree of agency in the governance of GDP. While these statisticians are aware of and engage with criticisms, they reject the inclusion of unpaid household services based on shared professional norms and economic ideas.
Cambridge Core - Political Sociology - Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada - by Barry Eidlin
This Presidential Address offers elements for a systematic and cumulative study of destigmatization, or the process by which low-status groups gain recognition and worth. Contemporary sociologists tend to focus on inequality in the distribution of resources, such as occupation, education, and wealth. Complementing this research, this address draws attention to “recognition gaps,” defined as disparities in worth and cultural membership between groups in a society. Drawing on research I have conducted, I first describe how neoliberalism promotes growing recognition gaps. Then, drawing on research on stigmatized groups across several societies, I analyze how experiences of stigma and destigmatization are enabled and constrained by various contextual factors and actors, including institutions, cultural repertoires, knowledge workers, and social movements activists. I conclude by proposing a research agenda for the sociology of recognition and destigmatization, and by sketching how social scientists, policy makers, organizations, and citizens can contribute in the reduction of recognition gaps.
A growing literature posits the importance of boundaries in structuring social systems. Yet sociologists have not adequately theorized one of the most fraught and consequential sites of boundary-making in contemporary life: the delineation of the official edges of the government—and, consequently, of state from society. This article addresses that gap by theorizing the mechanisms of state boundary formation. In so doing, we extend culturalist theories of the state by providing a more specific model of how the state-society boundary is produced. Further, we contribute to institutionalist accounts of politics by highlighting boundary-work during policy creation as a crucial site of political struggle, one with causal implications insofar as it illuminates a process that determines fine-grained distinctions in policy forms.
This article endeavors to replace the sociology of professions with the more comprehensive and timely sociology of expertise. It suggests that we need to distinguish between experts and expertise as requiring two distinct modes of analysis that are not reducible to one another. It analyzes expertise as a network linking together agents, devices, concepts, and institutional and spatial arrangements. It also suggests rethinking how abstraction and power were analyzed in the sociology of professions. The utility of this approach is demonstrated by using it to explain the recent precipitous rise in autism diagnoses. This article shows that autism remained a rare disorder until the deinstitutionalization of mental retardation created a new institutional matrix within which a new set of actors—the parents of children with autism in alliance with psychologists and therapists—were able to forge an alternative network of expertise.
Why are some diseases more stigmatized than others? And, has disease stigma declined over time? Answers to these questions have been hampered by a lack of comparable, longitudinal data. Using word embedding methods, we analyze 4.7 million news articles to create new measures of stigma for 106 health conditions from 1980 to 2018. Using mixed-effects regressions, we find that behavioral health conditions and preventable diseases attract the strongest connotations of immorality and negative personality traits, and infectious diseases are most marked by disgust. These results lend new empirical support to theories that norm enforcement and contagion avoidance drive disease stigma. Challenging existing theories, we find no evidence for a link between medicalization and stigma, and inconclusive evidence on the relationship between advocacy and stigma. Finally, we find that stigma has declined dramatically over time, but only for chronic physical illnesses. In the past four decades, disease stigma has transformed from a sea of negative connotations surrounding most diseases into two primary conduits of meaning: infectious diseases spark disgust, and behavioral health conditions cue negative stereotypes. These results show that cultural meanings are especially durable when they are anchored by interests, and that cultural changes intertwine in ways that only become visible through large-scale research.
How do public safety net and elite private mental health providers cope with a key dilemma since psychiatric deinstitutionalization—managing madness when people have the right to refuse care? I observed two approaches to voluntary community-based services, one that tolerates “non-compliance” and deviant choices, and another that attempts to therapeutically discipline clientele. The puzzle, given theories of the paternalistic governance of poverty, is that select poor patients are given autonomy while the privileged are micro-managed. Drawing on comparative fieldwork in Los Angeles, I show how contrasting ecological pressures and resource bases shape divergent practices. In the context of urban poverty governance, mental health care and low-barrier housing offer a way to remove problem people from public space. This “tolerant containment” is linked to limited therapeutic capacity and the construction of clients as beyond transformation. In the context of family systems governance, elite private mental health care is a project to reform wayward relatives and equip them with respectable futures. A “concerted constraint” of deviance, akin to Lareau’s theory of privileged childrearing, is reserved for those who can afford rehabilitation and conceivably recover. Using these cases, I contribute to theories of social control and inequality in advanced liberal societies.
To many, insane asylums are a relic of a bygone era. State governments took steps between 1950 and 1990 to minimize the involuntary confinement of people in mental hospitals, and many mental health facilities closed down. Yet, as this book reveals, the asylum did not die during deinstitutionalization. Instead, it returned in the modern prison industrial complex as the government shifted to a more punitive, institutional approach to social deviance, mental illness, and people with disabilities. Focusing on Pennsylvania, the state that ran one of the largest mental health systems in the country, the author tracks how the lack of community-based services, a fear-based politics around mental illness, and the economics of institutions meant that closing mental hospitals fed a cycle of incarceration that became an epidemic. This groundbreaking book recasts the political narrative of the late twentieth century, as the book charts how the history of asylums and prisons were inextricably intertwined. It argues that the politics of mass incarceration shaped the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric hospitals and social welfare policy, and vice versa. The book offers critical insight into how the prison took the place of the asylum and shaped the rise of the prison industrial complex and creating new forms of social marginality.
The state is central to social scientific and historical inquiry today, reflecting its importance in domestic and international affairs. States kill, coerce, fight, torture, and incarcerate, yet they also nurture, protect, educate, redistribute, and invest. It is precisely because of the complexity and wide-ranging impacts of states that research on them has proliferated and diversified. Yet, too many scholars inhabit separate academic silos, and theorizing of states has become dispersed and disjointed. This book aims to bridge some of the many gaps between scholarly endeavors, bringing together scholars from a diverse array of disciplines and perspectives who study states and empires. The book offers not only a sample of cutting-edge research that can serve as models and directions for future work, but an original conceptualization and theorization of states, their origins and evolution, and their effects. Provides scholars and students with a conceptual apparatus and set of questions that can guide their research. Allows readers to gain an overview of where research currently stands and where it could go next. Provides a synthetic view of a diverse scholarly literature.
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Americans with all sorts of disabilities came to be labeled as "unproductive citizens." Before that, disabled people had contributed as they were able in homes, on farms, and in the wage labor market, reflecting the fact that Americans had long viewed productivity as a spectrum that varied by age, gender, and ability. But as Sarah F. Rose explains in No Right to Be Idle, a perfect storm of public policies, shifting family structures, and economic changes effectively barred workers with disabilities from mainstream workplaces and simultaneously cast disabled people as morally questionable dependents in need of permanent rehabilitation to achieve "self-care" and "self-support." By tracing the experiences of policymakers, employers, reformers, and disabled people caught up in this epochal transition, Rose masterfully integrates disability history and labor history. She shows how people with disabilities lost access to paid work and the status of "worker--a shift that relegated them and their families to poverty and second-class economic and social citizenship. This has vast consequences for debates about disability, work, poverty, and welfare in the century to come. © 2017 The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
This book examines how neoliberalism is constituted from multiple, diverse elements; how these elements are brought together and made to cohere; and the challenges, contestations, and consequences of such. Informed by assemblage thinking, the collection builds on research that emphasizes the forms of experimentation, adaptation, and mutation through which neoliberalism is enacted and rendered workable across different spaces. Contributors provide original case studies on topics such as democratic administration, carbon markets, the sharing economy, behavioral economics, disease management, free trade, and youth volunteering. They interrogate the forms of expertise through which neoliberalism is rendered knowable; the diverse socio-technical practices that make neoliberalism governable; and the practices, effects, and tensions involved in the assembling of neoliberal subjects.
The book relates the history of post-war psychiatry, focusing on deinstitutionalisation, namely the shift from asylum to community in the second part of the twentieth century.
After the Second World War, psychiatry and mental health care were reshaped by deinstitutionalisation. But what exactly was involved in this process? What were the origins of deinstitutionalisation and what did it mean to those who experienced it? What were the ramifications, both positive and negative, of such a fundamental shift in psychiatric care? Post-War Psychiatry in the Western World: Deinstitutionalisation and After seeks to answer these questions by exploring this momentous change in mental health care from 1945 to the present in a wide range of geographical settings. The book articulates a nuanced account of the history of deinstitutionalisation, highlighting the constraints and inconsistencies inherent in treating the mentally ill outside of the asylum, while seeking to inform current debates about how to help the most vulnerable members of society.
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies provides an intimate examination of the everyday lives and suffering of Mexican migrants in our contemporary food system. An anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, Holmes shows how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care. Holmes's material is visceral and powerful. He trekked with his companions illegally through the desert into Arizona and was jailed with them before they were deported. He lived with indigenous families in the mountains of Oaxaca and in farm labor camps in the U.S., planted and harvested corn, picked strawberries, and accompanied sick workers to clinics and hospitals. This "embodied anthropology" deepens our theoretical understanding of the ways in which social inequalities and suffering come to be perceived as normal and natural in society and in health care.
Disability Servitude traces the history and legacy of institutional peonage. For over a century, public and private institutions across the country relied on the unpaid, forced labor of their residents and patients in order to operate. This book describes the work they performed, in some cases for ten or more hours a day, seven days a week, and the lawsuits they brought in an effort to get paid. The impact of those lawsuits included accelerated de-institutionalization, but they fell short of obtaining equal and fair compensation for their plaintiffs. Instead, thousands of resident and patient-workers were replaced by non-disabled employees. Disability Servitude includes a detailed history of longstanding problems with the oversight of the sub-minimum wage provision in the Fair Labor Standards Act oversight. Beckwith shows how that history has resulted in the continued segregation and exploitation of over 400,000 workers with disabilities in sheltered workshops that legally pay far less than minimum wage.
This chapter explores neoliberalism not as a specific kind of expertise but as a form of critical technopolitical reflection on the way that the authority of truth and the legitimate exercise of political power both ground and limit each other. Focusing on the work of the political scientist Vincent Ostrom, it examines how American neoliberalism emerged as a critique of expert rule established during the Progressive Era and the New Deal and as an argument in favor of an alternative model of administration that is embedded in a “polycentric” democratic polity. It proposes that Ostrom’s work suggests a reappraisal of the critique of technical expertise and democracy that has been advanced in recent social theory.
In Harris v. Quinn (2014), the United States Supreme Court used disability rights rhetoric of independence and control to argue that disabled people—not the State—are the real employers of in-home care workers. Consequently, the State cannot force care workers to pay labor union fees. Justice Alito’s majority decision interprets the employment contract as a capacity contract: a device that uses the recognition of equal cognitive capacity to obscure domination. Alito ignored the vulnerability of disabled people and in-home care workers to legitimize neoliberal cutbacks. In her dissent, Justice Kagan argued that disabled people, care workers, and the State forge multiple and iterative contracts. Using Kagan’s dissent, Charles Mills’s critique of ideal theory, and Susan Burgess and Christine Keating’s participatory social contract, I argue that an emancipatory contract must replace cognitive capacity as the condition of membership with the recognition of shared human vulnerability amid oppressive conditions.
In the mid-1980s, Daniels coined the term ‘invisible work’ to characterize those types of women’s unpaid labour – housework and volunteer work – which had been culturally and economically devalued. Scholars have since applied this term to many types of labour, yet there is little clarity or consensus as to what ‘invisibility’ means and what mechanisms produce it. Through an in-depth analysis of this far-reaching literature, the present article seeks to reconstruct ‘invisible work’ as a more robust analytical concept. It argues that work is made invisible through three intersecting sociological mechanisms – here identified as cultural, legal and spatial mechanisms of invisibility. Though they differ in function and degree, each of these mechanisms obscures the fact that work is performed and therefore contributes to its economic devaluation. Ultimately, this revised concept of invisible work offers scholars a new analytic tool to untangle the systems that produce and reproduce disadvantage for workers.
Welfare reform has many implications for the labor movement in terms of erosion of public benefits, privatization, mandated em ployment in low wage jobs or workfare, and other effects. Labor can address these challenges through several strategies including: organizing workfare workers, raising wage standards through living wage campaigns and effective policy advocacy with other progres sive organizations, and designing better programs to serve welfare clients. Several examples of labor's involvement in the arena of welfare policy are examined, including workfare organizing, par ticipation in welfare rights coalitions and collaborating with ser vice providers. As Congress considers reauthorization of the Tem porary Assistance to Needy Families Program in 2002, labor's per spectives can be extremely valuable in the policy debate.
When a panel of federal judges ruled in August 2009 that California must release a full one-quarter of its prisoners, it did more than insist that 40,000 people go free. It asserted that what was once a "correctional crisis," marked by deadly overcrowding and monumental prison mismanagement, had become chronic. No longer a temporary phenomenon, the "critical condition" of the Golden State's prisons was now the normal state of affairs. This book shows how the California Correctional Peace Officers Association (CCPOA), the labor union representing prison officers and other correctional workers, had transformed from a loose, fraternal organization into one of the most politically potent and feared interest groups in the nation. The book describes how the union promoted ultratough policies like "Three Strikes and You're Out," empowered political figures and groups that supported its interests and views on criminal punishment, and frustrated efforts to privatize prisons. And as its leaders made strides for its members, the union also influenced the nature, purpose, and scope of imprisonment. So to understand California's deep and durable penal crisis, The book explains, we cannot neglect the story of this group so often known simply as "the powerful prison guards' union." The book draws on years of intensive research as he uses the lessons of the CCPOA to explore how actors create, shape, and protect their preferred status quo and considers whether, by making these mechanisms clear, we might open the door to real and lasting change in the penal field and beyond.
This essay describes different kinds of research questions, process perspectives, and types of explanations to argue pragmatically that the quality and coherence of process research will be enhanced when these ingredients of process research are aligned. A distinction is made between questions about process past (what has happened?), process present (what is going on?), process future (where are we going?), and process action (what should we do?); which are then associated respectively with the historical reconstruction, becoming/emergent, unfolding, and developing/ control process perspectives. Each of these research questions requires a specific and distinct type of explanation, in terms of a unique sequence of events, a key event, a generalizable pattern of events, or a social mechanism. A hierarchy of logical relationships between questions and explanations is discussed, leading to implications for management research as well as management practice.
Disciplining the Poor explains the transformation of poverty governance over the past forty years—why it happened, how it works today, and how it affects people. In the process, it clarifies the central role of race in this transformation and develops a more precise account of how race shapes poverty governance in the post–civil rights era. Connecting welfare reform to other policy developments, the authors analyze diverse forms of data to explicate the racialized origins, operations, and consequences of a new mode of poverty governance that is simultaneously neoliberal—grounded in market principles—and paternalist—focused on telling the poor what is best for them. The study traces the process of rolling out the new regime from the federal level, to the state and county level, down to the differences in ways frontline case workers take disciplinary actions in individual cases. The result is a compelling account of how a neoliberal paternalist regime of poverty governance is disciplining the poor today.
Sociologists have long been interested in understanding the emergence of new social kinds. We argue that sociologists’ formation stories have been mischaracterized as noncausal, descriptive, or interpretive. Traditional “forcing-cause” accounts describe regularized relations between fixed entities with specific properties. The three dominant approaches to causality—variable causality, treatments and manipulations, and mechanisms—all refer to forcing causes. But formation stories do not fit the forcing-causes framework because accounts of formation violate the assumptions that ground forcing-cause accounts and instead emphasize eventfulness, assemblage, and self-representation. Yet these accounts are, we argue, fundamentally causal. In particular, formation stories provide the historical, empirical boundaries for the functioning of forcing-cause accounts. We catalog the breadth of formation stories in sociology and use examples from diverse literatures to highlight how thinking of formation stories as causal accounts can improve our understanding of the relationship of history and culture to causal analysis.
In this article I elaborate and codify the extended case method, which deploys participant observation to locate everyday life in its extralocal and historical context. The extended case method emulates a reflexive model of science that takes as its premise the intersubjectivity of scientist and subject of study. Reflexive science valorizes intervention, process, structuration, and theory reconstruction. It is the Siamese twin of positive science that proscribes reactivity, but upholds reliability, replicability, and representativeness. Positive science, exemplified by survey research, works on the principle of the separation between scientists and the subjects they examine. Positive science is limited by “context effects” (interview, respondent, field, and situational effects) while reflexive science is limited by “power effects” (domination, silencing, objectification, and normalization). The article concludes by considering the implications of having two models of science rather than one, both of which are necessarily flawed. Throughout I use a study of postcolonialism to illustrate both the virtues and the shortcomings of the extended case method.
Methodology can only bring us reflective understanding of the means which have demonstrated their value in practice by raising them to the level of explicit consciousness; it is no more the precondition of fruitful intellectual work than the knowledge of anatomy is the precondition of“correct” walking.
Max Weber— The Methodology of the Social Sciences
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, research on stigma has continued. Building on conceptual and empirical work, the recent period clarifies new types of stigmas, expansion of measures, identification of new directions, and increasingly complex levels. Standard beliefs have been challenged, the relationship between stigma research and public debates reconsidered, and new scientific foundations for policy and programs suggested. We begin with a summary of the most recent Annual Review articles on stigma, which reminded sociologists of conceptual tools, informed them of developments from academic neighbors, and claimed findings from the early period of “resurgence.” Continued (even accelerated) progress has also revealed a central problem. Terms and measures are often used interchangeably, leading to confusion and decreased accumulated knowledge. Drawing from this work but focusing on the past 14 years of stigma research (including mental illness, sexual orientation, HIV/AIDS, and race/ethnicity), we provide a theoretical architecture of concepts (e.g., prejudice, experienced/received discrimination), drawn together through a stigma process (i.e., stigmatization), based on four theoretical premises. Many characteristics of the mark (e.g., discredited, concealable) and variants (i.e., stigma types and targets) become the focus of increasingly specific and multidimensional definitions. Drawing from complex and systems science, we propose a stigma complex, a system of interrelated, heterogeneous parts bringing together insights across disciplines to provide a more realistic and complicated sense of the challenge facing research and change efforts. The Framework Integrating Normative Influences on Stigma (FINIS) offers a multilevel approach that can be tailored to stigmatized statuses. Finally, we outline challenges for the next phase of stigma research, with the goal of continuing scientific activity that enhances our understanding of stigma and builds the scientific foundation for efforts to reduce intolerance.Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Sociology Volume 41 is July 30, 2015. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/catalog/pubdates.aspx for revised estimates.
Economics is often described as the most politically influential social science and yet economic advice is often largely irrelevant to prominent policy debates.We draw on literatures in political science, sociology and science and technology studies to explain this apparent contradiction. Existing research suggests that the influence of economics is mediated by local circumstances and meso-level social structures, and thatmuchof itflowsthrough indirect channels.We elaborate three sites of analysis useful for unpacking these influences: the broad professional authority of economics, the institutional position of economists in government, and the role of economics in the cognitive infrastructure of policymaking, including the diffusion of economic styles of reasoning and the establishment of economic policy devices for seeing and deciding.
The U.S. job structure became increasingly polarized at the turn of the twenty-first century as high- and low-wage jobs grew strongly and many middle-wage jobs declined. Prior research on the sources of uneven job growth that focuses on technological change and weakening labor market institutions struggles to explain crucial features of job polarization, especially the growth of low-wage jobs and gender and racial differences in job growth. I argue that theories of the rise of care work in the U.S. economy explain key dynamics of job polarization-including robust growth at the bottom of the labor market and gender and racial differences in job growth-better than the alternative theories. By seeing care work as a distinctive form of labor, care work theories highlight different dimensions of economic restructuring than are emphasized in prior research on job polarization. I show that care work jobs contributed significantly and increasingly to job polarization from 1983 to 2007, growing at the top and bottom of the job structure but not at all in the middle. I close by considering whether the care economy will continue to reinforce job polarization, or whether it will provide new opportunities for revived growth in middle-wage jobs.
The debate over penal labor has been a vociferous one, as advocates and proponents have, for at least a century, made their case for or against the practice of putting prisoners to work. Nonetheless, conspicuously absent from this discussion have been the very people who most directly and intimately experience that work: prison inmates. In this article, I examine penal labor as it unfolds in one particular carceral site, namely California's prison fire camps in which state prisoners do manual labor and fight fires. The results reveal that binaries in which prison labor is positioned as either entirely good or entirely exploitative do not mesh well with the multifaceted experiences of those on the ground, who find elements of both at play. The fire camps are, therefore, an atypical case study that will hopefully serve as impetus for more research into the experiences of prisoner workers, as well as a starting point for deepening and complicating the existing debate over work and punishment.
Since the early 1980s mass incarceration has become a critical fixture on the U.S. social landscape. Prison and jail populations have increased almost fivefold since 1980 with similar increments in the ranks of those under parole and probation. Historically many labor analysts and unions have regarded incarcerated people as an aberrant sector of the working class. Labels such as “lumpen proletariat,” “criminals,” and the “undeserving poor” have often been applied. In some instances, people doing poorly paid production work while incarcerated have been categorized as “scabs” who undermine hard won union gains. Such thinking is at odds with current realities, if it ever was appropriate. The recent patterns of criminalization have led to the imprisonment of significant swaths of working class people of color, largely the targets of the War on Drugs or anti-immigrant repression. Despite the fact that this racialized roundup now holds millions of workers captive, the process remains largely outside the scope of those concerned with labor and working class organization. Old stereotypes still keep “ex-convicts” and “felons” at the margins of labor organization and analysis. This article argues that unions and labor-oriented organizations need to oppose mass incarceration and adopt new strategies to incorporate a broad working class perspective in their approach to the criminal justice system. The author emphasizes that such an approach would compel unions to act in the interests of the broad working class, which at time may even be in conflict with the immediate interests of their members.
Few words in the current American lexicon are as ubiquitous and ostensibly uplifting as diversity. The actual meanings and functions of the term, however, are difficult to pinpoint. In this article we use in-depth interviews conducted in four major metropolitan areas to explore popular conceptions of diversity. Although most Americans respond positively at first, our interviews reveal that their actual understandings are undeveloped and often contradictory. We highlight tensions between idealized conceptions and complicated realities of difference in social life, as well as the challenge of balancing group-based commitments against traditional individualist values. Respondents, we find, define diversity in abstract, universal terms even though most of their concrete references and experiences involve interactions with racial others. Even the most articulate and politically engaged respondents find it difficult to talk about inequality in the context of a conversation focused on diversity. Informed by critical theory, we situate these findings in the context of unseen privileges and normative presumptions of whiteness in mainstream U.S. culture. We use these findings and interpretations to elaborate on theories of the intersection of racism and colorblindness in the new millennium.
Using a historical materialist approach, this paper maintains that the treatment of people with developmental disabilities is strongly related to the forces of production. While 19th century capitalism ameliorated some past abuses, early 20th century apologists for inequality advanced the idea that "defective" people were responsible for crime, poverty and urban distress. The adverse attitudes, stereotypes and policies supported by this ideology have shaped a culture that, despite reform efforts, largely defames and harms people with developmental disabilities. In the late 20th century, widespread devaluation of people with disabilities remains and continues to help legitimate social inequality.
Today, ethnographers and qualitative researchers in fields such as urban poverty, immigration, and social inequality face an environment in which their work will be read, cited, and assessed by demographers, quantitative sociologists, and even economists. They also face a demand for case studies of poor, minority, or immigrant groups and neighborhoods that not only generate theory but also somehow speak to empirical conditions in other cases (not observed). Many have responded by incorporating elements of quantitative methods into their designs, such as selecting respondents `at random' for small, in-depth interview projects or identifying `representative' neighborhoods for ethnographic case studies, aiming to increase generalizability. This article assesses these strategies and argues that they fall short of their objectives. Recognizing the importance of the predicament underlying the strategies — to determine how case studies can speak empirically to other cases — it presents two alternatives to current practices, and calls for greater clarity in the logic of design when producing ethnographic research in a multi-method intellectual environment.
This paper investigates notions of transition and independence, as well as the current circumstances that detain countless disabled people in employment endeavors that not only pay meager wages but also cement a lifelong servitude to the workshop. Sheltered workshops exist on the basis and replication of a structure that incarcerates disabled people within vocational‐like settings. This paper begins a discussion of the social contract that occurs between the disabled person in the workshop. The workshop is no longer a place of societal liberation that affords the individual the opportunity to learn vocational skills, but rather it has become an institution that creates its own army of workers that will forever be subjected to a life in the workshop because of their disability status.
This paper develops two theoretical perspectives on the distribution of wages in formal day labor markets–an economic view of day labor as an undifferentiated “spot market,” and an organizational view that emphasizes “market-making” organizations. We assess the utility of these theories with original survey data on homeless men in the formal day labor industry in Tucson, Arizona, utilizing hierarchical linear models. Consistent with the spot market view, there is little differentiation in the market with respect to formal wage levels. However, once we take account of the hidden costs of employment, there is some variation in the “real wages” of day labor, which is explained by organizations' use of practices that externalize costs onto workers. These findings suggest the utility of an organizational approach to understanding the operation of seemingly “marketized” forms of employment.
R E C E N T SCHO L A R S H I P on African American, Latina, Asian American, and Native American women reveals the complex interaction of race and gender oppression in their lives. These studies expose the inadequacy of additive models that treat gender and race as separate and discrete systems of hierarchy (Collins 1986; King 1988; Brown 1989). In an additive model, white women are viewed solely in terms of gender, while women of color are thought to be "doubly" subordinated by the cumulative effects of gender plus race. Yet achieving a more adequate framework, one that captures the interlocking, interactive nature of these systems, has been extraordinarily difficult. Historically, race and gender have developed as separate topics of inquiry, each with its own literature and concepts. Thus features of social life considered central in understanding one system have been overlooked in analyses of the other. One domain that has been explored extensively in analyses of gender but ignored in studies of race is social reproduction. The term social reproduction is used by feminist scholars to refer to the array of activities and relationships involved in maintaining people both on a daily basis and intergenerationally. Reproductive labor includes activities such as purchasing household goods, preparing and serving food, laundering and repairing clothing, maintaining furnishings and appliances, socializing children, providing care and emotional support for adults, and maintaining kin and community ties. Work on this project was made possible by a Title F leave from the State University of New York at Binghamton and a visiting scholar appointment at the Murray Research Center at Radcliffe College. Discussions with Elsa Barkley Brown, Gary Glenn, Carole Turbin, and Barrie Thorne contributed immeasurably to the ideas developed here. My thanks to Joyce Chinen for directing me to archival materials in Hawaii. I am also grateful to members of the Women and Work Group and to Norma Alarcon, Gary Dymski, Antonia Glenn, Margaret Guilette, Terence Hopkins, Eileen McDonagh, JoAnne Preston, Mary Ryan, and four anonymous Signs reviewers for their suggestions.
▪ Abstract For many years, US trade unions declined in union density, organizing capacity, level of strike activity, and political effectiveness. Labor's decline is variously attributed to demographic factors, inaction by unions themselves, the state and legal system, globalization, neoliberalism, and the employer offensive that ended a labor-capital accord. The AFL-CIO New Voice leadership elected in 1995, headed by John Sweeney, seeks to reverse these trends and transform the labor movement. Innovative organizing, emphasizing the use of rank-and-file intensive tactics, substantially increases union success; variants include union building, immigrant organizing, feminist approaches, and industry-wide non–National Labor Relations Board (or nonboard) organizing. The labor movement must also deal with participatory management or employee involvement programs, while experimenting with new forms, including occupational unionism, community organizing, and strengthened alliances with other social movements.