Abstract
Over the last 40 years, changing employer practices have introduced instability and insecurity into working-class jobs, limiting the voice that employees have in their own employment and deteriorating overall job quality. In the decade after the Great Recession, slow but sustained economic growth benefitted workers in terms of generally higher employment and wages and reductions in involuntary part-time work. But we show that in that same period, other aspects of working-class jobs changed in ways that were less advantageous to workers. We examine recent, troubling trends in nonstandard employment, precarious scheduling practices, and employer labor violations, arguing that without the introduction of policies that rebalance terms of employment toward worker interests, an economic recovery alone is unlikely to reverse the overall trend toward reductions in job quality. We argue for federal-level policies that expand public insurance programs, establish minimum standards of job quality, and include avenues for collective employee voice in employment and public policy debates. Such strategies have potential to improve job quality.
Prior to the arrival of the novel coronavirus in the United States, researchers lamented that the strong economy emerging out of the Great Recession yielded fewer benefits for workers than previous economic recoveries. Individuals with limited education and skills only saw slight wage increases, if at all, in the early recovery period after the Great Recession even as gross domestic product (GDP) continued to rise (Freeman 2013; Howell and Kalleberg 2019). The long and slow recovery did eventually deliver wage gains to the most disadvantaged workers and the working class 1 in the latter recovery years (Shambaugh and Strain, this volume; Groshen and Holzer, this volume). These gains are attributed to both low unemployment rates and expanded local and state minimum wage laws (Shambaugh and Strain, this volume; Nunn and Shambaugh 2020). Now, the COVID-19 pandemic has erased even modest postrecession economic gains. 2
This article looks beyond postrecession wage gains to examine other conditions of work that are important to assessing job quality in the decade after the Great Recession. First, we examine whether changing employer practices preceding the Great Recession that introduced instability and insecurity into working-class jobs and limited employee voice in the employer-employee relationship continued throughout the long and slow post–Great Recession recovery. Our contention is that the preponderance of bad jobs across periods of growth and contraction are not only the result of macroeconomic conditions. They are also due to policy and institutional factors that have increased the power of employers in the U.S. labor market to contain labor costs by externalizing risk onto workers through destabilizing employer practices. We demonstrate that such employer practices have continued in the period after the Great Recession.
Second, we consider the role of government stimulus efforts in improving job quality after the Great Recession and now. Relief measures during the Great Recession proved to be critically important to reducing poverty and hardship, but they were not primarily designed to improve job quality. We argue that new stimulus funding in response to the COVID-19 pandemic could serve as a base for the expansion of existing programs and the creation of new ones that operate to both relieve hardship caused by unemployment and underemployment and also improve the quality of working-class jobs.
Third, we discuss the potential of some recent policy innovations targeted at altering employer practices to improve working-class jobs. Policies that address employer hiring and scheduling practices and employee access to paid time off are designed to protect workers through the establishment of minimum standards for basic employment conditions related to wages, hours, and benefits. We argue that these policies—which were attracting great interest prior to the COVID-19 pandemic—may represent a promising path toward improving the quality of working-class jobs by guaranteeing a quality floor. Their efficacy is, however, contingent on the success of complementary initiatives to rebalance power toward workers. We close with a discussion of the roles that workers themselves play through unions and other organizing efforts in moving employer practices and public policy toward improved job quality.
The Employment Context before and after the Great Recession
Since 1979, three decades before the Great Recession, macroeconomic changes enabled by public policy choices and new managerial strategies resulted in a proliferation of new forms of employment arrangements, greater employer reliance on precarious scheduling practices, and weakened employment and labor laws (Bernhardt et al. 2008; Lambert 2008; Kalleberg 2011; Standing 2011; Appelbaum and Batt 2014; Weil 2014; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [NASEM] 2020). These trends shift the balance of power in the employer-employee relationship toward employers, and especially so during recessionary periods when employees have less influence over the conditions of their work. As such, an increasing share of economic risk now passes from firms and the government to individuals and families (Appelbaum and Batt 2014; Hacker 2006; Kalleberg 2011; Kalleberg and Vallas 2017; Lambert 2008; Standing 2011; Weil 2014). For example, many retail and food service workers must hold a shift open in case they are called into work, forgoing opportunities to work hours at an additional job, while not being paid for the reserved but ultimately unfilled shift with the other employer. Many of today’s truck drivers are hired as independent contractors and not only pay their own payroll taxes and health insurance premiums, but also pay to lease a truck from the firm for which they deliver goods (Viscelli 2016).
Workers likely enjoyed somewhat greater leverage during the almost full employment of the latter years of the economic recovery, as several articles in this volume demonstrate. Yet even as the labor market tightened, employers retained their preference for labor flexibility, many adopting new technologies called “workforce optimization” systems that facilitate the ability of local managers to align employees’ work hours with ongoing variation in consumer demand (Kesavan et al. 2020). When business models emphasize cost containment as the gateway to market success, more than a tight labor market is needed to protect and advance job quality (Weil 2014; Lambert 2014; Howell and Kalleberg 2019).
Alternative (nonstandard) work arrangements
Although the majority of U.S. workers are employed in regular jobs that pay a wage or a salary and involve an implicit or explicit contract between worker and firm, there has been a proliferation of alternative employment arrangements since the 1980s, such as platform-based gig work and work through a temporary staffing agency as well as freelancing and self-employment. The distinctions between regular and alternative, or “nonstandard”, work arrangements are meaningful to assessments of job quality given that the latter are not covered by social insurance programs; employment and labor laws that regulate wages, hours, or collective bargaining rights; or employer-sponsored benefits (NASEM 2020). Some definitions of alternative work arrangements also include wage and salary workers who work part time, on-call, or have an irregular or flexible work schedule (Mas and Pallais 2016; Fugiel and Lambert 2019). Whereas some nonstandard jobs come with high pay and job autonomy, those held by workers with limited education are poorly paid, highly insecure, and provide fewer hours than comparable regular jobs (Katz and Krueger 2019; Howell and Kalleberg 2019).
Definitional ambiguities, data limitations, reporting errors, and noncomparable samples make it difficult to accurately estimate prevalence and trends in alternative work arrangements (Bernhardt 2014; Katz and Krueger 2019; NASEM 2020). For example, alternative work arrangements are underreported in surveys that ask solely about a primary job, such as the Contingent Work Survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the RAND-Princeton Contingent Work Survey (Katz and Krueger 2019). Income from casual work is also underreported on surveys and on taxes, further challenging measurement efforts (Abraham and Houseman 2019).
Recent studies that take the abundance of new forms of employment arrangements into account estimate that at least 30 percent of workers engage in some form of nonstandard employment such as independent contractor arrangements, self-employment, on-demand platform work, on-call work, and informal or “casual” work (Bracha and Burke 2021). These alternative work arrangements disproportionately represent secondary sources of employment. Many workers combine them with standard employment to supplement low and unstable earnings (Farrell and Greig 2016; Abraham and Houseman 2019). For example, the increase in self-employment reported on administrative tax data since 2000—including a steady growth during the post–Great Recession recovery period (14.8 percent in 2008, 15.8 percent in 2014, 16.6 percent in 2016)—is driven primarily by small amounts of supplemental earnings, not primary jobs (Jackson, Looney, and Ramnath 2017; Katz and Krueger 2019). 3 Studies of electronically mediated work (the Online Platform Economy) show large growth from 2012 to 2018, but participation is sporadic, and hours per worker are minimal and have actually declined (Farrell, Greig, and Hamoudi 2019). Regarding primary job holders, Katz and Krueger (2019) estimate a modest increase in alternative work arrangements of 1 to 2 percentage points from 2005 to 2015, even after adjusting for cyclical trends (Katz and Krueger 2019). 4
Scheduling and staffing practices
In standard employment arrangements in which employers hire employees directly, employers frequently rely on just-in-time scheduling practices to contain outlays for labor (Lambert 2008, 2014; Fugiel and Lambert 2019). Schedules are posted with limited lead time, adjustments are made throughout the week, and employees have little input into how much or when they work. These employer practices result in unstable and unpredictable work hours that contribute to income volatility and economic insecurity (Lambert, Henly, and Kim 2019); difficulties aligning work responsibilities with other responsibilities (Clawson and Gerstel 2014; Henly and Lambert 2014; Stanczyk, Henly, and Lambert 2017); negative health effects, including disrupted sleep, negative mood, and psychological distress (Schneider and Harknett 2019; Ananat and Gassman-Pines 2020); and compromised access to public benefits (Nicholson and Needels 2006; Lambert and Henly 2013). Marginalized workers—for example, workers of color, with limited education, and in low-paid and part-time jobs—have long been at heightened risk of problematic scheduling practices (Rubery et al. 2005; Campbell and Chalmers 2008; Lambert, Fugiel, and Henly 2014; Wood 2016; McCrate 2018; LaBriola and Schneider 2020).
Evidence suggests that just-in-time scheduling practices and fluctuating work hours increased during the Great Recession and did not recede during the recovery period. For example, employing data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), Finnigan (2018) finds that the cumulative probability among hourly workers of ever reporting variable work hours increased from 36 percent in the period just preceding the Great Recession (2004–2007) to 46 percent immediately following (2008–2012). Panel data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey (NLS97) further suggest that the recovery did little to reduce work hour variability or improve other scheduling practices. As shown in Table 1, in each of the four rounds between 2011 and 2017, about one-third of working-class employees report a week or less advance notice, and approximately three-quarters report fluctuations in weekly work hours during the preceding month (excluding weeks when sick or on vacation). For most, these fluctuations are substantial, averaging more than 40 percent of respondents’ usual work hours (mean instability ratio) and constituting more than an 8-hour day of work (absolute instability). Although employer schedule control decreases steadily across the rounds, even in 2017, fully 45 percent of working-class employees report that their employer controls their schedule without their input. Workers without a college education are more likely than those with a college education to experience the “triple whammy” of work hour volatility, short advance notice, plus lack of schedule control (Lambert, Henly, and Kim 2019).
Schedule Characteristics in Working-Class Jobs by Survey Year
SOURCE: Based on data from National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1997 Cohort) rounds 15–18. Prepared by Peter Fugiel.
NOTE: Numbers are weighted estimates for cohort born between 1980 and 1984 who were in civilian employment with nonzero work hours at time of survey. “Working class” is defined as employees without a bachelor’s degree.
Difference between most and least hours equals 0, otherwise 1.
Coefficient of variation (CV) that norms the absolute difference of most and least weekly hours by usual weekly work hours: (most – least) ÷ usual.
Difference between most and least weekly hours in a month.
The NLS97 is a panel study and has a relatively young sample of workers, aged 26 to 31 years old in the 2011 round, confounding the maturation of the sample with the changing economy and raising questions about generalizability. But comparable questions in the 2016 General Social Survey (fielded in 2015), a nationally representative sample of U.S. residents of all ages, provide similar estimates of the prevalence of short notice and hour volatility: 40 percent of hourly workers report a week or less notice, and 79.2 percent report fluctuating hours that average 37 percent of usual work hours (Lambert, Henly, and Kim 2019).
It is easier to implement just-in-time scheduling practices with a largely part-time workforce (Lambert, Haley-Lock, and Henly 2012; Carré and Tilly 2017). During the Great Recession, involuntary part-time employment (working part time for economic reasons, according to the BLS) peaked at 9 million; it fell to about 4.5 million in 2019, 3 percent of the total employed population (Golden and Kim 2020). Still, involuntary part-time employment remains elevated, especially in working-class jobs in the service sector. Golden and Kim (2020) report that in 2016, 40 percent of part-time workers would prefer more hours, and 11 percent would like a full-time job. More than half of service workers would like more hours, and one-fourth would prefer a full-time job.
Employer violations of employment and labor laws
Bernhardt, Spiller, and Theodore (2013) argue that noncompliance with basic labor protections has become “a key feature of employers’ competitive strategy at the bottom of the U.S. labor market” (p. 829). Their 2008 study in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York demonstrates a high prevalence of employer violations across low-wage jobs, but especially among employers that adopt nonstandard payment systems and management strategies emphasizing cost containment. Two-thirds of the workers they surveyed during the recession faced pay-related violations in any given week, and these violations cost them 15 percent of annual wages. Generalizing from that data suggests that low-wage workers lose more than $50 billion to wage violations per year, with only about $2 billion recovered through enforcement mechanisms (McNicholas, Mokhiber, and Chaikof 2017).
Unfortunately, no post–Great Recession data are available that are equivalent to Bernhardt and colleagues’ 2008 survey data. Using Current Population Survey (CPS) data from 2007 to 2013, Fine and colleagues find that as unemployment rose during the Great Recession, minimum wage violations grew as well and were disproportionately experienced by low-wage workers of color and women. As unemployment began to fall slowly after 2010, so too did the rate of minimum wage violations (Fine et al. 2020). That said, whether employers engage in violations depends on noncyclical factors as well, namely, the risks imposed by violating the law (Fine et al. 2020; Galvin 2016; Weil 2005). In particular, enforcement regimes that focus on complaint-based investigation and that impose minimal financial penalties on violators are less successful at deterring employers, especially those in industries with historically high rates of noncompliance and low complaint rates (Fine et al. 2020).
Recent research suggests that employers may more aggressively violate the law in a legal context that demands a higher wage floor. Clemens and Strain (2020) use CPS data to investigate employer noncompliance with minimum wage increases from 2011 to 2018 in a sample of nontipped hourly workers aged 16 to 25 years who are not subject to overtime or commission pay. They conclude that most employers complied with minimum wage laws during this period; however, violations in the form of subminimum wage payments were more prevalent in states that enacted minimum wage increases. Thus, effective enforcement mechanisms are especially critical as labor law reforms designed to improve job quality are enacted.
Overall, these studies suggest that employer violations of labor standards in working-class jobs, especially those held by the most marginalized workers, are a serious concern even during periods of economic expansion and especially when risks to noncompliance are low.
Enter COVID-19 into This Employment Context
It is into this employment context that the novel coronavirus entered the United States in March 2020. A stunning number of workers in the United States have lost their jobs and weathered hour reductions (Cortes and Forsythe 2020; Stone et al. 2020). Twice as many workers in the bottom earnings quintile have lost jobs compared to those in the top quintile (Cortes and Forsythe 2020), and these same workers have also disproportionately faced hour cuts (Golden and Kim 2020). Black and Latino/a workers, immigrants, women, and less-educated workers have faced disproportionate job losses and hour reductions throughout the pandemic, in part because of the sectors in which they work (Alon et al. 2020; Borjas and Cassidy 2020; Couch, Fairlie, and Xu 2020). Women’s disproportionate caregiving responsibilities have also contributed to work hour reductions, as opposed to the work hour increases they experienced during the Great Recession (Kashen, Glynn, and Novello 2020).
The inequalities that the pandemic exposed are also visible inside workplaces and homes. Front-line workers, who are disproportionately workers of color (Blau, Koebe, and Meyerhofer 2020), continue working onsite, reporting to their jobs in hospitals and nursing homes, food processing plants, restaurants and bars, and grocery stores; or driving buses, delivering packages, and providing home-care services (Kinder, Stateler, and Du 2020). A significant number of workers in these jobs were already financially insecure prior to the pandemic (Schneider and Harknett 2020). White workers, more highly educated workers, and workers with higher incomes are more likely to hold jobs that allow them to work from home (BLS 2020). While working at home provides some public health protection, it also blurs the boundaries between work and home, and may cause interferences that create stress and reduce productivity (Schieman and Badawy 2020). Women are especially affected (Kashen, Glynn, and Novello 2020).
Improving Working-Class Jobs to Better Working-Class Lives: Lessons from the Policy Response to the Great Recession and COVID-19
Research indicates that interventions enacted in response to the Great Recession were effective at alleviating hardship and preventing further economic decline (Blinder 2013; Moffitt 2013; Bitler, Hoynes, and Kuka 2017; Wimer and Smeeding 2017; Chang, Romich and Ybarra, this volume; Ziliak, this volume). But the premature ending of relief provided through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) stimulus bill, coupled with state and local spending cuts, slowed the recovery and especially harmed workers at the bottom of the labor market (Blinder 2013; Danziger 2013). Moreover, the stimulus response to the Great Recession did little to address the systemic forces that had contributed to decades of deteriorating job quality, heightened job precarity, and declining worker power.
With passage of pandemic stimulus measures including the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act and the American Rescue Plan Act, we once again see massive new spending. Both acts include a combination of direct stimulus to households, expanded unemployment insurance (UI) benefits, some fiscal relief to states, and a variety of different programs to support employers. The CARES Act also included paid sick leave and paid family and medical leave. Several of these provisions recognize the changing nature of working-class jobs and working families’ needs. They can serve as models for protecting the economic security of workers who have been excluded from safety net protections in the past. Indeed, research demonstrates that stimulus spending has helped millions of families to cover regular expenses during the pandemic (Bhutta et al. 2020).
The expansion of UI is particularly relevant to our focus on working-class jobs, as it temporarily broadens UI eligibility to self-employed, independent contractors, partially employed, and those unable or unavailable to work because of COVID-19–related health and caregiving reasons. Given the new forms of nonstandard employment arrangements, growing precarity in work hours, and increases in long-term unemployment, these changes bring millions of additional workers in need of income support into the UI program, at least temporarily. Additionally, by recognizing that illness and caregiving are fundamental aspects of workers’ lives, the CARES Act also demonstrated the possibility of enacting national paid sick leave and paid family and medical leave. 5 If incorporated into future policies and programs, these components would improve the quality of working-class jobs by helping to ensure that workers in working-class jobs have access to benefits already available to more advantaged workers, such as paid sick days and UI, and to future initiatives to support caregiving through accessible child care and paid medical and family leave (Chang, Romich, and Ybarra, this volume).
Employment Regulation and Job Quality
One avenue for improving jobs directly is to require employers to meet minimum standards for basic employment conditions, not only for wages but also for work hours and benefits. Laws regulating employment are full of exemptions for employers and minimally enforced by government, leading scholars to classify the U.S. employment system as a regime of unilateral employer control (Berg, Bosch, and Charest 2014). The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the primary federal law intended to set standards for wages and hours, targeted problematic job conditions rampant at the turn of the twentieth century: child labor, long hours, and low wages. Its core provisions—minimum wage, overtime premium, restrictions on child labor, and recordkeeping—and their enforcement are needed as much today as in the past (Bernhardt, Spiller, and Theodore 2013; Weil 2014). But even if the FLSA were perfectly implemented by employers, it would still fall short of delivering universal standards of job quality. From the beginning, alternative work arrangements have been excluded from FLSA protections, and employers are allowed to pay some groups of workers—those with tipped income, teens, and workers with a disability—a subminimum wage, regardless of job performance. Some occupations that are disproportionately filled by workers of color are excluded from minimum wage and overtime protections altogether, notably farm workers. Voluntary employer efforts to improve the quality of jobs have also fallen short of ensuring universal standards of job quality (Lambert 2014).
A growing cadre of policy analysts, scholars, and labor activists are calling for strengthened federal standards on wages and hours, the incorporation of strategic enforcement into the FLSA, and new standards for previously unregulated conditions of employment, such as paid leave (Fortman 2014; Fine et al. 2020). Recent policy innovations, occurring in progressive urban centers as part of a renewed federalism, are being looked to as models for federal efforts. These municipal and state regulations target a host of employer practices including employee scheduling (Fair Workweek Laws), hiring (Ban-the-Box), wage rates (the Fight for $15 and a Union), and paid leave (Earned Sick Time and Paid Medical and Family Leave). Assessing the promise of recent policies to set standards that raise the floor on job quality requires consideration of how business and labor interests are balanced in policy provisions.
The absence of standards on work hours in the FLSA may help to explain why there was not noticeable improvement in scheduling practices during the post–Great Recession recovery. The FLSA does not require employers to provide employees with even a single hour of work or with a schedule of their work hours even one day in advance. Since 2014, five major cities—San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago—have enacted scheduling legislation that incorporates provisions primarily intended to increase schedule predictability, including two weeks’ advance schedule notice and a “predictability premium” (commonly one extra hour of pay) for employer-driven schedule changes (Lambert 2020). As with the FLSA, however, these “fair workweek” ordinances continue to protect labor flexibility for employers. Employers are neither required to guarantee workers minimum hours nor restricted from changing employees’ work schedules. When employers add hours or cancel shifts, they are required to pay a bit more. The laws are also typically limited to large corporations in retail and food services, leaving many marginalized workers outside their protection. 6 Workers in nonstandard arrangements are excluded from coverage under all current ordinances. Moreover, in response to progressive movements in some municipalities, businesses are wielding power through state law, as evidenced by passage of preemption laws that preclude municipalities from enacting fair workweek legislation or raising the minimum wage beyond the state’s minimum.
Our critique is not intended to fault fair workweek efforts or other local initiatives to regulate employer practices; indeed, our research has helped to inform them. Rather, our goal is to prompt reflection on how state- and municipal-level policy initiatives such as scheduling ordinances are incorporating employer interests in ways that may not sufficiently rebalance power toward workers, limiting the potential of the laws to improve the quality of working-class jobs even during a period of economic expansion.
Another way fair workweek laws may fall short of improving the quality of working-class jobs is if employers choose to respond by reducing hours or eliminating jobs. Given that corporations set labor budgets according to business considerations and not the number of workers on the payroll, increased outlays for labor could mean tighter labor budgets for frontline managers and, thus, fewer hours for workers (Lambert and Henly 2012).
Space constraints prevent a full review of emerging evidence on the effects of fair workweek laws; and scheduling ordinances are sufficiently recent that their impacts are mostly unknown. Still, there is some reason for optimism. A recent evaluation of Seattle’s Secure Scheduling Ordinance (SSO) conducted two years after its enactment shows modest improvements in workers’ reports of schedule predictability, as well as improved job satisfaction, overall well-being, and financial hardship (Harknett, Schneider, and Irwin 2021)—although implementation has been uneven across both worksites and provisions in the law (Lambert and Haley 2019). Evidence also suggests that business and worker interests may not be at odds when employers adopt scheduling practices that deliver greater predictability and control: a randomized experiment at the U.S. retailer Gap, Inc. that improved scheduling practices for hourly associates also increased store sales and labor productivity (Kesavan et al. 2020).
Worker Organizing and Job Quality
Workers, sometimes through unions, have the collective ability to constrain or resist employer strategies and reshape firm response to market pressure. Equally important, workers collectively shape the public policy debate around job quality. As such, workers are not simply the subjects of employer practices; they contribute to changing them and improving job quality.
If organized workers are guardians of labor standards, it is no wonder that we have serious issues with job quality. Throughout the 1970s, one in four U.S. workers were covered by union contracts. Since then, unionization rates have fallen steadily, and unions now cover just 11.7 percent of the workforce (Shierholz 2020). Unlike the Great Depression, which expanded the reach of labor unions, the Great Recession did not reverse or even forestall unions’ downward trajectory for the working class (see Nunn and Hunt, this volume). Indeed, the Great Recession may have ushered in a period of de-unionization in the public sector (Milkman and Luce 2017).
Still, unions remain important for the 16 million workers they represent and for working people more broadly. Union members earn better wages and nonwage compensation (Buchmueller, DiNardo, and Valletta 2004; Farber et al. 2018), with wages 11.2 percent higher than their nonunion counterparts; and, importantly, unions close gender and race wage gaps (McNicholas et al. 2020). Unions can also help nonunion workers, especially when union density is high in a sector and wage standards are established by union standards (McNicholas et al. 2020). Finally, unions support economic policies that help working people. As unions decline, their capacity to improve workers’ wages and benefits, raise floors in specific sectors, and strengthen policy for working people falls.
The decline of unions is itself in part a product of public policy and reflects employers’ use of power to pursue business interests by limiting workers’ collective power. The proliferation of state “right to work” laws, the undermining of public sector unions through privatization of public jobs, and the restructuring of the terms of public unionization through policy and the courts make union organizing more difficult and union representation less meaningful.
Still, new forms of organizing have grown during the post–Great Recession recovery. The Fight for $15 has changed the national conversation on the minimum wage and lifted the wages of 22 million workers (Lathrop 2018). 7 In 2012, fast food workers went on strike in New York City for “$15 and a union.” Over time, the movement increasingly focused on raising the minimum wage through legislation rather than bargaining. Florida became the eighth state to adopt moving toward a $15 minimum hourly wage in November 2020 (joining California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and New York). The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has supported this campaign, although the mobilization tactic of one-day strikes and strong social media presence are not traditional labor union organizing (Milkman and Luce 2017). Employers (some moving voluntarily to $15 in response to the movement), policy-makers, and researchers have followed (and often resisted) the movement, not created it. Despite low union density, worker organizing and mobilization transformed the minimum wage discourse.
Worker organizing strategies continue to evolve beyond the minimum wage, carried out by traditional unions, workers centers, and occupationally based national organizing networks (Milkman and Luce 2017). The National Domestic Workers Alliance, having passed a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in nine states, provides more evidence of the reach and impact of these campaigns to affect public policy (Fisk 2020). Work stoppages surged in 2018 to 2019 to a 35-year high (Shierholz and Poydock 2020), offering more evidence of ongoing organizing inside and outside of traditional unions. Teachers walked out of classrooms in West Virginia for nine days to protest the underfunding of state public education, successfully securing a raise and sparking a movement of teachers across the nation. In cities, teachers struck over public funding, and won “common good” demands for smaller classes and increased nurses and counselors (Blanc 2019). This work is especially notable as it focuses attention on the problem of job quality in the public sector. The teachers who walked out of their classrooms (some unionized and others without unions) bypassed school boards and took their campaign directly to the statehouses that set public education funding levels.
The pandemic has made organizing harder even as it has revealed how important collective voice is for protecting workers. Union workers have had a voice in navigating the pandemic, securing paid sick time, premium pay, and protective gear; and negotiating the terms of furlough (McNicholas et al. 2020). Yet the weak infrastructure for low-wage workers and the lack of union representation leave many workers without a seat at the table to help design workplace processes, procedures, and policies to stay safe.
Federal policy could give workers more power to bargain collectively to improve job quality, provide workers freedom to organize unions without employer interference, extend these organizing and bargaining rights to more workers, and ensure that employers face penalties when violating worker rights. These are aspects of proposed legislation, the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, which would help to rebalance power as workers seek to gain a collective voice. Investing in stronger enforcement of labor standards, limiting employers’ use of noncompete agreements to very limited situations and ensuring that immigrant workers have full rights and protection are additional steps to help empower workers (Shierholz 2018; Nunn and Hunt, this volume).
Employer practices are set in a context. The relentless public and private assaults on unions leave workers with weaker institutions to advance their interests in private employment, in public services, and more broadly in public policy. Even so, workers continue organizing to improve jobs and strengthen wage floors, for the right to protective equipment and safe jobs, for public funding for schools and social services. If there is interest in making employer practices work for working people, policies that support worker organizing and power must be part of the job quality agenda.
Footnotes
Notes
Julia R. Henly is a professor at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. Her research examines the economic and caregiving strategies of low-income families, precarious employment, and child care and other work-family policies.
Susan J. Lambert is a professor at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice. Her research examines how employer practices shape job quality, worker well-being, and inequality in society.
Laura Dresser is associate director of COWS and a clinical assistant professor in the Rosenbaum School of Social Work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research and practice focus on low-wage work, workforce development systems, and ways to build stronger labor market systems.