Abstract
Consuming Work: Youth Labor in America is a book of uncommon breadth. The book is divided into six substantive chapters and examines a range of considerations relating to the subject of youth work. Taking what labor scholars typically regard as the quintessentially “bad jobs” as subject matter, Besen-Cassino explores a number of questions: What does the contemporary landscape of youth labor look like? Which youth are most likely to work and in what jobs? What are their motivations for employment? What sort of meaning do youth assign to work?
Besen-Cassino covers tremendous ground, utilizing a range of materials for analysis including ethnographic, in-depth interview and survey data on youth workers between the ages of 16 and 21. Consuming Work also makes productive use of two large data sets (The National Longitudinal Study of Youth and World Values Study) to compare youth employment in the United States to other industrialized countries and to better clarify how class, race, and gender specifically pattern youth employment. The take-away is greater breadth of understanding of the complex field of youth employment and a deeper appreciation of the meaning and purpose with which American youth who do work, work. In this sense, this book establishes the groundwork for successive studies that could take any one of the topical chapters and explore them more fully.
To start, Consuming Work demonstrates how profoundly meaningful race, class, and gender are to understanding the youth labor market. Besen-Cassino identifies two types of youth employment: student employment and nonstudent employment, depicting a wide gulf between them. Student employment is largely an American phenomenon, with upper-income youth representing the largest percentage of youth in the United States who are employed. Interview and ethnographic material cast light on the class logics shaping middle-class youths’ orientation to work and the relative advantage they encounter in hiring. These youth sort jobs into a value scale within the secondary labor market. They distinguish between low-status fast-food work and the coveted jobs they claim at retail chains like Starbucks, Abercrombie, and Hollister, which carry high status and significant brand recognition within American youth cultures. Class provides distinct advantage in the more desired service jobs, which upper-income youth monopolize, since these both depend on and reward aesthetic labor, a type of labor homologous to a set of upper-middle-class dispositions and resources. In contrast, low-income kids, with neither the right zip code nor the aesthetic resources readily available to upper-income kids, are essentially barred from the labor market, a situation made all the more dire in the economic downturn of 2008. Besen-Cassino shows how low-income youths’ exclusion from even the most menial, low-status jobs helps to explain why “the poor get poorer” (p. 69). This is part of a larger puzzle Besen-Cassino pieces together across several chapters regarding how race and income pattern youth unemployment rates; interestingly, employment rates, not wages, explain racial inequality in the youth labor market. Chapter 7 tackles questions of gender, demonstrating that gender wage inequality begins in the youth labor market, thus shattering the so-called “gender utopia of youth work” (p. 128).
A second set of questions guiding Besen-Cassino’s inquiry examine why youth work, and challenges the prevailing assumption that economic need determines youth labor patterns. Quite the contrary, Besen-Cassino found that upper-income kids, those most likely to be employed, largely sought employment for social reasons, not economic ones. Instead, these youth crowd out employment positions for youth whose primary needs are economic.
Besen-Cassino argues that to understand work, we must also understand youths’ relationship to school as she charts the declining confidence youth find in school. While confidence in school as a concept was not always clearly defined, a clear picture does emerge from the data: Universities and colleges are failing to provide the sense of community and cohesion young adults long for. Instead, work provides opportunities to forge social bonds, expand youths’ network of friends, and meet new people. Work is sought for social ends, which is all the more meaningful Besen-Cassino argues in the “centerless suburbs” bereft of opportunities for social connection. For this class of workers, identity needs take precedence. All of this helps to explain why work is prioritized over family and school. Here, we gain a deeper appreciation of the ever-shifting and blurring boundaries of work and leisure, consumption and production.
For my own preference, I would have liked greater explication of economically inactive youth, the work experience of low-income youth, and some exploration of the role of adult immigrant labor in eclipsing work prospects for low-income youth in service work. There was significant enough repetition of themes across the chapters that it’s worth noting. These points aside, we are left with a deeper appreciation of the role meaning plays in structuring youth labor, how inequalities in work are reproduced, and the shifting terrain of youths’ social worlds.
Footnotes
(This review was commissioned and edited by the previous Book Review Editor, Denise Copelton.)