by Frederik Thuesen

Words matter crucially to the formation of social relations, particularly in ethnically diverse low-skill workplaces, where native-born workers encounter ethnic minority immigrant workers who may not be fluent in the host country language. Since many of these immigrant workers gain a foothold in the labor market in low-skill workplaces, linguistic barriers in these workplaces often have a profound impact on social relations.

Not surprisingly, many western workplaces—especially low-skill ones—are increasingly becoming ethnically and linguistically diverse from both immigration and the arrival of asylum-seekers from countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

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by Jennifer Glass

Much has been written recently about the growing earnings premium for workers willing to work long hours, creating a new dimension on which (mostly male) professionals without care responsibilities can distinguish themselves and hoard positions of power and authority within organizations. These findings should be of serious concern to scholars of inequality, as well as those studying new forms of work organization or the persistence of gender stratification in the workplace.

One primary way for groups to hoard resources, of course, is to “move the goalposts” as disadvantaged groups gain leverage in high wage sectors of the economy. The history of racial exclusion is full of such attempts to increase qualifications or transform them so that racial preferences can be kept intact. Long work hours serve the same purpose in excluding workers with family responsibilities and their associated costs (lower availability, greater need for flexibility, etc.) from positions of power and authority.

But recently, my colleague Mary Noonan and I examined the issue in a different way by looking longitudinally within the careers of individuals who are salaried workers to find the premium for overtime work.

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by Ellis P. Monk, Jr.

This seemingly simple, yet deceptively complex question is at the heart of burgeoning research on the ‘multidimensionality’ of race.  This research attempts to answer this opening question by considering a range of different measures of “race” as a concept – but what are these different dimensions?  And what dimensions seem to matter most when we measure social inequality?

In the United States, for example, many people associate race with ancestry.  This makes sense given the historical legacies of antiquated, purportedly “scientific” theories of race and the persistence of the ‘one-drop rule.’  Following this rule, individuals with ‘any known trace’ of African ancestry are to be classified as black.  Over the course of a few centuries this rule eventually was embraced by whites and non-whites alike resulting in the common folk notion of race that has been dominant in the U.S. for decades.

While it is clear that the population of ‘mixed-race’ individuals has grown tremendously in the United States, recent estimates show that less than 3% of the U.S. population identifies as ‘one or more race.’  Just think of President Barack Obama, whose “mixed” ancestry is well-known, but openly identifies as ‘black’ and, notably, does so on the U.S. census too.

The fact remains that most individuals with African ancestry simply view themselves as black and are viewed by the majority of the people they encounter in their daily lives simply as black.

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by Janette Dill

The shift from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy – sometimes referred to as The New Economy – has been very difficult for low- and middle-skill men, or men without a four-year college degree. Their wages have stagnated or declined, and job availability in many traditional male-dominated occupations, such as manufacturing and production, has decreased. Given this context, there is some evidence that more men are moving into care work occupations, or work that contributes to the physical, mental, social, and/or emotional well-being of others and whose primary labor process involves face-to-face relationships with those for whom they care. But how do low- and middle-skill men fare when they enter care work occupations?

It is well documented that occupations that involve paid care work such as child and health care, are valued less; care workers earn lower wages compared to other workers when we take into account other work-related factors, such as education and work experience.

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by Kyung Joon Han and Eric Graig Castater

There has been a longstanding consensus in the labor politics literature that countries and time periods with higher union density (the proportion of workers that belong to a union), union coverage (the proportion of workers covered by a union bargained contract, regardless of whether they are union members), and/or wage bargaining level (the level at which unions and employers bargain over wages, ranging from the firm to the national level, with the latter signifying a “higher” level of wage bargaining) are associated with lower levels of wage inequality.

Indeed, much of this scholarship has found that such “union presence” variables help explain a substantial portion of the cross-national and over-time variation in wage inequality in the wealthy democracies. However, recent evidence indicates that such a union effect on wage inequality disappeared during the 1990s due to the decentralization of bargaining structure as well as the decline of union density and union coverage.

In short, unions are only able to reduce wage inequality when they have substantial organizational strength.

In an article recently published in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, we examine whether unions still have an effect on wage inequality, but do so by focusing on what we term the capital and skill mechanisms, the primary means by which unions reduce wage inequality.

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by Paula McDonald, Paul Thompson and Peter O’Connor

A new study has revealed that 27% of employees have witnessed their employer using online information to ‘profile’ job applicants. Approximately 55% of organisations now have a policy outlining how profiling can and should be used as an organisational strategy.

Despite its increased practice however, most employees are not comfortable with being profiled. Over 60% believe they have a right to a private online identity that should not be accessed by employers. But only 40% of those surveyed reported they manage their social media activities with their current employer in mind.

What is profiling?

Most of us have probably ‘googled’ someone to find information about them. Perhaps we searched for information on a potential flatmate, a new colleague, or even a new boss. With the aid of an internet search engine, we can easily learn important details about people (e.g., their appearance, lifestyle choices, professional affiliations) before we meet them. Perhaps more controversially, employers can learn whether they seem like the ‘right’ kind of person to hire? This is known as profiling: the collection of online information for the purpose of monitoring and evaluating current and future employees.

The practice of profiling is not without controversy, with recent commentaries questioning the legitimacy of the practice. In particular, although personal information is publicly available, some have objected to its use based on employees’ rights to a private identity. In other words, there is some question as to whether profiling employees is a legitimate practice or whether it oversteps the boundaries of privacy.

To investigate this question from the perspective of employees, we conducted a survey study of 2000 employees across a range of occupational groups in Australia and the UK. We used this sample to determine the extent of profiling, the outcomes of profiling and the attitudes of employees towards profiling. We also looked at whether profiling depended on industry and profession and how often organisations defined the parameters of profiling in their policies.

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by David S. Pedulla

Most of us have family members, friends, or acquaintances that have experienced unemployment. It can be a brutal experience, economically, socially, and psychologically. A large body of academic research backs this up. There are far-reaching consequences of being unemployed. These effects span many domains of life, from health, to family dynamics, to psychological wellbeing. There is also evidence that unemployment can lead to lower earnings down the road.

Following on this line of research, a recent body of scholarship has asked whether there is also a direct effect of unemployment on being able to get a new job. In other words, do employers screen out job applicants who are unemployed in favor those who are currently working?

In general, the answer appears to be “yes.”

To investigate this issue, separate teams of researchers in the United States and Sweden sent fake job applications to apply for real job openings and randomly assigned some of those job applications an employment gap: a spell of unemployment. The studies found that employers tended to pass over the unemployed applicants in favor of applicants who were employed. The effects were strongest for longer-term unemployment (rather than short periods without a job) and current spells of unemployment (rather than unemployment in the past).

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by Alexandra Killewald

Through the second half of the 20^th century, American women participated in the labor force at increasing rates. Divorce rates also rose rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s, raising concerns that the trends were related: perhaps marriages became less stable because women were no longer dependent on men for their financial well-being.

But women’s economic independence from their husbands isn’t the only way that money, work, and divorce could be associated. Another possibility is that couples who have few financial resources are more likely to divorce, maybe because they argue more about how to spend those limited resources.

Yet another possibility is that divorce is more likely when spouses don’t fulfill what’s socially expected of husbands or wives. Those expectations might include that the husband is employed full-time or that the wife takes primary responsibility for housework. In this case, it isn’t money itself that affects the risk of divorce, but the work spouses do, both in the labor force and at home.

In a recently published study, I tested these theories and whether the predictors of divorce had changed over time for American couples. In particular, I wondered whether American couples had become more accepting of wives’ employment and of couples sharing responsibility for housework, so that these behaviors no longer increased the risk of divorce.

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