A few days ago, the top story on Huffington Post was an article titled “Women’s Jobs Axed by State Austerity Politics.” The piece argued that as public sector jobs are decreasing, women are disproportionately the ones losing work as many of the jobs that are affected by budget cuts—teaching, providing child care—are those that are typically filled by women. Inasmuch as jobs tend to be sex segregated, the female dominated jobs in the private sector that women tend to occupy (administrative services, secretarial work) are not in high demand, leaving women in a position where the sort of jobs in which they tend to be concentrated are declining or even disappearing.

The Soul of the University: When Outsourcing Hits Home

By Steven Vallas

April 13, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis

2 Comments

National Labor Relations Board officials count votes at Northeastern University
April 12, 2012
Author’s Photo

There is by now a sprawling literature on the spread of precarious employment. Arne Kalleberg’s important new book on this topic, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, is a case in point. Guy Standing’s book, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, is another. A few years ago, the harsher side of this phenomenon was documented by Annette Bernhardt and her colleagues, in The Gloves Off Economy, on the growing willingness of employers to violate even the basics of employment law.

But we academics often seem to assume that bad jobs exist largely outside our own institutions. So it’s worth asking: How are the terms and conditions of employment changing at our home institutions? How are the workers who support our universities faring in the current economy? What is work like for employees performing functions that have been outsourced by our universities? And what opportunities exist that might help workers reshape the terms and conditions of employment they currently face? In other words, what do we do when outsourcing hits home?

Internet Privacy and the Workplace

By Chris Prener

March 14, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis, Panel - Facebook

1 Comment

We’ve been posting quite a bit on Facebook here in recent weeks, and I wanted to pass on a pair of new stories that have recently been posted on MSNBC’s website. Each are quite troubling and deserve our attention as digital citizens and as sociologists.The first article, which was published last week, describes how employers (including a police department) and colleges have been demanding “behind the scenes” access to Facebook accounts as part of their “background” checks of employees and/or students. The second article, published just yesterday, describes how a middle school student was forced, with police in the room, to turn over her Facebook password to her school principal. What is most troubling is that this is done, in all cases, to gain access to “private” messages that are not publicly available to viewers of an individual’s page on Facebook.

Each of these stories represent our society’s struggle over how to cope with the brave new world of social media. Facebook has become just the latest venue to criticize the boss or principal (though nothing beats a resignation letter posted on the New York Times’ opinion page). Unlike the water cooler or the local coffee shop, however, the digital footprints left behind on Facebook provide physical evidence of an employee’s displeasure. We lack a cohesive set of legal protections in the United States from this sort of behavior by management (be it the boss or the principal), though such intrusions do violate Facebook’s terms of service.

Until such protections are enacted, some are advising their students and colleagues to take their more sensitive discussions underground. We should all consider strongly the ramifications of our tweets, Facebook status updates, and blog posts for that job down the road or the one we’ve got. This much perhaps goes without saying. Yet we also need to consider as a society how to protect this speech and ensure that speech that occurs out of the public eye using social media can stay that way.

Where’s the Boss? Lunching with Spouse, Doing Pilates, Getting a Haircut and, of course, at a Meeting

By Julie Kmec

March 2, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis

1 Comment

Last week the WSJ printed an article describing how CEOs around the world spend their time. The article drew on data from a larger study, the Executive Time Use Project , and relied on reports of time use by CEO’s personal assistants. The article indicates that assistants only tracked activities that lasted over 10 minutes in a single week selected by researchers. That assistants, rather than the CEOs themselves, were keeping track of time use leads me to believe the reports are relatively accurate. After all, the assistant probably does most of the scheduling of a CEOs day and CEOs are likely too busy to track data time or to agree to record their time use.

Facebook, Labor, and the Possible Perils of Social Media

By Chris Prener

February 22, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis, Panel - Facebook

4 Comments

UPDATED 2/23/12 @ 2:30pm EST – Additional Follow-up Post @ Cyberology Published

We’ve all seen the potential for social media platforms to take part in some of the most important social movements of the last year. From Twitter’s use in Tunisia, Egypt and other Arab countries to the widespread use of social media during the worldwide Occupy protests, we’ve seen how social media can bring us together and bring down governments. More recently in Syria, we’ve seen how YouTube can emerge as the sole source of information on the ground in areas where the world’s traditional media may be unable to reach.

Last week, in the wake of Facebook’s decision to “go public”, I wrote a post about Facebook and the potential for the exploitation of its members. After some discussion among the editorial team, we decided to reach out to some of our colleagues for whom social media is a true intellectual passion. We’ve been able to put together a small panel on Facebook and the possibility for labor exploitation that seeks to address the ways in which all members of Facebook help to contribute to Facebook’s monetary value.

While we’re not “anti” Facebook – indeed, we at OOWBlog have our own Facebook page – we think the decision to “go public” by Facebook provides an ideal moment to reflect on the changing nature of business, labor, and leisure in the 21st century.

To that end, please check out my lead post as well as a response by the University of Maryland’s PJ Rey and two scholars are the University of Essex, Christopher Land and Steffen Böehm. We hope you enjoy them!

Update – 2/23/12 @ 2:30pm EST – PJ has also posted a great follow-up piece over at Cyberology where he blogs regularly. He makes some great points and I urge you all to check it out.

Is Facebook “Using” Its Members?

By Chris Prener

February 22, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis, Panel - Facebook

9 Comments

Facebook’s decision to file for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) with the Securities and Exchange Commission has made headlines and will likely be the most notable tech IPO since Google went public in 2004. Not everyone is rushing to “like” Facebook’s decision to make an IPO, however. The New York Times published an op-ed entitled “Facebook is Using You”, which criticized Facebook’s business plan and argued that the implications of an individual’s online activity extend far beyond the potential for embarrassing photos to surface. In sociological terms, there seems to be an argument surfacing that Facebook is exploiting the labor power of its users. If this is indeed so, Facebook may represent a new frontier for work and labor where even leisure activity can be exploited for the generation of profit.

ZD Net’s Emril Protalinski, who blogs about Facebook for the twenty year old tech site, responded to the Time’s piece and decried the position that Facebook somehow owed its users. Protalinski’s argument rests on the idea that becoming a Facebook member is a voluntary act. Users who enter into this relationship with Facebook receive a service that is free because Facebook can cover its operating costs through advertising revenue.

Follow-up to Jobs Post

By Chris Prener

February 12, 2012

News Analysis

1 Comment

A few days ago, I wrote about the ways in which the unemployment rate ‘hides’ the reality of unemployment. Yesterday, the Associated Press put out a story about long term unemployment that captures some of the daily struggles of several individuals who have been without work for some time. It was picked up by quite a few major newspapers, including the Washington Post. If you have not already seen the article, I highly encourage you to check it out.

Good News for American Jobs? The Devil is in the Details

By Chris Prener

February 9, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis

3 Comments

Last week saw the release of monthly employment data by the Labor Department. At face value, the overall news was good – the unemployment rate in the United States, at approximately 8.6%, is at its lowest projected level in years. However, as a recent op-ed in The Economist noted, the state of the union remains dire. Much of the malaise can be felt within the ostensibly improving American job market, where in spite of some good news there are plenty of reasons to remain cautious.

Not Working It: Race and Gender Stereotypes in Entertainment Media

By Adia Harvey Wingfield

January 24, 2012

Commentary, News Analysis

Declining public sector jobs, black workers and the racial gap

By matt vidal

December 5, 2011

Commentary, News Analysis

2 Comments

A recent New York Times article reports on how the long downturn of the US economy has hit the public sector hard, which, in turn, has been devastating for the black middle class. The article notes that black workers are about one third more likely than whites to be employed in the public sector. Blacks have historically been more able to find work in the public sector, as they faced more discrimination in the private sector. Overall, unemployment rates for blacks have consistently been about twice that for whites, with the black unemployment rate peaking at 16.7% last summer.

The article provides important reporting, but it is unfortunate that it only cites economists and does not address sociological contributions to understanding racial discrimination in labor markets. It notes that economists explain the persistent racial gap in terms of lower educational levels for blacks (the standard human capital refrain), along with continuing discrimination.