Men as Suspicious Day Care Teachers and Moms-in-Chief

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September 22, 2012
Panel - Men and Childcare
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By Barbara J. Risman, Professor and Head, Department of Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago

There is no debate about the remarkable lack of men as child care workers.  This occurrence of apparent gender stereotypes driving one man away from the profession illustrates some core issues in the continuing saga of a somewhat stalled gender revolution.   Another illustration of the state of current gender politics is a Stanford educated lawyer, once her husband’s mentor in a law firm, describing herself as the mom-in-chief.

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“Mr. Mom”? Why Not Just, “Dad”?

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September 22, 2012
Commentary, Panel - Men and Childcare
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Like Lata Murti, I, too, have been thinking, teaching, and writing about men and women at work for a long time, and my initial reaction to her story is one of regret for Adam.  Nearly simultaneously, though, I think about my own daughter and what my spouse and I expect of the people who care for her.  When I look back at the history of her baby-sitters, the majority of them (all but one) were women.  And when I’m honest with myself, I’m not sure I can dismiss the possibility that each of those independent decisions was gendered in some way.

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Party Platforms, God, and Work

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September 12, 2012
Commentary, Election 2012
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Religion is not territory we’ve covered in any real detail here on our blog. The Democratic Party Platform, however, has raised an interesting intersection between work and religion that deserves some attention. Last week, the Democratic Party opted to alter the language of its 2012 Party Platform to remove the word “God” (though they have since reinstated the language). This created an immediate stir among Democrats and Republicans, and elicited an highly critical response from Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney (his comments on the removal of “God” are at the beginning of the video). What this debate reveals is the particular way in which the Democratic platform describes, in the same breath, individual labor, and religion.

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The squeeze on middle-aged women: a new pattern to lookism?

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September 7, 2012
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With battles won over sex and race discrimination in the past, and more recently over disability and sexual preference, it may be that lookism becomes the next frontier in the battle against employment discrimination. Studies on both sides of the Atlantic have revealed both a beauty premium and a beauty penalty. Workers perceived to be better looking are more likely to be hired, to turn in better workplace performances, receive better pay and have better career prospects. Conversely those workers perceived to be average or worse looking receive less pay, are regarded as poorer performers, have more stunted careers and are more likely to lose their jobs.

Over the past few months, British media types have been convulsed in a debate about lookism. It started when a columnist in the Daily Mail newspaper, Quentin Letts, commented derogatively on the looks of a 60 year old female government minister. She was, Letts admitted, good looking for her age but because of the glop that she slapped onto her face at night.

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Are you better off than you were forty years ago?

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September 5, 2012
Commentary, Election 2012
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An emerging critique of U.S. President Barak Obama’s record is the idea that Americans are not better off than they were four years ago. A quick caveat – it seems that Republicans are speaking primarily to “average”, i.e. middle class, Americans here. Paul Ryan, the Republican nominee for the Vice Presidency, has forcefully adopted this critique of Obama, suggesting that his record should be judged based on whether  Obama’s policies have improved the lives of Americans. In a campaign stop on September 3rd, Ryan went as far as to suggest that Jimmy Carter’s Presidency, much derided by the right, seems like the “good ‘ole days” compared to Obama’s:


This reference is more than just a slant at President Carter. It is a reference to then candidate Reagan’s campaign against Carter in 1980, when he famously asked Americans whether they were better off or not than they were when Carter began his term.


What these arguments miss, however, are the fundamental changes these so-called “average” Americans have experienced over a much longer period.

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Welcome to a new regular contributor — Chris Warhurst

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August 3, 2012
Announcements
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The OOW team is delighted to welcome a new regular contributor, Chris Warhurst, Professor of Work and Organizational Studies at the University of Sydney in Australia.

Chris is going to write a monthly column, focused mostly on the issue of “aesthetic labor,” which refers to how employers attempt to mobilize, develop and commodify the looks, dress and style of workers. For more on this concept, see Chris’s overview here and an empirical study of his here.

But also keep an eye tuned here for Chris’s posts, which are sure to be insightful! His first post, soon to be up, discusses sociological evidence showing a beauty premium and a beauty penalty in employment – better looking people get paid more (and have more opportunities), while average or worse looking people fare worse in the labor market.

Ginsburg’s Reshaping of Sex Discrimination and What it Means for You

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July 19, 2012
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Did you know that know that employment decisions based on the assumption that men are breadwinners can be just as illegal as those that assume women are caregivers?  That penalties men experience as a caregiver can be illegal under Title VII?  If you’ve ever wondered what gave rise to men’s legal right to provide family caregiving and how was written—and subsequently unwritten—into law , read law professor Stephanie Bornstein’s recent publication.

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Farewell to Work?

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July 9, 2012
Commentary
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It’s an old debate, actually –think back to the 1950s, when a burgeoning literature emerged on the employment effect of automation. Or, think about fictitious portrayals such as Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, which provided a dystopian image of a corporate-dominated society in which paid employment was virtually obsolete. More recently, we’ve seen books by such well-known scholars as Stanley Aronowitz, Jeremy Rifkin, Andre Gorz, and Ulrich Beck, among others, all adopting the Cassandra-like cry: Bid Farewell to Work!

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Creative Workers or Servants? Apple’s American Workforce and the Service Economy

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June 29, 2012
Commentary, News Analysis
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The New York Times recently published an in-depth article on “Apple’s Retail Army, Long on Loyalty but Short on Pay,” as part of its excellent series on “The iEconomy.” The new article notes that the majority of Apple’s US workforce (30,000 of its 43,000 domestic employees) are not engineers – part of the hailed “creative class” typically associated with the likes of Apple – but hourly retail sales employees.

Last year, the article reports, “each Apple store employee — that includes non-sales staff like technicians and people stocking shelves — brought in $473,000.” Yet, many of these employees are paid just $25,000 per year.

The most common definition of low-wage work used in international comparative research is two thirds of the median income. In the US, the median income in 2011 was $34,460. This puts the typical Apple store employee at 73% of the median, making employment in an Apple store effectively a low-wage job.

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