The Gig-ification of Retail and Service Work

Existing literature on work in the gig economy focuses almost exclusively on the experience of work within a rather narrow set of ‘platform firms.’ This article explores how the proliferation of platform and gig work has impacted employment for non-platform employees. I conduct a case study of two grocery companies in California, interviewing informants such as workers, union representatives, and industry experts and analyzing company filings and industry publications. I find that, across different firms, platform technologies are being used to transform the employment relations, labor process, and business model of grocery businesses in ways that continue their historic strategies to casualize labor. My findings suggest that platform technology is being used to casualize labor and improve productivity in ways that extend beyond gig firms to impact the entire service sector, providing insight into coming moves to ‘gig-ify’ work. This paper is currently under review.

The Changing Climate for Union Organizing

Although a majority of American workers support unions, union density numbers remain at a historic low. In this project, sponsored by Work Rise, Kate Bronfenbrenner, Suresh Naidu, Anders Rhodin, Victor Yengle, and I update Bronfenbrenner’s work (in Changing to Organize, Blueprint for Change, and No Holds Barred) to examine union organizing and employer opposition between 2016 and 2021. We design and distribute a survey to the lead organizers of a random sample of 297 NLRB representation election cases in bargaining units of over 50 workers. We ask about company characteristics, campaign types, employer tactics, union tactics, and worker and organizer demographics. We find that unions have been shifting to softer targets, moving away from mobile industries, which has changed the way that employer opposition looks. Preliminary results from this research have been presented at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth conference in September 2022, in front of the U.S. House of Representatives Labor Committee in November 2022, and at the Worker Empowerment Research Network (WERN) Conference at MIT in December 2022. An academic paper containing the full findings is forthcoming.

Racial Capitalism and Protests

This paper received the ASA Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements’ Mayer N. Zald Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Student Paper Award.

The Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s murder during the summer of 2020 demonstrated an unprecedented scale of mobilization against police violence. What made the response to this killing larger than past incidents of police brutality? In this paper, Hannah Pullen-Blasnik and I explore how the rapid and severe economic recession created by the COVID-19 pandemic related to protest participation. We collect data on protest attendance and sudden employment loss in 491 commuting zones in the United States and find that employment loss is positively and significantly associated with greater rates of BLM protest attendance. This relationship is not observed for other protests during the pandemic, indicating a specific relationship between police brutality and economic shock. These findings expand the social movement literature on how political and economic systems interact, contextualizing police violence as one dimension of a broader systemic failure of racial capitalism. This paper is currently under review.

Underemployment and Part Time Work

A tight labor market doesn’t mean a good one. My dissertation research examines the increase in involuntary part time work: when people have jobs but not enough hours at those jobs and often have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. I use data from a variety of public sources such as the US Census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) to examine changes in involuntary part time work over the years. I explore what purpose these jobs serve and what they can tell us about the US economy and capitalism in general.

Unions and Political Education

Can unions impact the political and social attitudes of members and increase civic participation? Using a mixed methods approach, Adam Reich, Rachel Sherman, Suresh Naidu and I examine the impact of one union’s political education program. Through interviews and data analysis, we hope to understand if and how unions can shape the political attitudes and actions of members.