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Disenfranchised recounts the tumultuous events that have shaped and reshaped factory politics in China since the 1949 Revolution. The book develops a theoretical framework consisting of two dimensions—industrial citizenship and autonomy—to explain changing authority relations in workplaces and uses interviews with workers and managers to provide a shop-floor perspective. Under the work unit system, in place from the 1950s to the 1980s, lifetime job tenure and participatory institutions gave workers a strong form of industrial citizenship, but constraints on autonomous collective action made the system more paternalistic than democratic. Called “masters of the factory,” workers were pressed to participate actively in self-managing teams and employee congresses but only under the all-encompassing control of the factory party committee. Concerned that party cadres were becoming a “bureaucratic class,” Mao experimented with means to mobilize criticism from below, even inciting—during the Cultural Revolution—a worker insurgency that overthrew factory party committees. Unwilling to allow workers to establish permanent autonomous organizations, however, Mao never came up with institutionalized means of making factory leaders accountable to their subordinates. The final chapters recount the process of industrial restructuring, which has transformed work units into profit-oriented enterprises, eliminating industrial citizenship and reducing workers to hired hands dependent on precarious employment and subject to highly coercive discipline. The book closes with an overview of parallel developments around the globe, chronicling the rise and fall of an era of industrial citizenship.

This book describes a new life stage, encore adulthood, sandwiched between conventional adulthood—traditional careers and childrearing—and conventional old age. A time of varied paths in work, retirement, family care, or civic engagement, this stage is made possible by medical advances and lifestyle changes improving population health and longevity. The encore adult years occur around ages 55 to 75, as Boomers begin to think about second acts. Twenty-first-century life in North America and Europe is changing in remarkable ways—characterized by the book’s four key themes: First are similarities in changes at both ends of adulthood, emerging adulthood and encore adulthood. Both Millennials and Boomers are without scripts for what’s next. Second, these times of rapid social, economic, and technological changes enable people to experiment, opening up opportunities for some to fashion new ways of working and living. Third, opportunities for renewal and heightened risks are unequally distributed; education, class, gender, race, and age expand or narrow life chances and life quality. Fourth is the distinctly gendered life courses of women and men, with financial, physical, and emotional well-being implications. The book is divided into three sections, each representing one of three research, policy, and action agendas: first is recognizing institutional inertia, and the outdatedness of contemporary career, retirement and life-course templates. Second is supporting Boomers’ time-shifting improvisations, their alternative pathways. Third is institutional work, including social innovations in language, customs, and policies opening up varied and customized career, retirement, and life-course paths.

For decades, the idea that more education will lead to greater individual and national prosperity has been a cornerstone of developed economies. Indeed, it is almost universally believed that college diplomas give Americans and Europeans a competitive advantage in the global knowledge wars. Challenging this conventional wisdom, this book forces us to reconsider our deeply held and mistaken views about how the global economy really works and how to thrive in it. Drawing on cutting-edge research based on a major international study, the chapters show that the competition for good, middle-class jobs is now a worldwide competition—an auction for cut-priced brainpower—fueled by an explosion of higher education across the world. They highlight a fundamental power shift in favor of corporate bosses and emerging economies such as China and India, a change that is driving the new global high-skill, low-wage workforce. Fighting for a dwindling supply of good jobs will compel the middle classes to devote more time, money, and effort to set themselves apart in a bare-knuckle competition that will leave many disappointed. The chapters urges a new conversation about the kind of society we want to live in and about the kind of global economy that can benefit workers, but without condemning millions in emerging economies to a life of poverty. The book is a radical rethinking of the ideas that stand at the heart of the American Dream. It offers an expose of the realities of the global struggle for middle class jobs, a competition that threatens the livelihoods of millions of American and European workers and their families.

Heartland Blues provides a new perspective on union decline by revisiting the labor movement at its historical peak in the 1950s and analyzing campaigns over right-to-work laws and public-sector collective bargaining rights in the industrial Midwest. The focus on 1950s labor conflicts, including union failures, departs from popular and academic treatments of the period that emphasize consensus, an accord between capital and labor in collective bargaining, or the conservative drift and bureaucratization of the labor movement. The state campaigns examined in Heartland Blues instead reveal a labor movement often beset by dysfunctional divisions, ambivalent political allies, and substantial employer opposition. Drawing on social movement theories, the book shows how many of the key ingredients necessary for activist groups to succeed, including effective organization and influential political allies, were not a given for labor at its historical peak but instead varied in important ways across the industrial heartland. These limits slowed unions in the 1950s. Not only did labor fail to crack the Sunbelt, it never really conquered the industrial Midwest, where most union members resided in the mid-twentieth century. This diminished union influence within the Democratic Party and in society. The 1950s are far more than an interesting side story. Indeed, the labor movement never solved many of these basic problems. The labor movement’s social and political isolation and its limited responses to employer mobilization became a death knell in the coming decades as unions sought organizational and legislative remedies to industrial decline and the rising anti-union tide.

In 2004, the first United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government of India created a National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) to review the country’s informal economy in general and to improve the plight of poor workers in particular. The result was a series of reports highlighting the problems of the labouring poor with regards to livelihood security. Some of the Commission’s major findings are: 86 per cent of the total number of workers are in the informal sector, self-employment and casual labor are the most common forms of employment in India, and almost 80 per cent of the informal sector workers belong to households that are poor and vulnerable. The Indian government promptly enacted two major social security laws: the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) of 2005 and the Unorganized Workers Social Security Act (UWSSA) of 2008. This book examines the impact of NREGA and UWSSA at the national level, focusing on the social security schemes designed for workers in the informal economy. It reviews the implementation of NREGA and the national health insurance scheme known as Rashtriya Swasthaya Bima Yojana (RSBY), as well as the functioning of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and the Rajiv Aarogyasri Community Health Insurance Scheme in Andhra Pradesh. Aside from Andhra Pradesh, the book also presents case studies of the functioning of social security schemes in Kerala, Gujarat, Odisha, and Punjab.

Does the burgeoning Indian Information Technology (IT) sector represent a deviation from the historical arc of caste inequality or has it become yet another site of discrimination? Those who claim that the sector is caste-free believe that IT is an equal opportunity employer, and that the small Dalit footprint is due to the want of merit. But they fail to consider how caste inequality sneaks in by being layered on socially constructed ‘pure merit’, which favours upper castes and other privileged segments, but handicaps Dalits and other disadvantaged groups. In this book, Fernandez describes how the practice of pure and holistic merit are deeply embedded in the social, cultural, and economic privileges of the dominant castes and classes, and how caste filtering has led to the reproduction of caste hierarchies and consequently the small Dalit footprint in Indian IT.

This book is an attempt towards a fresh understanding of the political economy of women’s work in India and its relationship with the Indian state. The study critically analyses the concept and politics of work, worker, and women workers. The politics of the ‘social’, social welfare, and social policy is defined very close to how the public and the private are defined. There is an extension of the domestic into the public in the context of women workers in the social welfare schemes like the honorary workers. The study analyses the history and politics of work and women’s work in the Indian context through a case study of honorary workers in the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) scheme. The book examines how women figure in the state’s social welfare policies, making a link between the politics around women’s work and social welfare policies. It contributes towards a better understanding of the broader political framework constructed by the political economy of the state within which women’s work gets defined as honorary. The study examines the complexities around the weakening of social sector services with the withdrawal of state support under globalization coinciding with the need and demand for expansion of the horizon of state welfare schemes and programmes like the ICDS and its anganwadis. With more and more women especially from poor or lower-middle-class background employed in new social welfare schemes where the form of work is defined as voluntary social service, the book brings into attention the issue of further marginalization and exploitation of women workers especially from the lower or middle class by the Indian state.

This book is the culmination of research over a period of 25 years. It highlights the relation between the rocks from which India's great capital city is constructed and the people who sacrifice to turn them into a useful form. The result is an interesting account of the lifeworld of some of the poorest and most forgotten people: the stone quarry workers. The book describes the material conditions of their poverty and exploitation as well as their aspirations and poetic expressions. It is a major contribution to the anthropology of labour in the informal sector of a globalized Indian economy and society. In producing a field study of a labour settlement barely thirty kilometres from the heart of Delhi, the urban mainstream society gets to see a world that lies beyond its boundaries. The workers are in themselves fragmentary and fortuitously organized around the themes of class and labour, who represent their consciousness by means of protest and conformity. Despite the workers' varying accounts of their personal lives, the narrative constructs labour in relation to wider society. Labour is intertwined with society in relations of necessity, contingency, reflexivity, and expediency.

This book confronts the persistent issues of youth unemployment and worsening socioeconomic precarity in the United States. While overall unemployment has declined, the unemployment rate remains nearly twice as high for young people 16–19 years of age and nearly three times as high for those aged 20–24. Millions of youth are neither in school nor working, and rates of unemployment and underemployment are nearly two to three times higher for black and Latino youth. Despite these glaring statistics, far more attention has been given to diminished social prospects facing young people in Europe than in America, and this is what makes this book so important. The volume’s Introduction places the issue in a global and national context, while suggesting a range of solutions and discussing the distinctive cultural ideology of the American dream as it intersects with young people's diverse experiences. Chapters in each of the book’s four sections explore structural and cultural causes of youth unemployment, their ramifications for both native and immigrant youth, and how both middle- and working-class youth across diverse races and ethnicities are affected within and outside the legal economy. Overall, the book insists that because the youth of today face greater insecurity than earlier generations, the time has come to address factors like technological changes, the rise of the 24/7 and “gig” economy, and the polarization between “good” and “bad” jobs; thus, the book features chapters on potential solutions including effective school-to-work models, shorter and shared hours, full employment, and basic income.