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This talk intersects with my work on several collaborative projects, and I extend special thanks to my co-authors Sabeel Rahman, Andreas Wiedemann, Bruno Palier, and Pepper Culpepper. I owe a debt of gratitude as well to a group of Americanists with whom I have collaborated or taught and from whom I have learned a great deal about American politics—Theda Skocpol, Devin Caughey, Jacob Hacker and especially Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Paul Pierson. Many colleagues provided invaluable input into earlier versions of this paper, including Kate Andrias, Laura Bucci, Caroline de la Porte, Werner Eichhorst, Dan Galvin, Anton Hemerijck, Alex Hertel-Fernandez, Martin Höpner, Chris Howell, Christian Ibsen, Jeff Isaac, Alan Jacobs, Desmond King, Margaret Levi, Bruno Palier, Paul Pierson, and Brishen Rogers. I am also grateful to Elizabeth Dekeyser, who provided expert research assistance, and to Lukas Wolters, who helped to prepare the manuscript for submission.
Figure 1
Academic labor force, United States
Source: AAUP and the Integrated Post Secondary Education Data System (excluding graduate students)
[Figure omitted. See PDF]
In short, this practice of substitution—swapping more flexible, more contingent forms of employment in place of previously more secure jobs—affects many different kinds of employees in many different sectors and at different skill levels. Thus, precarity, as I am using the term today, extends well beyond the gig workers to whom I referred at the outset.
In exploring these issues, I will be pushing back against the self-congratulatory tone often struck when our current administration boasts about record low levels of unemployment and robust job creation. I also hope to shed some light on one of the more puzzling features of the American labor market, namely continued real wage stagnation despite eight years now of steadily declining unemployment.13 The question for me is not how many jobs did the U.S. economy generate last month or last year, but what kinds of jobs are these and how many of these jobs do people at the low end have to hold in order to make ends meet?
The rest of my talk proceeds in five steps. First, I want to look into the forces that are driving the growth of various sorts of atypical work arrangements. Second, I will discuss why these developments pose a problem, both at...