Good jobs, bad jobs : the rise of polarized and precarious employment systems in the United States, 1970s to 2000s

TL;DR: Kalleberg as mentioned in this paper argues that the proportion of good jobs and bad jobs in the US economy, defined in terms of pay and benefits, is essentially the same now as in 1979 and concludes that job inequality and precariousness in US employment has increased substantially since the 1970s.

Abstract: high-pay jobs such as managers and low-pay jobs such as unskilled service work, but a decline in jobs that support a middle-class lifestyle. However, there are also some results that do not fit the growing-inequality thesis. For example, in Chapter Six we learn that the proportion of good jobs and bad jobs in the US economy, defined in terms of pay and benefits, is essentially the same now as in 1979. While Kalleberg concludes Part Two by claiming that job inequality and precariousness in US employment has increased substantially since the 1970s, my impression from reviewing these chapters is that perceptions of precariousness have increased slightly across all occupations (Chapter Five) and that while employees at the top have seen their pay rise relative to lower-level employees (Chapter Six) they have paid for this in the form of greater relative insecurity, longer/ harder hours at work (Chapter Eight) and lower job satisfaction (Chapter Nine); and that fewer employees across all pay grades and occupations are today subject to traditional Taylorist work routinization and bureaucratic command and control styles of supervision (Chapter Seven). In the final section, on ‘challenges for policy’, Kalleberg calls for a new social contract to ameliorate what he perceives as harder times at work, one that harkens back to New Deal and Great Society liberalism. In Chapters Ten and Eleven he discusses formidable obstacles to its implementation. But while Kalleberg recognizes that globalization forces have played a strong role in shaping US employment practices, his solutions to the problems of job polarization and insecurity e.g., an expanded social safety net, government sponsored retraining, and strengthening of collective bargaining rights, are almost entirely national-institutional. The book ends with a short paragraph calling for the elaboration of a global agenda to address these problems, but offers no ideas on how to bring this about or even what such an agenda should look like. Overall, Kalleberg achieves a meticulous documentation of changes in US employment practices since the 1970s that under other circumstances might have served as a conversation starter in academia and public policy circles. But, since the book’s main topics – the decline of the US middle class and unionism, the polarization of occupational pay structures, the fraying of the social safety net – have already been documented in recent years by others and at a similar level of detail, it is a bit late to that conversation. That said, Kalleberg’s writing is clear and jargon-free, the organization of the book is logical, the evidence presented is a cogent mix of others’ research and original analysis of government datasets and is reported in a manner that is apprehensible to readers lacking a strong statistical background. As such, it is recommended as a text in undergraduateor masters-level industrial sociology or industrial relations courses that cover changing employment circumstances in the USA. As a work of social criticism, though, it is ultimately more successful at describing problems than offering viable solutions. In that regard, it is like many such works, dating back to Marx and Weber.20