The Shadows of Immobility: Low-Wage Work, Single Mothers' Lives and Workplace Culture.

Low-Income Single Mothers;Immobility of Low-Wage Jobs;Workplace Culture;United States;Low-Wage Labor Market;Post-Welfare Reform;Anthropology and Archaeology;Social Work;Social Sciences;Social Work and Anthropology

Clum, Kimberly A.Root, Lawrence ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Low-Income Single Mothers;    Immobility of Low-Wage Jobs;    Workplace Culture;    United States;    Low-Wage Labor Market;    Post-Welfare Reform;    Anthropology and Archaeology;    Social Work;    Social Sciences;    Social Work and Anthropology;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/60819/kimclum_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Contemporary American public policies targeted towards low-income single mothers reflect a presumption that steady employment in and of itself, even in the low-wage labor market, is the key to mobility.The experiences recounted in this dissertation challenge that presumption.Based on fifteen months of ethnographic research among single mothers working as nursing assistants at a care facility in southeastern Michigan, this dissertation reveals lives characterized by considerable economic hardships and social strains.Even long-term job tenure does little to diminish these struggles as the job’s structure (a structure typical of less-skilled service-sector jobs), combined with conditions in single mothers’ home lives, militates against significant wage or occupational mobility.This immobility creates economic and social tensions that permeate these mothers’ home and work lives.In this ethnography of the social experience of immobility, I explore how the immobility of these nursing assistant jobs joins together the economic and social world of the workplace with the economic and social worlds of the single mothers in both predictable and unexpected ways.I document, for example, the quandaries the wages pose for women’s home lives and how women handle these.But, uniquely, I also show how tensions engendered by low wages and immobility feedback into and are managed within the workplace.I demonstrate that workers’ economic and social struggles are not only recognized by management but are incorporated into workplace practices in ways that help contain and depoliticize their disruptive potential.I also highlight ways in which neo-liberalism and speculative capitalism (and the market-based, individualized orientations they promote) encourage both the mothers and management to embrace remedies to the immobility of these jobs that depend on individual effort and market opportunities.Within the workplace this can be seen in management’s endorsement of extra-work, postsecondary educational endeavors.The improbability of such endeavors for most mothers, however, leads some to devise ;;alternative” strategies for transforming their circumstances involving on-line dating, membership in a multi-level marketing sales organization, and participation in the subprime mortgage market; strategies that can expose mothers to significant risk.This dissertation suggests the limits of individualized, market-based remedies in ameliorating larger inequalities.