for All Workers in 200976
3.5 A Schematic of Intergenerational Resource Transfers80
3.6 World Population Projections (in Millions): 1950–205084
3.7 How Value Accumulates in a Global Supply Chain87
3.8 Per Capita Purchasing Power From 1990 to 2016: Comparison of the United States, China, and Ghana89
4.1 Government Public Expenditure as Percentage of Gross Domestic Product: International Comparisons, 2014100
4.2 Unemployment Entitlements: International Comparisons102
4.3 Trends in Mass Layoffs in the United States: 1996–2012105
4.4 Job Security Configurations of Dual-Earner Professional Couples (80% Confidence That Jobs Will Be There in Two Years)108
4.5 Percentage of Displaced Professional Workers Who Received Notification That Their Jobs Would Be Eliminated111
5.1 Use of Time as a Means to Organize Work Remains a Legacy of the Old Economy132
5.2 Percentage of Workers According to Weekly Work Hours: United States, 2016137
5.3 Average Annual Work Hours: International Comparisons, 2016139
5.4 Annual Paid Vacation Days and Paid Holidays: International Comparisons140
5.5 Percentage of Employed Persons Working on Their Main Job at Different Hours of the Day and Night: 2011–2015149
5.6 Patterns of Employment/Hours of American Couples With Children, 2014153
6.1 Men’s and Women’s Labor Force Participation Rates (Age Sixteen Years and Older): United States, 1940–2017165
6.2 Employment Configurations of Married Couples: United States, 2015165
6.3 Women’s and Men’s Earnings (in $1,000s) and Income Ratios for Full-Time Year-Round Workers: United States, 1960–2016 (Earnings Adjusted to 2016 Dollars)167
6.4 Occupations With High Percentages of Women Workers: United States, 2014172
6.5 Gender Compositions of Bachelor’s Degrees Conferred: United States, 2014–2015174
6.6 Percentage of Husbands and Wives Reporting That Their Career Was Favored Over Their Spouse’s Career (by Life Stage)176
6.7 Converging Divergences in Women’s and Men’s Values and Preferences Over Time178
6.8 Instead of Hiring This Woman, Most College Students Would Hire an Equally Qualified Man. Would You?182
6.9 Last Week Tonight With John Oliver Writers Receive Their Emmys in 2017: Why Are There So Few Women?188
6.10 Two Different Job Descriptions: Why Does One Job Pay Less Than the Other?189
6.11 Health Benefits of Breastfeeding194
6.12 Statutory Family Leave Entitlements in Developed Countries198
7.1 An Editorial Showing Fear of Immigrants (Circa 1860)209
7.2 Mean Income of Men With Earnings: United States, 1970–2016 (Adjusted to 2016 Dollars)212
7.3 Mean Income of Women With Earnings: United States, 1970–2016 (Adjusted to 2016 Dollars)213
7.4 Percentage of People Living Below the Poverty Line: United States, 2016214
7.5 Percentage of Households Owning Select Assets by Race: United States, 2013217
7.6 Percentage Graduating From College (Age Twenty-Five Years and Older) by Race: United States, 1970–2017219
7.7 Unauthorized Immigrants as Percentages of Workers in Select Occupations: United States, 2014241
8.1 Organized Protests Provide Visibility to Labor Concerns254
About the Authors
Stephen Sweet is the Charles Dana Professor of Sociology at Ithaca College and Executive Officer of the Work and Family Researchers Network. His studies of work and its impact on and off the job have appeared in a variety of publications, including Work and Occupations; Sex Roles; Research in the Sociology of Work; Family Relations; New Directions in Life Course Research; Journal of Vocational Behavior; Journal of Marriage and the Family; Generations; and Community, Work, & Family. His books, The Work–Family Interface (2014), Data Analysis With SPSS: A First Course in Applied Statistics (2012), and College and Society: An Introduction to the Sociological Imagination (2001), have been extensively adopted in sociology courses. He has edited and coedited publications including the journal Teaching Sociology (2015–2019), the Work and Family Handbook: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Methods, and Approaches (2006), and The Work and Family Encyclopedia (2008–2011). His current research focuses on program design practices in STEM fields. In his off hours, he enjoys cooking, swimming, running, and biking.
Peter Meiksins is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Cleveland State University. He has published widely on the sociology of work, particularly the sociology of technical work and of the professions, in journals such as Work and Occupations; Sociological Quarterly; Work, Employment & Society; Theory and Society; Technology and Culture; and Labor Studies Journal. He has coedited several books on work and labor and is the coauthor of two books, Engineering Labour: Technical Workers in Comparative Perspective and Putting Work in Its Place: A Quiet Revolution. His current research focuses on engineers, the environment and the state, and gender and engineering. He divides his time between Cleveland and Amsterdam. He enjoys travel, running, cooking, and reading.
Preface to the Fourth Edition
This book is an effort to make sense of work opportunity—as it was in the twentieth century and as it is today—and how it influences lives on and off the job. When we began writing the first edition of this book, we thought this would be a straightforward endeavor. First, we intended to discuss the “old economy” and the types of opportunities present when most of the labor force was employed in jobs critical to mass production industrial work. Then we were going to write about the emerging “new economy” and the ways new technologies, new organizations, new jobs, a new workforce, and globalization are transforming work. Our unique contribution would be to show the ways that current policies and practices, designed to correspond with needs in the old economy, fail to address the present-day concerns.
When we wrote the first edition, we spent well over a year blocking out chapters, going back into the research literature, writing chapter drafts, restructuring our arguments, and rewriting. With all of these efforts, we faced a recurring problem, namely, that our observations about the old economy kept intruding into what we wanted to say about the new economy, and vice versa. Our work in that first year would have been far easier if we had recognized then what was to become a central theme of this book: the old economy has not been replaced by a new economy; the old economy is operating within the new economy.
Once we understood the overlap of the old and new economies, we realized
