effects of historical change (in this case the transition to a new economy) can vary depending on its timing with respect to an individual’s biography, as well as to his or her gender, class, and race (Elder and Shanahan 2007; Moen 2001). The stories also reveal how careers unfold when new opportunities are introduced and old opportunities are dismantled.
Exhibit 1.1 Meg: A Successful Trader Strives to Manage a Demanding Career With a Child Who Has Special Needs
Meg started her career as a trader in the male-dominated world of the New York Stock Exchange. Although family connections and good fortune helped her gain entry to Wall Street, her early successes came from hard work, tough-mindedness, and interpersonal savvy. It also helped that she entered the world of Wall Street just as the stock market was to catapult to record high levels in the 1990s. By the age of twenty-five, Meg was promoted to head trader and received a remarkable salary. She also met her husband at the stock exchange.
To support her husband’s transition into a law career, Meg followed him to Philadelphia. In Philadelphia, Meg landed a position in a firm that was soon to manage one of the largest investment funds in the country, another remarkable leap in an already successful career. Along the way, Meg had two children and benefitted from flexible work arrangements, moving intermittently between part-time and full-time work as the children matured. However, when her third child was born with serious medical needs, Meg decided to take a career break to provide more intense care and supervision, and her employer agreed. However, when Meg tried to return to her job in a part-time capacity, her firm gave her a choice: return full-time or resign. She chose to resign.
Note: Based on Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home (pp. 28–30) by Pamela Stone, 2007, Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Exhibit 1.2Tammy: A Midcareer Manufacturing Worker Attempts to Salvage a Career and a Community
Tammy was born into a disadvantaged family in 1966 in Youngstown, Ohio. Early on, she was raised by her grandmother, who worked as a maid and companion to an elderly widow, but, at least for part of her childhood, she also lived with her mother, who was trying to recover from drug abuse. The city she grew up in entered a steep decline when she was a child; the steel mills began to close and the neighborhoods deteriorated as the people who lost their jobs left to find work elsewhere.
When she was fifteen, Tammy got pregnant; she broke up with the father and raised the baby on her own. She was determined not to drop out of school or be like many of the other girls around her, so she finished high school on time and later earned an associate’s degree. She worked for a while in a supermarket and hoped for a manager’s job, but nothing materialized. After a stint on welfare, she was able to find a job working in one of the region’s few remaining industrial establishments, the Packard Electric Plant in nearby Warren, Ohio, making electrical components for GM cars. She worked there for two decades (earning as much as $25 an hour), as the plant slowly shrank around her and the union that represented workers grew steadily weaker.
In the early 2000s, a series of corporate and legal maneuvers resulted in the plant becoming part of GM’s Delphi Automotive Systems, which was then spun off as a separate company. Delphi eventually filed for bankruptcy in 2005 in an attempt to get out of its union contract and wind the company down. Like many workers who had lived through the company’s gradual shrinkage, Tammy did not fully foresee Delphi’s decision to close or sell most of its units and eliminate two-thirds of its workforce. Some workers at Tammy’s plant would be kept on—but with dramatic cuts to their wages and benefits and likely eventual job loss. The alternative was to accept a lump-sum buyout but also lose most of their pensions. Tammy accepted the buyout, determined to do something else with her life.
Tammy invested some of the money she received from the buyout with a relative who was speculating in real estate. At first, she received good returns on her investment but later lost most of her money when the real estate bubble of the late 2000s collapsed. She had to beg her relative to return a small portion of her investment so that she could keep her small house. She went back to school to earn a bachelor’s degree and was approached by a professional organizer who was looking to hire community organizers to help combat the effects of Youngstown’s decline. Tammy was passionate about her city and determined to do something, so she got the job. Since then, she has worked on several surveys of her city, which made her even more aware of the decline brought about by deindustrialization. Even as the fracking boom began to create jobs in the region, Tammy could see that most of the people like her in Youngstown were not finding jobs and were being passed by. By comparison, she considered herself lucky.
Note: Based on The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer, 2013, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Exhibit 1.3 Emily: A Contract Worker Navigates Insecure Employment
Emily is in her late forties and markets herself as a freelance editor/proofreader. While at one time she was a “regular employee,” the job that she previously held vanished when her employer relocated. Her path to becoming a contract worker was not an intended career path. It was a means of rescuing a career that was dislodged.
Emily currently works as an editor with two different employers, a large law firm and small publishing company. She is not considered to be a career employee at either of these companies, does not have a private office, and shares a cramped workspace with another employee. She is not included in many of the office social functions, and her level of involvement with other regular employees is quite restricted. Nonetheless, her job as a freelancer provides her considerably more flexibility than her coworkers, and this is something that she values. And, because she is skilled at her work, her compensation is comparable to what the regular employees make.
Because the terms of Emily’s employment rest on her employers’ interest in hiring her for subsequent work, she keeps watch for opportunities. She believes that her type of job, based on short-term agreements between employees and their employers, is the wave of the future. While she feels secure in knowing how to do her work, she has a constant sense of insecurity in that she does not know what the future holds for her.
Note: Based on Freelancing Expertise: Contract Professionals in the New Economy (pp. 2–3) by Debra Osnowitz, 2010, Ithaca, New York: ILR Press.
Exhibit 1.4 Rain: A Chinese Immigrant Finds Work in the American Food Service Industry
Rain is twenty-nine years old and has been in the United States for five years. Born and raised in a village in rural China, Rain says that he came to the United States to escape religious persecution (but it is possible that this story is for the sake of his visa application). His journey to the United States was expedited by a “snakehead,” whom Rain paid the equivalent of $70,000 to arrange transport and needed documents. Rain was initially flown from China to Mexico. Like immigrants from South America, he was escorted to the U.S. border and told to “run.” Later he was picked up by an associate of the snakehead, who transported him from Houston to New York.
Within Chinatown in New York, Rain was connected to a network of opportunities to work in Chinese restaurants located throughout the United States. In fact, family run Chinese restaurants outnumber McDonald’s restaurants in small towns. Moving from town to town, Rain learned to cook Chinese food to suit the American tongue, with its heavier emphasis on sweetness. It was in the United States that he tasted his first egg roll. Currently, Rain lives in a house owned by the restaurant owner, along with five of his coworkers, all of whom are Chinese immigrants.
Rain’s treatment in each restaurant depends very much on the ownership, but a constant
