Newswise has highlighted a new study by Stephen Sweet and Peter Meiksins titled the ‘Changing Contours of Work.’ In the study, the authors present a picture of the ‘new economy’ characterized by a lack of job security or upward mobility experienced by the majority of workers. Sweet and Meiksins call for a ‘new deal’ to address these issues, including a new worker’s bill of rights. Sweet notes, ““If you look back to the Fair Labor Standards Act —that said if you want to employ a worker more than 40 hours a week you have to pay them overtime at time-and-a-half. This is a wonderful way of reorganizing and creating a disincentive for employing workers for long hours; it could also benefit potential workers who are not in the labor force. The Act did exactly what it was intended to do. Now, it is not working as well, so we have to rethink how we are going to provide health care, how we are going to keep workers from being overworked and how we are going to provide levels of security that currently don’t exist. In short, we need to rethink what we need to expect from employers, what we need to expect from our government, unions and from each other in the workplace.”
About the study…
“Make no mistake, there is a new economy,” says Stephen Sweet, lead-author of “Changing Contours of Work” and an assistant professor of sociology at Ithaca College. He explains how the new economy has opened up prospects for working in new ways and created opportunities for new groups of workers. “But one problematic feature of the new economy is the way it segregates opportunity into ‘good jobs’ (that are increasingly fragile) and ‘bad jobs’ that lack benefits, livable wages and prospects for mobility,” says Sweet. Thus, he explains that the new economy creates chasms that separate many workers from reasonable working conditions, reasonable chances of upward mobility, reasonable chances of job security and reasonable chances to earn a living wage.
But what should we do about it? (According to the authors…)
“As we consider social policy, a key question concerns how to make the new economy work for everyone. This includes dismantling gender and racial chasms, but also addressing the needs of workers laboring in jobs that provide few resources.”
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