A Day’s Work: Casual Employment in the United States, 1938-1972

Scholars on employment place the origins of insecure employment in the 1970s, due to trends such as deindustrialization, globalization, and automation. However, insecure employment has existed in the U.S. long before the 1970s. Historian Maia Silber will examine the history of precarious employment from 1938 to 1972. She will conduct archival research to better understand how employment precarity persisted despite postwar forces and institutions that seemed to provide relative security in employment.