Winner of the 2019 Distinguished Scholarly Monograph Award Presented by the Labor and Labor Movements Section of the American Sociological Association

Winner of the 2018 William G. Bowen Award Presented by the Industrial and Labor Relations Section of Princeton University

“If you think declining job quality is an inevitable outcome of globalization, computerization, or financialization, think again. Where Bad Jobs Are Better systematically dismantles doom and gloom arguments to offer an empirically-based account of how reasonable reforms to U.S. employment and labor law could help ensure that hourly retail jobs are at least pretty darn good. Françoise Carré and Chris Tilly show how institutional structures, social norms, and worker voice combine to create meaningful variation in the quality of seemingly similar retail jobs. No book on the retail sector approaches either the insights or the comprehensiveness as that offered by Where Bad Jobs Are Better.”

—Susan Lambert, associate professor, School of Social Service Administration and codirector, Employment Instability Researchers Network, University of Chicago

“This richly comparative book decisively punctures the myth that retail jobs are inherently bad jobs. By comparing two retail sectors in the United States and retail jobs in seven countries, Françoise Carré and Chris Tilly show how institutions shape the quality of retail jobs and point to ways that bad jobs in retail and other service sectors can be upgraded.”

—Arne L. Kalleberg, Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

“Retail is the largest employment sector in the United States—and Françoise Carré and Chris Tilly offer the most comprehensive and thorough analysis of the management and employment practices in retail that we have. Based on ten years of careful field studies coupled with national data, they explain how the industry has evolved, why so many retail jobs are ‘bad,’ and why this is not inevitable. Their rich descriptions of working conditions across many retail sectors and countries show the negative effects of bad jobs on working families, and show that employers have a choice in their business and labor strategies. By tracing Wal-Mart across several countries, they show how the same employer can behave differently in different environments. Timely, accessible, engaging, important—Carré and Tilly speak to a broad audience of academics, practitioners, and policymakers—providing key insights on how to turn bad jobs into good ones.”

—Rosemary Batt, Alice Hanson Cook Professor of Women and Work and chair, Department of Human Resource Studies, ILR School, Cornell University

Retail is now the largest employer in the United States. For the most part, retail jobs are “bad jobs” characterized by low wages, unpredictable work schedules, and few opportunities for advancement. However, labor experts Françoise Carré and Chris Tilly show that these conditions are not inevitable. In Where Bad Jobs Are Better, they investigate retail work across different industries and seven countries to demonstrate that better retail jobs are not just possible but already exist. By carefully analyzing the factors that lead to more desirable retail jobs, Where Bad Jobs Are Better charts a path to improving job quality for all low-wage jobs.

In surveying retail work across the U.S., Carré and Tilly find that the majority of retail workers receive low pay and nearly half work part-time, which contributes to high turnover and low productivity. Jobs staffed predominantly by women, such as grocery store cashiers, pay even less than retail jobs in male-dominated fields, such as consumer electronics. Yet, when comparing these jobs to similar positions in other countries, Carré and Tilly find surprising differences. In France, though supermarket cashiers perform essentially the same work as cashiers in the U.S., they receive higher pay, are mostly full-time, and experience lower turnover and higher productivity. In Germany, retailers are required by law to provide their employees notice of work schedules six months in advance. And as the authors show in a chapter on Wal-Mart around the world, while the company is notorious for its low-quality jobs in the U.S., in many countries including China and Mexico, Wal-Mart is unionized, pays more than its competitors, or both. 

The authors show that disparities in job quality are largely the result of differing social norms and national institutions. For instance, weak labor regulations and the decline of unions in the U.S. have enabled retailers to cut labor costs aggressively in ways that depress wages and discourage full-time work. On the other hand, higher minimum wages, greater government regulation of work schedules, and stronger collective bargaining through unions and works councils have improved the quality of retail jobs in Europe.

As retail and service work continue to expand, American employers and policymakers will have to decide the extent to which these jobs will be good or bad. Where Bad Jobs Are Better shows how stronger rules and regulations can improve the lives of retail workers and boost the quality of low-wage jobs across the board.

FRANÇOISE CARRÉ is research director at the Center for Social Policy at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

CHRIS TILLY is professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“Who Will Care for Us? is a comprehensive and probing work on the challenges and opportunities of building a labor force to do some of the most consequential and sensitive work in our society: providing long-term care for others. Paul Osterman analyzes this complicated landscape with clarity and offers new, creative, and tractable approaches to policy.”

—David Weil, dean, Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University, and former Wage and Hour Administrator, U.S. Department of Labor

“In Who Will Care for Us?, Paul Osterman provides important insights into the chall- enges and opportunities for the most important members of the long-term care workforce—the certified nursing assistants and home care aides who provide the lion’s share of services to very vulnerable populations. He combines the best of storytelling and robust scholarship to highlight the systemic factors that explain why this profession is so undervalued. As important, he offers a thoughtful range of policy and practice solutions to elevate this workforce and ultimately deliver better services to a diverse and growing long-term care population.”

—Robyn I. Stone, executive director and senior vice president for research, LeadingAge Center for Applied Research

“With the aging baby boom generation, long-term care will be one of the great policy challenges in the coming decades. In Who Will Care for Us?, Paul Osterman identifies one of the key barriers to achieving high-value long-term care: our underinvestment in how we pay and train the direct care workforce. He makes the compelling case that continuing with the status quo is not the answer. He argues for transforming the direct caregiver job to encompass a much wider set of roles. In order for this to occur, we need to not only retrain our workforce, but also reform many of the policies that have led us to neglect our caregivers.”

—David Grabowski, professor of health care policy, Harvard Medical School

The number of elderly and disabled adults who require assistance with day-to-day activities is expected to double over the next twenty-five years. As a result, direct care workers such as home care aides and certified nursing assistants (CNAs) will become essential to many more families. Yet these workers tend to be low-paid, poorly trained, and receive little respect. Is such a workforce capable of addressing the needs of our aging population? In Who Will Care for Us? economist Paul Osterman assesses the challenges facing the long-term care industry. He presents an innovative policy agenda that reconceives direct care workers’ work roles and would improve both the quality of their jobs and the quality of elder care.

Using national surveys, administrative data, and nearly 120 original interviews with workers, employers, advocates, and policymakers, Osterman finds that direct care workers are marginalized and often invisible in the health care system. While doctors and families alike agree that good home care aides and CNAs are crucial to the wellbeing of their patients, the workers report poverty-level wages, erratic schedules, exclusion from care teams, and frequent incidences of physical injury on the job. Direct care workers are also highly constrained by policies that specify what they are allowed to do on the job, and in some states are even prevented from simple tasks such as administering eye drops.

Osterman concludes that broadening the scope of care workers’ duties will simultaneously boost the quality of care for patients and lead to better jobs and higher wages. He proposes integrating home care aides and CNAs into larger medical teams and training them as “health coaches” who educate patients on concerns such as managing chronic conditions and transitioning out of hospitals. Osterman shows that restructuring direct care workers’ jobs, and providing the appropriate training, could lower health spending in the long term by reducing unnecessary emergency room and hospital visits, limiting the use of nursing homes, and lowering the rate of turnover among care workers.

As the Baby Boom generation ages, Who Will Care for Us? demonstrates the importance of restructuring the long-term care industry and establishing a new relationship between direct care workers, patients, and the medical system.

PAUL OSTERMAN is Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Professor of Human Resources and Management at the M.I.T. Sloan School of Management.

A 1910 pamphlet on the essential characteristics of vacation schools open for the summer, based on reports of school authorities and voluntary organizations, including teacher salaries and descriptions of class activities.

CLARENCE ARTHUR PERRY, Department of Child Hygiene, Russell Sage Foundation