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.

Now considered a classic in the field, this book first called attention to what Kanter has referred to as the "myth of separate worlds." Rosabeth Moss Kanter was one of the first to argue that the assumes separation between work and family was a myth and that research must explore the linkages between these two roles.

ROSABETH MOSS KANTER holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professorship at Harvard Business School, where she specializes in strategy, innovation, and leadership for change.

Finalist for the 2016 Academy of Management's George R. Terry Book Award

“Private Equity at Work is the first comprehensive examination of private equity—its history, economic performance, and social consequences, especially for employees. The authors cast a gimlet eye on private equity’s business model, whose shortcomings are dissected with razor-sharp analysis. The material is timely and original. It includes detailed case studies as well as proposals to better regulate this invisible but omnipresent industry.

—SANFORD M. JACOBY, Distinguished Professor, UCLA

“In this brilliant new book, Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt pull back the curtain on the shadowy world of private equity and its role in the management and mismanagement of our economy. Their rigorous, balanced, and well-written study shows how inadequate government regulation, biases in the tax code, and a permissive Wall Street culture combine to put private equity financiers in charge of important American companies, often to the detriment of the long-term interests of workers, investors and the broader economy. Appelbaum and Batt develop a program of common sense policy changes that will help us tap the socially productive potential of private equity while trimming its worst excesses. This terrific book will be of interest to policymakers, students, and scholars, and should be read anyone wanting to understand why America's widely shared prosperity got derailed and how to get it back on track.”

—GERALD EPSTEIN, professor of economics and codirector, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Private equity firms have long been at the center of public debates on the impact of the financial sector on Main Street companies. Are these firms financial innovators that save failing businesses or financial predators that bankrupt otherwise healthy companies and destroy jobs? The first comprehensive examination of this topic, Private Equity at Work provides a detailed yet accessible guide to this controversial business model. Economist Eileen Appelbaum and Professor Rosemary Batt carefully evaluate the evidence—including original case studies and interviews, legal documents, bankruptcy proceedings, media coverage, and existing academic scholarship—to demonstrate the effects of private equity on American businesses and workers. They document that while private equity firms have had positive effects on the operations and growth of small and mid-sized companies and in turning around failing companies, the interventions of private equity more often than not lead to significant negative consequences for many businesses and workers.

Prior research on private equity has focused almost exclusively on the financial performance of private equity funds and the returns to their investors. Private Equity at Work provides a new roadmap to the largely hidden internal operations of these firms, showing how their business strategies disproportionately benefit the partners in private equity firms at the expense of other stakeholders and taxpayers. In the 1980s, leveraged buyouts by private equity firms saw high returns and were widely considered the solution to corporate wastefulness and mismanagement. And since 2000, nearly 11,500 companies—representing almost 8 million employees—have been purchased by private equity firms. As their role in the economy has increased, they have come under fire from labor unions and community advocates who argue that the proliferation of leveraged buyouts destroys jobs, causes wages to stagnate, saddles otherwise healthy companies with debt, and leads to subsidies from taxpayers.

Appelbaum and Batt show that private equity firms’ financial strategies are designed to extract maximum value from the companies they buy and sell, often to the detriment of those companies and their employees and suppliers. Their risky decisions include buying companies and extracting dividends by loading them with high levels of debt and selling assets. These actions often lead to financial distress and a disproportionate focus on cost-cutting, outsourcing, and wage and benefit losses for workers, especially if they are unionized.

Because the law views private equity firms as investors rather than employers, private equity owners are not held accountable for their actions in ways that public corporations are. And their actions are not transparent because private equity owned companies are not regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Thus, any debts or costs of bankruptcy incurred fall on businesses owned by private equity and their workers, not the private equity firms that govern them. For employees this often means loss of jobs, health and pension benefits, and retirement income. Appelbaum and Batt conclude with a set of policy recommendations intended to curb the negative effects of private equity while preserving its constructive role in the economy. These include policies to improve transparency and accountability, as well as changes that would reduce the excessive use of financial engineering strategies by firms.

A groundbreaking analysis of a hotly contested business model, Private Equity at Work provides an unprecedented analysis of the little-understood inner workings of private equity and of the effects of leveraged buyouts on American companies and workers. This important new work will be a valuable resource for scholars, policymakers, and the informed public alike.

EILEEN APPELBAUM is senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, D.C. and Visiting Professor in the Management Department, University of Leicester, UK.

ROSEMARY BATT is the Alice Hanson Cook Professor of Women and Work at the Industrial and Labor Relations School, Cornell University.

On the 50th anniversary of President Lyndon B. Johnson's declaration of "unconditional War on Poverty," January 8, 2014, the National Poverty Center at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, the Russell Sage Foundation, and Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity hosted a forum offering diverse perspectives on the effects of anti-poverty policies in the U.S. Click here to learn more about this special event.

Many believe that the War on Poverty, launched by President Johnson in 1964, ended in failure. In 2010, the official poverty rate was 15 percent, almost as high as when the War on Poverty was declared. Historical and contemporary accounts often portray the War on Poverty as a costly experiment that created doubts about the ability of public policies to address complex social problems. Legacies of the War on Poverty, drawing from fifty years of empirical evidence, documents that this popular view is too negative. The volume offers a balanced assessment of the War on Poverty that highlights some remarkable policy successes and promises to shift the national conversation on poverty in America.

Featuring contributions from leading poverty researchers, Legacies of the War on Poverty demonstrates that poverty and racial discrimination would likely have been much greater today if the War on Poverty had not been launched. Chloe Gibbs, Jens Ludwig, and Douglas Miller dispel the notion that the Head Start education program does not work. While its impact on children’s test scores fade, the program contributes to participants’ long-term educational achievement and, importantly, their earnings growth later in life. Elizabeth Cascio and Sarah Reber show that Title I legislation reduced the school funding gap between poorer and richer states and prompted Southern school districts to desegregate, increasing educational opportunity for African Americans.

The volume also examines the significant consequences of income support, housing, and health care programs. Jane Waldfogel shows that without the era’s expansion of food stamps and other nutrition programs, the child poverty rate in 2010 would have been three percentage points higher. Kathleen McGarry examines the policies that contributed to a great success of the War on Poverty: the rapid decline in elderly poverty, which fell from 35 percent in 1959 to below 10 percent in 2010. Barbara Wolfe concludes that Medicaid and Community Health Centers contributed to large reductions in infant mortality and increased life expectancy. Katherine Swartz finds that Medicare and Medicaid increased access to health care among the elderly and reduced the risk that they could not afford care or that obtaining it would bankrupt them and their families.

Legacies of the War on Poverty demonstrates that well-designed government programs can reduce poverty, racial discrimination, and material hardships. This insightful volume refutes pessimism about the effects of social policies and provides new lessons about what more can be done to improve the lives of the poor.

MARTHA J. BAILEY is associate professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Michigan and faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

SHELDON DANZIGER is the President of the Russell Sage Foundation. He was formerly the Henry J. Meyer Distinguished University Professor of Public Policy and director of the National Poverty Center at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at University of Michigan.

CONTRIBUTORS: Elizabeth Cascio, Chloe Gibbs, Harry J. Holzer, Bridget Terry Long, Jens Ludwig, Kathleen McGarry, Douglas L. Miller, Edgar O. Olsen,Sarah Heber, Katherine Swartz, Jane Waldfogel, Barbara Wolfe.

A Volume in the National Poverty Center Series on Poverty and Public Policy

The rapid rise in the proportion of foreign-born residents in the United States since the mid-1960s is one of the most important demographic events of the past fifty years. The increase in immigration, especially among the less-skilled and less-educated, has prompted fears that the newcomers may have depressed the wages and employment of the native-born, burdened state and local budgets, and slowed the U.S. economy as a whole. Would the poverty rate be lower in the absence of immigration? How does the undocumented status of an increasing segment of the foreign-born population impact wages in the United States? In Immigration, Poverty and Socioeconomic Inequality, noted labor economists David Card and Steven Raphael and an interdisciplinary team of scholars provide a comprehensive assessment of the costs and benefits of the latest era of immigration to the United States.

Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality rigorously explores shifts in population trends, labor market competition, and socioeconomic segregation to investigate how the recent rise in immigration affects economic disadvantage in the U.S. Giovanni Peri analyzes the changing skill composition of immigrants to the United States over the past two decades to assess their impact on the labor market outcomes of native-born workers. Despite concerns over labor market competition, he shows that the overall effect has been benign for most native groups. Moreover, immigration appears to have had negligible impacts on native poverty rates. Ethan Lewis examines whether differences in English proficiency explain this lack of competition between immigrant and native-born workers. He finds that parallel Spanish-speaking labor markets emerge in areas where Spanish speakers are sufficiently numerous, thereby limiting the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born residents. While the increase in the number of immigrants may not necessarily hurt the job prospects of native-born workers, low-skilled migration appears to suppress the wages of immigrants themselves. Michael Stoll shows that linguistic isolation and residential crowding in specific metropolitan areas has contributed to high poverty rates among immigrants. Have these economic disadvantages among low-skilled immigrants increased their dependence on the U.S. social safety net? Marianne Bitler and Hilary Hoynes analyze the consequences of welfare reform, which limited eligibility for major cash assistance programs. Their analysis documents sizable declines in program participation for foreign-born families since the 1990s and suggests that the safety net has become less effective in lowering child poverty among immigrant households.

As the debate over immigration reform reemerges on the national agenda, Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality provides a timely and authoritative review of the immigrant experience in the United States. With its wealth of data and intriguing hypotheses, the volume is an essential addition to the field of immigration studies.

DAVID CARD is Class of 1950 Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

STEVEN RAPHAEL is professor of public policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley.

CONTRIBUTORS: Marianne P. Bitler, Irene Bloemraad, Sarah Bohn, Chistian Dustmann, Mark Ellis, Cybelle Fox, Tomasso Frattini, Robert G. Gonzales, Hilary W. Hoynes, Christel Kelser, Jennifer Lee,  Ethan Lewis, Magnus Lofstrom, Renee Reichl Luthra, Douglas S. Massey, Giovanni Peri, Michael A. Stoll, Matthew Townley, Roger Waldinger, Richard Wright, Min Zhou.

A Volume in the National Poverty Center Series on Poverty and Public Policy