Degraded Work

"Marc Doussard posits a new interpretation of the 2001 to 2006 profit-wage disjuncture that is innovative and fresh. This is the stuff of truly innovative urban-economic analysis."—David Wilson, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

"Distinctive and pioneering, Degraded Work analyzes the areas of excess profit within two sectors that are often viewed as very close to perfectly competitive, smaller scale neighborhood retail and residential construction. These detailed analyses help make a broader case that low wages and precarious work are not inevitable. Doussard integrates these elements into an instructive polemic against some popular but oversimplified analyses of urban and labor market restructuring, introducing the concept of degraded work to capture the changes he observes."—Chris Tilly, UCLA

"An important and much-needed intervention in the literature on inequality and low-wage work."—Labour/Le Travail

"Degraded Work is a valuable contribution to the study of low-wage work, inequality, labor markets, and organizing. Doussard makes a convincing case that policy makers, practitioners, and scholars need to engage in serious local, sectoral research in order to truly understand the labor market."—Social Service Review

"Well-written and clearly argued."—International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

"Well-researched and illuminating."—Labor Studies Journal

"A remarkably detailed book, Degraded Work challenges one of the dominant theories for urban inequality in North America and challenges readers to do something about inequality in their own city. Perhaps Doussard’s greatest accomplishment is to challenge what his readers believe and what they are doing with their lives or careers, without being confrontational. His analysis shows considerable depth and detail, but he presents it with humor, and without pretense, so it is accessible to experts and laypeople alike."—Economic Geography

"Marc Doussard’s Degraded Work is a timely foray into the complex and controversial reality of current workplace circumstances and conditions in urban America."—AAG Review of Books

Critics on the left and the right typically agree that globalization, the loss of manufacturing jobs, and the expansion of the service sector have led to income inequality and rising numbers of low-paying jobs with poor working conditions.

In Degraded Work, Marc Doussard demonstrates that this decline in wages and working conditions is anything but the unavoidable result of competitive economic forces. Rather, he makes the case that service sector and other local-serving employers have boosted profit with innovative practices to exploit workers, demeaning their jobs in new ways—denying safety equipment, fining workers for taking scheduled breaks, requiring unpaid overtime—that go far beyond wage cuts. Doussard asserts that the degradation of service work is a choice rather than an inevitability, and he outlines concrete steps that can be taken to help establish a fairer postindustrial labor market.

Drawing on fieldwork in Chicago, Degraded Work examines changes in two industries in which inferior job quality is assumed to be intrinsic: residential construction and food retail. In both cases, Doussard shows how employers degraded working conditions as part of a successful and intricate strategy to increase profits. Arguing that a growing service sector does not have to mean growing inequality, Doussard proposes creative policy and organizing opportunities that workers and advocates can use to improve job quality despite the overwhelming barriers to national political action.