Degraded Work: The Struggle at the Bottom of the Labor Market

Conclusion: Building a Fair Labor Market in Postmanufacturing Economies

225 Conclusion Building a Fair Labor Market in Postmanufacturing Economies Workplace inequalities in the United States widened during the Reagan years. They widened further during the celebrated 1990s economic boom. Workers fell behind during the anemic 2001–7 business cycle (which treated upper-echelon professionals and financiers kindly) and fell further behind during the disastrous 2007–9 recession. Three years into an anemic economic recovery, unemployment remains high, and labor force participation rates remain low. Union membership and health care coverage continue to fall, and workers’ organizations across the country report the ongoing violation of basic labor laws by employers in a broad range of industries. This litany of bad news makes it clear that inequality on the job is doing fine. But for the first time in recent memory, public discussion about inequality has grown in tandem with the real thing. As unionized manufacturing jobs vanished and low-wage service positions took their place during the 1980s and 1990s, critics of the United States’ distinctive and mounting inequalities found themselves exiled to the margins of politically acceptable discussion. As the current, weak economic expansion slowly fills the hole carved by the employment dislocations of 2008 and 2009, income inequality has taken a central place in news and politics. Unfortunately , engaging the problem of income inequality, no matter how aggressive , provides no guarantee of addressing its root causes. Academic critics of inequality know this problem well. Channeled into the concepts of social and economic polarization, inequality has for decades served as a central analytic in urban scholarship. It yields extremely valuable work: the economic polarization that scholars chart in research on deindustrialization and the growth of finance industries is historically specific and empirically nuanced. Furthermore, the conceptual frames articulating these inequalities—labor market polarization, dual cities, and global cities 226 · CONCLUSION stand as particularly potent examples—establish the problem at hand with clear images and appropriately tidy concepts. But even as they steer attention toward a crucial problem, these structural formulations often lead to analytical and practical dead ends. What options does a student, activist, or scholar engaged at the urban scale have for addressing a global structural problem? The theories of inequality used to analyze U.S. cities were developed through research and concepts rooted in global analysis. These global origins generate various conceptual, methodological, and policy mismatches for individuals using structural theories of inequality to organize action at the urban scale. A useful analysis of the diverging fortunes of high- and low-wage earners necessarily begins with the assessment of global trends: the decline of manufacturing employment in OECD nations, the rising power of financial industries, and the strategically crucial role played by central business districts that coordinate finances, design, and production for global firms. But the analysis becomes mechanistic when the urban scale is treated as a simple by-product of these global transformations. Theories of global cities and service sector economic growth are useful but incomplete and misshapen as tools for analyzing specific industries, labor markets, and cities. As Michael Peter Smith, Angus Cameron, and Ronan Palan forcefully argue, the structuralism in these theories often has the unintended consequence of persuading elected officials and community activists that workplace polarization is so powerful and so fully determined by forces operating at higher spatial scales as to be completely beyond their control (Smith 2001; Cameron and Palan 2004). Identifying the global origins of these problems helps to establish their significance, but it does not suggest ways to address them. The concept of degraded work provides a way to bridge these globally derived theories with research, theorization, and action at the urban scale. The growth of degraded working conditions originates in global and national transformations, including immigration, the fragmentation of the consumer bases targeted by local-serving industries, and the ascent of small workplaces that fall through the cracks of a workplace regulatory system built around large business establishments with hundreds of workers. But the actual form degraded work takes depends specifically on local factors—the competitive geographies of the industries targeting low-wage workers, pockets of excess labor supply, and local industrial and institutional histories. There can be no formula for identifying CONCLUSION · 227 these arrangements, and the work of charting the competitive practices of local-serving industries will always be messier and more open-ended than the foundational concepts of national economic inequalities. But that messiness is an asset, not a liability. The fluid and...