Legacies of Work – Social Policy, Employment, and Regimes of Inequality

Session Submission Type: Virtual Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Who can and cannot work? When? How? And under what conditions? The papers on the panel collectively explore the ways by which diverse social policies construct, shape, and map inequalities in the workplace. The papers juxtapose structure with agency, and institutional durability with policy dynamism, highlighting both the centrality of policy mechanisms, institutional legacies, and governing arrangements and the importance of historical contingencies, actor choices, and ideational frames. In so doing they explain historical and contemporary examples of unequal supports and protections in the workplace. Taken together, the papers diversify the scope and project of historical institutionalism by employing a multiplicity of interpretive methods and data, ranging from archival to statistical and covering multiple time periods. Carol Nackenoff explores how race and class affected the political fate of mothers’ pensions and day nurseries in the early twentieth century, ; Alexis Walker examines the absence of paid family leave through the twentieth century; Eva Bertram explores contemporary inequalities in protections for contingent, gig economy workers relative to traditional workers; and Alphonso, Sledge, and Thomas investigate how and why state reopening polices in the wake of the COVID pandemic mapped onto social disparities among workers across states. In each case, the papers explore the policy foundations and legacies of unequal costs and burdens of work, in terms of structuring historical and on-going inequalities to workplace access, employment protections and support.

Sub Unit

• Division 7: Politics and History

Cosponsor

• Related Groups / Labor Politics

Individual Presentations

• Organized Black Women & Political Development: Day Nurseries v Mothers’ Pensions - Carol Nackenoff, Swarthmore College

• The United States’ Lack of Paid Family Leave in Historical Perspective - Alexis Walker, Saint Martin's University

• The Politics of Contingent Work - Eva Bertram, University of California, Santa Cruz

• Saving Lives, Reopening the Economy: State Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic - Gwendoline M. Alphonso, Fairfield University; Daniel Sledge, University of Texas, Arlington; Herschel F. Thomas, University of Texas, Arlington

Chair

• Kimberley S. Johnson New York University

Discussant

• Herschel Nachlis Dartmouth College