Debt and Theft: Financialization and Precarious Employment for University Staff

• In Event: 171 - Section on Organizations, Occupations and Work Paper Session. The Changing Nature of Work in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

This paper brings a feminist perspective to theories of the corporate university by examining how processes of financialization in the public university took away what Kallenberg calls “good jobs” from university staff and replaced them “bad jobs.” As the oral histories with university staff show, the new corporate regime took away job security, regular working hours, overtime pay, and long-term financial security. In short, with financialization their employment and long-term future has become precarious. While financialization in the contemporary context is often associated with debt, in this paper, I reframe this thinking, by arguing that we conceptualize financialization as theft. I emphasize the term theft for two reasons. First, this is how most of the clerical workers I interviewed talk about financialization; they emphasize what the University’s risky financial practices have stolen from them. Second, debt carries with it the connotations of conservative social movements. The Tea Party, for examples blames poor people and recent immigrants for the federal government’s creation of debt. Theft, by contrast, does not blame poor people, but rather underscores what newer financial practices have taken away from the middle class, the working class, and the poor, in a process that bears many similarities to earlier debt crises in the Global South. In sum, theft highlights structural processes and its consequences that the notion of debt does not.

Author

• Jennifer L. Pierce, University of Minnesota