Gratitude Narratives: Claiming Dignity and Making Precarity Livable

• In Event: Culture and Economic Life

Abstract

How do low-wage workers use gratitude to interpret and navigate precarious employment and economic insecurity? Drawing on 94 in-depth interviews with fast-food and low-wage hourly healthcare workers in Los Angeles County, I examine how workers mobilize gratitude in accounts of work and financial life. Rather than expressing a stable emotional disposition or simple accommodation to inequality, workers deploy what I call felt gratitude and performed gratitude: narrative forms that situate hardship in comparative perspective and interpret institutional or relational actions as signals of recognition that confer dignity. Felt gratitude recalibrates expectations and sustains positivity amid instability, while performed gratitude frames workplace practices, policy interventions, or interpersonal gestures as evidence that one’s labor has been seen or valued. These findings reveal that structural precarity does not simply erode dignity; it reshapes how it is claimed and sustained, recalibrating expectations and imbuing incremental gains with heightened symbolic significance. Attending to gratitude illuminates the cultural processes through which insecurity is rendered morally intelligible and livable without foreclosing critique.

Author

• Tara Kane Prendergast, University of Arizona