Beyond ‘good’ and ‘bad’ jobs: a field theory of power at work

Dominant understandings of labor market inequality have tended to focus on simple binaries: employed versus unemployed workers, “good” versus “bad” jobs. As new forms of work and relationships to work have multiplied, however, it is clear that these simple dichotomies constrain our thinking. “Employment” excludes workers who perform labor but are not legally categorized as “employees,” while “unemployment” overlooks those who have given up searching for jobs and who increasingly lag behind both employed and unemployed workers. Meanwhile, existing definitions of job quality focus on precarity stemming from economic coercion, and do not adequately account for the noneconomic (or not directly economic) ways that employers exert power over workers, including status coercion. In this chapter, we move away from these binaries to conceptualize the labor market as a complex system of power and resource allocation that produces and reflects relational and contextual inequalities along multiple axes—economic, cultural, and political—that in turn shape the actions of workers and employers within a larger field of contention.