Today precarious work presents perhaps the greatest global challenge to worker well-being, and has become a major rallying point for worker mobilization around the world. This conference focuses on analyzing the growth of precarious employment and informal labor, its consequences for workers and their families, the challenges it poses to worker organizing and collective mobilization, and how workers and other social actors are responding to precariousness. We seek to understand the patterns of social and economic domination of labor shaped by the state, capital, gender, class, age, ethnicity, skills, and citizenship, and examine the manifestations of labor resistance and acquiescence in their specific contexts.
The conference is initiated by the American Sociological Association (ASA)’s Labor and Labor Movements Section, the International Sociological Association (ISA)’s Research Committee on Labor Movements (RC44), and the Chinese Sociological Association’s China Association of Work and Labor (CAWL). It builds in part on an ongoing scholarly exchange between the ASA Labor Section and the CAWL. The conference program will focus on the United States and China, but will include a range of global cases and perspectives. Interdisciplinary approaches and innovative research methods are welcomed.