Session: Understanding and Improving Working Conditions in Racialized and Gendered Jobs (Society for Social Work and Research 30th Annual Conference Anniversary)

Jobs have long been gendered and racialized in ways that influence the expectations placed on workers, their working conditions, their access to labor rights, and their approaches to organizing. As Joan Acker and Victor Ray have argued, jobs are often designed with a particular worker identity in mind. Jobs associated with white men were the first to unionize and to claim to offer a family wage to the idealized male worker who was expected to be unencumbered by any caregiving obligations that could be relegated to women and people of color. In contrast, jobs designed with women and people of color in mind are often related to such caregiving and service obligations, and workers are often expected to be more compliant and accepting of low wages.

The first paper explores issues of racial inequality in highly gendered workplaces. It uses scheduling, payroll, and survey data from a major apparel retailer to examine the mechanisms through which racial inequality is structured into the scheduling process. The next two papers both draw from qualitative research in New York City to examine recent efforts to improve working conditions in fields that are disproportionately composed of women and people of color. Exploring a recent wave of nonprofit unionization in the human services field, the second paper seeks to understand the organizing process, opportunities, and challenges, as well as the response of nonprofit management to worker unionization efforts. The third paper sheds light on the possibilities for worker cooperatives in improving working conditions for precarious domestic work and develops the Intersectional Work-Life Ecosystem framework (IWLE) to examine how intersecting identities and structures shape precarious workers' work-life balance needs and solutions. Together, these papers apply an intersectional lens to explore working conditions and current struggles for labor rights in various gendered and racialized occupations. They all examine the experiences of workers in traditionally feminized fields, including human services, retail, and domestic labor. Comparing the working experiences of nonprofit human service workers, retail workers, and Hispanic immigrant domestic workers, allows us to draw important connections and distinctions between these fields, shedding light on how workplace inequalities tied to race, gender, citizenship interact in different contexts, and inform efforts to improve working conditions.