Consolidated Advantage: New Organizational Dynamics of Wage Inequality

The two main axes of inequality in the U.S. labor market—occupation and workplace—have increasingly consolidated. In 1999, the largest share of employment at high-paying workplaces was blue-collar production workers, but by 2017 it was managers and professionals. As such, workers benefiting from a high-paying workplace are increasingly those who already benefit from membership in a high-paying occupation. Drawing on occupation-by-workplace data, we show that up to two-thirds of the rise in wage inequality since 1999 can be accounted for not by occupation or workplace inequality alone, but by this increased consolidation. Consolidation is not primarily due to outsourcing or to occupations shifting across a fixed set of workplaces. Instead, consolidation has resulted from new bases of workplace pay premiums. Workplace premiums associated with teams of professionals have increased, while premiums for previously high-paid blue-collar workers have been cut. Yet the largest source of consolidation is bifurcation in the social sector, whereby some previously low-paying but high-professional share workplaces, like hospitals and schools, have deskilled their jobs, while others have raised pay. Broadly, the results demonstrate an understudied way that organizations affect wage inequality: not by directly increasing variability in workplace or occupation premiums, but by consolidating these two sources of inequality.

Women’s Health in/and Work: Menopause as an Intersectional Experience

This paper employs an intersectional lens to explore menopausal experiences of women working in the higher education and healthcare sectors in Australia. Open-text responses from surveys across three universities and three healthcare settings were subject to a multistage qualitative data analysis. The findings explore three aspects of menopause experience that required women to contend with a constellation of aged, gendered and ableist dynamics and normative parameters of labor market participation. Reflecting on the findings, the paper articulates the challenges of menopause as issues of workplace inequality that are rendered visible through an intersectional lens. The paper holds a range of implications for how to best support women going through menopause at work. It emphasizes the need for approaches to tackle embedded and more complex modes of inequality that impact working women’s menopause, and ensure that workforce policy both protects and supports menopausal women experiencing intersectional disadvantage.

Language Attitudes Studies Between the Past and the Present: The Current State of Research in the Arab World and Within the Saudi Context

Language attitudes studies are integral to our understanding of language-society dynamics, specifically in regions where linguistic diversity can create issues connected to social structure and social cohesion. The field of language attitudes studies heavily impacts research in areas such as language planning and policy, education and workplace inequality, and cultural discrimination. Thus, it is important to have a work that presents an overview of the most important notions and concepts in this field, with a specific focus on topics such as defining language attitudes, the components of an attitude, and the different methods of measuring it. This paper aims at providing this overview in addition to assessing the current status of language attitudes studies in the Arab world and outlining the challenges and opportunities for researchers in this field. One of the significant characteristics of language attitudes research in this region is the lack of studies that focus on the inequality dimension. Many studies in this region have opted to investigate the Standard-Spoken dichotomy and the attitudes of speakers toward foreign languages such as French and English. Researching issues such as the attitudes toward other Arabic varieties and toward migrant guest workers’ use of pidgins remains limited in the Arab context. Factors such as cultural rivalry and national pride may represent some of the obstacles in the path of conducting broader studies in the field of language attitudes in this region.

Combating Inequality: The Between- and Within-Group Effects of Unionization on Earnings for People with Different Disabilities

This paper addresses whether and how unions help to dismantle workplace inequality experienced by people with different types of disabilities. Using pooled 2009-2018 CPS MORG data of 630,799 respondents covering almost a decade, we find that union membership is especially beneficial for people with disabilities compared to the larger population, as well as other status groups. Furthermore, people with the severest disabilities benefit the most from being in unionized work, increasing weekly earnings by 36% for people with self-care and independent living-related disabilities. Because union membership increases disabled workers’ weekly earnings by more than double the increase experienced by people without disabilities, it brings unionized disabled workers closer to overall average earnings with important implications for inequality. Unionized work reduces earnings inequality between disabled and non-disabled workers, but earnings boosts associated with union membership generate more pronounced inequality within groups of workers with disabilities depending on whether individuals have access to unionized employment. We find that gaps among employed unionized and non-unionized disabled workers are significantly larger than those experienced by unionized and non-unionized female, Black, and Hispanic workers.

The Production of Merit: How Managers Understand and Apply Merit in the Workplace

In this article, we develop a process model that specifies how managers come to understand and approach the evaluation of merit in the workplace. Interviews from a diverse sample of managers and from managers at a U.S. technology company, along with supplemental qualitative online review data, reveal that managers are not blank slates: we find that individuals’ understandings of merit are shaped by their (positive and negative) experiences of being evaluated as employees prior to promotion to management. Our analysis also identifies two distinct managerial approaches to applying merit when evaluating others: the focused approach, in which managers evaluate employees’ work actions quantitatively at the individual level; and the diffuse approach in which managers assess both employees’ work actions and personal qualities, quantitatively and qualitatively, at both the individual and team levels. We further find that, as a result of their different past experiences as subjects of evaluation, individuals who experience mostly negative evaluation outcomes as employees are more likely to adopt a focused approach to evaluating merit, whereas individuals who experience mostly positive evaluation outcomes are more likely to adopt a diffuse approach. Our study contributes to the scholarship on meritocracy and workplace inequality by showing that merit is not an abstract concept but a guiding principle that is produced and reproduced over time based on individuals’ evaluation experiences in the workplace.

Rising between-workplace inequalities in high-income countries

It is well documented that earnings inequalities have risen in many high-income countries. Less clear are the linkages between rising income inequality and workplace dynamics, how within- and between-workplace inequality varies across countries, and to what extent these inequalities are moderated by national labor market institutions. In order to describe changes in the initial between- and within-firm market income distribution we analyze administrative records for 2,000,000,000+ job years nested within 50,000,000+ workplace years for 14 high-income countries in North America, Scandinavia, Continental and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. We find that countries vary a great deal in their levels and trends in earnings inequality but that the between-workplace share of wage inequality is growing in almost all countries examined and is in no country declining. We also find that earnings inequalities and the share of between-workplace inequalities are lower and grew less strongly in countries with stronger institutional employment protections and rose faster when these labor market protections weakened. Our findings suggest that firm-level restructuring and increasing wage inequalities between workplaces are more central contributors to rising income inequality than previously recognized.