Invisible Labor: Hidden Work in the Contemporary World

by Marion G. Crain (Editor), Arlie Russell Hochschild (Foreword), Winifred Poster (Editor)

Across the world, workers labor without pay for the benefit of profitable businesses—and it's legal. Labor trends like outsourcing and technology hide some workers, and branding and employer mandates erase others. Invisible workers who remain under-protected by wage laws include retail workers who function as walking billboards and take payment in clothing discounts or prestige; waitstaff at “breastaurants” who conform their bodies to a business model; and inventory stockers at grocery stores who go hungry to complete their shifts. Invisible Labor gathers essays by prominent sociologists and legal scholars to illuminate how and why such labor has been hidden from view.

Genres: Nonfiction, Labor

326 pages, Hardcover

First published June 28, 2016

Reviews

[Malia Odekirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book took me some time to finish but I had moments of devouring the content. The nature of having so many contributors made the style and approach diverse which was valuable, but caused my personal buy-in to vary. For the most part, I found this interesting and highly useful (more so than I expected) for my own research. A few chapters really stood out to me: ch. 1, ch. 8, ch. 10, and ch. 13. A lot of texts really stood out as framing devices that I was already aware of or now want to dig into. The most prominent seem to be Bourdieu, Hochschild, Marx, and Weber. I want to dig into Hochschild soon and Weber eventually.