American Idle - (Inequality at Work: Perspectives on Race, Gender, Class, and) (Paperback)

About the Book

What happens when older workers lose their jobs in a recessionary economy filled with employers who favor hiring younger workers? From hard falls to soft landings, American Idle uses in-depth interviews to detail how these workers simultaneously embrace and resist the pervasive messages of the neoliberal era as they manage the painful mismatch between expectation and reality.

Book Synopsis

In American Idle, sociologists Annette Nierobisz and Dana Sawchuk report their findings from interviews with sixty-two mostly white-collar workers who experienced late-career job loss in the wake of the Great Recession. Without the benefits of planned retirement or time horizons favorable to recouping their losses, these employees experience an array of outcomes, from hard falls to soft landings. Notably, the authors find that when reflecting on the effects of job loss, fruitless job searches, and the overall experience of unemployment, participants regularly called on the frameworks instilled by neoliberalism. Invoking neoliberal rhetoric, these older Americans deferred to businesses' need to prioritize bottom lines, accepted the shift toward precarious employment, or highlighted the importance of taking initiative and maintaining a positive mindset in the face of structural obstacles. Even so, participants also recognized the incompatibility between neoliberalism's "one-size-fits-all" solutions and their own situations; this disconnect led them to consider their experiences through competing frameworks and to voice resistance to aspects of neoliberal capitalism. Employing a life course sociology perspective to explore older workers' precarity in an age of rising economic insecurity, Nierobisz and Sawchuk shed light on a new wrinkle in American aging.

Review Quotes

"American Idle focuses on an underexamined, yet critical, group of the unemployed: those later in life. It's engagingly written and provides important insights into later-life unemployment. The authors' findings are all elegant and conceptually rich contributions to our understanding of the unemployment process for older Americans."--Sarah Damaske "author of The Tolls of Uncertainty: How Privilege and the Guilt Gap Shape Unemployment in America"

"American Idle's use of a life course approach to examine older adults' unemployment experiences is unique and fills a gap in the unemployment literature. The topic is timely, given the graying of the U.S. population, and the writing is engaging."
--Dawn Norris "author of Job Loss, Identity, and Mental Health (Rutgers University Press)"

About the Author

ANNETTE NIEROBISZ is a professor of sociology and the Ada M. Harrison Distinguished Teaching Professor of the Social Sciences at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. This is her first book.

DANA SAWCHUK is a professor of sociology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada. She is the author of The Costa Rican Catholic Church, Social Justice, and the Rights of Workers, 1979-1996.