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Full-Text Articles in Politics and Social Change
Exploitation Or Fun?: The Lived Experience Of Teenage Employment In Suburban America, Yasemin Besen-Cassino
Exploitation Or Fun?: The Lived Experience Of Teenage Employment In Suburban America, Yasemin Besen-Cassino
Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works
Objectivist scholars characterize typical teenage jobs as “exploitive”: highly routinized service sector jobs with low pay, no benefits, minimum skill requirements, and little time off. This view assumes exploitive characteristics are inherent in the jobs, ignoring the lived experience of the teenage workers. This article focuses on the lived work experience of particularly affluent, suburban teenagers who work in these jobs and explores the meaning they create during their everyday work experience. Based on a large ethnographic study conducted with the teenage workers at a national coffee franchise, this article unravels the ways in which objectivist views of these “bad …
Consumer Tactics As "Weapons": Black Lists, Union Labels, And The American Federation Of Labor, Wendy A. Wiedenhoft Murphy
Consumer Tactics As "Weapons": Black Lists, Union Labels, And The American Federation Of Labor, Wendy A. Wiedenhoft Murphy
Sociology
This article examines the role consumer tactics played in the American Federation of Labor's (AFL) strategy of business unionism. In particular, it explains how the AFL used its consumer tactics to try to mobilize the purchasing power of union members and their families to fight for higher wages and shorter working hours. The historical data collected for this article demonstrates that the AFL was not ignorant of the relationship between production and consumption, or the worker and the consumer. I discuss how the AFL used its consumer tactics to try to build solidarity across its affiliated trade unions and provide …