From Shop Floors to Work from Home: Workplace Determinants of Political Behavior

Session Submission Type: Created Panel

Session Description

This panel showcases four papers that illustrate the centrality of the workplace to understanding struggles over the trajectory of capitalist development, both at a global scale and in the United States.

These papers show that, despite partisan polarization, technological developments, and shifts in migration patterns, the workplace remains the primary stage on which workers experience the world. Workplace conditions can shape workers’ political preferences and attitudes, over and against the effects of partisanship (Lyon and Schneider). Abusive workplace conditions for migrant workers in the tech sector also interact with immigration policies, suggesting that such policies could be revised to better protect workers from exploitation (O’Donoghue). The global spread of “work from home” offers new promise for improving worker experiences, and workers often prefer these conditions; however, working from home brings new challenges for organizing a collective voice and wielding power in micro and macro political negotiations (Doellgast et al.). In presenting novel empirical findings about the effects of workplace conditions on political preferences and attitudes, and the efforts of diverse workers to improve their workplace conditions, this panel centers the workplace in order to offer an encompassing framework for analyzing the politics of contemporary capitalism.

Sub Unit

• Related Groups / Labor Politics

Cosponsor

• Division 55: Class and Inequality

Individual Presentations

• Working Conditions, Personal Experience, and Partisan Labor Policy Preferences - Gregory Lyon, Georgetown University; Daniel Schneider

• Migrant Labor Exploitation and Resistance in the Tech Sector - Dylan O'Donoghue

• Labor Power and Precarity in Digital Work: Union Responses to Work from Home - Virginia Doellgast, Cornell University; Sean O'Brady, McMaster University; Jeonghun Kim, Cornell University

Chair

• Matthew Thomas Lacouture Wayne State University

Discussants

• Darlene Nichole Moorman Kent State University

• Paolo Agnolin Bocconi University