Tag Archives: jobs

The legality of a prospective employer asking for your Facebook login information

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I’ve seen several stories about this: more employers are asking prospective employees to provide their Facebook login information (or login in front of them) so that they can look over your profile. While this is sure to anger some people, how legal is it?

Questions have been raised about the legality of the practice, which is also the focus of proposed legislation in Illinois and Maryland that would forbid public agencies from asking for access to social networks…

Companies that don’t ask for passwords have taken other steps — such as asking applicants to friend human resource managers or to log in to a company computer during an interview. Once employed, some workers have been required to sign non-disparagement agreements that ban them from talking negatively about an employer on social media…

Giving out Facebook login information violates the social network’s terms of service. But those terms have no real legal weight, and experts say the legality of asking for such information remains murky.

The Department of Justice regards it as a federal crime to enter a social networking site in violation of the terms of service, but during recent congressional testimony, the agency said such violations would not be prosecuted.

But Lori Andrews, law professor at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law specializing in Internet privacy, is concerned about the pressure placed on applicants, even if they voluntarily provide access to social sites.

So when will we get our first court case that tackles this issue?

I assume these companies have weighed the negative consequences of following these practices. Perhaps the logic goes something like this: if people have nothing to hide online, then there should be no problem having employers see their information. But I can’t imagine this will lead to good publicity for many corporations. Privacy is a big concern to many people and corporations are often seen as the bad guys in the larger battle.

Additionally, don’t employers have other ways to find out information that doesn’t require asking for login information? Perhaps they wouldn’t be able to get at Facebook information but that is not the only way to find out about people. What about asking for more references instead, professional and perhaps personal, and calling those references and asking thorough questions?

I’m also struck by the idea that some employers seem to be very afraid of Facebook and social media. Yes, it can backfire on their corporation or organization. But employees are capable of doing all sorts of dumb things and this is not restricted to Facebook posts.

The “gravity law” vs. the “radiation model” in predicting intercity mobility

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Here is an overview of two ways to model intercity mobility: the “gravity law” and the “radiation model” which was just recently proposed in Nature:

The reigning model of intercity mobility, used to predict patterns of movement from commuting to the spread of infectious disease, is called the “gravity law.” It was developed in the early 1940s by a Harvard lecturer named George Zipf and is, of course, based on Newton’s law, which says gravitational force increases when the mass of two objects is great and the distance between them is minimal.

In that same spirit, Zipf’s “gravity law” of mobility assumed that movement between two cities would be most frequent when their populations were large and their separation small. In reality, however, the “gravity law” doesn’t do a great job estimating the intercity movement it was intended to predict. While Zipf’s law frowns on the notion that people travel frequently between distant cities, recent research on so-called “super-commuters,” outlined by our own Richard Florida, shows that a considerable subset of urban populations is actually willing to commute quite far…

The “radiation model,” as the new idea is called, makes several assumptions the gravity model does not. For starters, it downplays the distance between two cities and emphasizes not only the cities themselves but the density of the areas surrounding them. That enables the model to estimate the number of jobs in a region more accurately. It also accounts a bit more for actual human behavior: while the radiation model presumes that people choose a job based on a balance of proximity and benefits, it recognizes that they’re willing to make long commutes if few jobs in their region satisfy their requirements.

As a result, the radiation model out-predicts the “gravity law” in direct competition. As an example, the researchers looked at mobility between two pairs of counties in Utah and Alabama. Both counties of origin had similar populations, as did both destination counties, and both pairs are more or less equidistant from one another. Actual Census data shows that 44 people make the commute in Utah, while six do in Alabama.

This sounds very interesting and required advances in data collection on this topic as well as modeling social networks and demographics. The main finding seems to be this: distance is not the only factor that matters in looking at trips between cities. As the case of the super-commuters suggests, people will live one place and work in another place far away in the right circumstances. Perhaps we should have already known this because of the relative importance of different cities: world-class cities or cultural centers or centers for certain industries (New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, respectively) would draw people from longer distances compared to “average” big cities (St. Louis? Denver?). Or, if we put this in world systems theory terms, certain cities sit at the center of American urban life and businesses and industries tend to concentrate within them while other cities are in more peripheral positions.

I would be interested to know whether the “radiation model” can suggest whether the number of super commuters will increase in the long-term and how this is affected by the strength of the overall economy and housing market.

The gendered tasks you do at work can affect the gendered work you do at home

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A new study in the American Journal of Sociology looks at what men who work in female-dominated careers do at home:

When stacked up against men who have jobs where men and women are equally represented, men in gender-atypical jobs put in an extra hour each week on typically male housework. What’s more, these men’s wives stick to female-typed tasks, spending about four hours more each week cooking dinner, vacuuming or throwing in a load of laundry. Meanwhile, women who work in male-centric professions also tend to pursue more female-typed housework but not with the same consistency as men in female-dominated arenas — perhaps because they perceive it as less of a threat to their femininity. (It should also be noted that a different study in the Journal of Family Psychology found that doing housework after a day on the job isn’t good for anyone, regardless of gender.)

What’s going on here? It seems to be a manifestation of what sociologists call the “neutralization of gender deviance.” Or, in plainspeak, “men are trying to bolster their masculinity at home,” says Daniel Schneider, the study’s author and a doctoral student in sociology and social policy at Princeton University…

Truth be told, Schneider was surprised by the findings. He’d expected to discover that men in gender-typical jobs — a mechanic, for example — would spend more time at home working on car or home maintenance. By that logic, he also anticipated that men in male-atypical jobs would come home and do more cooking and cleaning-type housework typically associated with women.

But humans don’t always make sense. “The market and home are really intertwined and influence each other,” says Schneider. “But they are not necessarily intertwined in a rational way. Instead, they’re intertwined in a way that’s about cultural salience and the meaning of gender.”

In other words: gender norms and expectations influence how people act. If we were to interview men who work in more female fields, would they be able to describe this process discovered in survey data? Also,  I wonder if this is tied to the amount of time people spend at work.

More broadly, this is a reminder that what happens in our career or at the workplace has an influence on other areas of our life. On one hand, perhaps this seems fairly obvious: our culture is one where people are defined by their occupation and what they do. As I tell my students, when you meet people as an adult, the first or one of the first questions you tend to be asked is, “what do you do [for work, a living]?” These puts a lot of pressure on individuals to have meaningful jobs. On the other hand, we tend to act like we can compartmentalize work and home. This goes back into history as there was a separation of home and work only in the Industrial Revolution as jobs moved out of the household or close by to larger factories and offices owned by corporations. While technology may have blurred the lines in recent decades, we still tend to have strong physical and mental boundaries between home and work.

Considering how much time full-time workers put into their jobs today, it should be little surprise that it is hard to keep these spheres apart. At the same time, specifying how it affects other areas of our lives is worth considering.

More “super-commuters” in America

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A new report says the number of “super-commuters” increased across the United States from 2002 to 2009:

New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation reports from 2002 to 2009 the number of super-commuters grew in eight of the 10 largest U.S. metropolitan areas. They grew in the Philadelphia area by more than 50 percent during that period.

The growth of super-commuters has occurred not just on the East Coast, but in cities such as Seattle and Houston, which had the greatest increase. The typical super-commuter is under 29 and more likely to be in the middle class.

The super-commuter is defined as someone who works in the central county of a given metropolitan area, but lives beyond the boundaries of that metropolitan area…

Many super-commuters are willing to take a plane to get to work or drive long distances because they can’t sell homes that have lost value and move. They often travel to another city on Monday, then return to their homes and families at the end of the work week.

Americans tend to go to where the jobs are. Here are several thoughts about this:

1. It would be nice to have an overall number of super-commuters in the United States. The full report gives figures by city and some of these are interesting: 59,000 for Manhattan, 233,000 for Los Angeles, 99,000 in Chicago, 251,000 in Houston, and 175,700 in Houston. On the whole, it doesn’t look like we are talking about a large number of Americans though the rise in this practice is noteworthy.

2. Is this more of a function of the size of the actual metropolitan area (New York has a broader metro region) or about the ease of transportation into a city or a mismatch between the number of jobs and affordable/reasonable housing?

3. This definition of a super-commuter is limited. For example, if a worker from Champaign, Illinois commuted to a job in Oak Brook, located in DuPage County, it wouldn’t count as a super-commute. This seems problematic since the job distribution in metropolitan regions is quite more diffuse today than in the past. If this definition was expanded to include all long trips from one metropolitan region to another, the numbers would be even more noteworthy.

4. One of the maps (Figure 7) from the full report reminded me of the idea of the megalopolis:

This is a reminder that urban and transportation planning needs to be broader in scale.

5. Are these “super-commuting corridors” long-term realities? If the economy improved, would these numbers drop or because of technology plus the realities of the globalized, post-industrial economy, are these corridors only going to continue to grow?

Exploited workers: why Apple and other companies will not move manufacturing jobs back to the US

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The New York Times has a long piece examining why Apple, even with the pleas of President Obama, will not likely move manufacturing jobs back to the United States. It sounds like it has a lot to do with what Apple can ask of workers in China. Here are a few examples:

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day…

The facility has 230,000 employees, many working six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant. Over a quarter of Foxconn’s work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day. When one Apple executive arrived during a shift change, his car was stuck in a river of employees streaming past. “The scale is unimaginable,” he said…

In mid-2007, after a month of experimentation, Apple’s engineers finally perfected a method for cutting strengthened glass so it could be used in the iPhone’s screen. The first truckloads of cut glass arrived at Foxconn City in the dead of night, according to the former Apple executive. That’s when managers woke thousands of workers, who crawled into their uniforms — white and black shirts for men, red for women — and quickly lined up to assemble, by hand, the phones. Within three months, Apple had sold one million iPhones. Since then, Foxconn has assembled over 200 million more.

This sounds ripe for a Marxist explanation: Apple has its products overseas because it can ask things of workers (possibly interpreted as “exploiting” these workers) that would be very difficult to ask of workers in the United States. American workers would not be happy about multiple things: non-predictable work hours, living in company dormitories, relatively low pay compared to wages in the first-world, consistent twelve hour days.

When I first read these descriptions, it immediately reminded of manufacturing in the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This was a period marked by labor unrest, the rise of unions, and a change in a lot of laws about what companies could ask of employees. We’ve had company towns; think of Pullman on the south side of Chicago. We’ve had bad working conditions; think the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. We’ve had low wages; now we have a minimum wage (that some would argue is still not enough and should be replaced by a living wage). With the protests of workers plus a growing prosperity, work conditions changed. Is China close to a similar period or does a different governmental approach and different culture make is less feasible? As Marx suggested, will the basics of capitalism help turn these workers against the system, pushing companies to look for workers in other countries?

The article hints at this but I think it could be put more clearly: there are not easy answers to this issue. If manufacturing jobs will not return to the US except in certain circumstances (see the recent battle over Boeing plants being located in right-to-work states), we need a clear discussion of this rather than politicians saying nice things.

Sociologist argues shorter work weeks would reduce unemployment

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Alongside a report last week suggesting the 40 hour work week was simply a cultural norm we could change, a sociologist argues that shorter work weeks would reduce unemployment levels:

[Juliet Schor, professor of Sociology at Boston College] claimed that working hour reductions have “a long history” of successfully leading to lower rates of unemployment.

“What progressive reductions in working hours financed by productivity do is allow a society to take some or all, depending on its choices, of its economic dividend of the productivity growth that it generates, and use it to give people more leisure time rather than more income,” Prof Schor added…

She cited the example of the Netherlands, where such a policy was implemented in 1980.

The Dutch began a 15-year project to alter the look of the working week, long enough to have a limited, if any, impact on real wages.

I wonder if Americans would like this trade off: fewer hours on the job and less pay for a lower unemployment rate. Would any politician have the guts or political capital to even make this a talking point? Everyone does want to reduce unemployment, don’t they…

At the same time, this could also lead to larger discussions in the United States about the emphasis on productivity and income growth over other desirable outcomes. Could you imagine lots of companies talking about wanting their employees to flourish rather than simply be more productive? Even discussions of living wages seem to focus on properly paying workers so they can survive rather than allowing them to pursue relationships and leisure time.

Sociologist predicts shift in American unskilled, immigrant laborers: they will come from China rather than Mexico

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While the economic downturn has reduced the interest in immigration reform, a sociologist suggests a new trend in the immigrant unskilled labor force in America: in the future, such laborers will come from China rather than Mexico.

Q: Why might Chinese immigrants overtake Mexican immigrants in low-wage, unskilled jobs here?

A: Mexico for decades has supplied our country with low-wage laborers, legal and illegal, but that’s grinding to a halt. Increased border surveillance and high unemployment are keeping people away from the United States. Other things are holding people in Mexico. They have a lower unemployment rate than we do. And what a lot of people don’t realize is that their fertility is dropping to 2.2 children per woman. It used to be six or seven children a few decades ago. There are fewer young people available (to take jobs), and fewer mouths to feed. There are about 4 million or 5 million undocumented Mexican immigrants in our country (and about 11 million illegal immigrants total). They pick up garbage, work construction, agriculture – all the things in big cities that the local people don’t want to do. Who’s going to do that work? There’s already a network of migration from China to our country; probably 200,000 to 300,000 undocumented Chinese are here. They’re mainly on the East Coast, in Houston and Los Angeles. They’re mainly doing restaurant work. Undocumented Mexicans are much more visible.

Q: Why would they leave China for the United States?

A: You have all of these rural-to-urban migrants inside China who are essentially driving the Chinese economy, doing all the work in the big cities, doing all the construction, the nanny work, the low-level jobs. They’re not going to do that forever. The economy is starting to slow down in China. The first people to lose their jobs will be these rural-to-urban migrants. In China, to move from one place to another, you have to get permission at both ends. That never happens, so people move unofficially. There are already 10 million unemployed rural-to-urban migrants. There’s already a China-to-U.S. network of undocumented migrants.

Several pieces of this argument strikes me:

1. The Chinese economy slows down. This would be a big issue for the global economy. Would there even be much of a flow of people round the globe if this happens?

2. The urbanization process in China may only be picking up steam. Here is a 2009 report from the McKinsey Global Institute on the topic. Is China prepared for this?

3. Mexican laborers are finding it harder to come to the United States and have more reasons for staying in Mexico. Does this mean that the debate over immigration from Mexico is essentially over?

4. If this shift does happen, would the immigration debate simply turn to China and away from Mexico? If so, what might be the implications of this for the US-China relationship?

A study showing the intersection of race and the status of particular jobs

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Sociologists have known (and measured) for decades that different jobs or fields can have very different levels of status (the more academic term: occupational prestige). A new study puts this social fact together with identifying people of different races and came to an interesting conclusion:

When it comes to determining the race of a stranger, our minds see more than skin color. That’s the conclusion of a study co-authored by UCI sociologist Andrew Penner, which was really quite simple when it came to the research. Viewers were shown images of the same man in business attire and a janitor’s uniform. Photos of a different man were added to the mix, as were those of women. Above the photos were boxes marked “white” and “black” so the viewers could assign the race of each person shown. You can imagine what the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation-funded research found.

Tracking the movements of each viewer’s mouse as it selected the race of the model, the researchers discovered that, initially, those in the business clothing were most often perceived to be white, while those in the janitor uniforms were usually ranked as black, despite the person in the respective photos being the same person of the same race.

Keep in mind that the person being tested may have ultimately chosen the correct race of the model. What the researchers were after was that initial assumption. The pattern grew more pronounced as faces became more racially ambiguous, the study concluded.

This is a reminder that there is a lot of interplay between race and social class. There are perceptions about people in certain jobs, represented in this study by particular clothing, that override our knowledge of the skin color of the person within the clothing. In Malcolm Gladwell Blink style, we make quick assumptions and then make more “rational” conclusions.

I wonder if the researchers looked at jobs where the perceptions about those workers might be similar. Would research subjects make such quick conclusions and if so, what would guide those snap judgments?

The “suburban depression”

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The ongoing economic crisis has hit a lot of sectors of American society. Some new data suggests the economic crisis has particularly hit the suburbs, the proverbial “land of milk and honey” in American life:

There has not been so large a portion of Americans in poverty since 1993. But this time the growth in poverty is different, hitting whites and suburbia harder than it did during the early 1990s slump…

The suburban poverty rate is 11.8 percent, a level not seen since 1967…

A key factor in the rise in suburban poverty may be the fact that the housing market has played such a central role in the economic slump.

Many suburbs have seen a vast amount of wealth erased by declining housing markets and mortgage foreclosures, resulting in a great deal of economic dislocation. Since white Americans are more likely to own homes than African Americans, this could also explain why whites have fared worse than they did in the 1990s while African Americans have fared better.

The interpretation here is that with homes losing a significant portion of their value, an investment vehicle that many suburbanites had relied on has proven to be a hindrance instead. I would want to see more data: how does the growth of the poverty rate in the suburbs compare to cities and rural areas? If you look at the Census 2010 figures, the poverty rate for central cities is 19.7% (14.8% for metropolitan regions) and it is 16.5% outside of metropolitan areas. While falling housing prices may be part of the problem, what about jobs – are a higher percentage of lost jobs suburban jobs? I haven’t seen anyone write about this jobs link.

This data also affects two other larger ideas narratives about suburbs:

1. Life in the suburbs is not supposed to get worse; rather, it is supposed to always get better. Have we simply reached the point where the standard of living and incomes simply can’t rise much more?

2. There is evidence from recent years that more poor people live in the suburbs than in cities. While the percentages of poor people are lower in the suburbs, the absolute numbers are higher. This is part of a growing trend: the suburbs aren’t just (and never totally were) where wealthy whites can live.

What’s good for Amazon.com may not be good for California (or America)

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Even though I just used this phrase (“What good for [company X] is good for America”] when looking at the impact of AT&T on American history, I agree that the deal Amazon is trying to offer California, jobs for no sales tax, is a bit strange:

Amazon has spent more than $5 million loading up their More Jobs Not Taxes campaign for a referendum that would repeal the legislation that started charging them taxes. Meanwhile, the latest turn in the political fight has been that Amazon offered to create 7,000 jobs if the state postpones enforcing its sales tax on the company until 2014.
Here’s why that offer is a big deal. It transforms a debate that is fundamentally about a value — fairness — into a numbers game. The next step will be that Amazon’s political operatives will plant the seed that the bill will kill jobs, probably a nice round number like 7,000 of them. According to our calculations, the politicos will say, California is killing the exact number of jobs that Amazon offered to add! Taxes are bad!
I don’t mean to pick on Amazon here. Every company is after as many tax advantages as they can get. Walmart, for example, which pushed the effort to get the Amazon sales tax bill passed, skirts some online sales taxes, too. And every company has realized that it is good politics to say that taxes kill jobs, whether they have real evidence for it or not…
Now, by transforming tax fights into skirmishes over how many jobs this or that tax will “kill,” every single tax becomes something that hurts America. The narrow (and self-serving) interests of every tax-fighting corporation become part of our national project. And the battlefield becomes the competing spreadsheets of political opponents who say that one plan or another will create more jobs, when it’s pretty obvious that no one knows precisely how that whole mechanism works.

Some observations:

1. Perhaps taxes are supposed to be about fairness – but corporations and municipalities have been playing this tax break game for years. Why wouldn’t Amazon think that it has enough clout to pull this off? Many communities and governmental bodies have been more than willing to give in to others.

2. The math is interesting: no sales tax = 7,000 jobs. I haven’t seen many details about this: does the value of these jobs equal the sales tax revenue that would be lost without Amazon? Couldn’t California hold out for more jobs or make this information public to try to worsen Amazon’s hand?

3. It is interesting that this battle about sales tax revenue between California and Amazon is getting attention; a number of states have already gone through this. Granted, California is bigger so perhaps this is about more money than elsewhere. But, additionally, California was home to some of the biggest property-tax revolts in the United States several decades ago, meaning that homeowners, and not just corporations, are interested in paying fewer taxes.