American Idle

Late-Career Job Loss in a Neoliberal Era

Annette Nierobisz, Dana Sawchuck, Annette Marie Nierobisz (Autoren)

Buch | Softcover

208 Seiten

2025
Rutgers University Press (Verlag)
978-1-9788-3586-3 (ISBN)

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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.

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.

ANNETTE MARIE 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.

1   “Broke, Unemployed, Downsized Again”
2   Hard Falls and Soft Landings
3   Generations at Work
4   In God We Trust
5   “Here’s Where I Am, Here’s Where I’ll Stay”
6   Silver Linings and Positive Thinking
7   Where Are They Now? And What Can We Do?
Appendix A   Studying Late Career Job Loss in the “Land of 10,000 Lakes”
Appendix B   Tables 1 and 2
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag	13.5.2025
Reihe/Serie	Inequality at Work: Perspectives on Race, Gender, Class, and Labor
Zusatzinfo	2 table images
Verlagsort	New Brunswick NJ
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	454 g
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Makrosoziologie
Themenwelt	Wirtschaft ► Volkswirtschaftslehre ► Makroökonomie
ISBN-10	1-9788-3586-8 / 1978835868
ISBN-13	978-1-9788-3586-3 / 9781978835863
Zustand	Neuware