Unemployment: The Accumulation of Advantage and Disadvantage

In The Tolls of Uncertainty: How Privilege and the Guilt Gap Shape Unemployment in America, Sarah Damaske documents the distress and devastation that unemployment wreaks. It hurts everyone, but Damaske makes a compelling case that unemployment, like the pathways leading up to and following it, touches people in vastly different ways. Some suffer far more than others. Both advantage and disadvantage accumulate. The Tolls of Uncertainty is based on 100 intensive life history interviews that Damaske and her team conducted in 2013 to 2015 with unemployed women and men, aged 28 to 52, in five counties in Pennsylvania. Some (the 58 respondents whom she could relocate) were reinterviewed a year later. All participants experienced an involuntary loss of a full-time job and qualified for benefits. Unlike much research that focuses on the long-term unemployed, Damaske focuses primarily on those unemployed for a few months. With her colleague Adrianne Frech, she analyzed national surveys to situate her qualitative findings (e.g., an analysis of the national survey confirms that working-class men are more likely to face chronic unemployment than women across class; the national data allow Frech and Damaske to analyze race and show that Black women and men are at even higher risk of chronic unemployment). Her chapters are organized in two useful ways. First, based on a life history framework, the chapters follow her respondents across trajectories of unemployment—from losing a job, to experiencing unemployment (or the ‘‘fall out’’), to job seeking (or ‘‘the search’’). Second, each chapter is organized primarily around four individuals—a white middle-class woman and man and a white working-class woman and man (with all married save the white working-class single mother). Using the four cases as a narrative device works well: by the end of the book, the reader comes to know these four people and grasps in distressing detail the unfairness of unemployment. The central theme of The Tolls of Uncertainty is that unemployment is not, as sometimes portrayed, a monolithic experience that reduces differences among those who experience it. Quite the reverse. The various stages of unemployment expand existing inequalities and create news ones. Women and men’s experience of job losses and job searches are dramatically different, and these gender differences are further tied to class (defined by occupation before unemployment) and race. This book carries on a comparative research tradition, two pieces of which Damaske cites quite extensively. Several decades ago, Katherine Newman (1988) compared those in the U.S. working class who lost jobs as a group to those in the middle class who were let go one at a time; comparing these different objective circumstances, Newman reveals the latter suffered and blamed themselves far less than the former. About decade ago, Ofer Sharone (2013) compared job loss among laid-off technology workers in Israel to both technical workers and blue-collar workers in the United States, again revealing a connection of The Tolls of Uncertainty: How Privilege and the Guilt Gap Shape Unemployment in America, by Sarah Damaske. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. 320 pp. $27.95 cloth. ISBN: 978069 1200149.