What do prisoner laborers, graduate students, welfare workers, and college athletes have in common? According to sociologist Erin Hatton, they are all part of a growing workforce of coerced laborers.Coerced explores this world of coerced labor through an unexpected and compelling comparison of these four groups of workers, for whom a different definition of "employment" reigns supreme—one where workplace protections do not apply and employers wield expansive punitive power...

Everyone knows that work in America is not what it used to be. Layoffs, outsourcing, contingent work, disappearing career ladders—these are the new workplace realities for an increasing number of people. But why? In The Temp Economy, Erin Hatton takes one of the best-known icons of the new economy—the temp industry—and finds that it is more than just a symbol of this degradation of work. The temp industry itself played an active role in this decline—and not just for temps. Industr...

An educational crisis from its origins to present-day experiencesIn the United States today, almost three-quarters of the people teaching in two- and four-year colleges and universities work as contingent faculty. They share the hardships endemic in the gig economy: lack of job security and health care, professional disrespect, and poverty wages that require them to juggle multiple jobs.This collection draws on a wide range of perspectives to examine the re...

Emma Delaney's past - what she remembers - is nothing to be proud of. A prostitute in the employ of the crime boss Lucas Fulbright, the last thing on her mind is fairy tales. Cale Kynsey is a man on a mission to find his long lost fiancée. Spinning a tale of betrayal and enduring love, he captures Emma's imagination. Together, they unravel a mysterious romance that transcends the bounds of space and time - and a love that has the power to weave a broken world back together . . . .if Emma can ...

The insightful chapters in this volume reveal the multiple and multifaceted intersections between mass incarceration and neoliberal precarity. Both mass incarceration and the criminal justice system are profoundly implicated in the production and reproduction of the low-wage “exploitable” precariat, both within and beyond prison walls. The carceral state is a regime of labor discipline—and a growing one—that extends far beyond its own inmate labor. This regime not only molds inmates into c...