Public Sector Precarity?: The Joint Role of Institutional and Organizational Processes

University Of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst MA

Investigators

Abstract

Public sector employment accounts for nearly one fifth of the U. S. labor force and is an important site of employment for women, racial minorities, and middle-class jobs. Traditionally public sector jobs have been viewed as stable, in contrast to private sector jobs that may be lost during economic downturns, as well as due to changes in demand for goods and services. Recent events, however, suggest public sector employment may also be precarious, and we know very little about how such precarity unfolds. This project uses administrative data to systematically analyze changes to public sector work from 1974 to 2017. This project investigates: 1) the quality of public sector jobs, including pay, turnover, and full time employment; and 2) differences in employment and pay by race and gender. The project will also chart state-level variation in these employment dynamics. Project findings will inform policy regarding workforce supports for employees in the public sector, including the need for retraining and transition support when public sector jobs are lost. State-level variation in such dynamics will enable policy makers at the state level to craft social supports most appropriate to their jurisdictions. Using over 7 million observations of workplace level data collected by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), this project is the first to conduct a systematic organizational level analysis of trends in public sector job quality. The project will evaluate the role of both organizational and state-level determinants of public sector employment. It considers state level institutional forces, such as union strength, political composition, and local economies, as well as organizational level factors, such as managerial composition and preexisting racial and gender segregation by workplace. The project will examine these dynamics descriptively for all US states from 1974 to the present and then statistically model dynamic change at the workplace level using error correction modeling, followed by fixed effects analyses. The project will contribute to the Relational Inequality Theory framework, thus enriching knowledge through in-depth study of how public sector organizations influence employment dynamics. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.