Precarious work in the United States is defined by economic and temporal dimensions. A large literature documents the extent of low wages and limited fringe benefits, but research has only recently examined the prevalence and consequences of unstable and unpredictable work schedules. Yet practices such as on-call shifts, last minute cancellations, and insufficient work hours are common in the retail and food-service sectors. Little research has examined racial/ethnic inequality in this temporal dimension of job quality, yet precarious scheduling practices may be a significant, if mostly hidden, site for racial/ethnic inequality, because scheduling practices differ significantly between firms and because front-line managers have substantial discretion in scheduling. We draw on innovative matched employer-employee data from The Shift Project to estimate racial/ethnic gaps in these temporal dimensions of job quality and to examine the contribution of firm-level sorting and intra-organizational dynamics to these gaps. We find significant racial/ethnic gaps in exposure to precarious scheduling that disadvantage non-white workers. We provide novel evidence that both firm segregation and racial discordance between workers and managers play significant roles in explaining racial/ethnic gaps in job quality. Notably, we find that racial/ethnic gaps are larger for women than for men.

This article uses a new database of subscribers to the New York Philharmonic to explore how high culture became a form of socially valuable capital in late-19th-century America. The authors find support for the classic account of high culture's purification and exclusiveness, showing how over the long Gilded Age the social elite of New York attended the Philharmonic both increasingly and in more socially patterned ways. Yet they also find that the orchestra opened up to a new group of subscribers hailing from an emerging professional, managerial, and intellectual middle class. Importantly, the inclusion of this new audience was segregated: they did not mingle with elites in the concert hall. This segregated inclusion paved a specific way for the constitution of cultural capital. It meant that greater purity and greater inclusiveness happened together, enabling elite cultural participation to remain distinctive while elite tastes acquired broader social currency. Edith Wharton's classic Gilded Age novel, The Age of Innocence, begins at the opera. The opening paragraphs describe the excitement throughout New York society at hearing the Swedish soprano Christine Nilsson sing

Policymakers concerned with economic inequality regularly advocate for laws to increase the minimum wage. The impact of such laws on low-wage employment levels has been studied extensively within the field of labor economics. Yet, the vast majority of this literature has failed to explore how changes in the minimum wage impact the actual experience of low-wage work. We first discuss qualitative evidence that Walmart, the largest low-wage employer in the country, adjusts to minimum wage increases by compressing wages at the lower end of its wage distribution. We then make use of an innovative source of data to explore quantitatively the impact of such compression on workers’ experiences of their jobs at Walmart. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we find that a higher minimum wage raises job satisfaction for workers who have worked at the company for under a year, but decreases job satisfaction for longer-term and marginally higher status employees.

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