While social distancing measures are essential in limiting the impact of a pandemic, such measures are often less feasible for low-income groups such as precarious workers who continue to travel on public transit and are less able to practice social distancing measures. In this paper, based on in-depth remote interviews conducted from April 2020 through June 2020, with more than 130 gig and precarious workers in New York City, we find that precarious workers experience three main hurdles in regard to accessing unemployment assistance that can be broadly categorized as knowledge, sociological, and temporal/financial barriers. Drawing on worker interview responses, we have named these responses: (1) Didn’t Know, (2) Didn’t Want, and (3) Can’t Wait. These challenges have led workers to turn to gig and precarious work, further highlighting the inequities of the pandemic. As a result, for some workers, so-called “side hustles” have become their primary social safety net.

Good jobs that allow remote work have enabled white-collar professionals to stay home during COVID-19, but for precarious workers, online advertisements for work-from-home employment are often scams. In this article, based on in-depth interviews conducted between April and July 2020 with nearly 200 precarious workers, we find that precarious workers regularly encountered fraudulent job advertisements via digital media. Drawing on Swidler’s concepts of the cultural tool kit and cultural logic, we find that in this time of uncertainty, workers defaulted to the focus on personal responsibility that is inherent in insecurity culture. Following the cultural logic of personal responsibility, job seekers did not place blame on job search websites for allowing the scams to be posted, but normalized the situation, deploying a scam detection repertoire in response. In addition, the discovery that advertised “good jobs” are often scams affecting workers’ desire to continue job hunting and perceptions of potential future success.

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What are the macro-social effects of mass political participation? This chapter integrates insights from scholarship on voting, civic associations, social movements, public policy, culture, and political institutions to theorize the ways that macro changes may be shaped by mass political participation. Focus is placed on empirical evidence across three main domains: policy, culture, and institutions. Mass political participation exerts influence indirectly on the formation of policy proposals and adoption through the media agenda, interest groups, and elected officials. Voting and other forms of participation in institutional politics can impact political culture by shaping political legitimacy, trust, and public opinion, and generate new modes of political expression. Democratization efforts supported by civil society institutions also work to shape the integration or fragmentation of a polity and the development of state capacity. This chapter concludes by identifying an opportunity for future scholarship to consider the independent and joint effects of different types of mass political participation.