The Making of Vulnerable Workers: Uncredentialed Young Adults in Postindustrial, Urban America

ABSTRACT

Common explanations for the employment difficulties facing young adults without a secondary credential center on skill deficits, with little attention given to policies and practices that shape the nature of work. Using interview data from a participatory action research project, this article examines the employment experiences of 43 uncredentialed young adults in a deindustrialized, urban community. Contextualizing their accounts within shifts in job and labor markets in the postindustrial political economy and drawing on the “vulnerable workers” framework, it shows how participants were disenfranchised as workers and job-seekers. I argue that educators should more fully account for the challenges facing workers with low levels of formal education and engage with economic and labor policies and practices that make these workers economically vulnerable.

Acknowledgments

I acknowledge the support of Richard Rothstein, research associate at the Economic Policy Institute and senior fellow at the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at the University of California (Berkeley) School of Law, in the preparation of this manuscript.

Notes on contributor

Tara M. Brown is an assistant professor of education at the University of Maryland, College Park. She holds a doctorate degree in education from Harvard University and is the recipient of a Spencer Research Fellowship and a Jacobs Foundation Dissertation Fellowship. Tara is a former classroom teacher in secondary alternative education. Her research focuses on the experiences of low-income adolescents and young adults of color served by urban schools, particularly as related to disciplinary exclusion and high school non-completion. She specializes in qualitative, community-based, participatory, and action research methodologies. Her most recent study, Uncredentialed: Young Adults Living without a Secondary Degree, focuses on the causes and implications of high school non-completion among, primarily, Latina/o young adults in an economically disenfranchised, urban community.

Notes

1. Upskilling refers to the notion that the skill levels needed to perform specific jobs, as well as the overall proportion of jobs which require higher level skills, are increasing.

2. Low skill jobs are those which require a high school education or less or require skills “that can be learned on the job in a relatively short period of time” (Erickcek, Houseman, & Kalleberg, 2003, p. 373).

3. Economic activity in which income is not reported to or taxed by the government is technically illegal.