Public Benefits and Private Safety Nets: Demographic Disparities in Resources Following Job Loss.

[摘要] Losing a job is a devastating experience, with ramifications that include a sudden drop in income and more subtle challenges such as unstructured days, the loss of a work-based identity, and mental health problems. This dissertation examines the resources—both public and private—that individuals deploy to cope with job loss and its concomitant challenges. The first two empirical papers examine disparities in the public resources available to individuals who lose jobs, and the third and final paper turns to disparities in the private resources. Chapter 2 uses a special supplement to the Current Population Survey to examine the demographic characteristics of UI applicants and recipients. It finds that low-socioeconomic status (as measured by education level) and racial minority job losers are less likely to apply for and, conditional on application, less likely to receive unemployment benefits. Chapter 3 uses in-depth interviews with unemployed individuals from across the socioeconomic spectrum to identify an understudied actor—the former employer—whose role in the benefit claiming process may affect disparities in receipt of UI benefits. Chapter 4 argues that racial disparities in private resources lead to unequal trajectories to recovery from job loss for African American and White job losers. Chapter 5 offers concluding thoughts, suggestions for social work practice, and implications for policy. Specifically, chapter 5 proposes three policy interventions: re-structuring the tax system that finances unemployment benefits, requiring employers to notify employees of the availability of unemployment benefits at job separation, and broadly strengthening the social safety net. Chapter 5 also calls on social work practitioners and scholars to take job loss seriously as a disruption to the life course, and to design and implement social work interventions targeting this disruption. Taken as a whole, the dissertation makes the case that while the public safety net could function to ameliorate demographic disparities in the consequences of job loss, it has grave shortcomings. The dissertation shows that because individuals of distinct demographic groups have unequal resources—both public and private—following job loss, job loss is a moment in which already extant race- and class-based inequalities are reproduced and amplified.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] Social Work

[关键词] Disparities after job loss;Social Work;Sociology;Social Sciences;Social Work and Sociology