Dr. Phillips’ newest area of research examines how Americans’ lives as workers inform their politics. Workplaces can be replete with lessons about the ways in which groups relate to each other or the consequences of speaking up or staying quiet, and provide access to particular sources of information and interpretation. Yet, political science has had little to offer in understanding how this labor shapes political views, practices and participation.

Life’s Work: How Gender, Labor and Immigration Shape Our Politics is a multi-method study that examines how work overlaps with ethnicity, immigration and gender to shape political incorporation and participation. Using an intersectional research design, the study will focus on three of the fastest growing groups of workers: Filipina, Korean and Indian American women. They each hold distinctive and informative roles in the American labor market that gained increased attention during the Covid-19 pandemic. Like other immigrant groups, they are overrepresented among essential workers, and face elevated disease risk and death rates during the pandemic. And, like other groups of women, they have had to contend with the collapse of their systems for dependent care.

The book and series of articles that results from this project will examine how workplace experiences inform individual capacity for political incorporation, with attention to three important areas of variation: identity group membership, labor market features such as unions, essential worker designations and occupational stratification, and the demands of unpaid care labor.

This project has received support from the Russell Sage Foundation, the USC Zumberge Diversity and Inclusion Research Initiative, and the USC Institute for Intersectionality and Social Transformation.

  • Have essential workers’ roles as workers informed their attitudes towards politics? Moreover, have the conditions of the pandemic contributed to a sense of group identity that is tied to work? This study argues that being an essential worker is a dimension of group identity that informs the social and political positioning of group members (Masuoka and Junn 2013; Kim 1999; Bourdieu and Johnson 1993). That distinct positioning serves as a particular site of political socialization and lens for attitude formation. Importantly, being an essential worker overlaps with other dimensions of identity, such as race, gender and immigrant community attachment. Within this intersectional framework, essential workers from different subgroups are distinctively positioned, and thus the processes by which being an essential worker shapes political attitudes are also socially specific.

    This study tests this argument using observational and experimental data from a first of its kind national survey of two of the largest populations that are overrepresented among essential workers in the United States, Filipina/o American and Mexican American women and men. The analysis demonstrates that “essential worker” is a widely utilized group identity marker, whose salience is informed by other, overlapping, dimensions of identity. It also shows that essential workers hold views about politics that are distinct from similarly situated adults and that the social positioning of essential workers, particularly during stay at home orders, is significantly related to their political attitudes.