Meritless: Unemployed Autoworkers, the Social Safety Net, and the Culture of Meritocracy in America and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study examines the worsening position of jobless blue-collar workers in an increasingly meritocratic economy, and uses an innovative crossnational comparative approach to gauge how much the social safety net improves their well-being. I take pairs of unemployed autoworkers who did the same job in the same or similar firms—with the only difference being the country they live in—and compare their outcomes to measure policy effects. My analysis is based on in-depth interviews with seventy-one former autoworkers (divided among American and Canadian workers, and Detroit Three and parts factories) and thirty-six industry and community experts in Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario, two metropolitan areas right across the river from one another. It also draws from ethnographic observation within households and the larger Detroit and Windsor areas, which allowed me to put my interviews in context and assemble a rich narrative portrait of unemployment and economic distress. Whereas one school of thought stresses the powerlessness of government in the face of globalization and related economic shifts, and another tends to see an expanded welfare state as a panacea for social ills, I stake out a view somewhere in the middle, arguing that the stronger supports in Canada help unemployed workers cope better with job retraining challenges, health problems, financial difficulties, and fragile family structures, but are limited in their ability to overcome relative inequalities: large gaps in education, family stability, and resources that exist between blue-collar workers and other segments of the labor force. I offer a theoretical and historical framework for understanding the evolution of the labor market and its consequences for less-educated workers, conceiving of the current iteration of capitalism as meritocratic in its focus on human capital as the just arbiter of status, and differentiating this meritocratic orientation from other egalitarian and fraternal approaches to policy and morality in past historical periods. Finally, I examine the meritocratic ideology that blunts political responses to rising inequality, finding that such views, long associated with white-collar professionals, have come to affect the thinking of even unionized blue-collar workers.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".