Invisible Labor: Hidden Work in the Contemporary World

Across the world, workers labor without pay for the benefit of profitable businesses—and it's legal. Labor trends like outsourcing and technology hide some workers, and branding and employer mandates erase others. Invisible workers who remain under-protected by wage laws include retail workers who function as walking billboards and take payment in clothing discounts or prestige; waitstaff at “breastaurants” who conform their bodies to a business model; and inventory stockers at grocery stores who go hungry to complete their shifts. Invisible Labor gathers essays by prominent sociologists and legal scholars to illuminate how and why such labor has been hidden from view.

• Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line
• Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary
• The Temp Economy: From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America
• Down and Out in the New Economy: How People Find (or Don’t Find) Work Today
• Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won't Do
• Still a Man's World: Men Who Do Women's Work (Men and Masculinity)
• Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
• Living a Feminist Life
• Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming (Princeton Studies in Culture and Technology)
• Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash