Research 

This project is motivated by the contradictions between strong employment metrics such as low unemployment and rising wages for low wage workers, and the dissatisfaction widely felt among workers about the economy. This project uses proprietary payroll data which provides day-worker level information about staffing, hours, and wages across the nation  for over 200,000 small businesses primarily in the front-facing service sector. 

I explore some hypotheses relating to the above stated contradictions and make contributions to the literature by exploring the hard to study phenomenon of understaffing and leveraging the granularity of the proprietary data to track workers across jobs and time, showing how working conditions relate to labor market dynamics. 

Papers: 

Habr, Katy. (Analysis in Progress). “Underworked and Understaffed: Scheduling, Turnover, and Power in the Post COVID Economy.” 

Habr, Katy. (Analysis in Progress). “Labor Markets and the Limits of Solidarity: The Impact of Starbucks Unionization on Local Coffee Shop Wages.” 

Habr, Katy. (Analysis in Progress). “Working for Hours: The Impact of Unstable Scheduling on Workplace Solidarity.” 

Literature on platform work focuses on workers’ experiences within ‘platform firms,’ where platform technologies coincide with a particular employment relationship (the ‘independent contractor’). Therefore, the literature conflates two separate processes: a technological process, where platform technologies facilitate deskilling and flexibility; and a political process, where platform technologies help redefine the employment relationship. 

Informed by a case study of two grocery companies in California, I show how the spread of platform technologies impacts work for ‘traditional’ employees. This article is based on original interviews with informants such as workers, union representatives, and industry experts and on analysis of over 500 company filings and industry publications.

I find that employers are using platform technologies to pursue technical changes in the labour process and political changes in the employment relationship, and that changes in the labour process facilitate changes in the employment relationship. 

I also examine the relationship between grocery stores and gig companies during the COVID-19 pandemic. I find that the COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant rise of e-commerce has created a contradictory relationship where grocery companies simultaneously partner with and compete with platform firms. However, both of these processes accelerate the gig-ification of work in the grocery industry and degrade working conditions for workers.

My findings speak to the necessity of preventing the proliferation of gig work through laws such as California's Proposition 22 and suggest a broader implication for majority of people who are employed in more traditional jobs. 

Paper: Habr, Katy. R&R at Work, Employment, and Society. "A Platform for Change: Deskilling, Reclassification, and the Reorganization of California's Grocery Industry."

• Winner of the American Sociological Association Labor & Labor Movements Sections' Distinguished Graduate Student Paper Award.

Book Chapter: Habr, Katy. Forthcoming. "Partner or Competitor?: Exploring the Relationship Between Grocery Companies and the Gig Economy During the COVID-19 Pandemic."

Although a majority of American workers support unions, union density numbers remain at a historic low. In this project, sponsored by Work Rise, Kate Bronfenbrenner, Suresh Naidu, Anders Rhodin, Victor Yengle, and I update Bronfenbrenner’s work (in Changing to Organize, 1995; Blueprint for Change, 2003; and No Holds Barred, 2009) to examine union organizing and employer opposition between 2016 and 2021. 

We design and distribute a survey to the lead organizers of a random sample of 297 NLRB representation election cases in bargaining units of over 50 workers. We ask about company characteristics, campaign types, employer tactics, union tactics, and worker and organizer demographics. We leverage the historic iterations of the survey to create a novel database of 1,600 cases that allows us to compare union and employer tactics over time and take into account historical factors like labor market strength, the changing US economy, and shifting political dynamics

Our results indicate that in the 2016 -2021 period, union and employer tactics decreased as unions won more elections. We also find that union and employer tactics respond to each other and to company and external characteristics, which we call the “stakes” of the campaign.  Finally, we find that a shift in union targeting has significant impacts on the type and ease of campaigns that both unions and employers run. If unions had been organizing the same types of targets in 2016-2021 as they had in 1999-2003, they would have faced much more intense employer opposition and achieved a much smaller percentage of election wins.

Preliminary results from this research have been presented at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth conference in September 2022, in front of the U.S. House of Representatives Labor Committee in November 2022, and at the Worker Empowerment Research Network (WERN) Conference at MIT in December 2022. This work has been covered in WNY Labor Today and the Cornell Chronicle. An academic paper containing the full findings is forthcoming.

Paper: Bronfenbrenner, Kate; Katy Habr, Suresh Naidu, & Victor Yengle. Working Paper. "The Changing Climate for Union Organizing: 2022 Update."

The Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s murder during the summer of 2020 demonstrated an unprecedented scale of mobilization against police violence. This project explores how the rapid and severe economic recession created by the COVID-19 pandemic related to protest participation. 

We collect data on protest attendance and sudden employment loss in 491 commuting zones in the United States and find that employment loss is positively and significantly associated with greater rates of BLM protest attendance. This relationship is not observed for other protests during the pandemic, indicating a specific relationship between police brutality and economic shock. These findings contextualiize police violence as one dimension of a broader systemic failure of racial capitalism. This paper is currently under review.

Paper: Habr, Katy* and Hannah Pullen-Blasnik*. Under Review. “A Convergence of Crises: Sudden Employment Loss and Black Lives Matter Protest Attendance During the Covid-19 Pandemic.”
    * co-first authorship

• Winner of ASA Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements’ Mayer N. Zald Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Student Paper Award 2023. 

Can unions impact the political and social attitudes of members and increase civic participation? Using a mixed methods approach, Adam Reich, Rachel Sherman, Suresh Naidu and I examine the impact of one union’s political education program. We conduct interviews of ten union members who act as trainers in the political education program to understand their trajectories of union involvement, political engagement, and participation in political education. We also conduct participant observation of seven union political education trainings, curriculum development meetings, and trainer meetings to understand how members respond to and understand the political education program in the context of their workplace issues. 

We combine this qualitative information with quantitative data from union political participation databases to examine the impact of attending political education trainings on union involvement and political attitudes. Our project has implications for the use of union political education programs for developing class consciousness and working to combat the rise of authoritarianism. 

An article exploring this project was published in Labor Notes.