“I Couldn’t Put Up with It No More”
“I Couldn’t Put Up with It No More”
Perceived Mistreatment and Distrust at Work
This chapter explores women's experiences in the workplace as they interacted with supervisors and coworkers. The workplace is an arena in which both employers and employees face uncertainty. As employers do not know which employees will perform reliably, employees similarly do not know whether employers will treat them fairly. Women in low-wage jobs often feel their supervisors (and sometimes their coworkers) mistreat them and thus do not trust that they will get a fair shake at work. Surprisingly, this distrust led women to quit their jobs not only before welfare reform, when they could reliably replace wages (at least in part) with welfare benefits, but also after reform, when no such financial guarantee was in place. Quick turnover in jobs was thus due not only to factors outside the workplace, but also to traits of the workplace itself—in this case, the conditions that produced employee distrust of supervisors.
Keywords: workplace experiences, supervisors, coworkers, low-wage jobs, job turnovers, workplace traits, employee distrust, women
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