Meritless

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.