The unemployment institution

Building on existing research and interviews with 100 unemployed men and women in the state of Pennsylvania, this chapter extends my earlier argument that unemployment is an institution. I argue that the last half-century has seen unemployment's rising significance in adult life in the United States and examine how government rules and regulations, organizational practices, and shared customs and languages shape the unemployment experience. By identifying the important role both the government and employers play in the transition from employment to unemployment, as well as the way unemployment language normalizes job loss and makes invisible the organizational role in the process, I demonstrate how institutional rules, practices, and customs result in disparate transitions to unemployment and embed precarity into the unemployment process.