The Art of the Resistance: Participation in the Slipstream and Acts of Resistance in a Culinary Re-Entry Program

Social policies since 1996 require that low income people participate in job training programs in order to receive social benefits under the “New Welfare State.” Many scholars have argued that job training programs aim to produce docile workers, who carry out only highly routinized work where little discretion is needed. Through ethnographic observation and interviews, I identify three means by which trainees manage the dual expectations of docility and the creativity demanded in a kitchen setting. First, they operate in a routine fashion, as if in a slipstream; second, they bank confidence by disregarding rules because of skill or favor by the chef; and third, workers take liberties and use resistance when not under surveillance. These findings suggest previous scholarship has overstated the extent to which the New Welfare State produces docile subjects, and implies that there are indeed a variety of outcomes of dignity and creativity for these workers

Predictive Analytics Supporting Labor Market Success: A Career Explorer for Job Seekers and Workforce Professionals in Michigan

Career Explorer provides customized career exploration tools for workforce development staff and job seekers in Michigan. There are separate Career Explorer modules for mediated staff services and self-service by job seekers. The system was developed by the Michigan Center for Data and Analytics in collaboration with the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research and Michigan Works! Southwest. It was funded by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Workforce Investment and the Schmidt Futures foundation’s Data for the American Dream (D4AD) project. In this paper, we describe specifications of the models behind the frontline-staff-mediated version of Career Explorer, which are based on program administrative data, applying data-science methods for predictive analytics. We also describe the self-service Career Explorer, which provides customized labor market information based on published Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Career Explorer became an active feature of Michigan’s online reemployment-services system in June 2021