Erin Hatton, Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment
| Author | Michael Gibson-Light |
| Published date | 01 April 2022 |
| Date | 01 April 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1462474520980812 |
| Subject Matter | Book reviews |
Lacey N (2008) The Prisoners’Dilemma: Political Economy and Punishment in
Contemporary Democracies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thomas Guiney
Oxford Brookes University, UK
Email: tguiney@brookes.ac.uk
Erin Hatton, Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment, University of
California Press: Oakland, 2020; 281 pp. ISBN 9780520305410, $29.95
(pbk)
Sociologists have long inventoried the arsenal of punitive expressions of authority that
managers deploy against workers of all stripes. As such studies reveal, contemporary
labor arrangements are frequently marked by varieties of economic and physical coercion
underlying worker precarity in the US and abroad. Yet, amidst the continued emphasis on
precarity in such contexts, certain other perilous features of work relationships remain
understudied. So argues Erin Hatton in her new book, Coerced: Work Under Threat of
Punishment, which aims to expand our understanding of the day-to-day workplace strug-
gles of diverse populations. In particular, Coerced reveals the reaches of “status coer-
cion,”through which overseers exert control over the rights, privileges, or potential
future opportunities that workers in good standing might obtain. As Hatton notes,
control over status represents “an additional form of coercive employer power that over-
laps with, but is distinct from, economic and physical coercion”(19). It may also be
shaped by perceptions of race, class, gender, and sexuality to compound vulnerabilities.
In unpacking the dynamics and impacts of status coercion, Coerced turns toward the
experiences of workers from four distinct arenas: penal laborers, workfare workers,
college athletes, and graduate student researchers in the natural sciences. Because of
their liminal legal standing—all engage in work, but none are formally classified as
employees—these laborers are particularly susceptible to status coercion. Drawing on
121 in-depth interviews with individuals who have worked under these labor arrange-
ments as well as numerous secondary sources, the book illuminates the shared experi-
ences of these seemingly disparate groups. This comparative approach reveals how
status coercion cuts across diverse sectors of the economy as well as occupational hier-
archies, uncovering deeper social processes inherent to classificatory instability.
The initial empirical chapters sketch the contours of domination faced by working
prisoners, workfare beneficiaries, student athletes, and graduate student workers.
Chapter 1 analyzes hundreds of secondary documents to investigate cultural narratives
that are commonly applied to these workers of liminal status. Racialized and gendered
rhetorics of immorality, dependency, privilege, and more are deployed to reframe their
labor as distinct from rights-bearing employment. Hegemonic logics serve to justify
and normalize their continued subjugation and their lack of access to standard labor pro-
tections such that their bosses’total authority becomes “culturally accepted and
Book Reviews 287
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