The Tolls of Uncertainty: How Privilege and the Guilt Gap Shape Unemployment in America.

• Author: Davis, Cindy L.

Damaske, Sarah. The Tolls of Uncertainty: How Privilege and the Guilt Gap Shape Unemployment in America. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021. Xi + 318 pages. Hardcover, $27.95.

In The Tolls of Uncertainty, sociologist Sarah Damaske paints an illuminating portrait of modern-day unemployment and highlights the plight of the contemporary American worker. The text relies on research conducted utilizing a qualitative interviewing method to explore the life courses of 100 unemployed middle and working-class men and women between 2013 and 2015, at the early stages of and through the first year of their unemployment experience. Damaske weaves individual's stories into the text including a white middle-class man who is able to take advantage of his time on unemployment to take a break from work and to use the funds he contributed to the unemployment system for support, to the white working-class woman who was already living below the poverty line while working full-time so that when her job was lost her limited unemployment benefits led her to have to decide between feeding herself or her children.

Damaske details the distinctions in the unemployed based on class and gender, highlighting issues such as differences in benefits and opportunities, the gender pay gap, and the second shift. Damaske explains how the institutional structures of unemployment in the United States are designed such that those in a position of privilege such as educated middle-class men, can receive greater benefits, and can more easily maneuver unemployment such as by taking advantage of networks and by receiving larger unemployment benefits than a working-class person, even though both may have paid the same into the unemployment system.

The text explores the question of how the conditions of unemployment serve to reproduce inequities that already exist in both class and gender where those who had better employment and more resources before job loss were better able to weather the unemployment experience. Thus, the unemployment experience differs between men and women and between middle and working-class persons. Damaske incorporates societal norms such as mothering and self-sacrifice into the examination and explains topics such as the guilt gap where she found that women often feel more guilt in their job loss, end up taking on more of the household tasks and are more likely to give up their own health care. Issues such as marital status, whether a...