Book Review: Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment by Erin Hatton

• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720985423
• Published date: 01 December 2021
• Author: Keally McBride
• Date: 01 December 2021
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2021, Vol. 49(6) 1048 –1071

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Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Coerced: Work Under Threat of Punishment, by Erin Hatton. Oakland: University of

California Press, 2020, 304 pp.

Reviewed by: Keally McBride, Department of Politics, University of San Francisco,

San Francisco, CA, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0090591720985423

Working is a difficult experience, and as a topic of academic research it is

confounding. How do you conceptualize the relationship between people’s

stories about their work; their experiences at work; and the cold, hard cash

involved in most forms of work? The incongruity of these different layers of

analysis are revealed in Erin Hatton’s Coerced: Work Under Threat of

Punishment. What should we make of the fact that one football player sees

himself as a slave on the auction block as he is measured and evaluated by

trainers and recruiters, while an inmate who works for as little as three cents

an hour during incarceration feels his work is employment that has value?

(139, 187). If all workers were trained in Marxist analysis, the topic would be

pretty dull, as we simply followed the money. However, it seems most of us

are terribly confused about our own experiences; we stay in jobs that make us

miserable, or we embrace objectively miserable jobs as a form of self-actual-

ization. And then there are the infinite varieties of experience in between

these poles.

Coerced is not interested in teasing out the inconsistencies of our percep-

tions and experiences of work in the way that Kathi Weeks did in The Problem

with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries

(2011).1 Nor is Hatton interested in providing a historical analysis of the evo-

lution of work and worker management as found in Andrea Komlosy’s Work:

The Last 1,000 Years (2018)2 and Joshua Freeman’s Behemoth: A History of

the Factory and the Making of the Modern World (2018).3 Hatton’s primary

goal is to supplement current research on precarity with a new category:

status coercion. While much has been made of the fact of increasing precarity

in the last two decades, Hatton believes that there is something additional to

be explored. It isn’t just our insecurity that makes us vulnerable; she finds a

series of occupational structures that intensify precarity through “employers’

power of status coercion” (211).

985423PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720985423Political TheoryBook Reviews

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