Kate Weisshaar, Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will present on the mechanisms producing hiring penalties for applicants with intermittent employment. Employment interruption is a common experience in today’s labor market, most frequently due to unemployment from job loss and temporary lapses to care for family or children. Audit studies have documented that both unemployed job applicants and parents who “opted out” of work face disadvantages in re-gaining a job, relative to applicants with continuous employment histories.

Please visit the seminar page to reserve time to meet with Professor Weisshaar.

Caring for chronically disabled family members is a stressful experience. In turn, psychosocial stress is linked to premature aging. CSDE Affiliate and Associate Professor of Anthropology, Dan Eisenberg recently published an article in Psychoneuroendocrinology in which he analyzes telomere length (TL), a biomarker of aging, as a possible mechanism linking psychosocial stress and accelerated aging in the Philippines.

CSDE Affiliate Jennifer Romich, Associate Professor of Social Welfare at the School of Social Work, was quoted in a recent article about Walmart’s new approach to reduce absenteeism, published by Bloomberg. Walmart is making sweeping changes to its employment policies, granting paid sick leave to hourly workers in the U.S., and, at the same time, possibly making it easier to fire those who miss too many shifts. From Walmart’s perspective, the new policies are designed to combat absenteeism both by making it easier for workers to take the time they need and discouraging no-shows. According to Romich, whose research focuses on resource use in low-income working families, “what’s really happening is they are concerned about people abusing paid time off.”