During the 2015–16 school year, 1.3 million students nationwide experienced homelessness. Yet hardships like homelessness represent dynamic rather than static states, and so annual figures understate the cumulative risk that students face over time. Moreover, despite recent efforts to understand eviction and foreclosure as exploitative and racialized processes, there have been few efforts to connect homelessness to these and other structural conditions. Using administrative data on the population of public school students in Michigan, we found that close to 1 in 10 students experienced homelessness while in school. Moreover, black students were over three times more likely to experience literal homelessness than white students. County-year fixed effects models indicate that rental costs, forced housing moves, and the opioid epidemic were associated with greater student homelessness. These findings have implications for our understanding of racial inequalities and the ways in which disadvantage and inequality are products of exploitative relationships.

Community-labor coalitions unite grassroots community organizations and hierarchical labor unions with the promise of increasing the effectiveness of each. Little is known, however, about whether and how community organizations benefit from such partnerships. We analyze survey data from the National Study of Community Organizing Organizations and field data from community-labor coalitions in Chicago to identify benefits and drawbacks for community organizations collaborating with unions. We find that community organizations that have unions as members generate more media attention, possess a broader tactical repertoire, and are more likely to mount state-level advocacy campaigns. Those benefits, however, come at the expense of grassroots mobilizing and result in less neighborhood-level organizing, fewer volunteers, and smaller turnouts at protest actions, all of which are vital to community organizing. Understanding these benefits and drawbacks can help advocates adjust strategy, tactics, and goals to ensure the long-term viability of community-labor coalitions.

The United States’ present neoliberal era shares with earlier tumultuous periods significant repressive tendencies in the political and economic domains. In the past, leading social workers confronted such crises in public forums and venues. This discourse analysis examines how they constructed compelling democratic narratives that influenced the enactment of beneficial social policy within three periods of democratic crisis. These social work leaders were members of presidential administrations, leaders of social work professional associations, directors of civil society organizations, and prominent writers for the profession or the public. They communicated through public and professional speeches, peer-reviewed articles, pamphlets, radio addresses, and congressional testimony. Discourse analysis reveals democratic themes such as autonomy, human dignity, equality, recognition, fostering of human capacity, social responsibility, and the necessity of moral contemplation. The historical lesson is that all social workers today should advance democratic discourse in their areas of influence to stem neoliberalism and promote democracy.

Low-income families experience multiple forms of instability, yet researchers have often focused on a single type of instability. This study used data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and examined patterns of multiple instability among low-income families with children, focusing on income, family structure, and residential instability. We employed sequence and cluster analyses to identify five distinct longitudinal profiles of multiple instability over five time points in a 2-year time period. The two largest profile groups experienced moderate overall and multiple instability (32 percent of families) or no instability (24 percent of families), with the remaining families experiencing increasing, decreasing, or persistent patterns of instability. There were stark differences between families in the no-instability group and the other families. Our findings suggest safety net programs must be more responsive to multiple forms of instability for all low-income families, and for certain subgroups of highly unstable groups in particular.