2026 Lecture on Public Policy
Rethinking Platform Labor
Juliet B. Schor
Professor of Sociology, Boston College
Tuesday, March 10, 2026 | 5:30 p.m. 
Wolfensohn Hall

In this lecture, Juliet B. Schor will consider dominant social science perspectives on labor platforms, the role of algorithmic management, and whether platform work can fulfill its early promises.

Schor is an economist and Professor of Sociology at Boston College. Her research trajectory has traced the evolution of American economic life over the past three decades, from diagnosing the crisis of overwork in the 1990s to imagining alternative economic futures today.

A leading scholar of consumption and work, Schor has been studying the "gig" and "sharing" economies for more than a decade. Her book After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back draws on years of fieldwork to reveal how platforms promised community and flexibility but often delivered precarity and exploitation—while also documenting efforts to build more equitable alternatives.

Her most recent book, Four Days a Week: The Life-Changing Solution for Reducing Employee Stress, Improving Well-Being, and Working Smarter, reports on pathbreaking research studying trials at hundreds of companies worldwide that instituted four-day, 32-hour workweeks with no reduction in pay. The findings demonstrate significant improvements in employee well-being and organizational performance, offering empirical evidence that alternatives to the standard workweek are both feasible and beneficial.

Her landmark book The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure became a New York Times and national bestseller, fundamentally challenging assumptions about progress and prosperity. Her books also include The Overspent American: Why We Want What We Don't Need and True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy.

Schor is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and an honorary fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics. Her research has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and by the National Science Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and the Russell Sage Foundation.

The annual Lecture on Public Policy is curated by the School of Social Science and supported by an anonymous gift.