This book describes the experience of joblessness and unemployment in contemporary Poland. It does so by combining qualitative and quantitative data from a special project conducted in Poland after the Great Recession and the long-term Polish Panel Survey (POLPAN) to describe the lives of the jobless: women and men currently out of work, the recently re-employed, and housewives. The book uses a class and inequality perspective to investigate how these women and men became jobless, how they look for and find employment, their household and social activities, and their political participation. It contextualizes these experiences with a description of Poland's economy, labor market and employment policies after the fall of Communism and builds on the active interviewing and social constructionist approaches to explore the complex interviewer-respondent relationship.

This book is about long-term changes to class and inequality in Poland. Drawing upon major social surveys, the team of authors from the Polish Academy of Sciences offer the rare comprehensive study of important changes to the social structure from the communist era to the present. The core argument is that, even during extreme societal transformations, key features of social life have long-lasting, stratifying effects. The authors analyse the core issues of inequality research that best explain "who gets what and why:" social mobility, status attainment and their mechanisms, with a focus on education, occupation, and income. The transition from communist political economy to liberal democracy and market capitalism offers a unique opportunity for scholars to understand how people move from one stratifi cation regime to the next. There are valuable lessons to be learned from linking past to present. Classic issues of class, stratification, mobility, and attainment have endured decades of radical social change. These concepts remain valid even when society tries to eradicate them.