The student loan pause was implemented to assist borrowers during the economic downturn caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Using quarterly data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey from 2019-2021, I analyze the impact of the pause on household spending on healthcare and retirement savings. Prior studies have shown negative impacts of student debt on health and retirement outcomes. The results indicate no statistically significant difference in spending in these categories for households that were eligible for the student loan pause. These findings raise concerns of whether the student loan pause was enough to help households affected by student debt and how these households will fare once the pause ends.

Throughout history, social movements have been a key tool for socio-political transformation. One way that they achieve this is through their ability to educate significant numbers of people in short periods of time. The study of “social movement learning” helps to explain how and why the exchange of knowledge powers social movements. This research seeks to understand how sex workers engage in social movement learning in the pursuit of labor rights, using a descriptive case study of the North Hollywood Stripper Strike (March 18, 2022-2023). Drawing on interviews with local organizers, this thesis analyzes the Stripper Strike’s union campaign through the lens of knowledge exchange. The resulting seven-part model of social movement learning expands Hall’s (2009) model to include 1) formal learning, 2) nonformal direct learning, 3) nonformal direct education, 4) nonformal indirect learning, 5) nonformal indirect education, 6) informal learning, and 7) informal education as relevant typologies. By creating an amended social movement learning model, this research seeks to facilitate social movement-driven socio-political transformation, specifically within the sex worker’s rights and labor movements.

This thesis argues that food delivery gig workers are the canaries in the coalmine for understanding the future of work and point to the proliferation of a more exploitative capitalist system. While exploitation in the workplace is not new, the way in which choice, freedom, and autonomy are used to repackage old forms of exploitation through digital platforms indicates a new iteration. This thesis draws on extant literature in order to analyze twelve in-depth interviews with gig workers working for food delivery platforms, as well as online forums dedicated to food delivery workers. The study finds that food delivery gig workers perceive this new labor system as advantageous in terms of flexibility, autonomy, and finances. Although this new job niche mitigates precarity for some individuals, the food delivery corporations constrain the very control that gig workers value and ultimately exacerbate worker precarity. Gig work is both an economic relief and exploitative, flexible, and unreliable, and emancipative and restrictive. Food delivery gig workers’ experiences highlight tensions for those who want both autonomy and control, alongside better working conditions and protections. Despite some workers being aware of their exploitation, conditions outside of the gig sector in the traditional economy are increasingly unable to meet their needs, so they are willing to accept and even defend a job that actively undermines their stability. Food delivery gig workers help to reveal the contradictions within the current labor market and point to opportunities for changing it.