The Fissured Workplace

In the twentieth century, large companies employing many workers formed the bedrock of the U.S. economy. Today, on the list of big business's priorities, sustaining the employer-worker relationship ranks far below building a devoted customer base and delivering value to investors. As David Weil's groundbreaking analysis shows, large corporations have shed their role as direct employers of the people responsible for their products, in favor of outsourcing work to small companies that compete fiercely with one another. The result has been declining wages, eroding benefits, inadequate health and safety protections, and ever-widening income inequality. From the perspectives of CEOs and investors, fissuring--splitting off functions that were once managed internally--has been phenomenally successful. Despite giving up direct control to subcontractors and franchises, these large companies have figured out how to maintain the quality of brand-name products and services, without the cost of maintaining an expensive workforce. But from the perspective of workers, this strategy has meant stagnation in wages and benefits and a lower standard of living. Weil proposes ways to modernize regulatory policies so that employers can meet their obligations to workers while allowing companies to keep the beneficial aspects of this business strategy.

For much of the twentieth century, large companies employing many workers formed the bedrock of the U.S. economy. Today, as David Weil’s groundbreaking analysis shows, large corporations have shed their role as direct employers of the people responsible for their products, in favor of outsourcing work to small companies that compete fiercely with one another. The result has been declining wages, eroding benefits, inadequate health and safety conditions, and ever-widening income inequality. “Authoritative...[The Fissured Workplace] shed[s] important new light on the resurgence of the power of finance and its connection to the debasement of work and income distribution.” —Robert Kuttner, New York Review of Books “The kinds of workplace fissuring discussed here—subcontracting, franchising and global supply chains-—have been the subjects of a number of studies detailing the employment effects that Weil describes. The Fissured Workplace is unusual in bringing this research together into an integrated, detailed and decidedly policy-oriented analysis...It makes a convincing case that the better regulation of fissured workplaces is a first step towards reversing the erosion of pay and conditions at the bottom of the labor market.” —Virginia Doellgast, Times Higher Education

In the twentieth century, large companies employing many workers formed the bedrock of the U.S. economy. Today, on the list of big business's priorities, sustaining the employer-worker relationship ranks far below building a devoted customer base and delivering value to investors. As David Weil's groundbreaking analysis shows, large corporations have shed their role as direct employers of the people responsible for their products, in favor of outsourcing work to small companies that compete fiercely with one another. The result has been declining wages, eroding benefits, inadequate health and safety protections, and ever-widening income inequality. From the perspectives of CEOs and investors, fissuring--splitting off functions that were once managed internally--has been phenomenally successful. Despite giving up direct control to subcontractors and franchises, these large companies have figured out how to maintain the quality of brand-name products and services, without the cost of maintaining an expensive workforce. But from the perspective of workers, this strategy has meant stagnation in wages and benefits and a lower standard of living. Weil proposes ways to modernize regulatory policies so that employers can meet their obligations to workers while allowing companies to keep the beneficial aspects of this business strategy.

Over the last fifty years in the United States, unions have been in deep decline, while income and wealth inequality have grown. In this timely work, editors Richard Bales and Charlotte Garden - with a roster of thirty-five leading labor scholars - analyze these trends and show how they are linked. Designed to appeal to those being introduced to the field as well as experts seeking new insights, this book demonstrates how federal labor law is failing today's workers and disempowering unions; how union jobs pay better than nonunion jobs and help to increase the wages of even nonunion workers; and how, when union jobs vanish, the wage premium also vanishes. At the same time, the book offers a range of solutions, from the radical, such as a complete overhaul of federal labor law, to the incremental, including reforms that could be undertaken by federal agencies on their own.

This unique study determines, by means of rigorous quantitative analysis, how cycles in New England cotton textile profits, output, borrowing, and capacity affected investment--and therefore industrial growth--during the nineteenth century. The firms studied were transitional forms between owner-managed companies and the modern corporation. From primary sources, Paul McGouldrick has constructed standardized balance sheets and income statements for each company year by year. A painstaking comparison with a much broader sample of companies shows that trends and cycles in profit rates for companies studied were typical of the industry.

From the Master and Servant legislation to the Factories Acts of the 19th century, the criminal law has always had a vital yet normatively complex role in the regulation of work relations. Even in its earliest forms, it operated both as a tool to repress collective organizations and enforce labour discipline, while policing the worst excesses of industrial capitalism. Recently, governments have begun to rediscover criminal law as a regulatory tool in a diverse set of areas related to labour law: 'modern slavery', penalizing irregular migrants, licensing regimes for labour market intermediaries, wage theft, supporting the enforcement of general labour standards, new forms of hybrid preventive orders, harassment at work, and industrial protest. This volume explores the political and regulatory dimensions of the new 'criminality at work' from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives, including labour law, immigration law, and health and safety regulations. The volume provides an overview of the regulatory terrain of 'criminality at work', exploring whether these different regulatory interventions represent politically legitimate uses of the criminal law. The book also examines whether these recent interventions constitute a new pattern of criminalization that operates in preventive mode and is based upon character and risk-based forms of culpability. The volume concludes by reflecting upon the general themes of 'criminality at work' comparatively, from Australian, Canadian, and US perspectives. Criminality at Work is a timely, rich and ambitious piece of scholarship that examines the many intersections between criminal law and work relations from a historical and contemporary vantage-point.

A Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year “An intellectual excursion of a kind rarely offered by modern economics.” —Foreign Affairs Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the most widely discussed work of economics in recent years. But are its analyses of inequality and economic growth on target? Where should researchers go from there in exploring the ideas Piketty pushed to the forefront of global conversation? A cast of leading economists and other social scientists—including Emmanuel Saez, Branko Milanovic, Laura Tyson, and Michael Spence—tackle these questions in dialogue with Piketty. “A fantastic introduction to Piketty’s main argument in Capital, and to some of the main criticisms, including doubt that his key equation...showing that returns on capital grow faster than the economy—will hold true in the long run.” —Nature “Piketty’s work...laid bare just how ill-equipped our existing frameworks are for understanding, predicting, and changing inequality. This extraordinary collection shows that our most nimble social scientists are responding to the challenge.” —Justin Wolfers, University of Michigan

Recent developments in the organization of work and production have facilitated the decline of wage employment in many regions of the world. However, the idea of the wage continues to dominate the political imaginations of governments, researchers and activists, based on the historical experiences of industrial workers in the global North. This edited collection revitalises debates on the future of work by challenging the idea of wage employment as the global norm. Taking theoretical inspiration from the global South, the authors compare lived experiences of ‘ordinary work’ across taken-for-granted conceptual and geographical boundaries; from Cambodian brick kilns to Catalonian cooperatives. Their contributions open up new possibilities for how work, identity and security might be woven together differently. This volume is an invaluable resource for academics, students and readers interested in alternative and emerging forms of work around the world.

With style and imagination, this iconoclastic work covers the major issues in development economics. In eight carefully reasoned essays, P. T. Bauer challenges most of the accepted notions and supports his views with evidence drawn from a wide range of primary sources and direct experience. The essays were selected on the basis of their interest to students and general readers from Bauer's book, Dissent on Development: Studies and Debates in Development Economics. Reviewing the previous work, the Wall Street Journal wrote: "It could have a profound impact on our thinking about the entire development question... Quite simply, it is no longer possible to discuss development economics intelligently without coming to grips with the many arguments P. T. Bauer marshalled in this extraordinary work."