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.

This volume challenges the idea of wage employment as the global norm, comparing lived experiences of ‘ordinary work’ across conceptual and geographical boundaries and opening up new possibilities for how work, income, identity and care might be woven together differently.

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.

An analysis of manpower

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

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.

Contemporaries of Carroll D. Wright (1840-1909) lived through the transformation of American society by the industrial revolution. For the most part they thought the transformation represented growth and progress, but many also found occasion for doubt and fear in its consequences. Their anxieties collected around the notions of a "labor problem" and "labor reform." Whether from hope or fear, people felt a need for statistical information. On this popular demand Wright built his career as statistical expert and renowned master of "labor statistics." His investigations during thirty-two years of government service (1873-1905) gave form to contemporary ideas and set precedents for modern procedures, as in his seminal studies of wages, prices, and strikes. In telling how Wright took up this unprecedented career, Mr. Leiby shows the importance of Wright's early years and relates his work to the politics and religion of his time as well as to its social science. In this perspective, the history of the labor bureaus and their voluminous reports take on their original human purposes and meaning.