Barry Bluestone

Negotiating the Future: A Labor Perspective on American Business.

Introduction * A New Vision for American Enterprise From The Glory Days To Troubled Times * The Glory Days and the Traditional Workplace Contract * Goodbye to the Glory Days * What Went Wrong? From The Adversarial Workplace To Employee Involvement * Management Rights and Union Demands * Employee Involvement in Action * Does Participation Work? Toward An Enterprise Contract * From Co-Managing the Workplace to Co-Managing the Enterprise * The Enterprise Contract * Creating a Benign Climate for the New Labor-Management Accord

The Macroeconomics of Work Time

In this paper we demonstrate that because of stagnating wages and rising job insecurity, there has been a change in the labor supply regime in the U.S. macroeconomy since the 1970s. There is now greater labor supply at any given officially measured unemployment rate. This induced growth in the quantity of labor effort is coming from experienced, incumbent workers and therefore does not show up in the official unemployment rate. While this may diminish family and community life, the increased aggregate labor supply means rising aggregate demand is being absorbed even at unemployment rates of less than 5 percent without sparking inflationary pressures. Because of this upward structural trend in weekly hours, monetary policy authorities must now recognize that standard jobless measures have become a misleading gauge of available labor.

The Great U-Turn Revisited: Economic Restructuring, Jobs, and the Redistribution of Earnings

In December 1986, the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) of the U.S. Congress made public its commissioned report, “The Great American Jobs Machine” (Bluestone and Harrison, 1986). It was to become one of the committee’s most controversial of the year. The “Jobs Machine” study concluded that during the 1980s the U.S. economy continued to churn out new jobs at about the same rapid pace as during the previous decade, but a majority of the jobs created after 1979 were of dubious quality as measured by the annual earnings they paid. The JEC report revealed that while more than 20 million additional jobs were generated in the United States between 1973 and 1984, nearly three out of five (58 percent) of the net new jobs created after 1979 paid

Wage Inequality Takes a Great U-Turn

7,400 or less a year (in 1984 dollars). In contrast, fewer than one in five of the additional jobs generated between 1963 and 1979 had paid such low wages.1

Economic Crises and the Law of Uneven Development

Inequality among the annual wage and salary incomes of American workers declined steadily throughout the 1960s and well into the decade of the 1970s. Then, somewhere between 1975 and 1978, the distribution of wages and salaries took a sharp U-turn. This was before the election of Ronald Reagan, before the passage of the sharply regressive tax act of 1981, and even before the official commencement of the monetarist

Black Capitalism: the Path To Black Liberation?

Some years ago a congressional committee requested testimony on the urban crisis. Dozens of experts appeared before the committee giving detailed accounts of the problems facing the city. One expert concentrated on the age and size of sewer pipes, another on the narrowness of city streets, and so forth. Each indicated what he thought to be one of the pressing problems of the city and the solution necessary to ease the crisis. Among the final witnesses was Lewis Mumford, one of America’s foremost urbanologists. In his testimony, Mumford asserted that the urban problem could never be solved by simply aggregating all of the solutions each expert had suggested. Rather, he indicated that the problem with American cities is that they are fundamentally unlivable. Urban areas had grown up in such an unplanned and anarchic fashion that to renovate the cities would be impossible. The only real solution to the urban crisis was to build new cities from scratch and

Chapter 11 - Old Theories in New Bottles: Toward an Explanation of Growing World-Wide Income Inequality

Back in 1960 the demand at Greensboro, North Carolina, was for a twenty cent harrburger at a downtown white-owned lunch counter. Since then, freedom rides, sit-ins, marches . for jobs, income and decent housing, and finally urban riots have become vehicles for black expression against racism and for a fair share of American affluence. The response of the white corporate sector to such anguished calls for change has been, in general, indifference, if not open hostility. Only when the smoke from ghetto uprisings could be seen in their suburbs did corporate management begin to realize that the problems in the ghe,tto were potentially their problems as well.

The deindustrialization of America: Basic Books, Inc., 1982. ISBN 0-465-01590-5.

Abstract The factor-price-equalization theorem argues that international trade will tend to equalize factor prices between nations, but can also tend to exacerbate the returns between factors of production within countries. This paper argues that economic developments have fostered the increasing relevance of this result derived from Heckscher-Ohlin trade theory. Factor price equalization may be an important effect explaining the stagnation in real median earnings and increased earnings inequality over recent decades.