Eileen Appelbaum

Balancing Work and Family: The Role of High‐Commitment Environments

Recently, researchers have begun to recognize that the nature of jobs, the workplace environment, and more generally, the culture of the workplace can have a significant impact on the ability of workers to balance their work and family lives. This article examines the effect of high-performance work practices, job characteristics, and the work environment on workers’ views about whether the company helps them balance work and family. Using data from a survey of workers across three manufacturing industries, we show that a high-commitment environment—characterized by high-performance work practices, intrinsically rewarding jobs, and understanding supervisors—positively influences employees’ perceptions that the company is helping them achieve this balance. This article reinforces the view that helping workers balance work and family responsibilities is not just a matter of benefits and formal family-friendly policies. Rather, it also depends on the characteristics of jobs within the business enterprise. A merican families are being pulled in many directions. The number of dual-earner families has increased, as has the combined hours parents are working, while the time-consuming demands of maintaining a family and caring for dependents are unchanged. With more people working for pay and family work hours rising, balancing work and family life is an increasingly critical issue. Partly in response to these concerns, employers have begun to adopt a range of family-oriented policies, and some have expanded the scope of their work and family programs to include assistance with elder care and a range of flexible work arrangements. More recently, researchers have begun to recognize that the nature

Unfinished Business: Paid Family Leave in California and the Future of U.S. Work-Family Policy

Unfinished Business documents the history and impact of Californias paid family leave program, the first of its kind in the United States, which began in 2004. Drawing on original data from fieldwork and surveys of employers, workers, and the larger California adult population, Ruth Milkman and Eileen Appelbaum analyze in detail the effect of the state’s landmark paid family leave on employers and workers. They also explore the implications of California’s decade-long experience with paid family leave for the nation, which is engaged in ongoing debate about work-family policies.Milkman and Appelbaum recount the process by which California workers and their allies built a coalition to win passage of paid family leave in the state legislature, and lay out the lessons for advocates in other states and localities, as well as the nation. Because paid leave enjoys extensive popular support across the political spectrum, campaigns for such laws have an excellent chance of success if some basic preconditions are met. Do paid family leave and similar programs impose significant costs and burdens on employers? Business interests argue that they do and routinely oppose any and all legislative initiatives in this area. Once the program took effect in California, this book shows, large majorities of employers themselves reported that its impact on productivity, profitability, and performance was negligible or positive.Unfinished Business demonstrates that the California program is well managed and easy to access, but that awareness of its existence remains limited. Moreover, those who need the program’s benefits most urgently—low-wage workers, young workers, immigrants, and disadvantaged minorities—are least likely to know about it. As a result, the long-standing pattern of inequality in access to paid leave has remained largely intact.

The end of full employment? On economic development in industrialized countries

In view of high and rising jobless rates in the industrialized countries the solution of the unemployment problem becomes a cardinal question for politicians and economists. What factors have determined the unemployment trend since the 1960s and what conclusions can be drawn for employment policy?

High-Performance Work Systems and Labor Market Structures

Both academic and popular reports suggest that the pace of experimentation with innovative workplace practices has accelerated in recent years (Marchington et al. 1993; Appelbaum and Batt 1994; Osterman 1994; Freeman and Rogers 1995; Lawler, Mohrman, and Ledford 1995; Harley 1999:556–557). However, the notion that new work systems are emerging, in which workers have greater discretion over the work process, is a matter of considerable controversy (Barker 1993; Parker and Slaughter 1993; Graham 1995; Ramsay 1996; Sewell and Wilkinson 1992; Sewell 1998; Knights and McCabe 1998a, 1998b).

Back to work : determinants of women's successful re-entry

Identifies changing patterns of labor force participation by married women and analyzes the consequences to women of the work versus family decision.

A Slow-Motion Recession: What Congress Can Do to Help

We are by no mean out of the woods yet. How much help does the economy need? Here is a comprehensive plan for action.

Post-Keynesian Theory: The Labor Market

The labor aspects of post-Keynesian theory have yet to be systematically developed. Still, as this article will attempt to show, it is possible to combine some widely agreed-upon tenets of post-Keynesian thought, such as the importance of the oligopoly sector, the nature of technology in industrialized countries, and the process of price formation by firms, with the work that has been done by American institutional economists, particularly with regard to segmented labor markets. The result of this synthesis is a fairly comprehensive analysis of the labor market that largely follows Keynes in its approach to the demand for labor, and the segmented labor market theorists in its approach to the supply of labor. A post-Keynes-

Institutions and employment performance in different growth regimes

In the 1990s, institutional and evolutionary economics emerged as one of the most creative and successful approaches in the modern social sciences. This timely reader gathers together seminal contributions from leading international authors in the field of institutional and evolutionary economics including Eileen Appelbaum, Benjamin Coriat, Giovanni Dosi, Sheila C. Dow, Bengt-ake Lundvall, Uskali Maki, Bart Nooteboom and Marc R. Tool. The emphasis is on key concepts such as learning, trust, power, pricing and markets, with some essays devoted to methodology and others to the comparison of different forms of capitalism. An extensive introduction places the contributions in the context of the historical and theoretical background of

Strengthening America's Middle Class

The author summarizes the many challenges to the middle class today. Is Washington addressing the right issues? Some, but by no means all, of them, she says.

Manufacturing Advantage: Why High-Performance Work Systems Pay off

participation in Quebec over the period 197993. Their detailed analysis of welfare entries, exits, and duration marks an important contribution to our understanding of participation dynamics. Also on the topic of social assistance, Constantine Kapsalis studies how benefit rate changes affect the employment rate of lone mothers. This work is in response to significant changes in benefit rates in Ontario in recent years. The author finds that a