Katherine V.W. Stone

From Widgets to Digits: Employment Regulation for the Changing Workplace

This book provides an innovative framework to understand and address problems generated by the changing nature of the workplace. For most of the twentieth century, employers fostered long-term employment relationships through the use of implicit promises of job security and well defined paths for career progression. Today, employers no longer value longevity nor do they seek to encourage long-term attachment. Instead they seek flexibility. The labor and employment laws of the twentieth century are based upon an out-moded model of stable labor-employer relationship. Today employees expect to change jobs several times during their work lives as they move across the boundaries of departments and firms. The new boundaryless workplace has many implications for labor and employment regulation. Existing labor and employment laws were built on the assumption of long-term, stable relationships between employees and firms. The National Labor Relations Act, with its emphasis on bargaining units and job-centered contractual rights, was designed to protect employees in long-term employment relationships within well-delineated, bounded workplaces. Similarly, many aspects of the private social welfare system in the United States, including programs for old age assistance, unemployment insurance and health insurance, are employer-centered and assume a long-term employment relationship with a single employing unit. The emerging boundaryless workplace undermines the effectiveness of these programs and raises many serious concerns of equity, justice, and social welfare. From Widgets to Digits analyzes the impact of the new flexible workplace on the issues of employment discrimination, ownership of human capital, worker representation, employee benefits and income distribution. It proposes legal and institutional reforms to ensure the conditions of success in todays boundaryless workplace. Professor Stone contends that a constructive program for workplace justice must provide continuity in wages, on-going training opportunities, transferable skills, unambiguous ownership of individual human capital, and portable health and retirement benefits. She also advocates the creation of a reliable social safety net to ease transitions and cushion the fall for those who are left behind by the boundaryless workplace. From Widgets to Digits begins with a historical treatment of the changing workplace. It recounts the early twentieth century transition from artisanal era to industrial era job structures, and the current transition from industrial to digital era job structures. It then details the tension between the new boundaryless workplace and the labor and employment law framework that was tailored to the earlier era. The book then focuses on several specific areas that require new policy directions - post-employment restraints, employment discrimination, employee representation, health insurance and pension benefits, and income distribution. In each area, it proposes new legal frameworks to redress the inequities and vulnerabilities of the new workplace.

Legal Protections for Atypical Employees: Employment Law for Workers Without Workplaces and Employees with Employers

In the United States, the decentralization of production has fostered the growth of many types of atypical employment, most notably temporary employment, homework, and dependent independent contractors. The labor and employment laws in the U.S. were designed for long-term employees, so that criteria for eligibility and schedules of benefits assume an on-going employment relationship with a single employer. As the numbers of atypical employees grows, more and more individuals find themselves lacking basic protection for minimum wage, health and safety, retirement security, industrial injury, and collective bargaining rights. This article surveys major U.S. employment laws to demonstrate that temporary workers, homeworkers, and independent contractors face practical as well as legal barriers that prevent them from getting full coverage under existing labor and employment laws.

Globalization and the Middle Class

The most important question for social policy today is: can the United States participate in global trade while maintaining a robust middle class? Or does expanded global trade necessarily mean doom for the U.S. middle class and others in advanced industrial nations? This question might have sounded provocative, incendiary, or just plain silly a decade ago, but it can no longer be ignored. Several different approaches have been advocated to preserve the living standards of the middle class in advanced countries in the face of expanded global trade. This essay examines three clusters of policies that are the most promising, policies to (1) encourage a race to the top that can counterbalance a race to the bottom; (2) promote the creation of local and regional agglomeration economies that will act as counterweights to a race to the bottom, and (3) foster firm-level innovation and develop the skills and human capital of the local population. It concludes that we adopt policies that braid these three together in order to preserve the U.S. middle class.

Employment and Labor, Regulation of

Employment regulation consists of the legal rules and institutions that constitute, govern, and structure the employment relationship. Until recently, most industrial countries had employment regulation that provided most employees with job security and an adequate package of social protection. However, these regulations have been relaxed in recent years as employers have moved away from hiring employees into long-term employment relationships and have created many types of short-term employment relationships instead. The decline of the standard form of employment and the regulatory regime that supported it has given rise to a number of controversies involving employment regulation. In addition, the spread of global trade and the diffusion of production around the world have put pressure on industrial countries to dilute their employment regulation and lower their labor standards. However, as global production and trade continue to proliferate, social pressures are building for more labor law protections both in the developed and in the developing world. Hence employment regulation is not likely to disappear, but it will be transposed as part of the emerging international regime.