Philip Moss

“Soft” Skills and Race: An Investigation of Black Men's Employment Problems

We investigated changes in skill requirements and the effects of these changes on Black mens access to entry-level jobs, using open-ended interviews of managers at 56 firms in four industries. Managers reported that due to heightened competitive pressure, “soft skills”—particularly motivation and ability to interact well with customers and coworkers—are becoming increasingly important. Many managers view Black men as lacking in these soft skills. This helps to explain Black mens growing disadvantage in labor markets.

Under Construction: The Continuing Evolution of Job Structures in Call Centers

We study inbound call centers in fourteen businesses, using interview-based case studies. Contrary to the notion that U.S. businesses are eliminating job security and internal career tracks, these firms still incorporate these features in their job structures, and in many cases businesses that initially dismantled job and career structures ended up rebuilding them. The paper suggests a more nuanced account of changing job structures that incorporates market, institutional, and agency factors.

Capitalism and Kinship: Do Institutions Matter in the Labor Market?

This study examines the determination of employment and pay on “capitalist” and “kinship” vessels in the New England fishing industry. Capitalist vessels resemble standard competitive firms in the way that employment and pay respond to changing market conditions; kinship vessels operate under work guarantees and income sharing rules. These differences in institutional rules lead to different patterns of income, employment, growth, and labor adjustment. The study shows how an understanding of the institutional structure of labor markets can contribute to the design of public policies to facilitate adjustment to change and to promote industrial growth.

Too many cooks? Tracking internal labor market dynamics in food service with case studies and quantitative data

We wish to acknowledge Radha Biswass participation and invaluable research assistance throughout this project. We also thank the Russell Sage and Rockefeller Foundations for financial support.

Income and employment change in the new ENGLAND fishing industry

Abstract This study analyzes the effects of a large decline in catch on the income and employment of fishermen and fish processors in New Englands two largest ports, Gloucester and New Bedford. The study is motivated by a dispute between the United States and Canada over rights to a portion of the fertile Georges Bank fishing ground and is based on a detailed field study of the existing economic arrangements in the industry and linkages among sectors. The disaggregated analysis of the sequence of adjustments to a decline in catch leads to a better understanding of the differential income and employment adjustments among fishermen and the employment adjustments in processing. The study also analyzes the potential for absorbing displaced fishing industry workers within the local economies. The analysis suggests that the adjustment process and absorption potential are quite different in the two ports and very uneven across sectors. Major dislocations will be felt primarily by scallopers and processing worke...

Learning About Discrimination by Talking to Employers

Discriminations dynamic nature means that no single theory, method, data or study should be relied upon to assess its magnitude, causes, or remedies. Despite some gains in our understanding, these remain active areas of debate among researchers, practitioners and policymakers. The specially commissioned papers in this volume, all by distinguished contributors, present the full range of issues related to this complex and challenging problem.

Hiring in Urban Labor Markets

Ten years ago, the central concern animating research on urban labor markets was the “underclass”—groups of low-income people, disproportionately, people of color, who remained cut off from the labor market. Discussion of urban labor markets, then as now, focused on racial and ethnic minorities, particularly African Americans. No surprises there: Blacks and Latinos are more concentrated in metropolitan areas than non-Latino whites, and far more concentrated in central cities— more than twice as likely as whites to reside in these urban hubs (Harrison and Bennett 1995:Table 4A.1). At that time the social science consensus held that African Americans as a whole continued to make great strides in labor markets, as they had over the course of the century. As blacks moved out of the South into urban areas and achieved higher levels of education, their wages rose apace (Smith and Welch 1989). Civil rights laws and affirmative action seemed to clinch this progress: Black managers and professionals became increasingly common. The wages of black and white male college graduates had become nearly indistinguishable; black women’s wages surpassed those of white women (Freeman 1976, Wilson 1978).

The New Division of Labor: How Computers are Creating the Next Job Market

are most likely to purchase and read books about how to ensure a good retirement. Did Weiss’s informants reveal the formula for a good retirement? Quite the contrary. While most of the retirees appeared to experience a good retirement, every aspect of retirement explored by Weiss revealed a variety of tolerable solutions. No single formula for securing a good retirement emerged beyond the kind of self-evident advice one might give any pre-retiree: When you grow older and retire, hoping for a good retirement, evidence suggests you should have a secure income, maintain good health, and arrange for a reliable source of social support. These are exactly the prospects the middle-class subjects of this research were likely to have. Further, research indicates that while white-collar workers are quite likely to express some initial concern and dissatisfaction with retirement, over time they tend to adapt well in part because in their work, they have learned to anticipate and adapt to change. Blue-collar workers tend to reverse this sequence: they report initial satisfaction associated with relief from heavy or tedious work but report decreasing satisfaction with the unstimulating routineness of retirement over time. The audience for this readable book will certainly include pre-retirees and retirees like the middle-class retirees studied. But sociologists who are interested in retirement as a life course event or, if older, as an event they are anticipating personally, may be attracted by the skill with which the author uses unobtrusive footnotes collected at the end of the book to provide the perceptive survey of an extensive relevant literature on retirement. Although a sophisticated reader will be disappointed by the author’s failure to discuss the challenges of qualitative research and the limitations of using a convenience sample of middle-class professionals and managers to make generalizations about successful retirement, these limitations may, in fact, recommend the book as a supplementary text for undergraduates and graduate students in sociology. This readable, helpfully footnoted book describing the multiple routes to a good retirement for middle-class workers is also a readable introduction to some common pitfalls of qualitative methodology and of generalizations based on small samples of convenience from a limited socio-economic range. The New Division of Labor: How Computers are Creating the Next Job Market, by Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. 192 pp.

Too many cooks?: changing wages and job ladders in the food industry

39.95 cloth. ISBN: 0691119724.

Stories Employers Tell

Consolidation and outsourcing in the food industry have created higher-paying food prep jobs, but also have erected barriers for lower-skilled workers trying to move up the ladder.