Download or read book Contingent Work Its Consequences for Economic Being the Gendered Division of Labor and the Welfare State written by Roberta M. Spalter-Roth and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 42 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Fat and Mean written by David M. Gordon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1996-05-15 with total page 646 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early 1980s, economic experts have recommended "downsizing" as the best way for U.S. corporations to remain competitive. Reducing unnecessary staff would lower costs, increase profits, and transform these companies into lean, mean production machines. As many American businesses pursued this strategy—often in the wake of mergers and acquisitions that left them with an unwieldy layer of middle management—and raised their bottom line, it seemed the experts were right. Yet as David M. Gordon shows in this iconoclastic book, most of them have really only gone halfway. They are "mean," but far from lean. Tracing the overall employment patterns of the past decade, Gordon shows that most American companies actually employ more managers and supervisors than ever before. These ever-increasing functionaries control company payrolls and pay themselves generous salaries—at the expense of average workers. For despite a steadily growing economy the real wages of the American worker have been falling for the past 20 years. To explain this decline and the much-debated "wage gap" that resulted, pundits and professors invoke various causes ranging from the flow of production jobs overseas to the average worker's lack of the technological skills needed in today's "knowledge economy." But Gordon exposes the single greatest factor in this decline, a corporate strategy that penalizes line workers and hinders businesses from competing effectively in world markets: the simultaneous overstaffing of management hierarchies and the inadequate compensation of workers. Instead of sharing profits with their employees, thus encouraging them to work harder, management has more often opted to prod workers by instilling fear of layoffs. Gordon unerringly plots the shortsighted and disastrous course of U.S. corporations, and documents the tremendous social and personal costs to their employees. Yet in addition to telling the harsh truth about downsizing, he suggests policies to ensure fairer business practices. Wages can increase— indeed, they must—as the economy begins to perform more efficiency. U.S. corporations have become fat and mean. They need to become lean and decent—not just for the sake of their workers, but for the sake of their competitive advantage. This provocative and original book shows how they can.
Download or read book Generating Jobs written by Richard B. Freeman and published by Russell Sage Foundation. This book was released on 1998-02-26 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American economy is in danger of leaving its low-skilled workers behind. In the last two decades, the wages and employment levels of the least educated and experienced workers have fallen disastrously. Where willing workers once found ready employment at reasonable wages, our computerized, service-oriented economy demands workers who can read and write, master technology, deal with customers, and much else. Improved education and training will alleviate this problem in the long run, but educating the new workforce will take a substantial national investment over many years. In the meantime, we face increasingly acute questions about how to include low-skill workers in today's economy. Generating Jobs takes a hard look at these questions, and asks whether anything can be done to improve the lot of low-skilled workers by intervening in the labor market on their behalf. These micro demand-side policies seek to improve wages and employment levels—either by lowering the costs of hiring low-skilled workers through employer subsidies, or by raising wage levels, benefit levels, or hours of employment, or by providing employment via government jobs. Although these policies are not currently popular in the U.S., they have long been used in many countries. Generating Jobs provides a clear-eyed assessment of this history, and asks if any of these policies might be applicable to the current problems of low-skilled workers in the United States. The results are surprising. Several recently touted panaceas turn out to be costly and ineffective in the American labor market. Enterprise zones, for instance, are an expensive way of moving jobs into areas of high unemployment, costing as much as $60,000 per job. Similarly, job-sharing, which has had uneven success in Europe, turns out to be ill-suited to conditions in the U.S., where wages are relatively low and workers need to work long hours to maintain income. On the other hand, a number of older, less flashy policies turn out to have real, if modest, benefits. Wage subsidies have increased employment among qualifying workers, and public employment policies can increase the number of workers from targeted groups working during the program. While acknowledging that many solutions are counterproductive, this definitive review of active labor market policies shows that many programs can offer real help. More than any rhetoric, Generating Jobs is the best guide to future action and a serious response to those who claim that nothing can be done.
Download or read book Redefining Flexibility written by Florence Catherine Gardner and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Affirmative Action Debate written by George Curry and published by . This book was released on 1996-06-20 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Politicians, executives, lawyers, and social researchers discuss affirmative action policies, their benefits and problems, and alternative solutions to discrimination.
Download or read book Looking Toward the Workplace of the 21st Century written by Heidi I. Hartmann and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Precarious Work written by Arne L. Kalleberg and published by Emerald Group Publishing. This book was released on 2017-12-08 with total page 477 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents original theory and research on precarious work in various parts of the world, identifying its social, political and economic origins, its manifestations in the USA, Europe, Asia, and the Global South, and its consequences for personal and family life.
Download or read book Contingent Work written by Kathleen Barker and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The successful 1997 strike by the Teamsters against UPS, and the overwhelming support the American public gave the strikers highlighted the impact of contingent work--an umbrella term for a variety of tenuous and insecure employment arrangements. This book examines the consequences of working contingently for the individual, family, and community.
Download or read book Analyzing Oppression written by Ann E. Cudd and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzing Oppression presents a new, integrated theory of social oppression, which tackles the fundamental question that no theory of oppression has satisfactorily answered: if there is no natural hierarchy among humans, why are some cases of oppression so persistent? Cudd argues that the explanation lies in the coercive co-opting of the oppressed to join in their own oppression. This answer sets the stage for analysis throughout the book, as it explores the questions of how and why the oppressed join in their oppression. Cudd argues that oppression is an institutionally structured harm perpetrated on social groups by other groups using direct and indirect material, economic, and psychological force. Among the most important and insidious of the indirect forces is an economic force that operates through oppressed persons' own rational choices. This force constitutes the central feature of analysis, and the book argues that this force is especially insidious because it conceals the fact of oppression from the oppressed and from others who would be sympathetic to their plight. The oppressed come to believe that they suffer personal failings and this belief appears to absolve society from responsibility. While on Cudd's view oppression is grounded in material exploitation and physical deprivation, it cannot be long sustained without corresponding psychological forces. Cudd examines the direct and indirect psychological forces that generate and sustain oppression. She discusses strategies that groups have used to resist oppression and argues that all persons have a moral responsibility to resist in some way. In the concluding chapter Cudd proposes a concept of freedom that would be possible for humans in a world that is actively opposing oppression, arguing that freedom for each individual is only possible when we achieve freedom for all others.
Download or read book On Gender Labor and Inequality written by Ruth Milkman and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2016-07-15 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ruth Milkman's groundbreaking research in women's labor history has contributed important perspectives on work and unionism in the United States. On Gender, Labor, and Inequality presents four decades of Milkman's essential writings, tracing the parallel evolutions of her ideas and the field she helped define. Milkman's introduction frames a career-spanning scholarly project: her interrogation of historical and contemporary intersections of class and gender inequalities in the workplace, and the efforts to challenge those inequalities. Early chapters focus on her pioneering work on women's labor during the Great Depression and the World War II years. In the book's second half, Milkman turns to the past fifty years, a period that saw a dramatic decline in gender inequality even as growing class imbalances created greater-than-ever class disparity among women. She concludes with a previously unpublished essay comparing the impact of the Great Depression and the Great Recession on women workers. A first-of-its-kind collection, On Gender, Labor, and Inequality is an indispensable text by one of the world's top scholars of gender, equality, and work.
Download or read book Freelancing Expertise written by Debra Osnowitz and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2010-10-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contract work is more important than ever—for better or for worse, depending on one's perspective. The security once implied by a full-time job with a stable employer is becoming rarer, thereby erasing one of the major distinctions between "freelance work" and a "steady gig." Why hang on to a regular job for the sake of security if security can no longer be assumed? Instead, contractors, hired temporarily for specific knowledge and skills, market their expertise as they move from project to project. Even though their employment is precarious, a great many consider freelancing preferable to holding a "regular" job: the control they feel over their time and careers is well worth the risks that come with relatively uncertain cash flow. Freelancing Expertise is a qualitative study of decision making, work practices, and occupational processes among writers and editors who work in print and Web communications and programmers and engineers who work in software and systems development. Debra Osnowitz conducted sixty-eight extended interviews with representatives of both groups and twelve interviews with managers and recruiters, observed four different work settings in which contractors work alongside employees, and monitored blogs and online discussions among contractors. As a result, she provides a unique and sensitive assessment of a cultural shift in occupations and organizations.Osnowitz calls for a reconfiguration of the employer/employee relationship that accepts more variation and flexibility: just as "freelancing" has, over time, taken on many traits considered characteristic of traditional career paths, so might regular jobs make themselves more appealing to today's workforce by mimicking some of the positive aspects of transactions between clients and contract workers.
Download or read book Sociological Abstracts written by and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CSA Sociological Abstracts abstracts and indexes the international literature in sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. The database provides abstracts of journal articles and citations to book reviews drawn from over 1,800+ serials publications, and also provides abstracts of books, book chapters, dissertations, and conference papers.
Download or read book Vicarious Language written by Miyako Inoue and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2006-04-05 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Inoue has accomplished an extraordinary task, which is without precedent in the East Asian Fields. To my knowledge, no author has ever demonstrated as persuasively as she does that the issues concerning women's Japanese can be explored in such an innovative, engaging way. Vicarious Language brilliantly displays how effectively Foucauldian archaeology can be introduced to the study of gender and language, and undermines any of the previous studies in English of what is erroneously referred to as the unique feature of the Japanese language. This is a superb model of engaged scholarship."—Naoki Sakai, author of Voices of the Past: The Status of Language in Eighteenth-Century Japanese Discourse "Miyako Inoue's Vicarious Language is a work of scholarly distinction and cultural insight. She explores the texture of Japanese modernity, its national rituals and social practices, by way of a sustained, semiotic analysis of womens' language—the language of self-expression that women use in intimate and institutional contexts, and the language used to define the gendered roles assigned to women within the powers of patriarchy. Her sources range widely from scholarly studies to the 'popular opinion' fostered by newspapers and advertisements; her excellent ethnography investigates the strategies of institutions and organisations, while inquiring into the politics and poetics of everyday life; her analytic method is, at once, conceptually sophisticated and textually intensive. This is a work that allows you to participate in the lifeworld of the Japanese language, at the illuminating moment when gender relations are writ large in the social syntax of national life. This is a book that will make a lasting impression on a range of disciplines."—Homi K. Bhabha, Anne F.Rothenberg Professor, Harvard University
Download or read book The Division of Labor in Society written by Émile Durkheim and published by Digireads.com. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: mile Durkheim is often referred to as the father of sociology. Along with Karl Marx and Max Weber he was a principal architect of modern social science and whose contribution helped established it as an academic discipline. "The Division of Labor in Society," published in 1893, was his first major contribution to the field and arguably one his most important. In this work Durkheim discusses the construction of social order in modern societies, which he argues arises out of two essential forms of solidarity, mechanical and organic. Durkheim further examines how this social order has changed over time from more primitive societies to advanced industrial ones. Unlike Marx, Durkheim does not argue that class conflict is inherent to the modern Capitalistic society. The division of labor is an essential component to the practice of the modern capitalistic system due to the increased economic efficiency that can arise out of specialization; however Durkheim acknowledges that increased specialization does not serve all interests equally well. This important and foundational work is a must read for all students of sociology and economic philosophy.
Download or read book The Transformation of Welfare States written by Nick Ellison and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-04-07 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Globalization', institutions and welfare regimes -- The challenge of globalization -- Globalization and welfare regime change -- Towards workfare? : changing labour market policies -- Labour market policies in social democratic and continental regimes -- Population ageing, GEPs and changing pensions systems -- Pensions policies in continental and social regimes -- Conclusion : welfare regimes in a liberalizing world.
Download or read book Books and Periodicals Online written by and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 1620 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Women and Recession Routledge Revivals written by Jill Rubery and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-10-18 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1988, this book compiles a collection of works investigating the impact of recession on women's employment. The authors argue that the most important explanation of differences in women's experience between the countries is the form of labour market regulation and organisation. They point out that current changes in these forms of regulation, and not displacement of female labour, pose the main threat to any gains that women have made in the labour market in the post- World War II period.
