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The Future of Work
Program Description
In the thirty years after World War II, incomes grew rapidly for most Americans and unprecedented numbers were able to join the middle class. However, between 1973 and 1996, real median earnings among full-time male workers fell 15 percent, with even more drastic declines among those without a college degree. Since its inception in 1994, the Foundation’s Future of Work program has supported approximately 150 research projects examining the causes and consequences of this long-term deterioration in the availability and quality of jobs for low-skilled workers in the United States. Together, they provide valuable information about the types of policies that may help improve the employment outlook for low-skilled workers.
In the first few years of the program, RSF made about 80 individual grants for large-scale studies of aggregate labor market data. Investigators found evidence that a number of factors had put downward pressure on the wages of low-skilled workers, including foreign outsourcing, immigration, the decline of unions, downsizing, and the increasing substitution of computers for low-skilled labor. Other scholars studied the effect of poor-quality jobs and insecure employment on mental health, alcoholism, family formation and stability, and the cohesiveness of communities. Still other research addressed policies to equip more Americans with the skills demanded in the modern economy, from improving the way schools teach basic cognitive skills to making higher education more affordable for students from poor families. Finally, a few scholars took up the ambitious task of forecasting how the continued computerization of the economy might shape demand for various skills in the future.
In 1998, the
Future of Work program switched gears, commissioning a series of in-depth case
studies of hundreds of individual firms in over 25 industries in the United States.
Researchers examined how changing competitive pressures were affecting the
demand for skills, the organization of work, and the wages and career outlooks
of low-skilled workers. This project culminated in the 2003 publication of the
Russell Sage volume Low-Wage America:
How Employers Are Reshaping Opportunity in the Workplace, edited by
Eileen Appelbaum of Rutgers University, Richard Murnane of Harvard
University, and Annette Bernhardt of New York University. The case studies described
in Low-Wage America demonstrate the
influence of regulatory, business, and other labor-market institutions on the
quality of frontline jobs and show that when increased competition forces
employers to restructure their work processes, low-skilled workers fare better
where unions are strong, training consortia are available to equip workers with
new skills, and employer partnerships and universities exist to spread
innovative management practices.
Current Activities
The influence of institutions on the quality of American jobs demonstrated in the U.S. case studies inspired the Foundation’s current major initiative begun in 2004: a comparative study of low-wage jobs in five European countries, where firms face similar competitive pressures as in the United States, but operate under different institutional and policy regimes. The first part of this study, completed in 2007, aims to address the question of whether the quality of jobs for low-skilled workers is higher in European countries, with their more interventionist institutions, as compared to the United States.
Research teams from Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom documented the working conditions of call center operators, food processing factory workers, nursing assistants, retail clerks, and housekeepers in their respective countries through case studies of individual firms in each industry. The teams examined how differences in the degree to which employees are unionized, whether firms market themselves as either low-cost or high-quality, the structure of their ownership (national or multinational), and other factors shape the quality of jobs in each industry. A set of five books reporting on the results of the case studies in each country will be published in spring 2008. In the second, current phase of the project, some of the participants from the European studies and from the study of low-wage work in America are collaborating in producing a cross-national comparison of labor markets and specific industries in the five European countries and the United States, analyzing how different institutional arrangements affect management practices, job quality, and wages. A volume reporting on the cross-national findings and drawing implications for U.S. labor market policy will be published in 2009.
Should you have any questions about the Future of Work program, please contact Kelly Westphalen, Program Associate (Kelly@rsage.org). Otherwise, all information on
applying for a research award in the Future of Work program can be found on our How
to Apply website.
Recent Visiting Scholars
2008 - 2009
Harvey Molotch, New York University
Virginia L. Parks, University of Chicago
Dorian T. Warren, Columbia University
Katherine V.W. Stone, University of California, Los Angeles
2007 - 2008
Paul Frymer, University of California, Santa Cruz
Niels Westergaard-Nielsen, University of Aarhus, Denmark
2006 - 2007
Christopher Rhomberg, Yale University
2005 - 2006
Nancy Folbre, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
2004 - 2005
Greg J. Duncan, Northwestern University
Ruth Milkman, University of California, Los Angeles
2003 - 2004
Olivier Blanchard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Becky Pettit, University of Washington
Arnold J. Sameroff, University of Michigan
Sarah E. Turner, University of Virginia
Edward N. Wolff, New York University
2002 - 2003
Sandra Danziger, University of Michigan
Sheldon Danziger, University of Michigan
Henry Farber, Princeton University
Sandra Susan Smith, University of California, Berkeley
Louis Uchitelle, The New York Times
2001 - 2002
Rosemary Batt, Cornell University
Maria Cancian, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Robert M. Hauser, University of Wisconsin, Madison
2000 - 2001
Leslie McCall, Rutgers University
Arne L. Kalleberg, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Frank Levy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology