Since the "Japanese invasion" of the US automobile market in the 1980s, America's motor vehicle manufacturers have been forced to emulate their overseas rivals in order to compete with them. Many have spun off the production of parts and components into separate enterprises-- some of them in Mexico-- and then used their leverage over these independent suppliers to bargain down input prices. America's auto-makers have regained ground, but how have their component suppliers coped with these competitive pressures, and how have their coping strategies affected low skilled workers?

One goal of corporate restructuring is to foster a so-called "high-performance workplace," in which skilled workers are organized into small, relatively autonomous teams, granted more responsibility and expected to show greater initiative. Derek Jones of Hamilton College with Takao Kato and Adam Weinberg of Colgate University want to know whether such high-performance workplace strategies are slower to emerge, costlier to implement, and more difficult to sustain outside of metropolitan centers.

With the rise of managed care, and the fall of Medicare/Medicaid payments, the US health care industry is consolidating. Hospitals are merging to achieve economies of scale; clinics and practices are coming together into networks. Hospitals are also reorganizing their workplaces, from top to bottom, in search of greater efficiency. An award was made to Eileen Applebaum of the Economic Policy Institute, Peter Berg of Michigan State University, Ann Frost of the University of Western Ontario and Gil Preuss of Case Western Reserve University to study these changes in the hospital workplace.

Labor market intermediaries (LMIs) reduce the information, training, and legal costs of hiring disadvantaged workers, thereby expanding their employment opportunities. Because of the comparative advantage LMIs have in helping put disadvantaged workers into jobs, many state welfare and employment agencies are outsourcing their training and placement services to these firms.

Welfare reform legislation mandates that recipients of government aid find jobs, regardless of business cycle conditions. But when demand for workers in the private sector slows, jobs are hard to come by for low-skilled workers. Edward Nell and Raymond Majewski, economists at the New School University, propose an Employer of Last Resort (ELR) program, by which government would employ workers to produce valuable public goods when job creation is slow in the private sector, and give them job training and placement services.

 What part have unions played in the corporate restructuring of recent
decades? As managers have experimented with mergers and acquisitions,
outsourcing and flexible staffing, how have unions responded? While unions
may attempt to resist restructuring efforts, in some cases the very presence
of a union may spur managers to turn to outsourcing and labor saving
technologies as a way to erode union bargaining power. More positively,
unions may cushion the impact of restructuring without impeding it, giving

Women are entering the labor force in increasing numbers, and the income gap between male and female workers has been steadily declining. So why do recent studies focus on the perpetuation of gender inequality and not on its decline?

In today's rapidly changing economy, the labor force is increasingly called upon to develop new skills in order to keep pace with the constant flow of technological innovation. Since government training programs are often limited to unemployed and disadvantaged workers, it is incumbent upon employers or workers themselves to take the initiative and upgrade the skill level of the moderately educated workforce.