IS WORK EXPERIENCE REWARDED?

A volatile labor market, with employers frequently revising their labor requirements and workers always on the look out for new jobs, provides much work for "labor market intermediaries"-- organizations which act as job brokerages, matching job seekers and potential employers. Traditional intermediaries such as temporary help agencies, professional associations, and union hiring halls, have been joined recently by non-profit community development corporations and numerous ventures occasioned by efforts to move former welfare recipients into jobs.

Many firms are experimenting with compensation schemes, such as share options or profit sharing, that give workers a more direct financial stake in the company. Some firms are also offering workers a greater say in decision-making. To support a pilot study of such "shared capitalism," a presidential award was made to Richard Freeman of the National Bureau of Economic Research and Douglas Kruse of Rutgers University. Freeman and Kruse will conduct a survey of employees across the country, mapping out the scope of "shared capitalism" and workers' attitudes towards it.

EXPLAINING INEQUALITY ACROSS MANUFACTURING PLANTS

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.