Race and speech combine to affect the lives of minority workers in many important ways. Linguists have analyzed the differences between Standard American English (SAE) and African American English (AAE), a dialect spoken by many blacks in the United States. Many African-Americans are bi-dialectical, tending to use more AAE features in casual settings, but more SAE features in formal settings. Switching between AAE and SAE, known as “code-switching,” is believed to be widespread, although nationally-representative data have never been used to measure its prevalence.
In theory, computerized work has the potential to dramatically affect employment and earnings as core technologies improve—natural language processing, speech recognition, robotic movements, machine vision, information retrieval, and context awareness in various domains. However, our understanding of these effects remains limited and much of the current discussion remains speculative.
As is now well-known, economic inequality has been increasing for nearly four decades with the rise in inequality largely established using measures of individual and household income. IRS tax records indicate that the top 5% of income earners nearly doubled their share of the national income from 20% in 1970 to 36% in 2012. Census data suggests that the income shares of the bottom 80% of the population declined over the same time period.
Books
What Works for Workers?
Public Policies and Innovative Strategies for Low-Wage Workers
About This Book
The majority of new jobs created in the United States today are low-wage jobs, and a fourth of the labor force earns no more than poverty-level wages. Policymakers and citizens alike agree that declining real wages and constrained spending among such a large segment of workers imperil economic prosperity and living standards for all Americans. Though many policies to assist low-wage workers have been proposed, there is little agreement across the political spectrum about which policies actually reduce poverty and raise income among the working poor. What Works for Workers provides a comprehensive analysis of policy measures designed to address the widening income gap in the United States.
Featuring contributions from an eminent group of social scientists, What Works for Workers evaluates the most high-profile strategies for poverty reduction, including innovative “living wage” ordinances, education programs for African American youth, and better regulation of labor laws pertaining to immigrants. The contributors delve into an extensive body of scholarship on low-wage work to reveal a number of surprising findings. Richard Freeman suggests that labor unions, long assumed to be moribund, have a fighting chance to reclaim their historic redistributive role if they move beyond traditional collective bargaining and establish new ties with other community actors. John Schmitt predicts that the Affordable Care Act will substantially increase insurance coverage for low-wage workers, 38 percent of whom currently lack any kind of health insurance.
Other contributors explore the shortcomings of popular solutions: Stephanie Luce shows that while living wage ordinances rarely lead to job losses, they have not yet covered most low-wage workers. And Jennifer Gordon corrects the notion that a path to legalization alone will fix the plight of immigrant workers. Without energetic regulatory enforcement, she argues, legalization may have limited impact on the exploitation of undocumented workers. Ruth Milkman and Eileen Appelbaum conclude with an analysis of California’s paid family leave program, a policy designed to benefit the working poor, who have few resources that allow them to take time off work to care for children or ill family members. Despite initial opposition, the paid leave program proved more acceptable than expected among employers and provided a much-needed system of wage replacement for low-income workers. In the wake of its success, the initiative has emerged as a useful blueprint for paid leave programs in other states.
Alleviating the low-wage crisis will require a comprehensive set of programs rather than piecemeal interventions. With its rigorous analysis of what works and what doesn’t, What Works for Workers points the way toward effective reform. For social scientists, policymakers, and activists grappling with the practical realities of low-wage work, this book provides a valuable guide for narrowing the gap separating rich and poor.
STEPHANIE LUCE is associate professor of labor studies at the Murphy Institute, CUNY School for Professional Studies.
JENNIFER LUFF is lecturer in the department of history, Durham University, U.K.
JOSEPH A. McCARTIN is professor of history at Georgetown University.
RUTH MILKMAN is professor of sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center.
CONTRIBUTORS: Eileen Appelbaum, Peter B. Edelman, Richard B. Freeman, Jennifer Gordon, Sarah Hamersma, Harry J. Holzer, Stephanie Luce, Jennifer Luff, Joseph McCartin, Ruth Milkman, Alice O’Connor, John Schmitt, Paul Osterman, David Weil, Jeffrey B. Wenger
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Books
Private Equity at Work
When Wall Street Manages Main Street
About This Book
Finalist for the 2016 Academy of Management's George R. Terry Book Award
“Private Equity at Work is the first comprehensive examination of private equity—its history, economic performance, and social consequences, especially for employees. The authors cast a gimlet eye on private equity’s business model, whose shortcomings are dissected with razor-sharp analysis. The material is timely and original. It includes detailed case studies as well as proposals to better regulate this invisible but omnipresent industry.
—SANFORD M. JACOBY, Distinguished Professor, UCLA
“In this brilliant new book, Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt pull back the curtain on the shadowy world of private equity and its role in the management and mismanagement of our economy. Their rigorous, balanced, and well-written study shows how inadequate government regulation, biases in the tax code, and a permissive Wall Street culture combine to put private equity financiers in charge of important American companies, often to the detriment of the long-term interests of workers, investors and the broader economy. Appelbaum and Batt develop a program of common sense policy changes that will help us tap the socially productive potential of private equity while trimming its worst excesses. This terrific book will be of interest to policymakers, students, and scholars, and should be read anyone wanting to understand why America's widely shared prosperity got derailed and how to get it back on track.”
—GERALD EPSTEIN, professor of economics and codirector, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Private equity firms have long been at the center of public debates on the impact of the financial sector on Main Street companies. Are these firms financial innovators that save failing businesses or financial predators that bankrupt otherwise healthy companies and destroy jobs? The first comprehensive examination of this topic, Private Equity at Work provides a detailed yet accessible guide to this controversial business model. Economist Eileen Appelbaum and Professor Rosemary Batt carefully evaluate the evidence—including original case studies and interviews, legal documents, bankruptcy proceedings, media coverage, and existing academic scholarship—to demonstrate the effects of private equity on American businesses and workers. They document that while private equity firms have had positive effects on the operations and growth of small and mid-sized companies and in turning around failing companies, the interventions of private equity more often than not lead to significant negative consequences for many businesses and workers.
Prior research on private equity has focused almost exclusively on the financial performance of private equity funds and the returns to their investors. Private Equity at Work provides a new roadmap to the largely hidden internal operations of these firms, showing how their business strategies disproportionately benefit the partners in private equity firms at the expense of other stakeholders and taxpayers. In the 1980s, leveraged buyouts by private equity firms saw high returns and were widely considered the solution to corporate wastefulness and mismanagement. And since 2000, nearly 11,500 companies—representing almost 8 million employees—have been purchased by private equity firms. As their role in the economy has increased, they have come under fire from labor unions and community advocates who argue that the proliferation of leveraged buyouts destroys jobs, causes wages to stagnate, saddles otherwise healthy companies with debt, and leads to subsidies from taxpayers.
Appelbaum and Batt show that private equity firms’ financial strategies are designed to extract maximum value from the companies they buy and sell, often to the detriment of those companies and their employees and suppliers. Their risky decisions include buying companies and extracting dividends by loading them with high levels of debt and selling assets. These actions often lead to financial distress and a disproportionate focus on cost-cutting, outsourcing, and wage and benefit losses for workers, especially if they are unionized.
Because the law views private equity firms as investors rather than employers, private equity owners are not held accountable for their actions in ways that public corporations are. And their actions are not transparent because private equity owned companies are not regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Thus, any debts or costs of bankruptcy incurred fall on businesses owned by private equity and their workers, not the private equity firms that govern them. For employees this often means loss of jobs, health and pension benefits, and retirement income. Appelbaum and Batt conclude with a set of policy recommendations intended to curb the negative effects of private equity while preserving its constructive role in the economy. These include policies to improve transparency and accountability, as well as changes that would reduce the excessive use of financial engineering strategies by firms.
A groundbreaking analysis of a hotly contested business model, Private Equity at Work provides an unprecedented analysis of the little-understood inner workings of private equity and of the effects of leveraged buyouts on American companies and workers. This important new work will be a valuable resource for scholars, policymakers, and the informed public alike.
EILEEN APPELBAUM is senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, D.C. and Visiting Professor in the Management Department, University of Leicester, UK.
ROSEMARY BATT is the Alice Hanson Cook Professor of Women and Work at the Industrial and Labor Relations School, Cornell University.
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About This Book
An effective democratic society depends on the confidence citizens place in their government. Payment of taxes, acceptance of legislative and judicial decisions, compliance with social service programs, and support of military objectives are but some examples of the need for public cooperation with state demands. At the same time, voters expect their officials to behave ethically and responsibly. To those seeking to understand—and to improve—this mutual responsiveness, Trust and Governance provides a wide-ranging inquiry into the role of trust in civic life.
Trust and Governance asks several important questions: Is trust really essential to good governance, or are strong laws more important? What leads people either to trust or to distrust government, and what makes officials decide to be trustworthy? Can too much trust render the public vulnerable to government corruption, and if so what safeguards are necessary? In approaching these questions, the contributors draw upon an abundance of historical and current resources to offer a variety of perspectives on the role of trust in government. For some, trust between citizens and government is a rational compact based on a fair exchange of information and the public's ability to evaluate government performance. Levi and Daunton each examine how the establishment of clear goals and accountability procedures within government agencies facilitates greater public commitment, evidence that a strong government can itself be a source of trust. Conversely, Jennings and Peel offer two cases in which loss of citizen confidence resulted from the administration of seemingly unresponsive, punitive social service programs.
Other contributors to Trust and Governance view trust as a social bonding, wherein the public's emotional investment in government becomes more important than their ability to measure its performance. The sense of being trusted by voters can itself be a powerful incentive for elected officials to behave ethically, as Blackburn, Brennan, and Pettit each demonstrate. Other authors explore how a sense of communal identity and shared values make citizens more likely to eschew their own self-interest and favor the government as a source of collective good. Underlying many of these essays is the assumption that regulatory institutions are necessary to protect citizens from the worst effects of misplaced trust. Trust and Governance offers evidence that the jurisdictional level at which people and government interact—be it federal, state, or local—is fundamental to whether trust is rationally or socially based. Although social trust is more prevalent at the local level, both forms of trust may be essential to a healthy society.
Enriched by perspectives from political science, sociology, psychology, economics, history, and philosophy, Trust and Governance opens a new dialogue on the role of trust in the vital relationship between citizenry and government.
VALERIE BRAITHWAITE is associate director of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. She is also coordinator of the Trust Strand of the Reshaping Australian Institutions Project in the Research School of Social Sciences.
MARGARET LEVI is professor of political science and Harry Bridges Chair in Labor Studies, University of Washington, Seattle. She is also director of the University of Washington Center for Labor Studies.
A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation's Series on Trust