About 27.5 million Americans—nearly 24 percent of the labor force—earn less than $8.70 an hour, not enough to keep a family of four out of poverty, even working full-time year-round. Job ladders for these workers have been dismantled, limiting their ability to get ahead in today’s labor market. Low-Wage America is the most extensive study to date of how the choices employers make in response to economic globalization, industry deregulation, and advances in information technology affect the lives of tens of millions of workers at the bottom of the wage distribution.

Based on data from hundreds of establishments in twenty-five industries—including manufacturing, telecommunications, hospitality, and health care—the case studies document how firms’ responses to economic restructuring often results in harsh working conditions, reduced benefits, and fewer opportunities for advancement. For instance, increased pressure for profits in newly consolidated hotel chains has led to cost-cutting strategies such as requiring maids to increase the number of rooms they clean by 50 percent. Technological changes in the organization of call centers—the ultimate “disposable workplace”—have led to monitoring of operators’ work performance, and eroded job ladders. Other chapters show how the temporary staffing industry has provided paths to better work for some, but to dead end jobs for many others; how new technology has reorganized work in the back offices of banks, raising skill requirements for workers; and how increased competition from abroad has forced U.S. manufacturers to cut costs by reducing wages and speeding production.

Although employers’ responses to economic pressures have had a generally negative effect on frontline workers, some employers manage to resist this trend and still compete successfully. The benefits to workers of multi-employer training consortia and the continuing relevance of unions offer important clues about what public policy can do to support the job prospects of this vast, but largely overlooked segment of the American workforce. Low-Wage America challenges us to a national self-examination about the nature of low-wage work in this country and asks whether we are willing to tolerate the profound social and economic consequences entailed by these jobs.

EILEEN APPELBAUM is professor and director of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University.

ANNETTE BERNHARDT is senior policy analyst at the Brennan Center for Justice, New York University School of Law.

RICHARD J. MURNANE is the Thompson Professor of Education and Society, Harvard Graduate School of Education and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

CONTRIBUTORS: David H. Autor, John W. Ballentine Jr., Ann P. Baretl, Rosemary Batt, Peter Berg, Rachel Connelly, Deborah S. DeGraff, Laura Dresser, George A. Erickcek, Ronald F. Ferguson, David Finegold, Ann Frost, Erin Hatton, Susan Helper, Susan N. Haouseman, Larry W. Hunter, Casey Ichniowski, Derek C. Jones, Arne L. Kalleberg, Takao Kato, Morris M. Kleiner, Julia Lane, Alec Levenson, Frank Levy, Philip Moss, Gil Pruess, Harold Salzman, Kathryn Shaw, Chris Tilly, Mark Van Buren, Adam Weinberg, Steffanie Wilk, Rachel A. Willis.

A Volume in the RSF Case Stud ies of Job Quality in Advanced Economies

For over a decade, policy makers have emphasized work as the best means to escape poverty. However, millions of working Americans still fall below the poverty line. Though many of these “working poor” remain mired in poverty for long periods, some eventually climb their way up the earnings ladder. These success stories show that the low wage labor market is not necessarily a dead end, but little research to date has focused on how these upwardly mobile workers get ahead. In Moving Up or Moving On, Fredrik Andersson, Harry Holzer, and Julia Lane examine the characteristics of both employees and employers that lead to positive outcomes for workers.

Using new Census data, Moving Up or Moving On follows a group of low earners over a nine-year period to analyze the behaviors and characteristics of individuals and employers that lead workers to successful career outcomes. The authors find that, in general, workers who “moved on” to different employers fared better than those who tried to “move up” within the same firm. While changing employers meant losing valuable job tenure and spending more time out of work than those who stayed put, workers who left their jobs in search of better opportunity elsewhere ended up with significantly higher earnings in the long term—in large part because they were able to find employers that paid better wages and offered more possibilities for promotion. Yet moving on to better jobs is difficult for many of the working poor because they lack access to good-paying firms. Andersson, Holzer, and Lane demonstrate that low-wage workers tend to live far from good paying employers, making an improved transportation infrastructure a vital component of any public policy to improve job prospects for the poor. Labor market intermediaries can also help improve access to good employers. The authors find that one such intermediary, temporary help agencies, improved long-term outcomes for low-wage earners by giving them exposure to better-paying firms and therefore the opportunity to obtain better jobs. Taken together, these findings suggest that public policy can best serve the working poor by expanding their access to good employers, assisting them with job training and placement, and helping them to prepare for careers that combine both mobility and job retention strategies.

Moving Up or Moving On offers a compelling argument about how low-wage workers can achieve upward mobility, and how public policy can facilitate the process. Clearly written and based on an abundance of new data, this book provides concrete, practical answers to the large questions surrounding the low-wage labor market.

FREDRIK ANDERSSON is senior research fellow at Cornell University.

HARRY J. HOLZER is professor of public policy at Georgetown University and a visiting fellow at the Urban Institute.

JULIA I. LANE is director of the Employment Dynamics Program at the Urban Institute.

In 1899 the great African American scholar, W.E.B. DuBois, published The Philadelphia Negro, the first systematic case study of an African American community and one of the foundations of American sociology. DuBois prophesied that the color line would be the problem of the twentieth century. One hundred years later, Problem of the Century reflects upon his prophecy, exploring the ways in which the color line is still visible in the labor market, the housing market, education, family structure, and many other aspects of life at the turn of a new century.

The book opens with a theoretical discussion of the way racial identity is constructed and institutionalized. When the government classifies races and confers group rights upon them, is it subtly reenforcing damaging racial divisions, or redressing the group privileges that whites monopolized for so long? The book also delineates the social dynamics that underpin racial inequality. The contributors explore the causes and consequences of high rates of mortality and low rates of marriage in black communities, as well as the way race affects a person's chances of economic success. African Americans may soon lose their historical position as America's majority minority, and the book also examines how race plays out in the sometimes fractious relations between blacks and immigrants. The final part of the book shows how the color line manifests itself at work and in schools. Contributors find racial issues at play on both ends of the occupational ladder—among absentee fathers paying child support from their meager earnings and among black executives prospering in the corporate world. In the schools, the book explores how race defines a student's peer group and how peer pressure affects a student's grades.

Problem of the Century draws upon the distinguished faculty of sociologists at the University of Pennsylvania, where DuBois conducted his research for The Philadelphia Negro. The contributors combine a scrupulous commitment to empirical inquiry with an eclectic openness to different methods and approaches. Problem of the Century blends ethnographies and surveys, statistics and content analyses, census data and historical records, to provide a far-reaching examination of racial inequality in all its contemporary manifestations.

ELIJAH M. ANDERSON is Charles and William Day Professor of Social Sciences, University of Pennsylvania.

DOUGLAS S. MASSEY is the Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania.

CONTRIBUTORS: Linda H. Aiken, Ivar Berg, Mary Blair-Loy, Camille Zubrinsky Charles, Randall Colins, Kathryn Edin, Irma T. Elo, Frank F. Furstenberg Jr.,  Jerry A. Jacobs,  Grace Kao,  Robin Leidner, Janice F. Madden, Ewa Morawska, Timothy J. Nelson, Samuel H. Preston,  Douglas M. Sloane, Tukufu Zuberi.  

One of Choice Magazine's Outstanding Academic Books of 2000

For those interested in understanding the historical and scientific context of the census adjustment controversy, Who Counts? is absolutely essential reading. —Science

Ever since the founding fathers authorized a national headcount as the means of apportioning seats in the federal legislature, the decennial census has been a political battleground. Political power, and more recently the allocation of federal resources, depend directly upon who is counted and who is left out. Who Counts? is the story of the lawsuits, congressional hearings, and bureaucratic intrigues surrounding the 1990 census. These controversies formed largely around a single vexing question: should the method of conducting the census be modified in order to rectify the demonstrated undercount of poor urban minorities? But they also stemmed from a more general debate about the methods required to count an ever more diverse and mobile population of over two hundred million. The responses to these questions repeatedly pitted the innovations of statisticians and demographers against objections that their attempts to alter traditional methods may be flawed and even unconstitutional.

Who Counts? offers a detailed review of the preparation, implementation, and aftermath of the last three censuses. It recounts the growing criticisms of innaccuracy and undercounting, and the work to develop new enumeration strategies. The party shifts that followed national elections played an increasingly important role in the politization of the census, as the Department of Commerce asserted growing authority over the scientific endeavors of the Census Bureau. At the same time, each decade saw more city and state governments and private groups bringing suit to challenge census methodology and results. Who Counts? tracks the legal course that began in 1988, when a coalition led by New York City first sued to institute new statistical procedures in response to an alleged undercount of urban inhabitants. The challenge of accurately classifying an increasingly mixed population further threatens the legitimacy of the census, and Who Counts? investigates the difficulties of gaining unambiguous measurements of race and ethnicity, and the proposal that the race question be eliminated in favor of ethnic origin. Who Counts? concludes with a discussion of the proposed census design for 2000, as well as the implications of population counts on the composition and size of Congress. This volume reveals in extraordinary detail the interplay of law, politics, and science that propel the ongoing census debate, a debate whose outcome will have a tremendous impact on the distribution of political power and economic resources among the nation's communities.

MARGO J. ANDERSON is professor of history and urban studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

STEPHEN E. FIENBERG is Maurice Falk University Professor of Statistics and Social Change at Carnegie Mellon University.

A Volume in the RSF Census Series

What can the disciplines of political science and economics learn from one another? Political scientists have recently begun to adapt economic theories of exchange, trade, and competition to the study of legislatures, parties, and voting. At the same time, some of the most innovative and influential thinkers in economics have crossed the boundaries of their discipline to explore the classic questions of political science. Competition and Cooperation features six of these path-breaking scholars, all winners of the Nobel Prize for Economics, in a series of conversations with more than a dozen distinguished political scientists. The discussions analyze, adapt, and extend the Nobelists' seminal work, showing how it has carried over into political science and paved the way for fruitful cooperation between the two disciplines.

The exchanges span all of the major conceptual legacies of the Nobel laureates: Arrow's formalization of the problems of collective decisions; Buchanan's work on constitutions and his critique of majority rule; Becker's theory of competition among interest groups; North's focus on insecure property rights and transaction costs; Simon's concern with the limits to rationality; and Selten's experimental work on strategic thinking and behavior.

As befits any genuine dialogue, the traffic of ideas and experiences runs both ways. The Nobel economists have had a profound impact upon political science, but, in addressing political questions, they have also had to rethink many settled assumptions of economics. The standard image of economic man as a hyper-rational, self-interested creature, acting by and for for himself, bears only a passing resemblance to man as a political animal. Several of the Nobelists featured in this volume have turned instead to the insights of cognitive science and institutional analysis to provide a more recognizable portrait of political life.

The reconsideration of rationality and the role of institutions,in economics as in politics, raises the possibility of a shared approach to individual choice and institutional behavior that gives glimmers of a new unity in the social sciences. Competition and Cooperation demonstrates that the most important work in both economics and political science reflects a marriage of the two disciplines.

JAMES E. ALT is Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government and director of the Center of Basic Research in the Social Sciences at Harvard University.

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.

ELINOR OSTROM is codirector of the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis and the Center for the Study of Institutions, Population, and Environmental Change at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is also Arthur F. Bentley Professor of Political Science.

CONTRIBUTORS: James E. Alt, Kenneth J. Arrow, Gary S. Becker, James M. Buchanan, Norman Frohlich, Barbara Geddes, Robert E. Goodin, Russell Hardin, Bryan D. Jones, Robert O. Keohane, David D. Laitin, Margaret Levi, Douglass C. North, Joe A. Oppenheimer, Elinor Ostrom, Vincent Ostrom, Ronald Rogowski, Norman Schofield, Thomas Schwartz, Reinhard Selten, Kenneth A. Shepsle, and Herbert A. Simon.

It is a widely held belief today that there are too many lawsuits, too many lawyers, too much law. As readers of this engaging and provocative essay will discover, the evidence for a "litigation explosion" is actually quite ambiguous. But the American legal profession has become extremely large, and it seems clear that the scope and reach of legal process have indeed increased greatly.

How can we best understand these changes? Lawrence Friedman focuses on transformations in American legal culture—that is, people's beliefs and expectations with regard to law. In the early nineteenth century, people were accustomed to facing sudden disasters (disease, accidents, joblessness) without the protection of social and private insurance. The uncertainty of life and the unavailability of compensation for loss were mirrored in a culture of low legal expectations.

Medical, technical, and social developments during our own century have created a very different set of expectations about life, again reflected in our legal culture. Friedman argues that we are moving toward a general expectation of total justice, of recompense for all injuries and losses that are not the victim's fault. And the expansion of legal rights and protections in turn creates fresh expectations, a cycle of demand and response.

This timely and important book articulates clearly, and in nontechnical language, the recent changes that many have sensed in the American legal system but that few have discussed in so powerful and sensible a way.

Total Justice is the third of five special volumes commissioned by the Russell Sage Foundation to mark its seventy-fifth anniversary.

LAWRENCE M. FRIEDMAN is Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law at Stanford University.

Examines the impact of social forces on the legal system and how the rules and orders promulgated by that legal system affect social behavior. Dr. Friedman explores the relationship between class structure and the work of legal systems in the light of the existing literature and analyzes the influence of the cultural elements contained in a legal system. In a comprehensive analysis of the concept of legal culture, the author sheds new light on the development of our legal norms and the types of legal systems which prevail in a democracy.

LAWRENCE M. FRIEDMAN is Marion Rice Kirkwood Professor of Law at Stanford University.

Friedlander and Burtless teach us why welfare reform will not be easy. Their sobering assessment of job training programs willenlighten a debate too often dominated by wishful thinking and political rhetoric. Look for their findings to be cited for many years to come. —Douglas Besharov, American Enterprise Institute

A methodologically astute study that sheds considerable light on the potential for and limits to raising the employment and earnings of welfare recipients and provides benchmarks against which the impacts of later programs can be compared. —Journal of Economic Literature

With welfare reforms tested in almost every state and plans for a comprehensive federal overall on the horizon, it is increasingly important for Americans to understand how policy changes are likely to affect the lives of welfare recipients. Five Years After tells the story of what happened to the welfare recipients who participated in the influential welfare-to-work experiments conducted by several states in the mid-1980s.The authors review the distinctive goals and procedures of evaluations performed in Arkansas, Baltimore, San Diego, and Virginia, and then examine five years of follow-up data to determine whether the initial positive impact on employment, earnings, and welfare costs held up over time. The results were surprisingly consistent. Low-cost programs that saved money by getting individuals into jobs quickly did little to reduce poverty in the long run. Only higher-cost educational programs enabled welfare recipients to hold down jobs successfully and stay off welfare.

Five Years After ends speculation about the viability of the first generation of employment programs for welfare recipients, delineates the hard choices that must be made among competing approaches, and provides a well-documented foundation for building more comprehensive programs for the next generation. A sobering tale for welfare reformers of all political persuasions, this book poses a serious challenge to anyone who promises to end welfare dependency by cutting welfare budgets.

DANIEL FRIEDLANDER is senior research associate at the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation.

GARY BURTLESS is senior fellow in the economic studies program at The Brookings Institution.

During the 1970s, several striking population shifts attracted widespread attention and colorful journalistic labels. Urban gentrification, the rural renaissance, the rise of the Sunbelt—these phenomena signaled major reversals in long-term patterns of population distribution. In Regional and Metropolitan Growth and Decline in the United States, authors Frey and Speare place such reversals in context by examining a rich array of census data.

This comprehensive study describes new population distribution patterns, explores their consequences, and evaluates competing explanations of current trends. The authors also provide an in-depth look at the changing race, status, and household demographics of the nation's largest cities and discuss the broad societal forces precipitating such changes. Frey and Speare conclude that the 1970s represented a "transition decade" in the history of population distribution and that patterns now emerging do not suggest a return to the past.

With impressive scope and detail, this volume offers an unmatched picture of regional growth and decline across the United States.

WILLIAM H. FREY is faculty associate at the Population Studies Center, The University of Michigan.

ALDEN SPEARE, JR. is professor of sociology at Brown University.

A volume in the Population of the United States in the 1980s series.

A Volume in the RSF Census Series

Examines an alternative to the old patterns of living and working in the prevailing social system—the communal work place where work, recreation, and living space are brought together in a unified setting. The authors deal with a number of questions the communal work group faces, including the selection of projects, the choice of technologies and legal structure, and the means for determining economic viability. Past American and European communitarian movements are traced, as well as the nature and limitations of the new community experiments of the 1960s and 1970s.

DAVID FRENCH is assistant professor of economics at Johnson State College, Vermont.

ELENA FRENCH is assistant professor of social sciences at Johnson State College, Vermont.