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FALL COLLOQUIA: Changing Labor Market Institutions
in the U.S.
ANN MARKUSEN, Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University
of Minnesota
"An Occupational Approach to Economic
Development"
December 4, 2002 - 12:00-1:30pm, IRLE Director's Room
Co Sponsor: Department of City and Regional Planning
For more than 30 years, cities and states have attempted to
attract and retain businesses through incentives such as tax
breaks and subsidized land and buildings, widely believed to
be overly-expensive and inefficient in generating employment.
In this talk, Markusen makes the case for a human skills-based
theory of regional development and for conceptualizing regional
economies on the basis of occupations rather than industries.
She argues that economic development strategies should target
human talent and skilled people, including those in blue collar
and service occupations, whose contributions are generative
of growth for the overall economy and/or achieve equity goals.
She outlines how economic and community development planners
might target occupations as well as target industries in shaping
an economic development strategy, working with occupationally-based
organizations such as professional associations and trade unions.
FRED FEINSTEIN, University
of Maryland's School of Public Affairs
"The Limits of Reform at the NLRB and Alternative Strategies
for Labor"
November 18, 2002- 12:00-1:30pm, IRLE Director's Room
After decades of unsuccessful attempts to reform the NLRA, efforts
to
enhance the ability of workers to affect their working conditions
appear to be taking new forms. The NLRA has been essentially
unchanged for more than fifty years and is likely to remain
that way for the forseeable future, notwithstanding fundamental
changes in the workplace. Efforts to improve enforcement of
the Act during my tenure as General Counsel of the NLRB succeeded
in certain respects but enhanced enforcement is not likely to
address fundamental weaknesses in the Act. Notwithstanding the
deadlock on NLRA reform, significant innovation is emerging
in both policy and in how workers are seeking to gain leverage
in the workplace. These include changes in federal employment
law, increasing policy initiatives at the state and local level
and different approaches to organizing and asserting employee
influence in shaping workplace conditions.
Fred
Feinstein, former General Counsel of the National Labor
Relations Board, is a Senior Fellow and Visiting Professor at
the University of Maryland's School of Public Affairs where
he writes, teaches and develops executive education programs
on labor policy issues.
During his nearly six-year tenure as General Counsel, Feinstein
was recognized for efforts to improve the administration of
the National Labor Relations Act. He instituted a system for
case prioritization and made significant progress in assuring
the consistency in the timely conduct of elections for union
representation. He received four "Hammer Awards" for
these and other innovations in the operations of the Office
of General Counsel.
Before his appointment by President Clinton in 1994, Feinstein
served for 17 years as Chief Labor Counsel and Staff Director
of the U.S. House of Representative's Labor?Management Relations
Subcommittee. Responsible for directing the consideration of
labor legislation, Mr. Feinstein was lead staffer on the Family
and Medical Leave Act, the Worker Adjustment and Retraining
Notification (WARN) Act), and several efforts to amend the National
Labor Relations Act.
Feinstein has been an Adjunct Professor of Law at Georgetown
University School of Law, conducting courses on Legislation.
He was also an elementary public school teacher in East Harlem,
New York in the early 70's. Mr. Feinstein received a J.D. from
Rutgers Law School and a B.A. in Political Science from Swarthmore
College.
NELSON LICHTENSTEIN, Department of History, UC Santa
Barbara
"Postwar Intellectuals and the Demise
of the 'Labor Question'"
October 28, 2002 - 12-1:30pm, IRLE Director's Room
Many of America's most famous and influential intellectuals,
on the left and in the center, devalued and marginalized the
historic "labor question" during the decades that
followed World War II. Even before the onset of the great boom,
the specter - and to some the reality - of a bureaucratized
capitalism displaced and decentered Progressive Era/New Deal
issues of political economy. On the left, writers like Dwight
Macdonald, Herbert Marcuse, and C. Wright Mills saw capitalism's
mid-century crisis as one of cultural and social claustrophobia,
not class tensions. Meanwhile, in the liberal center, a generation
of well-connected intellectuals, including Clark Kerr, Seymour
Martin Lipset, Arthur Schlesinger, and Daniel Bell "defended"
trade unionism and a self-conscious working-class interest,
but only by propigating the idea of an insular and politically
parochical industrial pluralism ("free collective bargaining")
that collapsed when challenged by the post-Sixties growth of
a pervasive rights-consciousness in workplace legal culture,
as well as by the anti-union assault conducted by the corporate/Republican
Right during the 1970s and later.
Nelson Lichtenstein
is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa
Barbara. He is the author of State of the Union: A Century
of American Labor (2002), Walter Reuther: the Most Dangerous
Man in Detroit (1995); and Labor's War at Home: The CIO
in World War II, which will be shortly reissued from Temple
University Press. He serves on the editorial boards of Labor
History, New Labor Forum, and International Labor and Working
Class History. In 1996 Lichtenstein was a co-chairman of the
Columbia University "Teach-in with the Labor Movement"
that introduced John Sweeney and the AFL-CIO leadership to a
new generation of American academics and intellectuals.
PAUL OSTERMAN, Sloan School and the Department of Urban
Planning, M.I.T.
"Politics, Power, and Organizing: The Struggle for Economic
Justice"
October 14, 2002 - 12-1:30pm, IRLE Director's Room
Osterman will draw upon his work with the Industrial Areas Foundation,
a national network of community organizations, to discuss how
to strengthen progressive politics and progressive economic
policies. He will describe the organizing strategies of this
network and the nature of their faith based approach. He will
then layout and assess the labor market strategies which these
organizations have implemented in many of the cities in which
they operate. These include job training, living wages, and
school reform. The talk will be based on Osterman s forthcoming
book Gathering Power; The Future of Progressive Politics
In America (Beacon Press)
Paul Osterman is
the Nanyang Professor of Human Resources and Management at the
Sloan School and the Department of Urban Planning, MIT
His most recent book is Gathering Power; The Future of Progressive
Politics In America (Beacon Press, forthcoming). Other recent
books include Securing Prosperity: How the American Labor
Market Has Changed and What To Do About It (Princeton University
Press, 1999) and Working In America (MIT Press), 2001.
Osterman is also the author of Employment Futures: Reorganization,
Dislocation, and Public Policy and Getting Started: The
Youth Labor Market; the co-author of Working In America;
A Blueprint for the New Labor Market; The Mutual Gains
Enterprise; Forging a Winning Partnership Among Labor, Management,
and Government, and Change At Work, and the editor
of two books, Internal Labor Markets, and Broken Ladders;
Managerial Careers In The New Economy. In addition, he has
written numerous academic journal articles and policy issue
papers on topics such as labor market policy, the organization
of work within firms, job training programs, economic development,
and anti-poverty programs.
Osterman has been a senior administrator of job training programs
for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and consulted widely to
government agencies, foundations, community groups, and public
interest organizations. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from
MIT.
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