Blue-collar Labor Research Articles

Academic Work as Factory Work: A Former Blue-Collar Worker’s Observations on Class and Caste in the Academy

What was it like to have come of age after the Glorious Thirty (1945-1975), an era Jack Metzger (2016; 2021a) describes as a time when the working-class bettered their lives? I had the misfortune to have worked in several Metropolitan Detroit factories during the period of decline after the Glorious Thirty. During that time, I witnessed what the journalist George Packer (2013) has called ‘the Unwinding,’ the unraveling of the social contract that has left the working class to their own devices to find success and salvation. In keeping with the tradition in working-class studies of sharing lived experienced of class (Linkon, 2021, pp. 20-31; Strangleman, 2005, pp. 137-51), I highlight my multiple working-class lives to show that academic life is increasingly becoming more like blue-collar labor. Through a discussion of the concepts of class and caste, and the uniqueness of working-class culture, I propose that working-class academic crossovers are essentially ghosts trapped in a liminal limbo in an intellectual version of a contemporary factory that is largely devoid of the benefits of working-class culture.

How the Disappearance of Unionized Jobs Obliterated an Emergent Black Middle Class

In this introduction to our project, “Fifty Years After: Black Employment in the United States Under the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” we outline the socioeconomic forces behind the promising rise and disastrous fall of an African American blue-collar middle class. During the 1960s and 1970s, blacks with no more than high-school educations gained significant access to well-paid unionized employment opportunities, epitomized by semi-skilled operative jobs in the automobile industry, to which they previously had limited access. Anti-discrimination laws under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act with oversight by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission supported this upward mobility for blacks in the context of a growing demand for blue-collar labor. From the late 1970s, however, the impact of global competition and the offshoring of manufacturing combined with the financialization of the corporation to decimate these stable and well-paid blue-collar jobs. Under the seniority provisions of the now beleaguered industrial unions, blacks tended to be last hired and first fired. As U.S.-based blue-collar jobs were permanently lost, U.S. business corporations and government agencies failed to make sufficient investments in the education and skills of the U.S. labor force to usher in a new era of upward socioeconomic mobility. This organizational failure left blacks most vulnerable to downward mobility. Instead of retaining corporate profits and reinvesting in the productive capabilities of employees, major business corporations became increasingly focused on downsizing their labor forces and distributing profits to shareholders in the form of cash dividends and stock buybacks. Legitimizing massive distributions to shareholders was the flawed and pernicious ideology that a company should be run to “maximize shareholder value.” As the U.S. economy transitioned from the Old Economy business model, characterized by a career with one company, to the New Economy business model, characterized by interfirm labor mobility, advanced education and social networks became increasingly important for building careers in well-paid white-collar occupations. Along with non-white Hispanics, blacks found themselves at a distinct disadvantage relative to whites and Asians in accessing these New Economy middle-class employment opportunities. Eventually, the downward socioeconomic mobility experienced by blacks would also extend to devastating loss of well-paid and stable employment for whites who lacked the higher education now needed to enter the American middle class. By the twenty-first century, general downward mobility had become a defining characteristic of American society, irrespective of race, ethnicity, or gender. Since the 1980s, the enemy of equal employment opportunity through upward socioeconomic mobility has been the pervasive and entrenched corporate-governance ideology and practice of maximizing shareholder value (MSV). For most Americans, of whatever race, ethnicity, and gender, MSV is the not-so-invisible hand that has a chokehold on the emergence of the stable and well-paid employment opportunities that are essential for sustainable prosperity.

Labour Relations In Nepal Amid The Wake Of COVID-19 Outbreak

It has been now no wonder that labours are the propeller of the physical development of the earth in the form of blue collar and white collar labour. It includes all formal, semi-formal and informal sectors. Accordingly, labour law manages and regulates the status of labour in relation with employer, employee and the society. It establishes industrial relation i.e. rights and obligations of workers and employers, working hours, wages, leaves, labour security etc. ILO sets the standard and benchmark through series of conventions, protocols and recommendations on labour matter applicable for the member country across the globe. Along with the impact of COVID -19, many labours across the globe can be dislocated and forced for layoff. In fact, layoff is not the ultimate answer if we want to revitalize the world economy. The outbreak of pandemic has forced to stop labour movement. It has quite a lot contracted world’s economic activities. Even partial and nonpayment of remuneration to labour may further shrink effective demand in market which can be adverse to the whole economic transactions.

A Crowded Future: Working against Abstraction on Turker Nation

This paper examines digital labor and community through an ethnography of a discussion board supporting short-term digital contract workers on the Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk). First, we give a thorough overview of mTurk, the crowdsourcing marketplace, and Turker Nation, a discussion board for workers on mTurk. We trace the experience of interacting with this infrastructure on mTurk as worker and employer. Following, we look at scholarship on software infrastructure and autonomous Marxist theorizations of contemporary work. We demonstrate how the labor of participating on the discussion board Turker Nation helps to counter the abstraction the infrastructure provides. We show how workers on Turker Nation use the platform to structure time, build socializing spaces at work and initiate collective organizing. In doing so, we argue that workers’ labor belies conventional class classification, such as white-collar and blue-collar labor and instead lays the groundwork for how to structure future digital workplaces. We argue that this laboring resists the assumed logic of capitalism for digital labor that subsumes and takes over workers’ lives and conclude by looking at the limitations of the community’s collective organizing in terms of agreeing on points to communicated to the public.

Employment protection legislation and SME performance

This article examines the effect of employment protection legislation (EPL) on small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) performance. Rather than relying on country-specific proxies for EPL, as is common in the literature, we compute firm-specific measures of a firm’s exposure to EPL by using a panel dataset of 13,112 Belgian SMEs for the period between 2000 and 2009. The empirical results show that firms perform better when faced with lower hiring and firing costs through the use of more blue-collar labour contracts. The evidence showing improved performance by firms that attempt to achieve greater flexibility by hiring more temporary workers is limited.

Can the Intern Resist? Precarity of Blue-Collar Labor and the Fragmented Resistance of the White-Collar Intern in Laurent Cantet’sHuman Resources

Drawing on the literature regarding internships and cinema of precarity, this article addresses how one “learns” to intern and negotiate his or her class identity between a blue-collar past and white-collar future through an analysis of Laurent Cantet’s Human Resources. In contrast to Lauren Berlant’s astute though pessimist reading of the movie, I propose that internships may highlight the creative and organizing potential of labor power. A critique of Human Resources serves as an analytical lens through which the constitutive role of internship, its political desire to lead to crisis at work and its ability to resist precarity, albeit in a fragmented manner, may be revealed.

Book Review: Jeff Torline, Working Class: Challenging Myths about Blue-Collar Labour

Book Review: Jeff Torline, <i>Working Class: Challenging Myths about Blue-Collar Labour</i>

Organizing the Organized: Trade Union Renewal, Organizational Change and Worker Activism in Metropolitan America and Working Class: Challenging Myths about Blue-Collar Labor

Organizing the Organized: Trade Union Renewal, Organizational Change and Worker Activism in Metropolitan America and Working Class: Challenging Myths about Blue-Collar Labor

Book Review: Working Class: Challenging Myths about Blue-collar Labor

Book Review: Working Class: Challenging Myths about Blue-collar Labor

Transport and Logistics Developments in the Baltic Sea Region until 2025

The aim of this article is to chart likely futures of transport and logistics in the Baltic Sea Region in 2025. The research draws on a Delphi study data collection process, which included an international panel of experts. Several sector-related factors are identified that affect competitiveness of the region by 2025 from transport and logistics perspective: fuel and operational efficiencies, technology diffusion, labor productivity, low-cost country subcontracting, under-capacity in road and rail infrastructure, blue-collar labor scarcity, and sector regulation. Competitiveness oriented policy recommendations are presented accordingly.

Book Review: Working Class: Challenging Myths about Blue-Collar Labor, by Jeff Torlina

Book Review: <i>Working Class: Challenging Myths about Blue-Collar Labor</i>, by Jeff Torlina

Estimating Lost Output from Allocative Inefficiency, with an Application to Chile and Firing Costs

We propose a new measure of allocative eciency based on unrealized increases in aggregate productivity growth. We show that the dierence in the value of the marginal product of an input and its marginal cost at any plant - the plant-input - is exactly equal to the change in aggregate output that would occur if that plant changed that input’s use by one unit. The mean absolute gap across plants for any input can then be interpreted as the gain to society that would occur if every plant had a one-unit change in that input in the ecient direction, holding everything else constant. We show how to estimate this average gap using plant-level data from Chilean manufacturing from 1982-1994, a sector largely viewed as being one of South America’s least distorted. We nd the gaps for blue and white collar labor are quite large in absolute value and increasing over time, and that a one-unit move in the correct direction for blue collar would increase aggregate value added by almost 0.5%. We nd the gap for materials is small and the gap for electricity non-neglible but not

Working Class: Challenging Myths about Blue‐Collar Labor – By Jeff Torlina

Working Class: Challenging Myths about Blue‐Collar Labor – By Jeff Torlina

The Role of Corporate Social Responsibility and Soft Law Options in the Protection of Migrant Workers’ Interests in Host Countries — The Case of Malaysia

Abstract This article examines the potential for corporate social responsibility (CSR) and other soft law initiatives in generating change for blue-collar migrant workers in the Malaysian workplace. We explain the absence thus far of adequate protection for blue-collar migrant labour in formal law and corporate governance from a ‘path-dependence’ perspective and examine the potential of soft law options and government policies on labour migration as possible catalysts of change. The impact of the 1997 Asian financial crisis in creating new corporate governance rules and government support for the development of CSR is discussed along with international initiatives, such as the United Nations Global Compact, whereby Malaysian companies have committed to playing a positive role in creating favourable outcomes for labour and human rights. Avenues of development vis-à-vis CSR and other soft law mechanisms for blue-collar migrant workers are offered. We conclude with a comment on the trajectory for CSR, soft law options and blue-collar migrant employee relations in Malaysia by highlighting the potential for hybrid labour regulation, whereby soft law may be hardened through creative methods of interpretation by the courts.

Would More Skills Raise Demand for Those Who Do Not Get Them? Evidence from South African Manufacturing

Policy-makers claim that a shortage of skills is constraining output and that a rise in skill supply would benefit less skilled occupations in South Africa. This assumes/implies that skilled and unskilled labour are complements. To test the claim, this paper estimates Hicks elasticities of complementarity and elasticities of factor price with manufacturing data. Aggregate estimates suggest that white-collar labour complements blue-collar labour, so a rise in skill supply would lead to a rise in demand for less skilled labour. Disaggregated results show skilled/artisanal and unskilled labour are complements, while semi-skilled and unskilled labour are substitutes.

Steel Town (review)

Reviewed by: Steel Town Elizabeth Bush Winter, Jonah; Steel Town; illus. by Terry Widener. Atheneum, 2008. 40p ISBN 978-1-4169-4081-4 $16.99 R* 7-10 yrs Part informative treatise on the heyday of the American steel industry, part paean to blue-collar labor, Winter's poetic text traces the fiery journey of ore to iron to steel and celebrates the grinding, sweaty toil of the men who run it through the mill. The relentless heat and din of the 24/7 operation is captured in pulsing repetitions: "Inside the iron mill,/ it's like another world:/ fire and smoke,/ fire and smoke./ No matter the time of day or night,/ the men keep working,/ the machines don't stop:/ fire and smoke,/ fire and smoke." Everywhere there's danger—rivers of molten metal, train cars of bubbling ore that teeter on overhead rails, furnaces that measure degrees in thousands rather than hundreds. The lunchtime whistle heralds the only respite the workers will enjoy, from the time they climb down the stairs on Goat Hill Path at the beginning of the shift until "another shift is over./ Time to punch the time-card./ Time to get paid:/ Three crinkly bills/ in a grimy hand./ That means food." Widener's husky acrylic paintings turn the towering machines, furnaces, and smokestacks into smoldering monuments to industry, and the smoke-infused air grapples with the brilliant orange flames for the right to color the sky. He also takes just enough artistic liberty with scale and perspective to allow the workers to emerge as masters of the beast, trudging home beat but not quite beaten. Blast some Aaron Copland in the background and make this the centerpiece for a Labor Day program. Copyright © 2008 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Protection, Openness, and Factor Adjustment: Evidence from the Manufacturing Sector in Uruguay

The authors use a panel of manufacturing firms to analyze the adjustment process in capital blue collar and white collar employment in Uruguay during a period of trade liberalization when average tariff protection fell from 43 to 14 percent. They calculate the desired factor levels arising from a counterfactual profit maximization in the absence of adjustment costs, generating a measure of factor shortages or surpluses. The average estimated output gap for 1982-95 is 2 percent. The authors' policy analysis shows that trade openness affected the adjustment functions of all three factors of production. Highly protected sectors adjust less when creating jobs (reducing labor shortages) than sectors with low protection. This may be due to fears of policy reversal in highly protected sectors. Also, highly protected sectors adjust more easily (than low protection sectors) when destroying jobs (reducing labor surpluses), especially in the case of blue collar labor. This suggests that trade protection may in fact destroy rather than create jobs within industries, as firms in highly protected sectors are more reluctant to hire and more ready to fire than firms in sectors with low protection. The results for capital are qualitatively similar but quantitatively smaller, suggesting that trade protection plays less of a role in explaining adjustment costs for capital. Interestingly, export-oriented sectors have lower adjustment costs for blue collar labor but not for white collar employment or capital, suggesting that export-led growth may be particularly successful in reducing blue collar unemployment.

French Sociology of Work and Labor: From Shop Floor to Labor Markets to Networked Careers

Concentrating mostly on France, this paper considers the changing interests and the renewal of academic alliances in the sociology of work and labor over the last 50 years. Three periods result from the combined dynamics of sociology's internal agenda and societal changes: (1) analysis of blue-collar labor as the downgrading process of complete work in taylorist industry; (2) sociology of labor markets and employment, and analysis of the bargaining processes of rules, identities and the value of work; (3) reconciliation of work and labor in distributed and flexible organizations, based on mobile and involved workers.

High tech and high heels in the global economy: women, work, and pink-collar identities in the Caribbean

High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy is an ethnography of globalization positioned at the intersection between political economy and cultural studies. Carla Freeman’s fieldwork in Barbados grounds the processes of transnational capitalism—production, consumption, and the crafting of modern identities—in the lives of Afro-Caribbean women working in a new high-tech industry called “informatics.” It places gender at the center of transnational analysis, and local Caribbean culture and history at the center of global studies. Freeman examines the expansion of the global assembly line into the realm of computer-based work, and focuses specifically on the incorporation of young Barbadian women into these high-tech informatics jobs. As such, Caribbean women are seen as integral not simply to the workings of globalization but as helping to shape its very form. Through the enactment of “professionalism” in both appearances and labor practices, and by insisting that motherhood and work go hand in hand, they re-define the companies’ profile of “ideal” workers and create their own “pink-collar” identities. Through new modes of dress and imagemaking, the informatics workers seek to distinguish themselves from factory workers, and to achieve these new modes of consumption, they engage in a wide array of extra income earning activities. Freeman argues that for the new Barbadian pink-collar workers, the globalization of production cannot be viewed apart from the globalization of consumption. In doing so, she shows the connections between formal and informal economies, and challenges long-standing oppositions between first world consumers and third world producers, as well as white-collar and blue-collar labor. Written in a style that allows the voices of the pink-collar workers to demonstrate the simultaneous burdens and pleasures of their work, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy will appeal to scholars and students in a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, women’s studies, political economy, and Caribbean studies, as well as labor and postcolonial studies.

Can Unions Survive? The Rejuvenation of the American Labor Movement.

Defines the challenges facing the movement and offers comprehensive prescriptions for its successful transformation. --The George Washington Law Review valuable analysis of the rise, fall, and--hopefully--the revival of unionism in America. [The book] distills into readable form a mass of legal and empirical analysis of what has been happening in the workplaces of the United States and other industrial democracies. Most important, Craver has drawn a blueprint of what must be done to save collective bargaining in this century--must reading for scholars, lawmakers, and, especially, union leaders themselves. --Paul C. Weiler, Harvard Law SchoolAuthor of Governing the Workplace: The Future of Labor and Employment Law A thoroughly researched, insightful, and readable look at why American unions have declined. . . . This is a very informative analyis of a vital topic, and it will have a multidisciplinary appeal to anyone interested in union- management relations. --Peter Feuille, Institute of Labor and Industrial Relations, University of IllinoisWhen employees at firms like Greyhound and Eastern Airlines walk out to protest wage and benefit reductions, they are permanently replaced and their representative labor unions destroyed. Every year, the threat or drama of a high-profile strike--in air traffic control towers, at Amtrak, or at Caterpillar--makes national headlines and, every year, several hundred thousand unrepresented American employees are discharged without good cause. During the past decade, employer opposition to unions has increased. Industrial and demographic changes have eroded traditional blue-collar labor support, and class-based myths have discouraged organization among white-collar workers. As the American labor movement begins its second century, it is confronted by challenges that threaten its very existence. Is the decline of the American labor movement symptomatic of a terminal condition? In this work, Charles Craver presents an incisive analysis of the current state of the American labor movement and a manifesto for how this crucial institution can be revitalized. Journeying with the reader from the inception of labor unions through their heyday and to the present, Craver examines the roots of their decline, the current factors which contribute to their dismal condition, and the actions that are needed--such as the recruitment of female and minority employees and appeals to white-collar personnel--that are necessary to ensure union viability in the 21st century. Craver thoughtfully discusses what labor organizations must do to organize new workers, to enhance their economic and political power, and to adapt to modern-day advances and to an increasingly global economy. He also suggests changes that must be made in the National Labor Relations Act. This book is essential reading for lawyers, scholars, and policy-makers, as well as all those concerned with the future of the labor movement.