Labor Market Constraints Research Articles

The Northern wing of the Randstad: Suburbia versus the city in the Netherlands

Besides economic upheaval, the 1980s also saw a shift in attitude towards cities, especially among researchers and city planners. The new enthusiasm contrasts starkly with the disfavour that characterized urban policy in the 1970s. In fact, scholars and policy-makers have called the eighties a decade of 'urban renaissance'. In the Netherlands, the Montijn Commission (1989), for instance, drew attention to opportunities for successful investment in big cities. And a classification of European cities (Brunei, 1989) took a broader perspective, positioning the large Dutch cities in a European urban hierarchy. Government policy reflected this growing interest. In the 'Vierde Nota Ruimtelijke Ordening' (Fourth Report on Physical Planning, 1988) the rising awareness of urban potentials coalesced to form a new urban policy for the Netherlands. Its main thrust is to finance projects aimed at reinforcing the urban economy. The Fourth Report on Physical Planning was followed by 'VINEX', the Dutch abbreviation for the 'Fourth Report Extra' (1990). This government white paper elaborated upon the Fourth Report's policy views on the spatial development of the Netherlands. That update did not stand alone; VINEX was accompanied by planning scenarios like 'The Randstad Towards 2015'1. This article seeks to elucidate the perspectives outlined in VINEX regarding the development of the Randstad and its constituent cities. The main issue addressed here is whether these policies are based on a realistic view of spatial developments. We pursue this point in light of our own research and other pertinent literature. The argument focuses on the spatial structure of the Randstad, regional economic development, and labour-market constraints. But first, we discuss the policy goals of VINEX concerning the Randstad in the framework of selected theoretical notions on urban development.

The Determinants of Black-White Differences in Early Employment Careers: Search, Layoffs, Quits, and Endogenous Wage Growth

This paper studies the transition from school to full-time employment and subsequent labor mobility during the first five postschooling years for several recent cohorts of black and white male "terminal" high school graduates using unique data from the 1979 youth cohort of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience. A constrained optimization model of labor force dynamics is implemented empirically integrating features of models previously described in the literature. The estimates of the model provide quantitative evidence on underlying structural differences in labor market constraints faced by blacks and whites. For example, while blacks have overall a substantially smaller wage return to work experience and face a less disperse wage offer distribution, blacks face a higher probability of receiving job offers.

From Batch to Flow: Production Technology and Work-Force Skills in the Steel Industry, 1880–1920

From Batch to Flow: Production Technology and Work-Force Skills in the Steel Industry, 1880—1920 MICHAEL NUWER The evolution of mass-production technologies is often associated with the predominance of machine-tending jobs. Most observers of early-20th-century steelmaking practices in the United States main­ tained that technological changes created a large class of machine operators. “The tendency in the American steel industry,” wrote Ste­ phen Jeans of the British Iron and Steel Institute in 1902, “is to reduce by every possible means the number of highly skilled men employed and more and more to establish the general wage on the basis of common unskilled labor. This is not a new thing, but it becomes every year more accentuated as a result of the use of automatic appliances which unskilled labor is usually competent to control.”1 Five years later, in 1907, John Fitch, a contemporary journalist, claimed that “fifteen or twenty years ago a large proportion of the employees in any steel plant were skilled men. The percentage of the highly skilled has steadily grown less; and the percentage of the unskilled has as steadily increased.”2 Based on such observations, Katherine Stone maintains that be­ tween 1890 and 1910 the vast majority of production jobs in the steel industry became semiskilled in the sense that the worker was required to “operate the machines, to feed them and tend them, to start them and stop them.”3 Mechanization led to the downgrading of skilled Dr. Nuwer is assistant professor of economics and industrial relations at Potsdam College of the State University of New York. Phis article is based on research under­ taken for his 1985 University of Utah dissertation, “Labor Market Structures in His­ torical Perspective.” He wishes to acknowledge helpful comments by Mark Prus, Peter Philips, Janet Callahan, and the Technology and Culture referees. ’J. Stephen Jeans, ed., American Industrial Conditions and Competition (London, 1902), p. 317. 2John Fitch, The Steel Workers (New York, 1910; repr. ed., 1969), p. 141. 3Katherine Stone, “The Origins of Job Structures in the Steel Industry,” in Labor Market Segmentation, ed. Richard C. Edwards, Michael Reich, and David M. Gordon (Lexington, Mass., 1975), p. 37.© 1988 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040- 165X/88/2904-0009$01.00 808 Technology and Work-Force Skills in the Steel Industry 809 workers and the upgrading of unskilled workers. By 1910 jobs in the steel industry were homogeneous enough that occupational skill dis­ tinctions were “virtually meaningless.”4 According to Stone, homo­ geneity tended to lower worker morale and thus highly differentiated job hierarchies were designed by steel industry management “to in­ crease individual worker output.”5 More recently Bernard Elbaum has shown that comprehensive earnings data from 1910 contradict Stone’s interpretation of job hierarchies. He reports that the range of relative occupational wages between the highest paid occupation and common labor was 1.4:1 in blast furnaces and 6:1 in bar mills. Furthermore, average pay was 12 percent greater than the common labor rate in blast furnaces and 70 percent in bar mills. According to Elbaum, these earnings differentials are “simply too wide to be plau­ sibly interpreted as a price willingly paid by management for labor peace and morale.”6 Instead Elbaum interprets the wage structure of the steel industry as resulting from the bargaining leverage of workers strategically lo­ cated in a high-throughput production process. In the steel industry, industry-specific production jobs were insulated from competitive labor-market constraints, which left broad latitude for group bar­ gaining. The piece-rate payment system afforded strategically placed process workers the ability to capture the benefits of increases in plant productivity.7 Elbaum and Frank Wilkinson have elsewhere pointed out that “although training and skill requirements may not have been great for machine tendingjobs, responsibility for machinery and ma­ terials could be considerable, as high throughput in bigger plants increased the costliness of errors. Top production hands . . . thereby retained strategic importance. In these circumstances bargaining le­ verage of groups of workers could well increase even as the skill and supervisory status of hands declined.”8 ’Ibid., p. 45. "’Ibid., p. 43. ’’Bernard Louis...

Labor Market and Policy Constraints on the Work Disincentive Effect of Welfare

Abstract The popular image of U.S. welfare assistance is that it reduces the motivation to work by offering an alternative to employment. This study examines the work disincentive effect of welfare under spatially variant conditions in the labor market and in the public assistance system. The contention is that the decision between work and welfare, and therefore the work disincentive effect of welfare, is constrained by variable opportunities for employment and for obtaining public assistance in different parts of the country. This proposition is examined, using a model of the response of welfare participation to work disincentives, across different labor market and public assistance contexts. Results of an analysis of AFDC recipiency in the states indicate that welfare participation is most responsive to work disincentives in the upper Midwest, lower New England, and on the West Coast, where welfare provision is relatively liberal and the employment structure is not oriented toward the needs of the AFDC...