Labor Reform Research Articles

Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class by Mark A. Lause

Reviewed by: Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class by Mark A. Lause Joanne Pope Melish (bio) Civil War, Labor, Working class, Strikes, Unions Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class. By Mark A. Lause. (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Pp. 296. Cloth, $95.00; Paper $28.00.) A curious gap lies at the intersection of labor history and Civil War history. Except for its role in the New York City Draft Riots, labor activism during the war years has received relatively little attention from Civil War historians; while in labor histories, workers have tended to morph into soldiers for the duration of the war, bracketed by their antebellum and post-war labor struggles. Of course, a labor issue—slavery—lies at the heart of the Civil War, but it is treated as such mostly in terms of the labor shortage incurred by slave owners when their slaves decided to become rebels, fugitives, "contrabands," or Union recruits; few have looked at slaves' actions themselves as labor activism. Mark A. Lause has stepped into this breach with a labor history of the Civil War—a detailed examination of the experiences of working people as they resisted, negotiated, exploited, and survived (or not) the war. He attempts to pay careful attention to all categories of workers—North and South, male and female, black and white, native-born and immigrant, free and freeing themselves. His goal is to show how their collective wartime experiences forged a post-war American working class in the Thompsonian sense—"as a process of self-definition through which workers come to see themselves as playing a distinct role in society" (x). Most transformative was the emancipation of four million slaves in the course of the war; what Steven Hahn has called the greatest slave rebellion in American history, Lause characterizes as its biggest and most consequential strike. The book is organized into four main parts with three chapters in each, along with a prologue and an epilogue. The prologue introduces the various categories of American working people and gives an overview of their efforts to assert their interests, ranging from advocacy of land and labor reform and trade unionism on the part of skilled workers to ad hoc job actions and resistance on the part of slaves. Lause emphasizes the stratification of the workforce, with its great inequalities of working conditions depending on race, gender, and status (as native-born versus immigrant, and free versus enslaved), that made a shared class sensibility impossible at the outset of the war. The twelve main chapters trace an astonishing crescendo of ever more [End Page 396] militant strikes, riots, and other job actions in both the old crafts and new industrial trades that accompanied worsening economic conditions in both the northern states and the Confederacy as the war went on. Male workers in one occupational category after another organized and struck for higher wages and shorter hours; slaves walked off their jobs in a "rolling strike" (58). A few groups of working women, too, struck over wages, working conditions, and competition brought on by the war; more frequently, however, working women's causes were championed by middle-class advocates stressing workers' essential roles as wives and mothers. While some workers were exempted from military service and others successfully evaded it, many labor activists served, and some died. Lause has painstakingly tracked many of them into and through their enlistments. Lause argues that the war brought about many changes for working people. First, it taught them to embrace the power of the government to effect fundamental social change, and thus to channel their earlier cooperative impulse through politics. "To a great extent," he suggests, "American socialism grew directly from the experience of the Civil War" (173). But hopes for the triumph of an egalitarian notion of free labor were disappointed. The organizing efforts of women during the war did not transform paternalism. While the war emancipated human beings from enslavement, it also "emancipated race from slavery, making it an issue in itself" for labor as in all other aspects of American life (163). So, then, did the great upsurge...

The Heart of Capitalism: Contested Visions of Labor Reform in Lurana Sheldon's Department Store Novels

The Heart of Capitalism:Contested Visions of Labor Reform in Lurana Sheldon's Department Store Novels Ashley Elizabeth Palmer On 6 May 1890, the Working Women's Society (wws) of New York sponsored a meeting at Chickering Hall to protest working conditions in the city's department stores. Although it was led by middle-class men, the meeting obliquely featured one woman's voice when a male speaker read wws secretary Alice Woodbridge's harrowing account of the "miseries of the poor women" working in department stores ("To Help"). Woodbridge's "Report on the Condition of Working Women in New York Retail Stores" details physical and emotional hardships ranging from exhausting working hours to repulsive sanitary conditions. The circumstances she reveals were so extreme that speakers at the meeting pronounced their reform efforts "a battle for humanity" to "struggle for the emancipation of these poor women" ("To Help"). The meeting's goal was to expose the hardships of shopgirl labor to middle-class consumers who typically experienced department stores from only the other side of the counter. But although reformers arranged the meeting to enlighten middle-class consumers, the majority of attendees were in fact shopgirls. Demonstrably invested in their own welfare, shopgirls showed up in such large numbers that one news story observed that "there were more shop girls than consumers or clergymen" in attendance ("To Better"). Addressing them directly, the speakers encouraged the shopgirls to "combine for their own protection" ("The Interests"). The Chickering Hall meeting raised concerns about department-store labor reform that would reverberate not only through Progressive Era discourse but also through popular literature over the next two decades. Fiction using the department store for its main setting can help us understand how turn-of-the-century authors grappled with the complexities of labor reform within the nation's consumer palaces. American literary criticism that examines consumerism [End Page 106] at the turn of the century rarely considers the service industry labor behind consumer culture; such criticism has instead prioritized consumers' experiences and perspectives.1 While the critical emphasis on consumer culture is a productive perspective, we risk losing sight of the laboring people who enabled that consumption. For one formerly successful but now nearly forgotten author, Lurana Sheldon, the department store—where labor and consumption meet across the counter—served as an ideal space to consider possible models of labor reform. Two of her novels, For Gold or Soul? A Story of a Great Department Store (1900) and For Humanity's Sake: A Story of the Department Stores (1900–1901), offer a counternarrative to the scenes of glamorized consumption proffered by such writers as Theodore Dreiser and Émile Zola.2 Instead, Sheldon's novels enter the space of the department store expressly to illustrate the hardships its workers suffered. In this respect, her work echoes Zola's emphasis on the workers' lives in Au bonheur des dames (1883; The Ladies' Paradise) as he traces Denise Baudu's physically demanding and mentally discouraging experience as a department-store shopgirl. Sheldon's novels expand upon this interest in the figure of the shopgirl by envisioning reforms to alleviate her hardships in these massive, often corrupt sites of capitalist consumerism.3 In doing so, Sheldon's work both depicts and reshapes the world of department-store labor illuminated by the Chickering Hall meeting, pushing beyond existing nineteenth-century reform efforts in the United States to envision more just circumstances for female retail workers. Analyzing two of Sheldon's out-of-print novels published between 1900 and 1901, this essay explores how Sheldon worked within her cultural and political contexts to imagine possibilities of labor reform. Recovering Sheldon's work reveals the capacity for imagination that American writers brought to reform; the visions she presents for change in these novels include benevolent management, unified workers, labor-conscious consumerism, and labor unions that encompass both management and workforce. Yet if these novels suggest alternatives to labor exploitation from within consumer culture, they also reveal the limitations of such impulses. Despite Sheldon's evident sympathy for the plight of the shopgirl, even the most radical changes her novels envision retain systems of top-down reform that often leave the shopgirl...

Austerity and labour market deregulation: High risks and weak justifications

16 | International Union Rights | 24/1 FOCUS | WORLD BANK AND IMF Austerity and labour market deregulation: High risks and weak justifications Financial crises can affect labour rights in a number of ways. Obviously, financial crises may reduce economic growth and employment and impair the right to work. However, in addition, governments have often undertaken reform measures that directly — such as reduction in wages and employment in the public sector aimed at reducing public expenditure or labour market deregulation in the private sector purportedly to increase competiveness — or indirectly — by creating economic conditions which increase pressure on workers, reducing wages or threatening employment, for example through privatisation of public enterprises, trade liberalisation or cutting domestic subsidies — affect labour rights. Labour-related austerity policies have been openly pushed by a number of official key creditors, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), together, more recently, with the European Commission and the European Central Bank — the so-called Troika. Especially since the late 1980s, labour-related conditionality has featured prominently in IMF financial assistance programmes. Indeed, around 50 percent of all lending programmes have involved one or more labour-related conditions over the period from 1994 to 2007. Since then, the number of IMF programmes with labour conditionalities appears to have fallen, but still, between 25 to 40 percent of IMF programmes adopted until 2014 contained labour-related conditions relating to the public or the private sector1. International financial institutions have promoted labour law deregulation not only through formal conditionality to financial assistance arrangements. IMF has also made use of other instruments to advocate for deregulatory labour reforms, such as its Article IV consultations in the context of its bilateral macroeconomic surveillance2. These involve a certain amount of pressure and may also affect a country’s capacity to obtain financing elsewhere, given that potential or actual investors and bilateral lenders often have recourse to these reports3. Labour law issues in economic adjustment programmes While IMF has occasionally supported moderate improvements in labour standards4, its prevalent stance regarding labour law has been a deregulatory one. Close to one third of the available letters of intent addressed by governments to IMF between 1998 and 2005 contained commitments to be flexible with labour market regulation5. Early cases can be tracked to the 1950s, such as when IMF required Argentina to control wage increases. Adjustment measures implemented during the 1980s in the context of the Mexican debt crisis entailed a considerable reduction in both the number of public employees and their salaries, among others. The relevant reforms ranged from minor modifications to comprehensive reform packages with far-reaching amendments to both collective and individual labour laws. For example, during the 1990s, Côte d’Ivoire undertook reforms in the context of an IMF/World Bank-supported economic adjustment programme, which included the deregulation of the rules concerning temporary employment, dismissal and overtime, and involved the decentralisation of the collective bargaining system. Similarly, the structural adjustment programme carried out in Argentina during the 1990s entailed individual labour law reforms, involving, for instance, extending the duration of the probation period and collective labour law reforms, which granted firm-level agreements priority over sectoral agreements. In recent years, austerity-driven labour law reforms have remained a widespread trend. No fewer than 89 countries implemented such reforms Austerity-driven labour law reforms have remained a widespread trend. As a result, the level of protection of labour law has been substantially reduced Juan Pablo Bohoslavsky is the United Nations Human Rights Council-appointed Independent Expert on foreign debt and human rights Austerity-related labour law reforms between 2010 and 20157 9 18 40 34 East Asia and Pacific Highincome countries Number of austerity-related labour law reforms Number of cuts in or caps on public sector wages 3 7 6 8 South Asia Middle East/ North Africa 11 14 12 17 Latin America/ Caribbean Eastern Europe/ Central Asia 8 32 SubSaharan Africa FOCUS | WORLD BANK AND IMF 17 24/1 | International Union Rights | between 2010 and 2015 and more than half (49) of them were implemented in developing countries. In addition, 130 countries had reportedly implemented or were contemplating cuts in or caps on publicsector salaries, more than two...

Rebels in Paradise: Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists by Bruce Laurie

Reviewed by: Rebels in Paradise: Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists by Bruce Laurie Matthew Mason (bio) Keywords Abolition, Slavery, Antislavery, Massachusetts, David Ruggles Rebels in Paradise: Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists. By Bruce Laurie. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 178. Cloth, $80.00, Paper, $22.95.) This latest monograph from an established historian of abolition examines five abolitionists from Northampton, Massachusetts. African American abolitionist David Ruggles is the best known of the five, although Laurie posits that the Free Soil and Republican Party politician Erastus Hopkins was the most significant of them. Taken together, these profiles illustrate the greatly varied nature of abolitionism even within one locality. The individual biographical sketches are illuminating, but the reader has to do almost all the work of discerning the larger significance of this collective picture. [End Page 181] Although Laurie apologetically included no women and only one African American in his five subjects, this group features a real socioeconomic assortment, from the wealthy businessman John Payton Williston through the political editor Henry S. Gere to the displaced free black man Ruggles. They also occupied a wide range along the spectrum of antislavery belief and action, disagreeing on questions such as whether to actively aid the Underground Railroad or to support John Brown. They also differed—as was abolitionists’ wont—on the efficacy of political action. In short, what Laurie says of Williston might well be said of his other subjects: He was “a contradictory figure who might give pause to modern-day readers in need of an iconic abolitionist” (84). Laurie’s narrative also highlights the complex context within which antislavery politics operated in antebellum Northampton, interacting with a wide range of other political, moral, and economic issues. His actors took diverse stances on those other questions and assigned them differing levels of priority. Their divergent positions at times rose to the level of conflict. For instance, while Sylvester Judd saw his staunch support for the Working-Men’s movement and his antislavery as “opposite sides of the same antiestablishment coin,” the industrialist Williston fought against child labor reform (23). Laurie’s “fine-grained treatment of the local scene” thus shows that “how antislavery politics played out on the ground” was rarely neat and tidy (3). Laurie is committed to making comparisons and contrasts among his five individuals, and to placing their individual stories within the appropriate contexts of sectional, state, and local politics. But he seems uninterested in explicitly developing the significance of his characters beyond the local. “None of” his figures besides Ruggles, he admits, “has ever figured in a popular or academic account of the abolitionist movement,” and this book never makes it clear why they should (1). Laurie is enough of an academic historian and makes enough historiographical forays that it would be unfair to dismiss this book as an exercise in local antiquarianism. But his historiographical passages are very few and dwell on micro points, rather than developing an argument or intervention in the literature for the book as a whole. The Acknowledgements section makes it clear that Laurie’s editors at University of Massachusetts Press were not inclined to stretch him beyond this posture, when he quotes them as saying that “we like” Northampton abolitionists “and have special affection for locals” (ix). While both producing parties thus seem to have settled for a rather [End Page 182] modest goal, it remains true that they reached it. For this book does provide readers “with a deeper and richer understanding of the meaning of political abolitionism in a particular place and time”—if they are willing to do a fair amount of the heavy intellectual lifting themselves (8). Matthew Mason Matthew Mason is an associate professor of history at Brigham Young University. He is the author of various books and articles on slavery and politics, including Apostle of Union: A Political Biography of Edward Everett (Chapel Hill, NC, 2016). Copyright © 2017 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

Zhou Youguang周有光: (January 13,1906 -- January 14, 2017)

Zhou Youguang周有光(January 13,1906 -- January 14, 2017) Victor H. Mair (bio) Zhou Youguang was the main architect and early advocate of Hanyu Pinyin (the official romanized orthography for Modern Standard Mandarin [MSM]). Although he had nurtured an interest in language studies already from the time he was in high school, Zhou did not become a professional language specialist until the mid-1950s, when he himself was already in his fifties. Before that time, he was an economist and financier, with a career that included working for a Chinese bank (Irving Trust, which represented Sin Hua [see below]) on Wall Street from 1946 and teaching as a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai three years later after the Communists took control of China. Toward the end of his life, he became increasingly interested in and outspoken on social and political issues. These aspects of his life have been well covered in many media accounts (see “Works Consulted” below). This obituary will focus mainly on the half-century when he was fully occupied as a linguist. Zhou was born Zhou Yaoping 周耀平 in Changzhou, Jiangsu Province, while the Manchus still ruled over the Qing Dynasty. He studied at St John’s University and then Guanghua University, both in Shanghai, graduating from the latter in 1927 with a degree in economics and a minor in linguistics. After the start of the second Sino-Japanese War in 1927, Zhou moved inland to Chongqing (Chungking), where he [End Page 500] took a job at the Sin Hua Trust and Savings Bank. He also studied in Japan for a while during the early thirties, first as an exchange student at the University of Tokyo, and later at Kyoto University. Although Zhou Youguang considered the study of languages and linguistics an avocation up through the first half of the 1950s, his life changed dramatically in 1955 when Premier Zhou Enlai, who had met Zhou Youguang earlier in Chongqing and knew of his fascination with languages and scripts, invited him to head a committee charged with the reform of written Chinese. It was lucky for Zhou Youguang that this opportunity arose, since many of his economist friends – especially those who had connections with the West – were severely persecuted and some of them committed suicide. Zhou and his committee of about 20 researchers worked for three years to design the new Romanization. The result was a scheme based on several earlier systems: the phonemes were adapted from National Romanization (Gwoyeu Romatzyh) (1928) and Latinxua Sin Wenz (1931), and the tone marks were inspired by Zhuyin Fuhao (Bopomofo). The efforts of Zhou Youguang and his colleagues on the Script Reform Committee bore fruit. On Feb. 11, 1958, Hanyu Pinyin was adopted by the First National People’s Congress and it soon had an enormous impact on Chinese society, economy, education, and culture. It was adopted as the official Romanization for Chinese, both by the International Organization for Standardization / ISO (1982) and the United Nations / UN (1986). Pinyin is the avenue by means of which all Chinese schoolchildren begin to learn how to read and write; and now – among countless other applications – Pinyin is the overwhelming means for inputting characters in electronic devices of all sorts (computers, cell phones, and so forth). It also has applications in many other areas of human endeavor: sign language, braille, semaphore, indexing and ordering (alphabetization), advertising, signage of all sorts, labeling, etc. Zhou Youguang helped to devise and perfect the use of Pinyin in all of these fields. Although Pinyin was a huge success, that did not save Zhou Youguang from being sent to a labor reform camp in the Ningxia countryside from 1969–1972 during the Cultural Revolution. He used to [End Page 501] tell stories about how his job was to act as a living scarecrow to keep birds away from the crops – a ludicrous assignment for a linguist of his stature. Zhou Youguang’s chief accomplishments were in language reform and applied linguistics, but he also had a deep interest in the history of writing worldwide. Several of his books and many of his articles detail various aspects of the development of writing throughout the world, including “The Family of Chinese Character...

The fallout from the 2017 labour reform in Brazil for the trade union movement

The fallout from the 2017 labour reform in Brazil for the trade union movement

New England Regionalism's Material Moments

New England Regionalism's Material Moments Emma Calabrese (bio) In Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896), time seemingly progresses so slowly that a single minute fails to pass into the next. As the narrator describes, "An hour was very long in that coast town where nothing stole away the shortest minute." Yet, while this line suggests that time is static, we may interpret these words differently: the narrator's denial that a minute is "stolen" suggests that it is not merely removed, but put to good use. Significantly, the next sentence begins, "I had lost myself completely in work . . ." 1 Jewett grounds her narrator's temporal experience in the pleasurable process of work, displacing an image of a static regional past and instead considering the textures of day-to-day experience in Dunnet Landing, Maine. This essay explores several works of New England regional literature, including Jewett's Country, that treat time neither as relentlessly forward-moving nor entirely stagnant, but rather as an always-fluctuating present whose expansive, cyclical, and repetitive movements manifest in the material pleasures of seemingly mundane domestic chores. I argue that, taken together, these texts supplied significant contributions to labor reform debates during the Industrial Revolution, beginning with the American Arts and Crafts [End Page 397] movement in the latter half of the nineteenth century and culminating in the emergence of the field of occupational therapy over the twentieth century's first two decades.2 Commencing with Mary Wilkins Freeman's "A New England Nun" (1891), I examine how the aging and unmarried protagonist, Louisa Ellis, lays claim to a humble domestic routine that she savors. Her time takes on material qualities that allow her to meditate with care and joy on each passing moment. Supplementing this discussion, I investigate comparable representations of what I call "material time"—temporalities that adopt tangible qualities, as well as figurations of physical objects conveying the passage of time—in Freeman's "An Honest Soul" (1887) and in the short story "Heartsease" (1895), by the lesser-known New England regionalist Alice Brown. Finally, I consider Jewett's evocations of routine in Dunnet Landing, where the present materializes as a messy amalgamation of pasts and futures. These readings, I argue, echo American Arts and Crafts reformists; anticipating occupational therapy proponents, Freeman, Jewett, and Brown invoke the problems arising from industrial efficiency and then reframe, revise, and transform these problems into their own antidotes. These writers imply that preindustrial patterns of artisanal craft and factory workers' methodical movements inhere within the same representations of daily practice. Like an optical illusion in which two images coincide, New England regionalists portray domestic work to imagine that seemingly incompatible temporalities exist within a single physical space. They accomplish this synthesis by depicting time as concrete: in their fictions, moments inhere within knitting stitches, quilt seams, and bottles of essences stored for future use. By materializing time, writers envision a seemingly irreconcilable artisanal past and industrial future that their protagonists harness within objects. Bill Brown's foundational contribution to the multidisciplinary field of new materialism informs how I [End Page 398] theorize time. He argues that, in contrast to nineteenth-century anthropologists who composed histories to chronicle human experience across vast spatial and temporal expanses, Jewett's ethnographic sketches of New England life's material components are spatially and temporally specific to 1890s Maine.3 Additionally, Brown maintains that Jewett's regionalism forms an important contribution to the shift within the field of anthropology from diachronic to synchronic time—or, from describing object groups combining to represent a long temporal period, to describing objects representing a singular historical moment. His analysis dovetails with my own study of contemporaneous regional writers who explored the therapeutic effects of dwelling in a tangible present. Supplementing Brown's study, I suggest that authors who describe rural New Englanders working across a synchronic present contribute to a turn-of-the-century philosophy of time that emphasizes momentary interactions between people and things. Building from this premise, I join regionalism and timekeeping scholars who theorize the diverse temporalities appearing in nineteenth-century American literature. Scholars have long recognized New England as a representative locus of tension...

El instrumento colectivo en la reforma laboral de 2016

The labor reform introduced by Law No. 20,940 (2016) redesigned the figure of the collective instrument. Taking the norms already in the Labor Code prior to the reform, and adding some legislative variants, the new regulation placed the collective instrument within a broad and generic concept under different alternatives such as the collective agreement or arbitration decision. The requirements that the reform incorporates demand to unravel the scope of the collective instrument, solving the legal gaps that the new legislation has generated. However, within this scheme, the figure of the negotiating group’s agreement has been left in an obvious normative loneliness, even though the reform refers to it in different passages.

Reemplazo de trabajadores huelguistas en la reforma laboral

Chile's recent Labor Reform, tried to definitely eliminate the employer’s possibility of replacing striking workers during collective bargaining. However, during the drafting of the law, a presidential instruction was introduced to nuance the extent of that restriction; this makes it essential to determine the argument that shaped the History of the Law. Thus, begins the interpretation of this norm and will guide the jurisprudence that, doubtlessly, will play a main role in its application and compliance with national and international standards in Freedom of Association.

Toward the Future EU Growth: Capital Markets Union and Structural Reforms

The progress of globalization confronts the EU with the new challenges. To answer these, the restoration of growth is the imperative. The competitiveness especially on the Mediterranean littoral and hopefully the real convergence must be restored. Renewal of the North to South capital flows is the sine qua non of this development. The key in this endeavor is the capital markets union, which will facilitate the increased activities of the venture capital – the main tool to create the new economy of innovation and creativity. But to be successful the capital markets union has to be complemented by reforms of labor markets, business creation environment and taxation. New approaches like special “economic innovation and growth” zones may be necessary. To fully implement the necessary structural reforms the cooperation of the private and public sectors on both the EU and national levels is necessary.

Policy Reforms and SME Performances: A Comparison of Two Major EMEs

This paper makes a comparative analysis of the major reforms and measures taken by China via-a-vis India to shape their SME sector performances. Since SME sectors are mostly labour intensive labour reforms are absolutely essential. This would in turn, facilitate FDI (foreign direct investment) inflows and ease the credit and finance problems faced by the SMEs. India with its lop-sided distribution of firm-size faces the challenge of “missing middle”. SMEs are finding it suboptimal to grow because of the archaic labour laws in India, that constrain hiring and firing policies related to firm’s downsizing decisions. One observation regarding Chinese reform is that their reform agenda was much ahead of time, holistic and gradual, unlike India’s reform measures, which are piecemeal and non-uniform across time, and hence was partially effective in facilitating stable growth in the SME sector across time. However, recent initiatives are quite ambitious, if the steps get translated into reality the SME sector’s growth might reach its potential.

Effects of Employment and Social Protection Reformsin Spain: a jurisprudential perspective

Abstract: This paper analyzes the consequences of the process of labor reforms on the Spanish labor market. Specifically, it is deepened in the interpretation of the social courts of the reforms related to employment and social protection. Therefore, the main legal measures during times of crisis are studied, which have introduced an important space to labour flexicurity. Highlighting the changes related to internal flexibility and external that have been interpreted and sometimes corrected by social jurisprudence. Keywords: labour reforms, Spanish labor market, social jurisprudence, labour flexicurity, internal flexibility, external flexibility. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.20318/sllerj.2016.3309

Fiscal Consequences of Structural Reform Under Constrained Monetary Policy

Given the weak economic performance of many countries since the recent crisis, there is an increasing need for structural reforms aimed at promoting long-run economic growth. Structural reforms can entail short-run output costs unless offset by a demand expansion. When monetary policy is constrained and cannot carry out this short-run expansion, there is a potential role for fiscal policy. In this case, reforms can go against fiscal consolidation in the short run, although they are expected to improve public finances in the long run. The aim of this paper is to quantify the short-run fiscal costs and long-run fiscal benefits of reforms, and investigate how the design of reforms can affect this trade-off. The focus is on the euro area, which has been particularly affected by high unemployment. In the model, both the costs and benefits of reforms are generally small, although increasingly large reforms entail larger rises in deficit-to-GDP in the short run. Results suggest that reforms in labour markets have little effect on public finances in the long run, but their short-run costs can be ameliorated by combining them with product market reforms.

Economic Reforms in China and India: Past and Future Challenges

In China and India broad economic reforms since the 1980s progressively opened to private initiative and international trade and were key contributors to their formidable growth patterns. Today, the positive effects of past liberalizations are fading and the two countries have reached a level of development and complexity that requires a “new generation” of reforms, qualitatively more complex and politically less palatable. This paper identifies the turning points in China’s and India’s long phases of fast growth. It then turns to the open issues that need government action to support a sustainable and lasting growth process. In China, the priorities are to foster new growth engines by boosting domestic consumption and improving quality and efficiency on the supply side. In India, the reforms proposed by the government aim at facilitating investment, fostering innovation, protecting intellectual property, and building top-class manufacturing infrastructure. Broad reforms of financial and labor markets are also on the agenda. To make progress in these reforms both countries will require overcoming the resistance of vested interests and short term implementation costs.

Mass Transit Workers and Neoliberal Time Discipline in San Francisco

ABSTRACTSan Francisco's public transportation system is the slowest major urban transit system in the United States and has one of the worst on‐time performance rates. In this article, I examine how these problems with time—slowness and lateness—are blamed on “unproductive” workers and mobilized as part of neoliberal restructuring strategies in San Francisco. Demands for faster‐moving and more timely transit lead to the implementation and enforcement of impossible‐to‐meet schedules, putting transit drivers in the position of chronic lateness. City officials and civic organizations mobilize chronic lateness to represent the transit system's public sector workers as fundamentally inefficient and in need of labor reform. I here suggest that the enforcement of impossible time demands represents a new use of time discipline. While time discipline has traditionally been theorized as a central technique in the production of the social relations of waged labor, neoliberal time discipline works to delegitimize the wage labor contract itself and to fracture the social arrangements of long‐term, waged employment. [neoliberalism, labor, urban transportation, time discipline, United States]

Employee Protection Law and Corporate Innovation: International Evidence

This paper assesses the effect of changes in domestic employee protection law (EPL) on corporate innovation activities. Across 20 non-US countries domestic firms’ innovation (both in quantity and quality) decreases if their country’s EPL is strengthened. Using a difference-in-difference approach and a dynamic model, we establish that a more stringent EPL causes a decrease in innovation, and not vice versa. As possible channels, we show that employee-friendly labor reforms create an ex-ante hold-up problem, force firms to hire fewer inventors, and induce shirking. Further investigation reveals that the negative relation is more pronounced in firms with high external finance dependency, in manufacturing industries, and in less unionized countries. Our extensive micro-level findings indicate that enhanced employment protection impedes corporate innovation productivity.

Collective learning and regime dynamics under uncertainty: labour reform and the way to autocracy in Russia

ABSTRACTThe article questions the structural approach to autocratic transition that sees government as knowingly and purposely building autocracy, and contributes to the tradition emphasizing the plurality of possible regime developments and the role of contingency therein, by providing a more systematic treatment of such contingency. We offer a path-dependent theory of political change and use insights from cognitive institutionalism to show how ad hoc policy reform practices become accepted as a trusted way of interaction by political actors and how they “learn” their way into autocracy. This intuition is substantiated with a case-study of the labour reform in Putin’s Russia. The early 2000s marked a surge in uncertainty in Russian politics caused by the succession crisis and the profound political turnover it triggered. This uncertainty could have resolved in a number of ways, each leading to a different political development. We trace the actual way out of this uncertainty and show that the major factor to condition further regime trajectory was the way social reforms were conducted. The course of these reforms determined the ruling coalition and the institutions that ensure credible commitment within its ranks (the dominant party), and contributed to crowding out the political market and opposition decay.

Organizing The Ordinary City: How Labor Reform Strategies Travel to the US Heartland

AbstractIn New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, formal alliances between labor unions and community organizations have spurred successful workplace and policy organizing campaigns. As a result, the institutional form of the community–labor coalition is travelling to smaller, less unionized and more politically conservative cities, where the replication of established organizing strategies must contend with political, economic and institutional differences that often go unnoted. Comparing community–labor alliances in Indianapolis, St. Louis and Chicago, this article identifies heretofore unobserved conditions of possibility for successful urban labor organizing in the US. Compared to smaller cities, Chicago and the large urban areas from which ideal practices are abstracted feature higher levels of union membership, significantly more funding of basic social and neighborhood services, and larger immigrant communities. Operating with minimal human services and limited recourse to the social and institutional networks of immigrant workers, labor coalitions in St. Louis and Indianapolis face recurrent barriers to identifying workplace problems, mobilizing low‐wage workers and sustaining citywide reform campaigns. This indicates geographical limits to the current organizing model and highlights the limitations of urban scholarship derived from large cities unrepresentative of urbanity as a whole.

Bubble economics and structural change: the cases of Spain and France compared

This paper delves into the recent events that led to the formation of the housing bubble in Spain and the resulting structural change that is arguably needed to put the economy back into the right track. For this purpose, we calibrate a model with different equilibria descriptive of the labor markets in Spain and France, where the unemployment rates went from the same initial spot to very different levels. In addition to this, we run a counterfactual analysis that throws some more light on the performance of the Spanish labor market and the housing bubble. Our results suggest that the unemployment rate in Spain has jumped to much higher levels while switching between equilibria or, what is the same, because of structural change. Moreover, our counterfactuals indicate that, first, there has been an important misdirection of resources into the construction industry mainly fueled by excessively low real interest rates and, second, the Spanish labor reform has fallen short of its own goals.

Labour market flexibility, employment and inequality: lessons from Chile

ABSTRACTFlexibility proponents assert that rigid Latin American labour markets impede economic expansion and job growth; they advocate reforming labour codes through increased flexibility. Critics argue that heightened labour flexibility exacerbates inequality without expanding employment. From this perspective, precarious employment and inequality are remedied by strengthening labour’s bargaining power. Chile’s maintenance of flexible labour reforms adopted during the dictatorship make it appropriate for evaluating these competing perspectives. Based on flexibility proponents’ predictions, we should expect increased formal sector employment over time, particularly among the least skilled Chilean workers, as well as reduced wage inequality. Yet, the rate of unemployment among least skilled workers in Chile remains essentially unchanged since the democratic transition as does income inequality. These conditions persist despite a high degree of labour market flexibility. Thus, Chile’s continued adherence to a flexibilised labour market should be understood not in terms of its capacity to reduce inequality or generate employment. Rather, it should be understood as the product of several interrelated factors: (1) the business sector’s ability to protect its interests; (2) the Concertación’s conscious limitation of threats to the business sector’s interests and (3) the weakness of organised labour, resulting from the perpetuation of the Pinochet-era labour regime.