 Your new post is loading...
The former secretary of labor on the need for a federal law requiring employers to pay for scheduled work
My recent column about the growth of on-demand jobs like Uber making life less predictable and secure for workers unleashed a small barrage of criticism from some who contend that workers get what they’re worth in the market.
Via Gary Yarus
Paul Solman: “Man vs. Machine.” Long the staple of science fiction, the “end of work” now beckons as reality. Journalist, author and Friend Of Making Sen$e (FOM$) Frank Koller attended a conference on the debate at Cornell University recently. He was accommodating enough to file this report.
"An internationalist, with the future in his bones and armed with history’s lessons about how to deflect its worst consequences, Roggero is the best representative of a new kind of scholar. His landmark analysis of the contemporary landscape of labor and knowledge could not be more timely or on target. Required reading for all who aspire to self-education."
Quality of life is perhaps the single largest factor underpinning human happiness, and that quality is largely determined by one’s job. It should be no wonder then that so many activists and politicians have made improving work a key element of their advocacy for generations. The history of America is, in many ways, the history of work.
In Germany, auto workers get paid well and their companies still profit. Author Thom Hartmann on why living wages and corporate success don't have to be mutually exclusive.
Too many jobs are now temporary and insecure: a new class, the 'precariat' is growing. Guy Standing has responded with an inspiring vision of a Good Society. By John Harris
Professor Robert Skidelsky looks at the dawn of a second machine age and explores the lessons of the Luddites for today's economy.
Kevin Kelly shares his views on technology driven innovations and the impact that these rapidly advancing technologies are having on job growth and employment numbers. Kelly acknowledges that computers will continue to automate many jobs, though he states that technology is also facilitating new jobs at an even faster rate. He predicts that jobs will continue to evolve rapidly in five to ten years, and that the most lucrative positions have not even been invented yet. You will also learn what he means by the “hacker mentality” and how this negative connotation can be seen as a type of exploration of design solving.
In today’s knowledge-based, global economy, leveraging internal and external talent has never been more important. Read on to see the future of the open talen
|
In the face of looming ecological catastrophe, can unions help restructure work itself? And what’s gender inequality got to do with it? We posed these questions to Tom Malleson, assistant professor of Social Justice and Peace Studies at King’s University College at Western University in London, Ontario, and author of After Occupy: Economic Democracy in the 21st Century.
The necessity of production is so easily proved that any hack philosopher of industrialism can fill ten books with it. Unfortunately for these neo-economist thinkers, these proofs belong to the nineteenth century, a time when the misery of the working classes made the right to work the counterpart of the right to be a slave, claimed at the dawn of time by prisoners about to be massacred. Above all it was a question of surviving, of not disappearing physically. The imperatives of production are the imperatives of survival; from now on, people want to live, not just to survive.
The shift toward “networked work” in the United States—spurred on by globalization, technological changes, and the reorganization of work activities—has important consequences for job quality that require further investigation. Using nationally representative data from the 2008 Networked Worker Survey, we examine how teamwork, telework, and information and communication technology use are associated with, and positively and significantly predict, job decision latitude (autonomy and skill development). The results imply that networked work helps enhance job decision latitude partly through greater network connectivity (social capital). Furthermore, the contribution of information and communication technology use to job decision latitude is contingent on its perceived benefits and on the organization of work into teams. These findings therefore help deepen our understanding of how the changing character of work affects worker control in contemporary workplaces.
The more we share together the happier we’ll be. That is what companies that make up the sharing economy promise. But while innovation is good for consumers, do the suppliers of the sharing economy get the same great bargain?
Yes, they have jobs … but the five people featured here are typical of millions who have no security, no holiday or sick pay, limited hours, and no dignity at work, writes Yvonne Roberts
(WBUR)
The beloved, profitable, worker-friendly Market Basket grocery chain is back in the hands of former CEO Arthur T Demoulas, following a mass worker and management revolt at the news that Demoulas's cousin, Arthur S Demoulas, was taking over the company, bringing in a notorious former Radio Shack CEO, and getting set to break up and sell off the company in order to extract higher dividends for shareholders.
Amazon and Walmart are prime examples of how in the early twenty-first century, state-of-the-art information technologies can be used to re-create the harsh, driven capitalism of the pre–New Deal era. With their reliance on tens of thousands of workers to shift goods in stores and warehouses, the two corporations depend heavily on a steady supply of unskilled labor very much in the manner of early-twentieth-century industrial sweatshops. But in their capacity to track employee performance, to speed it up, to measure it against targets, managers at Walmart and Amazon are empowered in ways that their predecessors of a century ago could only dream of.
The concept of 'work' has been at the heart of both the industrial as well as the information society, along with 'jobs' and 'growth' and that most rapidly outmoding term, GDP (expect a new metric to emerge here, soon, along the lines of 'gross national well being' ).
Workplace regimes are the complexes of formal and informal relations and institutions that structure the organisation of work in modern societies. A comparative understanding of their structure and significance is indispensable to socio-economics, for the organisation of work shapes not only the experience of life on the job but the material conditions and competitive prospects of workers and firms, the interests underpinning macro-level political bargains, and the prospects for social solidarity more generally. It is impossible to understand the varieties of capitalism, or their non-capitalist rivals and predecessors, without a firm understanding of the politics and practices of workplace regimes. But sociologists of work and comparative political economists tend to talk past each other, leaving potentially profitable opportunities for mutual dialogue unexploited.
|
Scoop.it!
