September 2006 (No. 15)
Contributors: Elizabeth del Rocío Camacho, Janice Kimball
IIR News & Events
Fall Reception and Library Dedication: September 29, 2006
Sixtieth Anniversary Event: November 17, 2006
Funding Update
New round of research and fellowship grants: deadline October 31, 2006
IIR Fall Seminar Series
Roster of Visiting Scholars, 2006-2008
Recent Sponsored Research
Industrial Relations Publishes Vol. 45, No. 3
IIR Unit News
Labor Center News
California Public Employee Relations News
Center for the Study of Child Care Employment News
Institute of Industrial Relations Library
Labor Project for Working Families
Campus News and Events
Center for Latin American Studies
Economics Department
Institute of Governmental Studies
Sociology Department Colloquium Series
IIR NEWS & EVENTS
Fall Reception and Library Dedication: September 29, 2006
IIR’s Fall Reception will be held on Friday, September 29, 2006 from 3:30-5:30 pm. The event will also serve as a dedication for the new Library space. Please RSVP to Myra Armstrong, 632-3312, zulu2@berkeley.edu.
The Sixtieth IIR Anniversary Celebration and All-Day Conference: November 17, 2006
Information will be forthcoming soon about the program; in the mean time, mark your calendars!
Funding update
The 2006-07 California state budget includes $6 million for statewide labor and employment programs at the University of California, with 60 percent for research and 40 percent for educational outreach This will restore funding to the 2000 level. About a third of the funds are designated to enhance the programs of the IIR and CLRE at UC Berkeley.
New round of Labor and Education Research Fund grants: deadline October 27, 2006.
The Labor and Employment Research Fund (LERF) is currently accepting proposals for the following grant program categories:
Faculty: (includes UC Principal Investigators)
Graduate Students:
Please refer to the Call for Proposals for details and program requirements. The Call is available on the LERF website at:
http://www.ucmru.net/ucmru/labor/index.htm
The program application is also posted there, or may be accessed directly at: http://flatiron.sdsc.edu/projects/LE/main.htm
The application deadline is Friday, October 27. Proposals will be reviewed in mid-November and awards will be announced by mid-December.
For assistance with preparing and submitting your application, please contact:
Barbara Campbell, bcampbel@berkeley.edu or 510-643-3505.
IIR Fall Seminar Series
Director's Room
2521 Channing Way
Light Lunch Provided
RSVP: Myra Armstrong, zulu2@berkeley.edu
Thursday, September 21, 4PM – 5:30PM
(Co-Sponsored with Center for Labor Research and Education)
"The San Francisco Health Access Model: The Policy, the politics and the prospects"
Ken Jacobs, Chair, Center for Labor Research and Education, UC Berkeley
Paul Kumar, Director of Government and Community Affairs, SEIU-United Health Care Worker’s West
Monday, September 25, 2006 – 12PM
"New Models of Organizing in Human Services and Long-Term Care: Can the success of homecare organizing be extended to other sectors?"
Carol Zabin, Labor Specialist, Center for Labor Research and Education, UC Berkeley
Monday, October 9, 2006 – 12PM
"Why Comply?: Civil Rights Enforcement in the Workplace"
Sean Farhang, Professor of Public Policy, Goldman School of Public Policy,
UC Berkeley
Wednesday, October 18, 2006 – 12PM
"Uncovering the American Dream: Inequality and Mobility in Social Security Earnings Data since 1937"
Emmanuel Saez, Professor of Economics
Joint with Wojciech Kopczuk,Columbia University and Jae Song, Social Security Administration
Monday, October 30, 2006 – 12PM
"Inequality, Opportunity, and Regional Innovation: Workforce Development in New York and San Francisco"
Karen Chapple, Professor, City & Regional Planning, UC Berkeley
Roster of Visiting Scholars, 2006-2008
IIR is pleased to welcome the following list of visiting scholars to UC Berkeley.
Dion Aroner -United States, January, 2005 through December, 2006
Former Assembly member, 14th District California. Visiting Scholar/Legislator-in-Residence with the Center for Labor Research & Education. Ms. Aroner is continuing her work on various human services and childcare workforce policy projects.
Arie Arnon- Israel, September 2006- 2008
Professor of Economics, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Arie Arnon is the Spring 2008 Diller Visiting Israeli Professor, UC Berkeley and will teach undergraduate and graduate classes through the Economics department. Prof. Arnon’s research interest is Palestinian economy and history of economic thought.
Carolina Carbajal de Nova - Mexico, July, 2006 through December, 2006
Department of Economics, UAM, Unidad Iztapalapa. Ms. Carbajal de Nova’s research work involves the Mexican economy and the evaluation of the inflationary nature of wages.
David Dickinson- South Africa, September to December, 2006.
Senior lecturer in Industrial Relations at the Wits Business School, University of
Witwatersrand, South Africa. He has been conducting research on the response of South African companies to the AIDS epidemic since 2000. His current research focuses on HIV/AIDS workplace peer educators.
Michael Fertig – Germany, November, 2006 through July, 2007
International research student sponsored by Professor David Card. He is from RWI Institute, Germany.
Tomoko Furugori– Japan, March, 2007 – 2008
Professor of Economics, Chuo University, Tokyo, Japan. Her research field involves ‘comparative studies on labor problems with particular interests for non-standard workers in U.S. and Japan’.
Oscar Gonzalez - Peral – Switzerland, 2005-2006
Oscar Gonzalez-Peral’s research focus is labor economics and the possible impact of the liberalization of migration rules in Europe (free mobility). He will be at the Institute of Industrial Relations for one year as a visiting scholar from the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Elizabeth Greenwood -United States, August, 2005 through August, 2007
Visiting scholar from MIT conducting environmental economics research with Professor Michael Greenstone, MIT.
Oivind Hagen– Norway, February, 2006 through December, 2006.
Research scientist at the Institute for Social Research in Industry, Norway. He is working with Professor Trond Petersen on a project focusing on the relationship between branding and internal change in organizations.
Terje Hagen- Norway, August, 2006 through July, 2007
Professor, Department of Health Management and Health Economics, University of Oslo, Norway. His research project involves analyzing management, financing and organization within the hospital sector.
Dariusz Jemielniak -Poland, February, 2007 through August, 2007.
Professor, Leon Kozminski Academy of Entrepreneurship and Management, Warszawa, Poland. Dariusz Jemielniak’s research interest is “workplace relations in high-tech companies”.
Paul Johnston - United States, June, 2006 through May, 2007
Last semester, Professor Johnston taught political sociology in UC Berkeley’s Sociology department. Johnston is continuing his work on labor relations, immigration, and political theory while at IIR.
Robert Macmillan -Canada, 2006-2007
Robert Macmillan is a visiting professor sponsored by Professor David Card, Economics, UC Berkeley. His research interest is education and he will be here from fall, 2006 through fall, 2007.
Brian McCall -United States, 2006-2007
Robert Macmillan is a visiting scholar from Toronto, Canada. His research interests are economics of education and education policy, labor economics, social insurance and health economics, and he will be heree from fall 2006 through fall, 2007.
Cristina Monoreo-Atienza –Spain, July, 2006 – September, 2006
Law professor Universidad de Malaga. During her sabbatical she will pursue research interests in economic, social and cultural rights.
Greg Oldham - United States, September, 2006 – 2007
Professor, Institute of Labor & Industrial Relations, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research project involves ‘conditions in the workplace that substantially influence employee creativity at work.’
Robert E. Prasch - United States, January, 2007 through May, 2007
Professor of Economics at Middlebury College, Vermont. One of his research projects has been a series of articles on the economics of the state-by-state Progressive Era minimum wage for women and children. He is interested in researching a paper on the California minimum wage.
Thomas Rankin -United States, June, 2005 through December, 2006
Former President, California Labor Federation, AFL-CIO, and a Visiting Scholar/Labor-Leader-in-Residence with the Center for Labor Research & Education at IIR.
Regina Riphan –Germany, Fall, 2006 through Fall, 2007
International research student sponsored by Professor David Card. Ms. Riphan is from University of Nuremberg, Germany.
Maria Rotundo –Canada, February, 2007 through May, 2007
Professor of Human Resources and Organizational Behavior, University of Toronto, Canada. Ms. Rotundo will continue her research on ‘performance measurement, selection, and leadership and occupational skill requirements as they relate to wage.’
Yea-Huey Su –Taiwan, August 1, 2006 through July, 2007
Professor of Information Management, National Central University, Taiwan. In 2005, Ms. Su assisted Professor Clair Brown in setting-up and conducting fieldwork in Taiwan. She plans to conduct interview-based research with semiconductor engineers during her stay in Berkeley.
Hiro Tanaka –Japan August, 2006 through March, 2007
President, Shiga Bunka College, He will continue his research –‘Comparative study of long-term care service workers in the US and Japan.’
Recent Sponsored Research
Steven Pitts
“Beyond Wal-Mart: The Crisis of Bad Jobs in the Black Community and What to Do About it”
Akonadi Foundation
Blacks face limited employment prospects due to institutional racism. This reality is framed as largely an issue of unemployment, and little attention is paid to the other aspect of the job crisis: the crisis of bad jobs. This narrow perspective has constrained the policy debate on the job crisis and has forced many Black communities to make a Hobson's choice between no jobs or a job which pays poverty wages. This dilemma is most evident as communities debate the presence of Wal-Mart. Last year, the Akonadi Foundation provided funding support to the University of California-Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education (CLRE) to document the changing nature of jobs held by Black workers in the Bay Area. CLRE will be building upon this work with a combination of research and convenings to contribute to the national dialogue about bad jobs in the Black community.
Katie Quan
“Kirke Wilson Labor Summer Internships, 2006-2007”
Rosenberg Foundation
For the past five summers, the Center for Labor Research and Education (Labor Center) at the University of California, Berkeley has conducted the Labor Summer Internship program, through which we provide critical support to community organizations working on campaigns to improve the lives of working people. In the Labor Summer Program, the Labor Center recruits and trains students from the University of California, and matches them with community organizations and labor unions seeking able and committed students for intensive summertime paid internships. The 2005 Kirke Wilson Labor Summer Internship was a valuable resource that allowed placement of an intern with a community site-the Day Labor Program at Centro de La Raza in San Francisco-that was unable to pay the internship stipend. Thus we could offer an opportunity for an intern to work in a worker justice organization that is on the cutting edge of organizing with immigrant workers, but lacks the institutional funding base of some of the larger unions. With a commitment from the Rosenberg Foundation for even more funding and for two years, CLRE will be seeking similar sites to add to the mix of participating organizations.
Juliann Sum
“Technical Support to Clarify and Streamline Workers' Compensation Rights and Procedures Rights”
California Dept. of Industrial Relations, Commission on Health and Safety and Worker's Compensation
Legislative changes in 2003 and 2004 have greatly altered rights and procedures in the California workers' compensation system. Many of the laws are unclear and inconsistent, causing confusion with claims, delays or nonpayment of benefits, and hearings before workers' compensation judges. Injured workers, employers, insurers, unions, and other participants throughout the state have requested guidance with these problems. Juliann Sum will be providing technical support to assist the Commission on Health and Safety and Workers' Compensation in convening task force meetings; evaluating legislative, administrative, and educational options; and developing recommendations to clarify and streamline the new laws.
Marcy Whitebook
“Leadership Curriculum”
Stone Foundation
This grant was awarded to support CSCCE''s development of the Interdisciplinary Master's in Early Childhood Development pilot program at the University of California, Berkeley. This program will provide students interested in pursuing the field of early care and education with an opportunity to become well versed in the varied contributions of such disciplines as public health, mental health, social welfare and public policy. The program, a joint effort of the School of Education, the School of Social Welfare, and the Department of Psychology, is housed in the School of Education.
Carol Zabin
“Solving the Direct Support Staffing Crisis in Developmental Disabilities in CA: the Professional Employer Organization”
Walter and Elise Haas Fund
Carol Zabin has received funding from the Walter and Elise Haas Fund to conduct research to develop and evaluate a financially self-sustaining Professional Employer Organization (PEO) to improve the recruitment, retention, and training of direct support workers in developmental disability services in California. The PEO is a social enterprise that provides human resource administrative services to participating agencies and presents three sets of benefits. First, by aggregating small employers, it will lower health insurance, training, and administrative costs. Second, it will create a labor-management partnership to develop a training program and defined career ladders for worker advancement and improved services. Third, the labor-management partnership will build the infrastructure for stakeholder advocacy for wage improvements linked to training. This model can be replicated in other "care" sectors such as long-term care, community-based mental health services, early childhood education and other community-based human services.
Carol Zabin
“Job Quality and Education Initiative”
Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund
The growing phenomenon of the working poor has emerged as a key public policy concern over the last decade, with its serious impacts on workers, public services, and the broader economy. In order to raise job quality, advocates have proposed raising job quality standards and improving business accountability. The UC Berkeley Labor Center has embarked on a Job Quality Research and Education Initiative to research this "high road" paradigm, to reframe the public debate about economic policy, and to disseminate our results broadly in support of efforts to preserve and create higher quality jobs.
Industrial Relations Publishes Volume 45, No. 3
Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society, Volume 45 Issue 3 is now in print and available online via Blackwell Synergy. Abstracts follow below.
Changing Regimes of Workplace Governance, Shifting Axes of Social Mobilization, and the Challenge to Industrial Relations Theory
MICHAEL J. PIORE and SEAN SAFFORD
This article challenges prevailing views about the collapse of the New Deal industrial relations system and the role of the market. It argues that the old system has been replaced not by the market but by an employment rights regime, in which the rules of the workplace are imposed by law, judicial opinions, and administrative rulings, supplemented by mechanisms at the enterprise level that are responsive to the law but also are susceptible to employee pressures, both individual and collective. The emergence of this regime is the product of a shift in the axes of social and political mobilization from mobilization around economic identities rooted in class, industry, occupation, and enterprise to identities rooted in the society outside the workplace: sex, race, ethnicity, age, disability, and sexual orientation. The shift in the axes of mobilization in turn reflects the collapse of the underlying model of social and economic organization upon which the collective bargaining regime was built and more fundamentally a shift in our understanding of the nature of industrial society and its direction of evolution in history. This interpretation poses a challenge to the conceptual tools used in industrial relations to understand the issues of work and to frame the public policy debate. We conclude with some suggestions as to the direction in which we might move to provide an alternative conceptual framework.
Language in the Public Service
LOUIS N. CHRISTOFIDES and ROBERT SWIDINSKY
In the Canadian public sector, legislation regulates the language of work and service to the public, generating a demand for bilingualism. We examine whether the bilingualism premium is higher in the public than in the private sector. We analyze how earnings from three census years, one before the legislation was strengthened, have evolved, we net out the effects of observables on earnings and we partially address the selection issue.
Does Network Care Prolong Work Absences?
WILLIAM G. JOHNSON, MARJORIE L. BALDWIN, and TRICIA J. JOHNSON
We used data on 120,000 workers with occupational injuries occurring in California, Connecticut, and Texas to analyze the effects of healthcare networks on postinjury durations of work absence. Controlling for selection and unobserved heterogeneity, work absences are shorter, all else equal, for network cases than for non-network cases. The shorter durations could reduce lost productivity by more than $3.8 million (a 9% reduction in work loss days for non-network cases) if network care were extended to the non-network cases in our sample.
Family Background and the Propensity for Self-Employment
GREG HUNDLEY
Empirical analysis shows that men with self-employed fathers and higher parental incomes are more likely to be self-employed, the impact of paternal self-employment is leveraged by higher family income, and self-employment is more likely when the father worked in an occupation with task requirements similar to those of an independent business. The idea that the paternal self-employment effect is attributable to sons following their fathers into occupations inherently more or less conducive to self-employment is not supported.
The Effects of Employment Protection for Obese People
CHRISTOPHER S. CARPENTER
This paper uses a 1993 court case, Cook v. Rhode Island, in conjunction with the implementation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) to estimate the impact of employment protection on the labor market outcomes of obese people. In Cook, a federal appeals court ruled for the first time that obesity can be covered under the ADA. Using data from 1988 to 1999, I estimate that Cook increased employment for obese women and men relative to those whose weight was in the recommended range on the order of four and two percentage points, respectively. The results provide new evidence that obesity has important labor market implications.
Rhetoric in Economic Research: The Case of Gender Wage Differentials
DORIS WEICHSELBAUMER and RUDOLF WINTER-EBMER
Scientific rhetoric can have a profound impact on the perception of research; it can also drive and direct further research efforts. What determines whether results are discussed in a neutral or a judgmental way? How precise and convincing do results have to be so that authors call for significant policy changes? These questions are in general difficult to answer, because rhetoric on the one hand, and content and methodology of the paper on the other, cannot be separated easily. We therefore used a unique example to examine this question empirically: the analysis of gender wage differentials. Here, the Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition represents a standard research method that compares male and female earnings, holding observable factors constant. We analyzed close to 200 papers to investigate what drives authors to talk about discrimination, whether and when they call for policy activism, or when they are more hesitant to do so.
Our results show that American authors are more reluctant to refer to discrimination. So are women, but only with respect to the titles of their papers. Furthermore, we find that the better the data and method used in a paper, the more likely an author is to assign his/her estimate of unequal wages to discrimination. The contrary is true the higher the prestige of the author or the research outlet.
The Determinants of Stock Option Compensation: Evidence from Finland
DEREK C. JONES, PANU KALMI, and MIKKO MÄKINEN
A new, long, and rich panel data set consisting of all Finnish publicly traded firms is used to study how firm characteristics and stock market developments influence the adoption and targeting of stock option compensation. Stock option adoption is found to be a procyclical phenomenon. Findings from firm-level econometric analysis often corroborate those based on U.S. data, but important differences also emerge. Findings include: (i) firms with higher market value per employee are more likely to use stock option compensation; (ii) share returns from the past year affect the adoption of targeted stock options, but not broad-based plans; (iii) our results are consistent with the hypothesis that selective and broad-based plans arise as solutions to differing monitoring difficulties. Broad-based schemes are observed when production is human capital-intensive and employee performance is hard to monitor, while selective schemes are adopted when ownership is dispersed and therefore owners may have weak incentives to monitor management.
The Incidence and Effect of Job Training among Japanese Women
DAIJI KAWAGUCHI
Using panel data of Japanese women, this paper analyzes who participates in firm-initiated training programs and the effect of this participation on wage level and wage growth. The analysis found that workers with stronger educational backgrounds are more likely to participate in firm-initiated training activities. Training participation and wage are positively correlated. Even after controlling for endogenous selection into training participation by a first-difference estimation, current training participation significantly explains current wage growth.
The Union Relative Wage Effect for Academic Librarians
DEBORAH O. LEE, KEVIN E. ROGERS, and PAUL W. GRIMES
This note investigates the impact of labor unions on the starting salaries of academic librarians. Using data collected from members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and employing standard ordinary least squares (OLS) and seemingly unrelated regressions techniques, the union relative wage gap was estimated annually over the 1989–1998 time period. Three important results were found. First, unionized academic librarians received a positive and significant union wage premium throughout most of the decade studied. Second, this wage premium declined in magnitude over time following the trend in the economy as a whole. Lastly, by the end of the sample period, the wage effect had disappeared and was no longer significantly different from zero.
Union Commitment and Participation in the Chinese Context
ANDY W. CHAN, FENG TONG-QING, TOM REDMAN, and ED SNAPE
Based on a meta-analysis of the largely North American Literature, Bamberger, Kluger, and Suchard (1999) found that the effects of job satisfaction and union instrumentality on union commitment are partially mediated by organizational commitment and pro-union attitudes respectively, and that union commitment has an effect on union participation. They also found that pro-union attitudes have a stronger direct effect on union commitment than does union instrumentality. In this note, we test the generalizability of these findings based on a sample of union members from the People's Republic of China (PRC). We test a model based on Bamberger, Kluger, and Suchard (1999) (Figure 1), although we conceptualize participation as union citizenship behavior (UCB).
Spring Events
April 22, 2013 at 12:00pm
‘Health and Happiness in Wealthy Democracies...’
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‘From Publication to Public Action: Lessons learned from the Berkeley Center for...’
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