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SPRING COLLOQUIA
Professor Flanagan's recent research interests include the effects
of globalization on labor conditions, wage structure and labor
market adjustments in transition economies and other global
human resource management issues. He has written extensively
on labor economics, of which two books are co-authored by Lloyd
Ullman. His research has covered both macro and micro labor
market issues in both U.S. and international labor markets.
He has collaborated with economists in other countries, and
his early books analyze the effects of income policies in Western
European nations.
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February 14, 2005
UNION STRUCTURE: THE
DEMOCRACY VS. EFFICIENCY DILEMMA AND THE SEIU’S
NEW UNITY PROPOSAL
George Strauss, Professor Emeritus, U.C. Berkeley
Katie Quan, Chair, CLRE
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The SEIU's proposed New Unity Partnership has stirred up considerable
interest and controversy within the union movement. Aside from
the question whether it might ever be adopted, the proposal
raises a number of issues: On the basis of what criteria would
(or should) membership be divided among the proposed 20 unions?
Would forced mergers work? What would be the impact of SEIU-like
centralization on union organizing success? What would be its
impacts on opportunities for membership participation, leadership
development, and internal democracy? And what do we mean by
union democracy, why is it desirable (or isn't it?), and what
is the tradeoff between democracy and efficiency?
If time permits, the impacts of three related trends will also be discussed: the increased hiring of staff from "outside" rather than from the rank-and file; staff people's growing mobility from union to union; and the rapid adoption by unions of managerial techniques (such as formal personnel appraisals) taken from Big Business.
Strauss's talk will be based in part on a book he is co-authoring,
tentatively titled "What's Happening in US Unions Today?"
February 25, 2005
A SPECIAL ADDITION TO THE SPRING COLLOQUIA SERIES:
CHANGING ECONOMIC ENVIRONMENTS, EVOLVING DIVERSIFICATION STRATEGIES,
AND DIFFERING FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE: JAPAN'S LARGEST TEXTILE
FIRMS, 1970-2001
Asli M. Colpan , Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Economics at Kyoto University
Takashi Hikino, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Economics of Kyoto University; Co-editor (with Alfred Chandler, and Franco Amatori) of Big Business and the Wealth of Nations. (NY: Cambridge, 1997)
Masahiro Shimotani, Professor and Dean Emeritus
of the Faculty of Economics at Kyoto University; Co-editor (with
Takao Shiba) of Beyond the Firm: Business Groups in International
and Historical Perspective (NY: Oxford, 1997), and a number
of books in Japanese on business groups and corporate structure.
February 28, 2005
PREPARING & RETAINING THE WORKFORCE FOR QUALITY
EARLY CARE & EDUCATION:
CURRENT RESEARCH AN POLICY INITIATIVES
Marcy Whitebook, Director and Senior Researcher, Center for the Study of Child Care Employment
Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, UC Berkeley
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March 3, 2005
"SLAVES TO FASHION"
Robert Ross
Professor, Sociology, Clark University
Author of "Slaves To Fashion: Poverty and Abuse in the New Sweatshops"
Co-Sponsored with Center for Labor Research & Education, UC Berkeley
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March 14, 2005
FAMILY, WAGES & CAREERS: Lessons from Scandinavia
Trond Petersen, Professor, Sociology, Haas School of Business,
U.C. Berkeley
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March 22, 2005
CHINESE LABOUR STANDARDS, CHINA'S TRADE UNION FEDERATION, AND THE QUESTION OF ENGAGEMENT
Anita Chan, Senior Research Associate,Contemporary China Centre,Research School of Pacific & Asian Studies, Australia National University, Canberra, Australia
Co-sponsored with the Center for Labor Research & Education
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Wednesday, April 6, 2005
VARIETIES
OF LABOR TRANSNATIONALISM - COMPARING LABOR STRATEGIES
FOR THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
Thomas Greven, Visiting Scholar
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Arie Arnon has been a professor at the Department of Economics,
Ben Gurion University since 1983. His areas of research include
macroeconomics and monetary theory as well as the history of
economic thought. A major focus in recent years has been the
political economy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He was
a co-author of "The Palestinian Economy: Between Imposed
Integration and Voluntary Separation" (Brill, 1997) as
well as many articles and is now working with colleagues from
Palestine, Israel and elsewhere on economic aspects of a permanent
peace agreement.
Professor Reich served as the 22nd Secretary of Labor during
President Clinton's first term. Before heading the Department
of Labor, he was on the faculty of Harvard University's Kennedy
School of Government. He served as an assistant to the solicitor
general in the Ford administration, where he represented the
United States before the Supreme Court, and he headed the policy
planning staff of the Federal Trade Commission in the Carter
administration. Professor Reich is author of seven books, including
The Work of Nations (which has been translated into 17
languages), Locked in the Cabinet, and most recently,
The Future of Success, as well as more than 200 articles
on the global economy, the changing nature of work, and the
centrality of human capital.
Other Affiliations:
University Professor and Maurice B. Hexter Professor of Social
and Economic Policy, Heller School for Social Policy and Management,
Brandeis University
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Monday, May 2, 2005
"I
LIKE DOING THINGS ON MY OWN" THE IRONIES OF INDIVIDUALISM
AMONG BLACK, URBAN POOR JOBSEEKERS
Sandra
S. Smith, Professor of Sociology, UC Berkeley
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In the urban poverty, joblessness, and job search literatures,
the assumption is that when connected to friends, relatives
and acquaintances in possession of job information and influence,
jobseekers will embrace assistance from these relations to find
work. Thus, black joblessness results in part from the lack
of these vital social resources. My research suggests that the
problem is far more complicated. Drawing from 105 in-depth interviews
of low-income blacks from Southeast Michigan, I find that roughly
one-third refused to seek or accept assistance from their personal
contacts with job information and influence and instead chose
to go it alone. In this paper, I investigate why and examine
the conditions that facilitate social resource mobilization
for job-finding. I link reluctance to accept aid to fears of
losing face—of falling short of expectations and/or being
maligned by their personal contacts for being jobless—and
I show that fears of losing face were greatest among those who
deployed joblessness discourses that give primacy to individual
and cultural deficiency explanations. In other words, reluctant
jobseekers embraced self-reliance during the job search process
in an effort to avoid failure and to show their worth, but in
so doing, reduced their chances of finding work in low-wage
labor markets where employers rely heavily on informal job referral
networks for screening and recruitment of job applicants.
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