An affiliate of the University of California
Miguel Contreras Labor Program
Miguel Contreras Labor Program
Recent Faculty Research
We are very pleased to announce the IRLE Faculty Research Awards for 2008-09 »
November 17, 2006
60th Anniversary Poster Session
| Irene Bloemraad Karen Chapple Sean Farhang Rucker Johnson Laura Kray |
Gillian Lester David Levine James Lincoln Jeff Perloff Steve Raphael |
Dylan Riley Emmanuel Saez Kim Voss Shelly Zedeck |
Other Faculty Research
| Clair Brown |
Principal Investigator: Clair Brown, Professor, Economics, UC Berkeley
Project Title: Positioning In The Value Chain To Capture Value: The Semiconductor Industry
Funding Agency: University of Minnesota
Summary: This new research builds upon previous studies of the semiconductor industry over the past decade, which witnessed many changes:
- resurgence of US chip suppliers and decline of Japanese companies, while
- disintegration of the industry value chain with the
rise of foundries and fabless
companies; - emergence of new low-cost locations, especially China
(for fabrication) and India
(for design); - consolidation of the equipment supply base;
- major increase in the cost of developing next-generation
process technologies,
and corresponding increase in the cost of building fabrication plants; and - fragmentation of product markets with the rise of
cell phones and the Internet
alongside the mainstay PC market.
Korea's Samsung rose steadily and European firms stabilized their shaky position;
Many research papers that cover this work are available on http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/worktech/.
This new project is aimed at better integrating the heretofore
separate research on process and design at our Industry Center
by studying the range and ramifications of relationships between
the two in today's chip industry. Ten years ago, the collaboration
between design and process engineers was almost exclusively
internal, but now it is increasingly likely to occur between
engineers at two different firms and on two different continents.
The effects of this organizational and spatial separation
are being felt in the fortunes of employees, firms, and nations.
The project will also to take advantage of the multi-Center
structure of this project to make a collaborative comparison
of the outsourcing of semiconductor production and design
with the similar phenomena occurring in product-level electronics
(with IPC) and auto parts (with AMP).The coordination of research
agendas and findings will lead to more robust results than
any single-industry study.
Principal Investigator: Clair Brown, Professor, Economics, UC Berkeley and Greg
Linden, Research Associate, UC Berkeley
Project Title: Competitive Semiconductors Manufacturing Program
Funding Agency: Urban Institute
Summary:
- Measure and analyze changes in wage inequality in the semiconductor industry over the past decade.
- Analyze the relationship between workforce composition and firm performance.
- Understand the changing nature of the workforce by analyzing changes in career paths and mobility patterns for workers and changes in career ladders in companies in the semiconductor industry over the past decade.
- How has within- and between-firm wage inequality changed for semiconductor workers in the 1990s?
- Along what dimensions has wage inequality increased for workers in the industry? How do these changes compare to national changes?
- What is the relationship between worker characteristics (e.g. skill, experience) and firm performance and survival?
- How have career paths for semiconductor workers (by occupation) changed over the 1990s? How do these career paths vary by race, ethnicity, and gender?
- How have career ladders provided by firms (by occupation) changed during the 1990s? How do firm characteristics, such as size, product market, region, longevity, affect the evolution of career ladders? To what extent does it appear that firms have choice in developing career ladders or to what extent does it appear 10 accept the dictates of the local labor market?
- What are the labor market outcomes for Hl-B visa holders, and what is the impact of Hl-B visa workers on the outcomes of permanent residents?
| Arindrajit Dube |
Principal Investigator: Arindrajit Dube, Assistant Professional Researcher, UC Berkeley
Project Title: The Dynamics of Job-Quality Transformation: Health Benefits in the Unionized Grocery Sector in California
Funding Agency: University of California Labor and Employment Research Fund
Summary: The study will analyze how the restructuring of health benefits and compensation among unionized grocery workers in California in 2004 and 2005 affected employee turnover, workforce demographics, and health care coverage and utilization in the industry. The sharp reduction in health benefits by grocers over the 2004-2005 period create a type of “natural experiment” that offers a unique opportunity to study the dynamics of job quality as it relates to health coverage and utilization. The study will utilize three main data sources: 1) A 100% sample of workers in two Northern and one Southern California union locals from 2001 and 2005—including start dates, demographic information and health plan enrollment; 2) Data from the health trusts on utilization of health services for various plans by broader tenure and demographic categories between 2001 and 2005 and 3) A survey of a random sample of 600 grocery workers in early 2006 to obtain information on health coverage and utilization.
Using this data, we will estimate: changes in employee turnover rates and employee demographics for new hires and senior employees in each region; changes in health insurance eligibility and coverage for senior and new workers under each of the two contracts; the impact of increased employee contributions on coverage for new hires; changes in the distribution of health costs; and utilization of particular health services.
These changes occur in the context of an overall transformation of the grocery industry workforce and a general trend of employers shifting rising health care costs to workers. Rising health costs have become the central issue in labor relations conflicts in the United States over the last five years. This case study provides an important window into understanding the impact of changes in compensation and health benefits on a low-to-moderate wage workforce.
| Lauren Edelman |
Principal Investigator: Lauren Edelman, Professor, Law and Sociology, UC Berkeley
Project Title: Judicial Deference to Institutionalized Employment Practices
Project Description
Funding Agency: National Science Foundation
Summary: The proposed research will contribute to understandings of the interplay between law and organizations by examining the extent to which court opinions reflect deference to institutionalized organizational structures. Through a systematic longitudinal analysis of 1000 federal court opinions in the area of employment discrimination, our analyses will address the following questions: (1) What is the prevalence of judicial deference to institutionalized organizational practices?; (2) Has judicial deference to institutionalized organizational practices increased over time?; (3) How does judicial deference to institutionalized organizational practices vary across jurisdictions, case characteristics (statutory claims, legal theories, type of alleged discrimination); plaintiff characteristics (demographic attributes; organizational or individual plaintiff); and industry of defendant?; (4) Does judicial deference increase the likelihood that employers will win employment cases, and does the relationship between judicial deference and employer win rates change over time?; and (5) Does judicial deference to a particular organizational structure affect the subsequent prevalence of lawsuits involving that structure?
We have already assembled a data set of 1000 federal civil rights cases decided in the U.S. district and circuit courts between 1965 and 1999, we have developed and extensively tested a coding scheme, and we have coded about one-third of the decisions. We seek NSF funding to complete the coding and to analyze the data. We will use quantitative content analyses to model patterns of judicial deference over time and across types of organizational structures, courts, case characteristics, and plaintiff and defendant characteristics. We will use qualitative content analyses to investigate in greater depth the reasoning that courts use in reviewing organizational structures, policies, and practices.
This research builds on and would contribute to the sociology of organizations, the sociology of law, and the growing socio-legal literatures on civil rights and on judicial behavior. Specifically, the research would contribute to socio-legal understandings of the relationship between organizations and their legal environments. If we are correct that courts tend to defer to institutionalized organizational structures, our findings will challenge extant understandings of the relationship between law and organizations. Research within both the sociology of organizations and the sociology of law generally adopts a top-down conception of the regulation process. In this view, law is exogenous and coercive: courts interpret statutes and dictate to organizations what they must do to comply. Organizations may resist the force of law or they may embrace it, and they may tweak the meaning of law at the margins, but they are essentially the receivers rather than the producers of legal rules. The research explores the alternative hypothesis that law is, at least in part, endogenous, or determined within the social fields that it seeks to regulate. According to the endogeneity perspective, organizations collectively construct the meaning of compliance with EEO law, and courts tend to accept those constructions when they interpret statutory.
| Hillary Anger Elfenbein |
Principal Investigator: Hillary Anger Elfenbein, Assistant Professor, Business, UC Berkeley
Project Title: Facilitating effective behavior through the understanding of others' emotions
Funding Agency: National Institute of Mental Health
Summary: This research addresses a key issue regarding how individuals navigate their social environment via the understanding of emotional expressions. The studies examine how accurately understanding others' emotion contributes to effective behaviors, using the workplace as an important context. Although previous research in the area has documented an association between individuals' accuracy in understanding of emotional expressions and greater professional effectiveness, further work is necessary to move beyond this zero-order correlation. It is worthwhile to open up this "black box" approach by exploring the mechanisms and behaviors responsible for the relationship between emotion recognition accuracy and workplace outcomes. Past work has generally focused on individual differences in skill, without considering the role of one's interaction partner or one's context. Further, this research aims to contribute to a sparse but promising literature on the effectiveness of training programs for emotional skills.
| David Levine |
Principal Investigator: David Levine, Professor, Business, UC Berkeley
Project Title: What do Certifications of Process Quality tell us about Job Quality?
Funding Agency: University of California Labor and Employment Research Fund
Summary: Advocates of “high road” manufacturing strategies hope that plants that produce high-quality output with high-skilled workers can maintain higher wages and employment security. While the widely-adopted ISO 9000 certification for quality management systems may indicate this strategy, critics claim such programs deskill employees.
The proposed study will combine data from many sources to examine how certification affects plant survival, revenue, employment, wages, and injury rates. Specifically, Dun and Bradstreet data will measure plant survival, revenue, and employment; EDD data will cover employment (in more detail than with D&B data) and wages; and data from the workers’ compensation system will include injury rates and severity.
To facilitate our comparisons to the ISO adopters, we will carefully construct a matched control group of plants. We will choose that latter to ensure the two groups are similar in terms of detailed (4-digit SIC) industry, pre-certification employment, revenues, and pre-certification levels in each outcome. We will then use a difference-in-difference methodology that controls for common shocks affecting each industry in the state as well as firm-level covariates (e.g., occupational mix for injury data; wage levels and distribution in the EDD data).
The policy implications of this research depend on whether ISO 9000 certification predicts better outcomes for workers, for employers, or for both. If ISO 9000 certification predicts better outcomes for both groups, then the policy implications are to broadcast the conditions under which certification can lead to this “win-win” outcome to encourage other companies to pursue this high-road approach to manufacturing. If ISO 9000 certification does not predict better outcomes for either group, the policy implications are to publicize the unimportance of certification. Finally, if certification predicts better outcomes for employers but worse outcomes for workers, it will be important to explore means to ensure workers have sufficient bargaining power to avoid harm from new workplace practices and to enhance enforcement of safety regulations.
| Alexandre Mas |
Principal Investigator: Alexandre Mas, Assistant Professor, Business, UC Berkeley
Project Title: Nurse Unionization and the Quality of Care
Funding Agency: University of California Labor and Employment Research Fund
Summary: This project seeks to examine whether new nurse unionization in California affected the quality of health care. First, we will examine whether hospitals that experienced unionization among various categories of nurses (RN’s, LVN’s and NA’s) in the 1990’s were associated with a change in the mix and timing of medical procedures. Second, we will test whether nurse unionization is associated with changes in “nurse-sensitive” health conditions, such as deep vein thrombosis, that can develop during hospital stays. Third, we will look at whether work disruptions, such as strikes or lock-outs, of nurses affected the quality of treatment. Finally, we will examine the effects of changing staffing ratios, brought about both by unionization and by California Assembly Bill AB. 394, on these sets of outcomes.
Extant evidence suggests a negative correlation between unionization and patient mortality outcomes. However, the existing literature – which is quite sparse – is not able to control for hospital specific factors, and is based only on cross sectional evidence. In contrast, we will use the timing of both union recognition and first contract, as well as a richer set of controls, to examine the impact of unionization on medical care and patient health outcomes. As a falsification test, we will test whether nurse unionization is associated with changes of health outcomes that are not nurse-sensitive. The project will utilize a near universe of patients who were discharged from California hospitals as well as a data from a variety of sources on collective bargaining, unionization, and labor relations at California hospitals.
The study will help policymakers and stakeholders understand how labor relations and legislation governing workplace practices affect health care delivery. Since health care is a critical and growing sector of the economy, the conclusions are of both academic, policy, and practical importance.
| Dara O’Rourke |
Principal Investigator: Dara O’Rourke, Assistant Professor, Environmental Science, Policy & Management
Project Title: Community College for Migrant Workers
Funding Agency: United States Department of State
Summary: The influx of millions of migrant workers over the last twenty years has been a driving force behind the rapid economic growth of the Pearl River Delta, China's most important exporting region. Nearly 50% of all Chinese products on the world market today are made by these migrant workers. Despite their significant contribution to the local economy, migrant workers are subject to exploitation by a series of discriminatory social policies largely derived from China's household residence permit system. Migrant workers struggle daily with low pay, excessive overtime, and occupational injuries and illness. Local governments collect numerous fees from migrants for residence and other permits, but deny them access to the public services that these fees make possible. Migrant workers don't have access to continuing education and, at the same time, their legal rights are violated on a daily basis.
Violations of migrant workers' basic human rights will negatively affect China's social stability
and economic development in the long term. To address these issues, we propose to establish a community college and offer free continuing education to migrant workers. The college will provide workers with technical skills, as well as concepts of democracy, human rights, and legal awareness. By making migrants better able to pursue and defend their own interests, this initiative will facilitate the development of a democratic, independent civil society in China. The first phase of this project is 18 months, from August 2003 to January 2005.
| Trond Petersen |
Principal Investigator: Trond Petersen, Professor, Business, UC Berkeley
Project Title: The Impact of Family Adaptations on Careers and Wages
Funding Agency: W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research
Summary: The central goal for the research is to assess whether the penalty to motherhood
occurs also when employees do the same work for the same employer. If it does, then the penalty observed in the market could in part be due to differential treatment from employers, not only to differential employment choices from mothers. Which is the case here has relevance for policy. Although a difficult question to research, it can partially be assessed using large-scale data with establishment-level information on all employees and their family and parental histories.
The context of the study will be Norway. This is a country with extensive family policies, with reasonable and high-quality child care, and extensive leave policies for mothers and fathers. The results will inform one on the impact of family adaptations on careers and wages in an environment where it is easy to combine family and career. The project will use matched employee-employer data from Norway in the period 1980-1997. For each year we have access to information on each employee, which firm he or she works in, wages, occupation, hours worked, age, education, family status, and number of children, including when they were born.
The three central questions to be analyzed are:
1. What is the wage gap at the occupation-establishment level, once employees do the
same work for the same employer, between mothers and non-mothers, between fathers
and non-fathers, and between the sexes net of parental status?
2. What is the promotion and wage growth gap at the occupation-establishment level, once employees do the same work for the same employer, between mothers and non-mothers, between fathers and non-fathers, and between the sexes net of parental status?
3. What are the adaptations in terms of hours worked and of employer and occupational changes resulting from mother- and fatherhood? Are adaptations made with the same employer in same occupation or by change of employers and occupation? Quantitative methods for longitudinal data will be used to analyze the data.
| Katie Quan |
Principal Investigator: Katie Quan, Associate Director, NAID Center, UC Berkeley
Project Title: Documenting the Effects of the Phase-out of the Multi-Fiber Agreement
Funding Agency: University of California Labor and Employment Research Fund
Summary: The UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education is seeking $50,000 to fund part of a larger project to document the impacts of the end of the Multi-Fiber Agreement, a system of global textile quotas lifted on January 1, 2005. We will document these effects by carrying out surveys among 600 garment workers in Los Angeles, China and El Salvador over a 2 year period. Our intent is to provide stakeholders such as workers, unions, businesses, and governments with information necessary to understand the economic and social consequences of the MFA termination and to generate policy solutions.
Researchers predict that eliminating the cost of quotas and lifting restrictions on quantities of clothing traded will cause apparel merchandisers to quickly consolidate production in countries that offer the lowest wages and place the most restrictions on worker rights. This research suggests that this shift will likely cause millions of workers to lose jobs to countries with low labor costs and poor labor rights compliance like China, where workers will gain jobs.
This study will address who gains and who loses in the context of trade liberalization. By obtaining data on employment levels, wages, living conditions, and comparing this data over the two year period that dramatic changes are expected to occur, we will gain empirical evidence of trade liberalization on working conditions which may support the win/lose predictions, or may refute them. We have selected two countries that may lose jobs (U.S. and El Salvador), and one country that may gain jobs (China).
In order to carry out 200 surveys in each country in each of two years, we will partner with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in each country that have an established record of working with garment workers. We will also train garment worker leaders to carry out the survey among their peers. Finally, we will partner with academics who have expertise on labor conditions in each of these countries and enlist the help of statisticians and other advisors to generate an academically rigorous product.
This proposal is to fund the portion of the larger project that looks at the effects of the MFA termination on labor and employment in California. Five thousand garment factories currently operate in our state, mostly in the Los Angeles area, and it is estimated that as many as half of those will close in the next several years, leaving 50,000 workers jobless.
The Labor Center will publish an analysis of our findings in Fall 2007. This report will be published in English, Spanish, and Chinese, and disseminated widely to appropriate stakeholders such as worker organizations, business organizations, academic organizations, legislators, and other policymakers, to inform global economic development policy.
| David Runsten |
Principal Investigator: David Runsten, Academic Specialist, IRLE, UC Berkeley
Project Title: Labor Impacts of Big Box Retail Development
Funding Agency: University of California Labor and Employment Research Fund
Summary: Big-box retail development is the most tangible expression of the organization of retailing in the American economy of the early 21st century: a business model founded on global sourcing, low prices, and low wages and benefits. The expansion via supercenters of big-box retailers in California is one of the most important transformations currently facing retail workers and communities in the state and the rest of the nation.
The goal of our project is to develop rigorous methodologies for forecasting the impacts of big-box retailers on employment, wages, and benefits. More broadly, our research will deepen understanding of the consequences of the retail model for families, working class communities, and government expenditures.
Our first research topic is the determinants and correlates of wages and health benefits for hourly employees of big-box retail. Using a database of store openings and labor market data, we will estimate the impacts of a big-box retailer’s arrival on wages, employment, employer-sponsored health care coverage, and sales tax revenue.
Secondly, we will investigate responses by existing retailers to the arrival of big-box retailers. We will conduct structured interviews with managers of supermarket chains in California to provide systematic data on firm strategies in response to supercenter arrival, and to create a decision model of store closures.
We will conduct a methodological study of measures for assessing working class communities’ physical access to affordable goods and services. This study will identify a practical approach that overcomes simplifications in the typical measures that lead to inaccurate assessments.
Our project will have an immediate impact on the policy dialogue concerning the expansion of big-box retailers. The project will make a major contribution to the research team’s effort to set standards for the economic and community impact assessments that are required for proposed supercenters in certain areas, such as Los Angeles.
| Carol Vendrillo |
Principal Investigator: Carol Vendrillo, IRLE, UC Berkeley
Project Title: California Public Employee Relations Internship Program
Funding Agency: State Bar of California
Summary: The Executive Committee of the Labor and Employment Law Section of
the State Bar of California voted to provide the California Public Employee Relations
Program a grant of $20,000 in order to fund an internship program that CPER has
operated (with our support) for over 10 years.
CPER publishes a journal that chronicles the developments in public sector labor and
employment law. It is a well-respected publication that has been in existence since the
inception of the earliest collective bargaining statutes in the state, some 35 years ago.
The LEL-sponsored internship allows a law student from one of the Bay Area's law
schools to gain invaluable experience in the highly specialized public sector field. The
number of traditional labor law courses offered at law schools has diminished in recent
years and very few institutions offer instruction focused on the public sector. Thus, the
internship program at CPER offers law students a unique opportunity to gain
understanding in this important area.
Under the direction of CPER Director Carol Vendrillo, the LEL intern becomes
acquainted with the statutory framework of collective bargaining in the public sector and
the decisions of the Public Employment Relations Board (the administrative agency that
enforces the statutes). By working at CPER, the intern also gains the acquaintance of
attorneys who practice in the field. In fact, several of LEL-sponsored CPER interns have
joined the ranks of public sector lawyers working at state agencies and in private practice.
| Margaret Weir |
Principal Investigator: Margaret Weir, Professor, Sociology, UC Berkeley
Project Title: Transportation Policy Development: Labor as a Missing Stakeholder
Funding Agency: University of California Transportation Center
Summary: For over a decade, federal transportation policy has sought to open regional transportation decision-making to new voices and to facilitate the use of transportation funds on an expanded array of transportation modes. Much of the impetus for these changes in federal legislation came from environmentalists and advocates for low-income communities, who believed that existing decision-making processes advantaged developers and highway interests. However, these processes have rarely engaged labor unions. This research project seeks to understand the role of labor in the development of transportation policy. The research takes a two-pronged approach: first, it examines the processes of coalition building in which labor has engaged as it seeks to participate in transportation policymaking. Second, the research analyzes the problems of consensus building around transportation policy within the labor movement, where institutional complexity, the potentially divergent interests of different unions, and a culture organized around the immediate goals of collective bargaining make it difficult for labor to engage effectively. The research will be conducted in two states: Illinois, where transit unions have launched a statewide coalition to increase state spending on public transit; and California, (both Los Angeles and the Bay Area), where central labor councils have taken the lead in bringing labor into transportation policymaking.
| Marcy Whitebook |
Principal Investigator: Marcy Whitebook, IRLE, UC Berkeley
Project Title: California Early Education Workforce Study, A Concept Paper
Funding Agency: First Five
Summary: The need for detailed and reliable data about the numbers and characteristics of center-based early care and education staff and of home-based providers has arisen repeatedly in the last several years, as local, state and federal policy makers have developed initiatives to address the issues of professional development, compensation and turnover in the early education workforce. In California, the development of universal preschool, school readiness and other programs focusing on children 0-5 will also have a large impact on the field. The question of who will provide these services, and how best to prepare them for the task, will be a central part of these ongoing discussions.
As a result, policy makers and advocates must devise a long-term research and evaluation strategy concerning the early care and education workforce. Although a few California counties periodically collect child care workforce information, there is no coordinated effort to document the characteristics of the workforce county-by-county or statewide, making it difficult to compare data, measure change over time, or project the costs of policy initiatives to benefit the workforce.
For the past several years, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation has provided support to our agencies for a pilot project to gather data on the wages, qualifications and tenure of licensed child care center teaching and administrative staff and family child care providers in eight California counties: Alameda, Kern, Monterey, San Benito, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara and Santa Cruz. We have also gathered demographic data for individual family child care providers. (County-specific reports are available at www.rrnetwork.org or www.ccw.org.) Data from this study, based on interviews conducted in the fall of 2001, offer information on differences and similarities across counties and across sectors of the child care field. For these counties, we are now able to answer some crucial questions, including how many members of the workforce have BA degrees, and we have found wide variation among the counties in terms of professional development.
Our long-term goal is to collect such information both statewide and regionally on an ongoing basis, since we will continue to need a statewide and local picture of the workforce. We have refined the child care center and family child care survey instruments, and are working on a sampling frame that will allow us to collect statewide and county-specific data. Since child care policies and programs function at both the county and statewide levels, both levels of data are essential - including a detailed look at differences among regions of the state. Collection of such baseline data would serve multiple functions with respect to planning and evaluation.
Principal Investigator: Marcy Whitebook, IRLE, UC Berkeley
Project Title: Next Steps: Research and Policy Activities on Workforce Issues
for Universal Preschool in California, 2004
Funding Agency: David and Lucile Packard Foundation
Summary: Over the last 20 years, research has pointed repeatedly to the central role of a skilled and stable workforce in ensuring quality early care and education, and in delivering on such programs' promise for healthy child development and school readiness outcomes.' The training and retention of teachers and providers are the key elements that "make or break" our early care and education system.
Researchers and policy makers have paid a great deal of attention to these workforce issues in California during the last decade, often with critical support from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Now, with increased discussion of a "preschool for all" initiative for the state, there is a new set of challenges and concerns regarding the professional preparation of an expanded preschool workforce, the readiness of the state's higher education infrastructure, and the level of compensation that will be needed to reward and retain this workforce. And while universal preschool is currently the central focus of research/policy discussions, many in the field also see this discussion as an opportunity to spread improvements more broadly throughout California's early care and education system.
In 2001, the Packard Foundation awarded a grant to the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment for a "Next Steps" project to examine and propose what should be the next generation of policy initiatives to address the stability, training and compensation of the early care and education workforce. The flexibility of this support has positioned us very well to be active, responsive participants at a time when the public policy terrain quickly shifted in California toward the discussion of universal preschool. The present proposal is focused on allowing us to continue in that influential role in statewide and county-level discussions.
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Research Awards
