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New Faculty Book Focuses on Workplace Standards at the Bottom of America's Labor Market
Posted on October 23, 2008
Urban Planning Professor Chris Tilly recently published The Gloves-Off Economy: Workplace Standards at the Bottom of America's Labor Market, co-edited with Annette Bernhardt, Heather Boushey, and Laura Dresser. The volume, published by Cornell University Press, is the 2008 Labor and Employment Relations Association volume. It includes a wide range of analyses how employers break, bend, and evade workplace laws and standards in the United States, along with proposals for remedying this increasingly serious problem.
Book Description from Cornell University Press:
Across the United States, increasing numbers of employers are breaking, bending, or evading long-established laws and standards designed to protect workers, from the minimum wage to job safety standards to the right to organize. This "gloves-off economy," no longer confined to a marginal set of sweatshops and fly-by-night small businesses, is sending shock waves into every corner of the low-wage labor market. In the process, employers who play by the rules are under growing pressure to follow suit, intensifying the search for low-cost business strategies across a wide range of industries and ratcheting up into ever higher reaches of the labor market. Although other books have touched on pieces of this problem, The Gloves-off Economy is the first to provide a comprehensive, integrated analysis-and quite a disturbing one. This book examines a range of gloves-off practices, the workers who are affected by them, and strategies for enforcing workplace standards. The editors, four respected labor scholars, have brought together economists, sociologists, labor attorneys, union strategists, and other experts to offer varying perspectives on both the problem and the creative solutions currently being explored in a wide range of communities and industries. The authors combine rigorous analysis with a stirring call to renew worker protections in the twenty-first century.
Information on the book is available at Cornell University Press.
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