Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

The Fissured Workplace
ISBN: 9780674726123
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Harvard University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter

For much of the twentieth century, large companies employing many workers formed the bedrock of the U.S. economy. Today, as David Weil's groundbreaking analysis shows, large corporations have shed their role as direct employers of the people responsible for their products, in favor of outsourcing work to small companies that compete fiercely with one another. The result has been declining wages, eroding benefits, inadequate health and safety conditions, and ever-widening income inequality.

"Authoritative...[ The Fissured Workplace ] shed[s] important new light on the resurgence of the power of finance and its connection to the debasement of work and income distribution."
--Robert Kuttner, New York Review of Books

"The kinds of workplace fissuring discussed here--subcontracting, franchising, and global supply chains--have been the subjects of a number of studies detailing the employment effects that Weil describes. The Fissured Workplace is unusual in bringing this research together into an integrated, detailed, and decidedly policy-oriented analysis...It makes a convincing case that the better regulation of fissured workplaces is a first step towards reversing the erosion of pay and conditions at the bottom of the labor market."
--Virginia Doellgast, Times Higher Education

In May 2014, David Weil became the U.S. Wage and Hour Administrator in the U.S. Department of Labor. Prior to that appointment, he was Peter and Deborah Wexler Professor of Management; Professor in the Department of Markets, Public Policy, and Law; and Everett W. Lord Distinguished Faculty Scholar at Boston University School of Management. He has also served as co-Director of the Transparency Policy Project at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.