TOIL AND TROUBLE: THE REFORM OF THE LABOR LAW

Reform of the labor law has been proposed to alleviate allegedly defective procedures and remedies in the present law. In spite of the fact that numerous violations and abuses of the existing law have taken place over the last several years and that the provisions of the existing law have been inadequate to prevent these violations and abuses, Congress has been unable to pass meaningful reform measures to deal effectively with those inadequacies. The present law allows for long delays in the settling of cases involving alleged unfair labor practices and has become, in the minds of many, a sham which does not protect the rights of workers and, indeed, allows employers to engage in unfair labor practices with very little fear of the consequences. Proponents of labor law reform argue that changes are needed to furnish adequate guarantees that the existing labor law will be effective. The lively debate in Congress over the issue of labor law reform demonstrates that it is one of the most controversial and important questions facing the nation today. Some argue that unless effective reform measures are adopted, workers will continue to labor under the existing ineffective system.     

PRODUCTION FUNCTIONS AND THE DISAGGREGATION OF LABOR INPUTS IN MANUFACTURING PLANTS*

ABSTRACT. This paper investigates the assumption of homogeneous labor inputs underlying the production functions in many regional models. The results indicate that nonproduction and production labor within manufacturing plants are not strongly separable, and the homogeneous labor assumption is not therefore appropriate. Hence, regional models need to take this into account in order to give reliable results. Differences between industries provide useful additional insights into their labor and capital relationships.     

METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS IN THE GEOGRAPHY OF LABOR RESOURCES

Soviet population geographers have tended to study labor-resource problems at the level of major civil divisions, such as republics, krays and oblasts. There is a real need for investigating such problems at a more detailed regional level, down to particular rayons and urban places in which people live and are employed. Various types of economic-geographic investigations of labor-resource problems are suggested and a research strategy is proposed. The author notes that if population cannot be redistributed regionally in keeping with a given economic objective, economic plans may have to be revised on the basis of the actual labor resource situation.     

3. SPACE,PLACE, AND GENDER: THE SEXUAL AND SPATIAL DIVISION OF LABOR IN THE EARLY MODERN HOUSEHOLD

Much has been written about the history of the work of men and women in the premodern past. It is now generally acknowledged that early modern ideological assumptions about a strict division of work and space between men and productive work outside the house on the one hand, and women and reproduction and consumption inside the house, on the other, bore little relation to reality. Household work strategies, out of necessity, were diverse. Yet what this spatial complexity meant in particular households on a day‐to‐day basis and its consequences for gender relationships is less clear and has received relatively little historical attention. The aim of this paper is to add to our knowledge through a case study of the way that men and women used and organized space for work in the county of Essex during the “long seventeenth century”. Drawing on critiques of the concept of “separate spheres” and the models of economic change to which it relates, together with local/micro historical methods, it places evidence within an appropriate regional context to argue that spatial patterns were enormously varied in early modern England and a number of factors—time, place, occupation, and status, as well as gender—determined them. Understanding of the dynamic, complex, uneven purchase of patriarchy upon the organization, imagination, and experience of space has important implications for approaches to gender relations in early modern England. It raises additional doubts about the utility of the separate spheres analogy, and particularly the use of binary oppositions of male/female and public/private, to describe gender relations and their changes in this period and shows that a deeper understanding demands more research into the local contexts in which the gendered division and meaning of work was negotiated.     

STRUCTURAL CHANGES IN LABOR DEMAND AND UNEMPLOYMENT IN LOCAL LABOR MARKETS*

ABSTRACT. It seems quite clear that the US. economy in the late 1970s and early 1980s was exposed to an accelerated rate of structural change resulting from energy price shocks, increased international competition and technological change. It is of considerable interest, then, that previous attempts to examine structural unemployment in this period find that structural shift in employment generally were not Significant determinants of the unemployment rate. This paper revisits this issue using a measure of structural job shifts drawn from the literature on establishment job creation and destruction. The results show that changes in the structure of labor demand across industry by establishment-size sectors had a statically significant and empirically important positive effect on the unemployment rate in a sample of 200 metropolitan labor markets during the 1976 to 1984 period.     

THE KNIGHTS OF LABOR DATA-BANK

Several countries have made large investments in building historical Geographical Information Systems (GIS) databases containing census and other quantitative statistics over long periods of time. Making good use of these databases requires approaches that explore spatial and temporal change. The authors use a variety of visualization and spatial analysis techniques to explore population change in Ireland during and after the Great Famine of the late 1840s. Importantly, the techniques allow differences over space and time to be explored, thus stressing the diversity between places, rather than making all places appear the same, a common criticism of many statistical approaches. The authors demonstrate the potential of these techniques to explore geographical and temporal variations in large quantitative GIS datasets.     

COMPENSATION FOR COMMUTES IN THE LAND AND LABOR MARKETS: SOME EVIDENCE FROM THE TOKYO METROPOLITAN AREA*

ABSTRACT. Recent research suggests that in nonmonocentric cities compensation for commutes takes the form of both lower housing prices and higher wages. This paper develops a random utility model that predicts the probability of an actor choosing to commute between each residence and job in a metropolitan area conditional on the observed location of housing units and job sites. The model allows commuting time, origin-specific amenities, land prices, destination-specific amenities and wages to influence actors' choices. We estimate the model using maximum likelihood and generalized least squares techniques and data on commuting between each of 38 origin and 15 destination jurisdictions in the Tokyo metropolitan area. The empirical results show that, all else equal, a one percent increase in commuting time reduces the probability that a route (origin-destination combination) will be chosen by almost five percent. Origin-specific amenities are not completely capitalized into land prices and destination-specific amenities are not completely capitalized into wages. Desirable residential amenities include school quality and a low ratio of day to night population. Desirable workplace amenities include a large share of white collar jobs and a high density of employment.     

THE BAM: LABOR,MIGRATION AND PROSPECTS FOR SETTLEMENT

The construction of the showcase Baikal-Amur Mainline (the BAM), which spans over 2,000 miles of unsettled, desolate territory, provides an excellent opportunity to study labor management and organization in a centrally planned economy, and illustrates the interplay of central planning with the relatively unhindered migration of workers. Significantly, in the face of a shrinking labor force, the USSR attracted thousands of young people to Siberia to work on the BAM. Now that the rail line is in place, the more difficult task will be to entice workers to settle in the BAM zone. Until the Soviet Government makes a firm commitment to improving the quality of life in Siberia, prospects for settling the BAM region remain uncertain. (The author wishes to thank Holland Hunter, Gilbert Rozman and Theodore Shabad for their generous help and encouragement.)