The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It
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
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The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It
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
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The Fissured Workplace: Why Work Became So Bad for So Many and What Can Be Done to Improve It
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
David Weil served as President Barack Obama's Wage and Hour Administrator in the U.S. Department of Labor from May 2014 to January 2017. He currently is Peter and Deborah Wexler Professor of Management in the Department of Markets, Public Policy, and Law at Boston University Questrom School of Business and serves as a co-Director of the Transparency Policy Project at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Table of Contents
Contents Part I: Vignettes from the Modern Workplace 1. The Fissured Workplace and Its Consequences 2. Employment in a Pre-fissured World 3. Why Fissure? 4. Wage Determination in a Fissured Workplace Part II. The Forms and Consequences of the Fissured Workplace 5. The Subcontracted Workplace 6. Fissuring and Franchising 7. Supply Chains and the Fissured Workplace Part III: Mending the Fissured Workplace 8. Rethinking Responsibility 9. Rethinking Enforcement 10. Fixing Broken Windows 11. The Fissured Economy 12. A Path Forward Notes References Acknowledgments Index