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The brutal impact of COVID-19 on garment workers: And the need for Global Binding Agreements in global supply chains

Mark Anner

The COVID-19 pandemic provides us with three crucial insights on employment relations in the global economy. It reminds us of the significant impact of international influences on employment relations regimes; it illustrates the extreme power imbalances in buyer-driven global supply chains; and it highlights the need for Global Binding Agreements (GBAs) as one important mechanism for ensuring decent work.

Private equity in health care: Profits before patients and workers

Rosemary Batt

On March 25, 2021, U.S. Representative Bill Pascrell Jr. (D-NJ), chairman of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight, held hearings into the growing power of Wall Street firms in the health care industry. The hearings focused on recent research documenting higher-than-average death rates in private-equity-owned (PE-owned) nursing homes. A rigorous study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) found that mortality rates in PE-owned nursing homes were 10 percent higher than the overall average, while Medicare billing was 11 percent higher.

PE-owned homes shifted resources away from patients. Frontline nurses spent fewer hours with patients, and to compensate for lower staffing, the homes made 50 percent greater use of antipsychotic drugs (drugs associated with higher mortality rates). They also spent more money on things unrelated to patient care, such as monitoring fees.

Increasing federal investments in early childhood care and education

Aaron Sojourner

American policy asks the most of parents in a phase of life when they have the least, harming our children, families, and nation in the process. We can do bet-ter by expanding public investments in young children and their families. We can do better by structuring those investments well.

Scientific discoveries in recent decades make clear that early childhood experiences influence the physiological processes of human development. Each child’s experiences in the first years after birth influence the lifelong trajectory of his or her cognitive and socioemotional development and health.1 As the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation noted, “The first five years of life are critical for children to build the strong educational, mental, and emotional foundation upon which future learning is built. The experiences, including access to quality childcare, during these formative years can significantly influence future outcomes.”

The care crisis of 2020-21

Günseli Berik

The COVID-19 public health crisis and the economic crisis that followed underscored the U.S. economy's dependence on unpaid and paid care work. Women dropped out of the labor force in large numbers partly because of household childcare needs due to daycare and school closures and the unavail-ability of after-school programs. The pandemic made hypervisible the disproportionate care-work burden of women and how it constrains mothers’ labor force participation in an institutional context where childcare services are unavailable. It also made visible inequalities among women, in terms of both the vulnerability to job losses and the ability to reconcile care for family while earning a living.

Industrial shredding: The rise and fall of Maine’s mighty paper industry

Michael G. Hillard

Maine is well known as a place of natural beauty and as a summer home to generations of upper-class residents of the Eastern Seaboard. Less well known is its long tenure as the leading producer of the nation’s finest papers. From the late nineteenth century until the 1960s, Maine was to paper as Detroit was to the American automobile industry. But unlike Detroit, with its aura of Henry Ford, the Flint Sit-Down Strike of 1936–37, and the rise of the United Autoworkers, the U.S. public knows little about Maine’s paper industry’s history.

The digital platform battleground

Maria Figueroa

On a rainy October morning in 2020, a small group of organizers and worker leaders of the Workers’ Justice Project (WJP), a locally based worker center in New York City, gathered near Central Park for a march they had organized to bring attention to the precarious conditions of app-based couriers. Such conditions had only been exacerbated because of the COVID-19 crisis, and the goal of the organizers was to mobilize delivery workers to promote local-level policies that would address the most pressing issues the workers were facing, including lack of access to bathrooms, electric bike robberies accompanied by violent crime, and low pay from the apps.

Labor relations in Myanmar: Before and after the coup

Richard D. Fincher

Before dawn on February 1, 2021, the Myanmar military overthrew the semi democratic government of the National League of Democracy (NLD). The national experiment with citizen governance ended that day. The military arrested NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi, President U Win Myint, and cabinet ministers. The political leaders, charged with various crimes, have been denied legal representation. The country is under martial law. The military has resorted to shooting citizens to chill the massive public protest.

Will post-pandemic work change much?

John W. Budd

As people look ahead to the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, many are heralding a work-from-home revolution. But for centuries, it’s been easy to overstate predictions about the future of work. Even when they are not just plain wrong, such predictions are, at best, only partially true: how people experience work varies tremendously by education and skill level, gender, race, class, age, unionization, geography, sector, occupation, employer, and more. Even someone in 1935 who predicted a future of greater unionization in the wake of the then-new National Labor Relations Act would have been more wrong than right.

Better minimum wage for maximum results

Kate Bahn

As the labor market claws back from the steep decline caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, it is more important than ever for Congress to raise the minimum wage. If the decades-long rise in economic inequality causes gains from the recovery to go almost entirely to those at the top, it risks dragging down growth. Raising the minimum wage now can not only provide long-term benefits for the hardest-hit workers and the economy, but such action can also speed the current recovery from the COVID-19 recession and make it more robust and resilient.

Will Joe Biden be a labor feminist president?

Emily E. LB. Twarog

In her book The Other Women's Movement: Work-place Justice and Social Rights in Modern America, Rutgers University historian Dorothy Sue Cobble coined the term "labor feminist," a New Deal-era activist who "promulgated a liberalism with a decidedly more egalitarian and populist bent than the version espoused by most New Deal liberals." In 2014, Sweden became the first country in the world to identify as a "feminist government," which means that "gender equality is central to the Government's priorities - in decision-making and resource allocation."

Public sector collective bargaining: Covid-19's disruptive impact

Quinton M. Herbert

Boxer Mike Tyson is famously quoted as saying “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” COVID-19 has certainly punched us all in the mouth. At the height of the COVID-19 response last spring, U.S. employers shed nearly 30 million positions from payrolls. “Depending on how you count it, you’re talking about something like a quarter of all U.S. jobs being disrupted by the pandemic,” according to Erica Groshen, a former Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner appointed by President Obama.

Pandemic lessons for management: COVID-19 could lead to high-performance work systems and a healthier employer-worker relationship

Yujie Cai

The COVID-19 global pandemic led to a variety of containment measures, such as "social distancing," "work from home," and even degrees of "lockdown" at workplaces all over the world. These all affected the world of work and necessitated a range of supports for individual workers (in the form of furloughs, for example) and businesses (in the form of grants). Some businesses still failed. Others succeeded because they were strategically resilient - a complex mindset that is valuable, rare, and imperfectly imitable by competitors.

Politicization of Catholic Social Teaching

David C. Jacobs

Author Jane Mayer wrote of the billionaire network bankrolling authoritarian politics in her book Dark Money (Penguin, 2017). While Mayer described the origins of climate change denial and “free market” think tanks, she missed another significant propaganda node, the initiative to check the influence of Catholic Social Teaching (CST). With varying degrees of energy, elements of the Catholic hierarchy have prioritized concerns of the working class and poor at least since Pope Leo XIII. The social encyclicals (Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, Centisimo Anno, and other documents of CST) in 1891 sought to address the conditions of the working poor through the advocacy of limited reforms that would preserve the status of the Church. Since 1890, the Church has been formally committed to acceptance of unionism and collective bargaining and the humanization of capitalism. The encyclicals have also embraced worker participation in management, employee ownership, and a broader distribution of property. In the United States, the Bishops’ Pastoral Letter on the Economy reinforced these commitments in 1986. The content of the encyclicals assured that many in the Catholic hierarchy would endorse labor causes and that Catholic business schools would emphasize curricula in labor, human resources, and ethics.

Employee health, safety, and well being: Is a pandemic enough to prioritize them?

Yaminette Diaz-Linhart

Work and organizations play a major role in determining the health of members of society. My personal journey as a public healthsocial worker and midlevel manager for health care and social service frontline workers was the impetus for starting a doctoral program in 2017. I am convinced that we need healthier workplaces, especially for frontline workers who are more than willing to put the needs of their communities above their own health and safety. I know, because I am one of those people.

Meeting in a fraught and eventful work year

Mike Lillich

The pandemic exposed the plight of essential workers and opportunities for transformation.

After a pandemic year full of media discussions of essential workers, a struggling economy, worker safety concerns, and a national election unlike any other, LERA members arrived, 604 strong, ready to talk and listen, albeit virtually, about the COVID year that was, the future of work, and the changes that the pandemic put into motion.

Local chapter update

William Canak

The National Chapter Advisory Council (NCAC) was founded in the early 1990s by Janet Conti, who at the time was an active member of the Hudson Valley Industrial Relations Research Association and the national IRRA, which was the name of our organization before we changed it to LERA.

LERA interest sections and industry councils

Mark D. Gough

During the pandemic, the LERA interest sections and industry councils were an engine of innovation, hosting Zoom webinars that advanced understanding the implications of COVID-19 for meatpack-ing, health care, higher education, gig work, construction, workplace safety, virtual dispute resolution, global governance, and other topics. These webinars brought in more than 100 new members to LERA. The format continues to be vital, with recent sessions on international and comparative industrial relations, the NLRB, and other topics. This outreach and education are deeply appreciated.

LERA 2021 Awards

LERA Office

LERA 2021 Awards

LERA@ASSA Conferencing virtually

Mike Lillich

This year’s American Social Sciences Association conference
(January 3–5), scheduled to be in Chicago, was virtual. LERA’s track included 18 two-hour webinars that attracted 620 attendees. Sessions included papers on the economics of the minimum wage, gender, older worker issues, discrimination, and regulation. The organizers of the conference were Aaron Sojourner (Minnesota) and Till von Wachter (UCLA).

A teachable moment

William Spriggs

William Spriggs originally published this open letter to economists in the Fall 2020 issue of For All, the magazine of the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. A version of the letter was later published in The New York Times.

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer about four miles south of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, home to the Institute. Days later, Howard University professor and 2022 LERA President-Elect William Spriggs wrote this open letter to economists.

Thank you to our 2020-2021 sponsors and contributors

LERA Office

Thank you to our 2020-2021 sponsors and contributors

Presidential address: facing multiple crises

Adrienne Eaton

I've been thinking about this talk for a long time and struggling with what to say in this moment and given the last year. I had originally been thinking I would focus this talk on democracy, and I spent some time reading the work of various political scientists and philosophers on the linkages between political and economic democracy, something I've long been interested in. But as I shifted my reading into some new areas and thought more about all the events of the past year, I headed in a different direction.

Books of Note

LERA Office

Books of note

Book Review of Labor in the Age of Finance: Pensions, Politics, and Corporations from Deindustrialization to Dodd-Frank by Sanford M. Jacoby

Nathan Wilmers

American labor relations typically features an employer on one side of the table and the workers and their union on the other. But when activist Relational Investors pressured Timken Corp. to cut contributions to its steelworkers’ pension, the California teachers’ pension fund benefited (as a Relational general partner and Timken shareholder).

Book Review of The UAW: an Iconic Union Falls Into Scandal by Frank Goeddeke Jr. and Marick F. Masters

Beverly E. Harrison

Presented in textbook style, The UAW: An Iconic Union Falls into Scandal, by Frank Goeddeke Jr. and Marick F. Masters, is an in-depth study (based on the public record) of the scandal within the auto industry, its impact on the U.S. economy, and the applicable labor law. The authors are an academic and a former auto worker turned academic who held several positions in his United Auto Workers (UAW) locals.

Book Review of Crossing Boundaries Work and Industrial Relations in Perspective by Russell D Lansbury.

Peter Berg

Crossing Boundaries: Work and Industrial Relations in Perspective takes the reader on a wonderful journey through the life of Russell Lansbury and what he has discovered as a teacher, researcher, and participant in industrial relations. I became acquainted with Lansbury primarily through his work in comparative employment relations; however, this book makes clear that the breadth of his research and contributions are much broader and larger.

Book Review of Power Politics and Influence at work by Tony Dundon, Miguel Martinez Lucio, Emma Hughes, Debra Howcroft, Arjan Keizer, and Roger Walden

Virginia Doelgast

The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the deep inequalities between workplaces and communities worldwide. It has also brought more public attention to the intricate ways they are connected, through global production networks, international migration, and globalized finance. As office buildings, schools, and national borders closed, differences in privilege and bargaining power between groups of workers became more obvious.

Book Review of Private Regulation of Labor Standards in Global Supply Chains by Sarosh Kuruvilla

Anil Verma

Not since Richard Locke’s 2013 book, The Promise and Limits of Private Power, have we seen a book that advances our understanding of corporate codes so significantly. Sarosh Kuruvilla’s Private Regulation of Labor Standards in Global Supply Chains is a meticulously researched book, chock full of recent evidence from empirical studies that provide new insights into one of the most intractable problems of our era.

Book Review of In the Name of Liberty: the argument for Universal Unionization by Mark R Reiff

Alexis N. Walker

From Amazon’s slogan, “Do it without dues,” during the failed unionization effort at an Alabama warehouse suggesting that labor unions are unnecessary for worker voice or protection to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Janus v. AFSCME (describing agency fees as extractions from “non-consenting employees” that violate workers’ First Amendment rights), it is clear that a conservative anti-union narrative dominates the landscape of American politics today.

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