2014 The Disunited States of America: Employment Relations Systems in Conflict

Abstract

Early in 2014, Senator Thomas Harkin (D-Iowa) described a heartbreaking episode of labor exploitation in his own state. For 40 years, mentally disabled men had toiled under body-wrecking conditions in a turkey-processing plant in Atalissa, Iowa. Each received monthly wages of $65. Room and board were provided but in a dangerously decrepit bunk. “What happened in Atalissa is hard to shake. It’s as close to involuntary servitude as I’ve ever seen,” said Senator Harkin in the New York Times (Barry 2014).Henry’s Turkey Service paid a subminimum wage to its employees as permitted by a provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938 covering less productive disabled workers. Shrouded in secrecy and willful ignorance, working and living conditions were in free fall. The loopholes in the FLSA permitted powerful actors to abuse employees while reserving greater degrees of protection for others. Exclusions for agricultural and domestic workers, lower minimum wages for restaurant workers, the exception for the mentally disabled, and uneven enforcement of the act leave many workers subject to exploitation. On the other hand, some states and cities have enacted much more generous minimums and have lifted labor standards in their jurisdictions (Barry 2014).Although the Thirteenth Amendment abolishes slavery and involuntary servitude, the courts have refused to interpret the prohibition of involuntary servitude with sufficient breadth to address the persistent problem of exploitation (“wage slavery” as perceived by many Civil War–era reformers). The Thirteenth Amendment’s exception for prisoners even allows some state governments to offer prison labor at a profit to private enterprise, thereby producing another low-wage employment enclave. While the National Labor Relations Act was meant to guarantee private sector workers positive rights as a corrective to weak individual bargaining power, the exclusion of significant categories of workers and the weakness of remedies for employer abuses leave the vast majority of American workers without the promised protections. The minority of workers with strong unions and generous employers find temporary respite on the tip of the archipelago oflabor standards while the rest are at risk.The complex and differentiated results of FLSA enforcement andunderlying deficits in constitutional protection are just two of the factorsproducing an uneven plain in employment relations in the United States.Despite the common misconception that Americans possess a consistentbundle of rights and that national government and “free markets” generateuniform results, the labor market would appear to be highly segmented.The federal structure, the unsettled nature of constitutional andstatutory rights, the power and strategic choices of profit-maximizingemployers, the persistence of variety in organizations forms, and unevenlevels of democratic participation generate vast differences in workplaceoutcomes. As a federal republic, the United States has multiple levels ofgovernment at the city, county, state, and national levels. Its size, history,and institutional complexity contribute to complex, multi-layered, andinconsistent patterns of economic regulation. In addition to the disparatepolicies of cities, counties, and states, economic conditions and strategicdecisions by managers produce a wide divergence of behaviors by firms.The contributors to this volume explore the evidence for a multiplicityof industrial relations or employment relations systems in what we mightcall the Differentiated States of America.