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This chapter investigates the policy and practice of established U.S. labor unions toward migrant labor and guest workers and provides alternative models for building worker power on a global basis. Organized labor operates at a disadvantage as it typically responds rather than acts as capital changes the nature of work to lower wages. Ideally, a proactive labor movement would shape the nature of work. Therefore, U.S. national labor unions and peak organizations have historically opposed all forms of migration. Most notably, in 1986, national unions were instrumental in shaping the employer-sanction provision in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). However, because legal penalties for hiring undocumented workers are minimal, the law has not deterred employers from hiring them. Furthermore, because minimum wage and hour standards are often unenforced by state and federal government regulatory agencies, undocumented immigrants are frequently more desirable to employers than U.S.-born workers.

Of the countless graduate students whom the Labor Board vets taught, only one was as brilliant, fervid, and thick-skinned as their tutors. That student was George Shultz. This chapter begins by discussing Shultz’s family background, education, military experience, and career in industrial relations and teaching before he entered government. The bulk of the chapter explains how Shultz drew on his experience in industrial relations to help establish affirmative-action programs in industry and unions and desegregate southern public schools in the Nixon administration and forge peaceful relations between the United States and the Soviet Union by the end of the Ronald Reagan administration.

This introductory chapter provides a background of California's paid family leave (PFL) program. Since 1993, the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) has guaranteed unpaid job-protected leaves for new parents of up to twelve weeks. However, it makes such leaves available to only about half of the U.S. labor force, and even those who are covered often cannot afford to take unpaid leaves. As a result, millions of American workers are regularly forced to choose between economic security and providing vital care for their families. California made history on September 23, 2002, when Governor Gray Davis signed a bill creating the nation's first comprehensive paid family leave program. California's PFL program provides up to six weeks of partial wage replacement for eligible workers who take time off to bond with a new child or to care for a seriously ill family member.

This chapter looks at the narratives of upwardly mobile, highly skilled Shia Ismaili Muslims employed in corporate America, which provide an important context for examining the intersection of transnational Islamic sectarian ideologies with racialized and classed regimes of U.S. labor flows, ideologies of the model minority, the neoliberal capitalist economy, and Pakistani nation building. Since the changes in U.S. immigration laws in 1965, Houston’s energy sector has attracted highly skilled Asian technical experts and professionals, as well as students pursuing higher education in the hard sciences. The collapse of Enron, an energy company based in Houston, in autumn 2001 resulted in massive layoffs, causing unexpected unemployment among Shia Ismaili Muslims. At this moment of crisis, they mobilized transnational Shia Ismaili networks to alleviate the impact of the loss of unemployment and rebuild their careers.

This chapter explains that although not much of Lin Manuel Miranda's Hamilton: An American Musical concerns Alexander Hamilton's life before he came to the colonies to make his fame as a Revolutionary War hero and leader of the new United States government, the opening song, “Alexander Hamilton,” implies that Hamilton worked as a child and did not appear to have attended primary or secondary school. Not only did he work hard as a child, but one is led to believe that his success later in life stemmed both from his early work experiences and from his lack of formal schooling as a child. If Hamilton had been born today, would he have been the same “self-starter?” Might his tendency “to work a lot harder” have been squelched by the “paternalism” associated with modern-day child labor laws and compulsory schooling laws? The chapter then discusses the U.S. child labor prohibitions, which are well within the mainstream of international child labor standards.

This chapter examines the similarities and differences between output measures produced by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It describes framework for the production account that incorporates data on the production of commodities by individual industries, as well as the interindustry flows available in the input-output accounts. This chapter analyzes theoretical foundation for a production account that can be used to analyze productivity and shows the relationship between gross domestic product (GDP) and the major-sector estimates using the production account framework.

This chapter discusses the panelists' opinion on the outcome of the Conference on a New Architecture for the U.S. national accounts. They all agree that the conference has accomplished the objective of initiating the lengthy process that will be required to produce an integrated and consistent system of U.S. national accounts. But they also acknowledged that the completion of the integration process will require collaboration between the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) to integrate he components of the core system of accounts and between the BEA and the Federal Reserve Board on integrated and consistent income and expenditures, capital, and wealth accounts.

This chapter describes the normal daily routines that bishops follow and compares their averages (in terms of hours spent sleeping and working) to those of other American males in their same age category. Analysis is also made of the amount of time that they spend praying and exercising each day. Some interesting results come to the fore such as the fact that bishops sleep two hours less per day and work two hours more per day than men their own age. We also delve into their preferences for both secular and Church news sources, noting (not surprisingly) that the more traditional bishops choose conservative outlets and the more progressive ones choose liberal sources.