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Educational interpreting emerged as a profession in the US in 1974, with the implementation of the first federal law protecting the educational rights of children receiving special services. However, there is little published data on how many DHH students use an educational interpreter. This chapter presents an overview of the range of skills and factors that would influence how much and how well a child would learn within an interpreted education standards for educational interpreters. Topics discussed include skill levels for educational interpreters, interpreter training programs and performance, and a model of learning within an interpreted education.

This chapter presents a summary of the dimensions of work quality discussed in the preceding chapters. These include skill levels and skill trends, employer training, task discretion, work-family balance, and job insecurity. It then considers their implications for the contrasting arguments about the determinants of work quality discussed in Chapter 1.

This chapter suggests that the nature of work in Britain changed dramatically during the last thirty years of the twentieth century. Sectoral shifts included a move from manufacturing towards services. There were also major shifts from the public sector to the private sector: between 1980 and 1998 the proportion of employees accounted for by private sector services rose from 26% to 44%. Part-time and temporary workers also became more common. These changes are often claimed to be associated with some more general transformations in the nature of work in Britain. One view holds that there have been improving levels of skills and training and better communication in the workplace. Another view holds that there have been increased levels of effort and stress. This chapter attempts to explain why rising skill levels, employee autonomy and commitment have been accompanied by widespread reports of increases in stress, lengthening working hours and a sense of a lack of control over one's working life.

This chapter first sets out the purpose of the book, which is to consider whether government investment in education and training would be more or less effective at alleviating economic inequality and strengthening the United States economy than direct subsidies to workers who are falling behind. The book explores four paradoxes. First, that in recent decades, educational attainment in the United States has risen faster than the skill requirements that employers seek. Second, even as skill levels and educational attainment have increased, wages have fallen after taking inflation into account. Third, changes in productivity do not appear to be strongly correlated to changes in skills or education, either for particular industries or for the economy as a whole. Fourth, as educational opportunities have improved for a broader segment of the US population, economic inequality has not decreased but rather has increased. The chapter then discusses recent trends in income, wealth, poverty, and inequality; trends in schooling and earnings; and trends in productivity and profitability. Finally, it presents an overview of the subsequent chapters and a summary of key findings.

This chapter examines the way in which sources of structural change have affected wage movements in the US economy. In so doing, it discusses the second major paradox of the book—namely, that while skill levels and educational achievements of the labor force have continued to rise since 1973, real wages have fallen. The trend is slightly different when both direct wages and salaries and the fringe benefits provided by employers are considered, which have increased slightly since 1973. However, even in this case, employee compensation exhibits a substantially smaller rise than the increase in skills and schooling levels after the early 1970s. The chapter is organized as follows. Section 3.2 summarizes some of the recent literature on wage changes in the US economy. Section 3.3 then presents statistics on trends in the real wage and employee compensation. Alternative wage series are used, including average hourly earnings of nonsupervisory employees and the employment cost index. Trends in earnings are compared with those of skills, schooling, and productivity.

This chapter examines the drivers of the relationships between openness, skill levels of workers, and migrant rights in high-income countries. It considers each of the three relationships—between openness and skills, rights and skills, and openness and rights—providing short case studies of where they occur, and why. It also looks at examples of policies that are not characterized by these relationships and analyzes the reasons for these exceptional cases. The case studies cover a wide range of political systems, welfare states, labor markets, and geographic regions of the world. They thus include labor immigration policies that are made in different national policy spaces. The chapter shows that policy decisions on how to regulate the admission and rights of migrant workers in high-income countries are firmly based on assessments of the consequences of admitting migrants as well as granting/restricting rights for the national interests of migrant-receiving countries.

This chapter delineates the trends in the well-being of American women over the last quarter century of the 1900s, painting a picture of substantial progress toward gender equality across a number of dimensions. Working in the opposite direction, however, trends in family structure and, in particular, the increase in families headed by single women, have adversely affected the economic well-being of women and their dependent children. Furthermore, as in the case of men, wage differentials by education widened among women in the 1980s and early 1990s, and female high school dropouts experienced real wage declines. While women at all skill levels upgraded their occupations, less skilled and middle skilled women lost union jobs, and their representation in higher paying industries declined. Finally, the income of individuals in families headed by couples with lower educational attainment has fallen relative to that of more highly educated couples.

This chapter presents the proposed applications of mind–brain relationships, which lack the empirical database backing that links the neurophysiological measures with behavior. It presents reasons, including lack of description and correlation and inconsistent empirical results, which prove why the brain activity's physiological measure cannot be used to predict behavior in a person. The applications proposed by the promoters are probabilistic in nature, with a substantial amount of variation. The chapter discusses the incompetency of cognitive neuroscience applications in measuring the motor-skill level and native ability or talent of an individual. Lack of empirical support for cognitive neuroscience applications proposing deception or lie detection with the use of brain imaging or EEG is presented.

This chapter employs an original cross-national dataset of individual and collective labor regulations to chart the range of variation in labor laws within Latin America during the 1980-2005 period. Econometric analysis finds that skill levels and organizational capacity are consistently correlated with differences in labor regulation “regimes” in recent decades. In addition, the chapter tests alternative hypotheses present in the literature, finding that government partisanship has important effects both through its historical legacies and through the reforms proposed by sitting governments.

This chapter discusses the effect of differences in the levels of skills, education and childbearing on the lifetime earnings of women in partnerships in the UK. Using simulated data for the earnings of couples, and making assumptions about gender roles, the chapter shows that women with higher skill levels are able to maintain levels of lifetime earnings approaching those of men whether or not these women have children. On the other hand, women with lower skill levels have the tendency to face lower lifetime earnings than men, specifically if they have children. This has serious implications for women's financial well-being if they face marital and relationship dissolution.

This chapter focuses on the labor market, looking at shifts in wages among workers. The results in this chapter emphasize the various ways in which the distribution and level of earnings have changed among employed men and women. It notes that the overall growth in skill levels in the U.S. workforce has shifted wages upward. It adds that women are working much more than before, so their annual earnings have grown markedly, largely due to increase in weeks worked per year. While hourly wages have become much more unequal, it notes that the rising inequality in wages has been somewhat offset by falling inequality in work effort among works, with more workers working full-time and full-year. It explains the result is that the overall distribution of annual earnings among workers has shifted upward, even while wage inequality rose. It details that some may be surprised to learn that annual earnings have grown among workers in the bottom half of the earnings distribution. It clarifies that the latter is due to greater work effort on the part of women.

This chapter describes the two-pronged methodological approach employed in the remainder of the book. First, it describes the original dataset assembled for the quantitative analysis – a comparative operationalization of 23 labor law features from 18 countries – and details the strengths and weaknesses implied in a quantitative research strategy. Next, it describes the qualitative, “analytic narrative” approach employed in the case studies. It discusses the selection criteria for choosing Chile, Peru, and Argentina as exemplary cases, and provides a preliminary comparison of their relative skill levels and labor organization throughout the twentieth century.

The purpose of this chapter is to assess the success of the public-sector-sponsored vocational and training programs in augmenting the skills of youths and young adults, and in reducing adult poverty. The chapter also discusses the range of existing programs and initiatives, and reviews what the evaluations of these programs tell us about the likelihood that youth or young adult participants will be poor when they reach adulthood. Employment and training initiatives that target economically disadvantaged youths who are at risk of dropping out of school or have already dropped out of high school have not usually been effective. Improving basic skill levels in primary schools and keeping kids in secondary school through a range of options from career academies to athletic programs appears to be the most effective strategy for reducing the risk of adult poverty among at-risk youths.

This chapter examines the growth of output and exports in South African manufacturing by comparison with the BRIC countries. Particular attention is paid to the more labour-intensive sectors and, by contrast, the more high-technology sectors. An examination of the changing share and composition of South African manufacturing and whether South Africa is de-industrializing follows. Manufacturing employment, productivity, and wage differentials and future prospects for South African manufacturing are outlined. The chapter concludes with an emphasis on the implications for employment and poverty alleviation.