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This chapter, which discusses the wage setting and employment protection institutions in Norway, also reports the Norwegian data sets. A large number of stylized facts regarding wage structure and labor mobility within and between Norwegian firms are then dealt with. The chapter covers the period from 1980 to 1997. The firms in the blue-collar data set are a subsample of the firms in the white-collar data set. White-collar wages are more strongly affected by firm heterogeneity, and are also under a more flexible regime in terms of wage setting. For high-level jobs, there is significant positive correlation between wage dispersion and entry. Wage dispersion among blue-collar workers is much smaller than among white-collar workers. Entry and exit rates are much higher for workers in low-level jobs than for workers in high-level jobs.

Chapter 5 refocuses the narrative on the experiences of white-collar workers employed within New York’s culture industries between 1941 and 1947. As economic conditions improved rapidly with the mobilization for war, the chronic underemployment and precariousness of work during the Depression gave way to the tightest labor market of the twentieth century. Wartime conditions facilitated union organizing even as they restricted unionists’ range of permissible collective action, leading white-collar unionists to support the social consumerism of the Office of Price Administration. The resurgence of unionism occurred within the context of a seismic shift toward a more equal distribution of income and wealth in the United States, which only intensified the political polarization of white-collar workers. In addition, this chapter also highlights the continued vibrancy of Popular Front labor feminism during the 1940s and women’s profound influence on the surge in white-collar organizing.

Chapter 2 explores the development of white-collar unionism in New York’s culture industries during the Great Depression. Culture workers responded to the crisis with new organizing initiatives, many of which eventually gravitated toward the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Larger groups of workers received charters from the CIO as affiliated international unions, such as the American Newspaper Guild, with the New York locals containing a substantial share of total national membership. Organizing efforts in cultural fields that were more concentrated in the metropolitan area, like the Book and Magazine Guild and the American Advertising Guild, became local unions within the United Office and Professional Workers of America, which was the CIO affiliate with a general jurisdiction covering white-collar workers. This chapter also examines the important role of women activists in white-collar organizing as well as unionists’ participation in the broader Popular Front social movement of the 1930s.

This chapter presents a few more details on the Swedish labor market, and then conducts formal descriptive analyses to document these changes throughout the 1970s and 1980s. The matched employee–employer data is used. The analysis of wage levels and wage changes, as well as the trends in worker mobility are elaborated. The chapter shows that the decrease in wage variation during the 1970s and the increase in the 1980s were due to increased variation of wages within firms and increased variation across firms. In addition, people in the low part of the wage distribution have the least to lose by changing jobs, and this relationship gets stronger all the way to the bottom of the wage distribution within firms. The job turnover and wage compression trends are strong for both blue- and white-collar workers in Sweden.

This chapter, which explores the structure of wages within and between Belgian firms, also investigates how the productivity of these firms is affected by their internal wage dispersion. The bargaining regime in companies in the Belgian private sector does not derive directly from Canadian union membership. The data show that high-paying firms are characterized by a more dispersed wage structure. The bargaining regime has a crucial effect on the structure of wages even in a corporatist country such as Belgium. Following a 10 percent rise in wage inequality, productivity increases by approximately 2.1 percentage points more within firms that are essentially composed of blue-collar workers. The chapter also reveals that there is a lower pay spread within firms that are mainly composed of white-collar workers.

This chapter follows Dallas-area job seekers through their layoffs and into the early stages of their job search, examining what appeared to be a surprising lack of anger and anxiety about their new predicament. It outlines the ideology of career management, which represents a historic cultural shift in the mindset of white-collar U.S. workers toward employment, dependency, and security. Perhaps best described as neoliberalism for the organization man set, career management builds on a long history of management theory and American mythologies of meritocratic individualism and masculine agency. It naturalizes the absence of secure, long-term employment, casts the resulting insecurity as an empowering alternative to dependence on a single employer, and prescribes explicitly individualistic, apolitical, pro-market means by which one can best position oneself to succeed in an increasingly global and competitive world.

Chapter 1 surveys the growth of the white-collar workforce during the first three decades of the twentieth century, and the related development of the culture industries centered in New York. The fundamental relationships that linked advertisers to the media took shape during these years, as manufacturers’ need to reach potential consumers fueled the expansion of existing newspapers and magazines, quickly dominated the new technology of radio, and pushed firms to become more attentive to the design and appearance of products. Even as the culture industries swelled to meet the imperatives of consumer capitalism, economic inequality constrained consumer demand, contributing to the onset of the Great Depression. Although business interests attempted to defend capitalist principles and to maintain their control over the advertising and media enterprises, the severity and duration of the Depression incited radical critiques of both the working conditions within the culture industries and the content that they produced.

We can best approach the issue of informating by visiting two work locales of the early 1980s depicted in Shoshana Zuboff's In the Age of the Smart Machine (1988). The book provides a sketch of one work site paradigmatic of a new mode of blue-collar work and a matching description of the new white-collar office of the time. Mainframe computing inaugurated not only sweeping changes in infrastructure and work routine, but also the possibility of a whole new mentality of work. Zuboff coined the term “informating” to mean that computers generate an inescapably thick wrapping of second-order information (information acting on information) around the primary interface of information acting on matter where automation occurs. Informating thus means building into automation the capacity metaphorically (and soon literally) to see the systemic whole of technological rationality—to glimpse not just individual files but the entirety of what C. Wright Mills named by synecdoche the “Enormous File” of white-collar workers. An important issue is the relation of counterculture to the entire baseline relating mainstream to subculture and work to leisure.

This introduction provides an overview of the The Making of the American Creative Class. It opens with a vignette narrating the successful unionization by white-collar workers at the Manhattan headquarters of the CBS network during the mid-1940s, which was exemplary of the larger movement of culture workers in mid-twentieth century New York that organized to challenge both the managerial prerogatives and ideological imperatives of consumer capitalism. The introduction also elucidates the book’s central premise, which is that its historical subjects—New York’s white-collar workers in publishing, advertising, broadcasting, and design—were at the intersection of two major trends in the twentieth-century United States: the expanding production and circulation of a pervasive culture of consumer capitalism, and the transformation of the middle class from a social grouping of proprietors and independent professionals to one comprised primarily of salaried employees.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book sets out to document, in empirical detail, how individualist, pro-market ideologies shape actual people's lives and worldviews through an ethnographic study of white-collar U.S. high-tech workers who lost their jobs in the first years of the twenty-first century. It is about people who espouse a doggedly resilient faith in their ability to improve their own circumstances by doing what they have to do. It is about a neoliberal faith in individual agency, the logic and efficiency of the free market, and the naturalness of the status quo system of insecure employment. The book argues that these workers were neither passive victims nor empowered free agents. How they saw the world, and the choices they made as they navigated through it, were the product of the historical and cultural context in which they lived.

Although there is vast diversity in apprenticeship concepts and practices in Europe, the United States, and other regions of the world, all apprenticeships are designed to support both the professional growth of workforce participants and business growth. Apprenticeships offer an efficient path to gaining valuable credentials and qualifications and thus are an important component of many career pathways. This chapter focuses on apprenticeships as a promising form of acquiring skills and credentials needed to fill the qualification gap of both white-collar and blue-collar workers. It provides a brief history of apprenticeship concepts, and it covers topics such as alignment of career pathways with apprenticeship concepts and trends. It illustrates the main ideas with examples of apprenticeship concepts and systems in several European countries and in the United States. It concludes with some considerations concerning future directions for research and practice.

Changes in control structures and corporate hierarchies, combined with rapid advances in information technology, are creating intense pressure in labor markets for many professional and technical occupations in the United States. Employers face increased incentives to monitor job content while workers experience heightened anxiety about potential obsolescence. These influences are reinforced by developments in the political economy as greater reliance is placed on unrestrained market forces. This chapter explores the attitudes of professional and technical workers toward their jobs and labor market institutions in search of information relevant to institutional transformation. Although primary attention is devoted to unions of white-collar workers, professional associations play an essential role in these markets and serve as an apt source of institutional comparison. The chapter describes the character and functions of professional associations and reflects on the decline of labor unions in the private sector. It presents evidence regarding the type of labor market institution preferred by professional and technical workers.

In the United States, unionism in the private sector is declining. In the face of this development, labor activists, workers, and nongovernmental organizations have formed diverse non-membership organizations (NMOs) or have altered the operations of member-based labor organizations, such as occupational associations, to perform some of the functions that traditional labor unions undertake on behalf of workers. This book examines the nature of these new labor market institutions, how they operate, how effective they have been in providing services or voice to workers compared to unions, whether they have the breadth and scope to expand in the labor market and substitute at least in part for traditional unions, or whether they are likely to be limited to small niches. Part 1 of the book analyzes the way NMOs operate in assisting workers, Part 2 explores the possibility that a membership organization—either union or non-union—could represent white-collar workers, and Part 3 examines potential opportunities to reinvigorate traditional unionism by considering the roles of non-wage benefits, union-management strategic partnerships, and expanded training opportunities.

How do firms adjust their personnel policies and internal structure to changes in their economic and institutional environment? A number of studies indicate that a firm's organizational structure and career paths remain remarkably stable, even in turbulent times. This chapter investigates how Russia's transition from a centrally planned to a market economy has affected the human resource policies of a heavy-industry firm. Using a personnel data set that covers 1,538 white-collar workers over up to seventeen years (1984 to 2000), it shows that from 1984 to 1991, the firm featured stable patterns of upward mobility that look quite similar to the career paths in Western firms. From the year 1992, when Yegor Gaidar's reforms began, to 2000 (during the transition), these career paths seem blocked. In all tiers of the firm's hierarchy except for the lowest one, more managers are hired from the outside market and fewer managers leave the firm. As a result, the firm becomes toploaded, and promotions are blocked. The privatization law probably provided insiders with favors through the so-called option 2 of the Russian voucher privatization.

This chapter shows that, for the southern blacks, migration is a route to economic advancement. To do so, the chapter first investigates the family background of black migrants leaving the South, revealing that young migrants living in the North in 1940 were drawn from households at both the top and the bottom of the occupational distribution. After arriving at their destinations, black migrants did not suffer an earnings penalty in the northern economy, but neither did they out-earn northern-born blacks as some have suggested. Rather, southern migrants earned just as much as northern-born blacks upon arrival in the North and experienced a similar pace of earnings growth over time.