Miguel Contreras Labor Program
Events
Monday, September 22, 2008 - 12pm
Climate Action, Energy Efficiency, and Job Creation in California
David Roland-Holst, Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics, UC Berkeley
Monday, September 29, 2008 - 12pm
Measuring the Task Content of Offshorable Services Jobs, Tradable Services and Job Loss
Lori Kletzer, Professor of Economics, UC Santa Cruz
Lori G. Kletzer, is a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and is a professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Before joining UCSC, she was a faculty member at Williams College. She has also taught at the University of Washington and was a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her research has been published in a number of professional journals including the American Economic Review, Journal of Economic Perspectives, and Industrial Relations. She is the author of Job Losses from Imports: Measuring the Costs (2001).
Monday, October 13, 2008 - 12pm
Some Lessons for the United States from Low-Wage Work in Europe
John Schmitt, Economist, Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, D.C.
Monday, October 20, 2008 - 12pm
Wal-Mart and beyond: How national institutions shape retail jobs around the world
Chris Tilly, Professor of Urban Planning and Director, IRLE, UCLA
Retailers around the world are experiencing similar changes in their environment. Advanced logistical technology has transformed retailing, shifts toward neoliberal policies have altered the labor policy environment, and there has been a consolidation of regional, national, and, increasingly, global retailers. These two papers examine the extent to which national differences in labor retail patterns and practices persist, and the reasons for that persistence. “Wal-Mart and its workers” uses Wal-Mart, the largest global retailer, as a lens on convergence and divergence in retail labor outcomes, particularly focusing on the US and Mexico but drawing in information from a variety of other countries as well. “Retail jobs in comparative perspective” more broadly compares large companies in food and consumer electronics retailing in the US, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK. Both studies show that significant national differences in retail jobs persist, and show little sign of vanishing. For example, Wal-Mart jobs in most countries are not worse than the retail norm, as they are in the US. National labor market institutions play a key role in these differences, but other institutions and market and cultural differences also play a role.
Monday, October 27, 2008 - 12pm
The Disposable Model of Labor Force Utilization in ItalyBruno Contini, Professor of Econometrics and Director, Center for Employments Studies, University of Torino, Italy
Monday, November 17, 2008 - 12pm
Do Immigrants Hurt Civic and Political Engagement? The Conditional Effects of Immigrant Diversity on Trust, Membership and Participation across 19 Countries, 1981 - 2000
Irene Bloemraad, Professor of Sociology, UC Berkeley
Irene Bloemraad’s recent research (with Christel Kesler, University of Oxford) is an attempt to qualify recent assertions that increasing diversity is detrimental to a vibrant civil society. Based on their analyses of a cross-national, cross-sectional time-series dataset that brings together individual-level World Values Survey data with country-level variables, they show that immigration-generated diversity can have a negative effect on trust, organizational membership and political engagement across advanced democracies, but that institutional arrangements – related to economic systems, corporatist state/society relations and policies for multiculturalism - shape this relationship in systematic ways and, in some cases, can reverse it entirely. They conclude that there is no “general” link between diversity and social capital. Rather, the direction and strength of the relationship depends entirely on how institutions and policies shape the context for trust and engagement.
Monday, December 8, 2008 - 12pm
Structure at Work: Organizational Identities and the Division of Labor in U.S. Wineries
Heather Haveman, Professor of Sociology & Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
All events are located at the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, 2521 Channing Way, Berkeley, CA.
TO ATTEND AN EVENT, PLEASE R.S.V.P. Myra Armstrong, zulu2@berkeley.edu
