1) The first week we are looking at some core numbers on rising economic inequality and a few of the broadest theories on why this happening, along with looking at some specific texts of how employers dominate the workplace and workers respond through workplace organizing.
Write a longer substantive post (at least two solid paragraphs) answering each question posted. Cite to the texts for this week to illustrate your points.
The texts for the first week start with readings describing the turn in recent decades towards greater economic inequality, a phenomena not confined just to the United States. One economist, Thomas Piketty, wrote a book in 2014 called CAPITAL IN THE 21st CENTURY which documented this more thoroughly that any book in recent years (and sold an astonishing 2 million copies, almost unprecedented for a serious economics book), so the first reading is by economist and NY Times columnist Paul Krugman assessing Pikettys argument in an essay called: Why Were in a New Guilded Age, in AFTER PIKETTY (pp. 60-71)
Supplementing this argument on rising economic inequality is a shorter essay on The U.S. Inequality Debate from the Council on Foreign Relations.
The question then is WHY is this happening and why is there economic inequality at all to begin with? A core question is why do workers exist as a distinct and subservient group compared to managers and the shareholders who run businesses, a question that Harry Braverman explored broadly in his book LABOR AND MONOPOLY CAPITALISM and we are reading two chapters from that called The Division of Labor and Scientific Management which highlight how the very organization of the workplace transfers knowledge and power to employers and thereby weakens the control and bargaining power by workers. We are reading pp. 49-83 in the book.
The next question is what can workers do in response? Discussions of inequality often focus on how to redistribute income from the wealthy into the hands of everyone else, but a key focus when we examine the workplace is why owners were able to retain a large portion of the value of work done to gain that wealth in the first place. The key mechanism workers have had in maintaining control in th
e workplace and reducing the employer share of the wealth produced by those workers is collective organizing through labor unions. Kim Voss and Rick Fantasia describe the increasing challenges US workers have faced in building unions in the essay An Exceptionally Hostile Terrain, which is part of their book, Hard Work: Remaking the Labor Movement. Read pp. 34-77 from the link.
Another driver of inequality in the workplace is the rise of big data and the use of it by employers to strengthen control of the workplace. Big data is the increasing centralization of control of data in the hands of a few companies combined with more and more sophisticated computer algorithms to derive information about workers, consumers and society in general by those controlling that data. The rise of Big Data has given companies increasing information about their employees, both information about who they hire and knowing what those they hire think, believe and wantgiving those companies an advantage in every negotiation over pay and benefits. What is new about information technology is that it increases corporate knowledge about the bargaining process itself, allowing companies to profile workers and consumers to extract knowledge about what those workers and consumers know in order to help companies win each moment of bargaining over price and conditions of employment or exchange. Whatever portion of that inequality can be attributed to the deployment of this technology itself, this data advantage in bargaining inevitably exacerbates other causes often cited such as globalization, attacks on unions, shifts in skill sets needed in the modern workplace, and automation.
The first piece we are reading for this week is a broad survey of the debate on the impact of big data on the workplace, a report by Alex Rosenblat, Kate Wikelius, Danah Boyd, Seeta Peña Gangadharan, and Corrine Yu entitled Data & Civil Rights: Employment Primer, produced by for the Data & Society/OTI/Leadership Conference in 2014.
Also read a short article by myself called How Workers Really Get Canceled on the Job on how pre-hiring personality screening and ongoing employer monitoring explicitly weed out workers likely to agitate for a union.