Book reviews
Steel
industry bargaining
World
labor situation
Publications
received
The Rise, Fall and Replacement of Industrywide Bargaining in the Basic Steel Industry. By Garth L. Mangum and R. Scott McNabb. Armonk, NY, M.E. Sharpe, 1997, 209 pp. $62.95, cloth; $21.95, paper.
Don’t let the awkward title keep you from reading Garth Mangum and Scott McNabb’s new book describing changes in the structure of collective bargaining in the U.S. steel industry. The authors, who possess both theoretical and practical experience in the steel industry and with its unions, note in a preface that steel bargaining was in the process of changing almost underneath their feet as they were concentrating on other, more narrow aspects of the industry; accordingly, this book ended up being quite different from what they had originally started out to write. For this the readers can be delighted.
In nine concise, well-thought-out chapters, the authors set out, in a lucid and accessible manner, the economics of the industry, the operation of historical influences, the workings of the labor market, and the impact of domestic and foreign competition over the last century. After an introductory overview of the scope and major arguments of the book, chapter 2 describes the formation of the Steel Workers’ Organizing Committee and the initiation of bargaining, campaigns by the United Steel Workers of America (USWA)in the direction of wage equity, influenced by the coming of World War II and the development and implementation of the Cooperative Wage Study, and the emergence of industrywide bargaining in the early post-war period and its more or less formal adoption in 1956 with the creation of the Coordinated Committee Steel Companies (management) and the Basic Steel Industry Conference (union).
As the authors note in chapter 3:
[T]he forces that would destroy industrywide collective bargaining…were set in motion in the very next negotiation following its introduction. The event that planted the seeds of eventual dissolution was the 116-day steel strike in 1959. However, that event would not have been pivotal had it not been for its interaction with product-market and technological developments just then emerging in the worldwide steel industry.
In the flush of postwar success, U.S. integrated steel producers were at first slow to invest in more capacity, and then poured money into technologies, like the traditional open hearth furnace, that were on their way out. In contrast, European and Pacific steelmakers, many of whose plants were ravaged by war, rebuilt with not only new equipment but new production processes such as continuous casters and oxygen furnaces. When competition from abroad began to seriously threaten the U.S. steelmakers’ market share, union and management linked arms to pursue a protectionist strategy, persuading government to adopt Voluntary Restraint Agreements and other measures designed to limit steel imports.
The authors describe how four postwar nationwide strikes in effect made the satisfactory conclusion of collective bargaining less likely: the parties were driven apart by their expectations, usually justified, that the government would intervene. In 1959, however, the nationwide strike lasted 116 days before a Taft-Hartley injunction was granted. Two major strikes in the 1960s helped drive domestic steel users increasingly to seek foreign sources and encouraged manufacturers to stockpile, exacerbating the cyclical aspects of the market.
During the 1970s, strikes were effectively foreclosed by the Experimental Negotiating Agreement, which raised wages 3 percent a year (derived from national, rather than industry, increases in productivity). But while the union’s no-strike pledge had a leveling effect on demand and production, forces in the direction of wage restraint were disarmed.
Much of this history is familiar to readers of prior historians and analysts of collective bargaining in steel. The authors build upon and generously cite Jack Stieber’s contributions to the 1980 Industrial Relations Research Association research volume and John Hoerr’s massive history of the decline of American steel, And the Wolf Finally Came (1988). However, Mangum and McNabb do not cite the chapter on steel bargaining by Jeffrey B. Arthur and Suzanne Konzelmann Smith in the 1994 research volume, Contemporary Collective Bargaining in the Private Sector (Paula B. Voos, ed., Madison, WI, Industrial Relations Research Association, 1994). This work provides a fine update of the Stieber material and is particularly informative when discussing job restructuring. Both the 1994 chapter and the book under review here discuss the difficult times of concession bargaining in the 1980s and the economic forces driving the restructuring of steel bargaining (that is, the successes of mini-mills, international joint ventures, modernization of domestic producers) and the "New Directions Bargaining Movement" of the USWA.
Mangum and McNabb provide a positive answer to the question raised 3 years earlier by Arthur and Smith: will there be "a new industrial relations system in steel embodied in the cooperative partnership model?" Where Mangum and McNabb truly add to our store of knowledge (apart from the remarkable clarity and conciseness with which they retrace familiar ground) is their description of the personal, political, and economic factors (including, notably, the vision of USWA president Lynn Williams) that propelled the union into its current role as a leader in the restructuring of the industry.
The salient details of bargains struck with major producers during the 1990s are reviewed, company by company, as are the remarkably far-reaching aspects of labor-management cooperation that informed these bargains. These elements, clearly bespeaking how trust has largely supplanted mistrust between union and company, include widespread information sharing, adoption of longer-term agreements, a union presence on company boards of directors, paring down of work rules and job classifications, and company commitments to job security and training.
Other scholars have similarly noted this transformation. In 1994, Professor Charles J. Morris, a longtime observer of industrial relations from a legal perspective, reviewed the workings of New Directions Bargaining at Inland Steel. In a paper presented at a joint U.S.-Mexico-Canada conference held pursuant to the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation, Norris stated:
This is truly a story of iconoclastic labor relations and industrial governance. It dramatically illustrated how workers and employers in the United States have already joined together to create a high-performance industrial relations model that is second to none in the entire world, and they have done so with Congressional permission but not Congressional mandate. This statutory encouragement of flexibility is one of the great strengths of the American collective bargaining system.
I have few quarrels with Mangum and McNabb, apart from a number of awkward phrases and areas where further detail might have been useful. I would, however, question their brief negative references to the labor cost implications of greater employee voice and workplace democracy, relating both to the fact of unionization itself and to the German model of codetermination and works councils. In the scholarly volume, Works Councils—Consultation, Representation, and Cooperation in Industrial Relations (J. Rogers and W. Streeck, eds., Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995), which analyzes devices to advance worker voice in Europe and North America, co-editor Joel Rogers concludes that "a well-designed system of intrafirm worker representation can produce economic benefit not just [to] workers, but to firms themselves." He cites the greater productivity and efficiency, as well as improved management decisionmaking and avoidance of costly mistakes, that result from greater employee involvement. This is especially true, Rogers says, when workers also receive more training and are given a share of productivity increases. As Mangum and McNabb make clear, both increased training and some form of compensation based on firm performance have characterized recent USWA agreements in steel.
In relation to the rest of Mangum and McNabb’s work, however, this is small criticism. It is perhaps most useful in pointing up the need for further documentation of the tangible advantages of labor-management cooperation, for the benefit of remaining skeptics. Thus, I commend The Rise, Fall and Replacement of Industrywide Bargaining in the Basic Steel Industry to all Monthly Labor Review readers, especially to the lay audience. It will be of particular value to labor studies groups, and to union leaders and members who want to understand the forces at work when a basic industry is beaten down and then comes back, smaller but tougher, in a recovery aided in no small part by labor-management cooperation.
World Labour Report: Industrial Relations, Democracy, and Social Stability, 1997–98. Washington, International Labour Organization, 1997, 283 pp. $39.95.
"… [T]he trade union movement has fallen on hard times," write the authors of the latest in the series of World Labour Reports ILO has published since 1984. The salient fact underlying this statement has been the sharp membership decline trade unions have suffered over the 1980s and 1990s, particularly in the industrial countries—a decline that paralleled the continued growth in the number of wage and salary earners, and thus resulted in an even greater contraction in trade union density (that is, the proportion of the total number of such earners belonging to unions). Thus, density shrank 21 percent in the United States between 1985 and 1995; 28 percent in the United Kingdom; 17 percent in the old Federal Republic of Germany (1985–93); and 31 percent in France.
Of the 70 countries surveyed, one-half experienced membership losses. Substantial gains, however, were reported by South Africa, Canada, South Korea, India, and China. Yet, in many newly industrializing and developing countries, membership has decreased as the "formal" sector contracted.
While in a number of European countries bargaining coverage considerably exceeds trade union density, trade unions’ claim that they represent broad worker interests has weakened as their strength has receded. Their overarching political and social functions—ensuring that workers have a voice in their work life; that productivity gains be more fairly distributed; that all persons able and willing to work be assured of a job—are being undermined.
Essentially four socioeconomic forces have put the trade unions increasingly on the defensive. One has been a shift in "the balance of power away from labor to capital," evidenced by the enhanced worldwide mobility of capital. Having arisen from liberalized investment regimes, such mobility enables firms to "raise and spend money anywhere in the world," increasing their "locational freedom." Even when not exercised, this freedom may wring concessions from a firm’s employees.
The second force, likewise detrimental to the unions, has been a turn toward greater enterprise autonomy in matters of industrial relations—away from industrywide or pattern bargaining, as well as, in tendency, from centralized tripartite bargaining (practiced in some European countries). This turn has been occasioned by the greater flexibility presumably required by globalized production and markets.
Thirdly, drastic changes in work organization have occurred, owing to technological advances enabling the design and manufacture of more high-quality and customer-specified goods, and requiring fewer lower skilled and more multi-skilled workers. This has tended to result in more individualized compensation systems, and closer identification of some worker groups with middle management. The unions, traditionally oriented to work organizations based on mass production and closely defined job descriptions, have had difficulty adapting their strategies to these changes.
Finally, the unions’ ability to press for high or full employment, and prevent the spread of contingent (or "casual" or "precarious") work, is hindered by pressures on macro-economic policies, exerted by international finance, to eschew Keynesian intervention seeking to secure such employment goals, and to assign priority to preventing wage and price inflation. The mobility of capital is thus accompanied by the "immobility" of the state, "the unquestionable decline in national policy autonomy," and, increasingly, the "transfer to enterprises functions previously largely performed at the national level."
Challenges facing the trade unions are given far greater weight by the ILO report than successes (which have generally remained "modest"). Among the weightiest of challenges has been the transformation of work and the organization of production already noted. Among the manifestations—some of which have roots, to be sure, dating to the 1960s—has been outsourcing, that is, the partial externalization of production of goods and/or services. Outsourcing, ILO writes, is a cause of labor market segmentation, if only "in some settings." These settings are evidently proliferating, as more small- and middle-sized enterprises have become subcontractors. The link between subcontractor and the contracting firm tends to be organizational, not merely commercial; hence the subcontractor’s autonomy in matters of technology, production methods, and layout gets to be narrowly circumscribed. "[R]elative to large firms, small- and middle-sized enterprises are far more likely to be nonunion," according to the report, hence working conditions are often inferior. In the case of "off-shore" locations, the subcontractor is obviously beyond the reach of domestic unions. A large share of imports from Mexico, for example (42 percent), move within the "internal" markets of contracting firms domiciled in the United States, ruling out any equalization of working conditions (as of the early 1990s, trade union membership in Mexico was down 26 percent from the late 1980s).
Trade unions have always assumed that their industrial relations opposites are firms, not merely their establishments; or industries consisting of reasonably homogeneous enterprises. But this assumption no longer holds or must be modified more and more, for two reasons. Many firms affiliate with others to form networks in carrying out given projects. Such inter-firm dependencies do not conform to traditional industrial relations structures; they do not, as it were, offer a readily discernible collective bargaining address.
The other reason consists of the obverse phenomenon, where multinational enterprises maintain specialized plants in various geographical areas, each separately managed. An estimated 75 percent of international trade is accounted for by interplant shipments. The plants may well be unionized, but the multinational enterprise center’s pressure on their managers limits their bargaining room, all the more so as the center will compare performance of its plants.
ILO reports a striking example of such "performance competition" between an Australian appliance manufacturer and his joint-venture partner in China. The highest monthly wage rate in the Australian factory was roughly 30 times higher than its Chinese counterpart; weekly hours, 38 in the former, 60 in the latter; and collective bargaining rights, fully recognized in the former, denied in the latter. The gap in labor rights and labor costs threatened closure of the Australian plant, the Chinese one having become a "benchmark and ‘negotiating lever’" for bargaining and reorganizing the former. Productivity increases in the Australian plant "up to the level where it would counterbalance" labor cost differentials became the overriding objective of the workers and managers there. Productivity was indeed raised substantially, but at the cost of a 50-percent cut in employment and an assembly line speedup. Performance competition thus may diminish gains won earlier; resistance may lead to plant closure. Trade unions’ fundamental task of protecting working conditions is put at risk.
The trend toward enterprise autonomy in industrial relations, pronounced in the United States and eroding centralized and industrywide bargaining in Europe, possibly prefigures a degree of de-institutionalization of collective bargaining. In the United States, there have been tendencies to "individualize" labor relations; an aspect of this tendency has been the spread of "independent contracting." It has been suggested that court action would suffice in case of disputes, and that personnel managements could administer collective relations. Union-nonunion cost differentials would in time disappear. The trend represents a potential incursion upon industrial relations as a function of democracy, as this function is implied in the report’s subtitle.
Another implication of the report’s subtitle is the link between industrial relations and social stability. This link has become tenuous. A growing number of workers, many women and youths among them, cannot obtain other than contingent work (part-time, casual, or contract). Such workers "currently represent a significant minority who often find themselves in conditions comparable to those of yesterday’s proletariat." The unions’ opposition to the category of jobs these workers hold is often unacceptable to them: they need these jobs for lack of better ones. Collective agreements afford a modicum of protection to some of them. Outstanding examples cited by ILO include the "Justice for Janitors" campaign that has been conducted by the Service Employees International Union; the "Living Wage" campaigns in some American cities; and the successes in organizing California healthcare workers.
The report devotes a brief chapter to trade union developments in Eastern Europe. No clear trend emerges from the discussion. In Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the unions were the foremost advocates of restoring civil society, and of ensuring democratic representation. They retain political influence, but authority over their membership has become "uncertain." Workers who do well evidently lack interest in joining unions; workers whose jobs are "precarious" remain reluctant to do so. Agreements between individual firms and unions, to be sure, are increasing but the report’s authors do not view this as a characteristic trend. There is (as yet) no discernible consensus among employers as to what role collective agreements should play, if any. This lack of consensus probably reflects the divergence of interests between the larger, still state-owned firms, and small- and medium-sized enterprises. Privatization seems not necessarily beneficial to the work force; it has resulted in the near disappearance of worker participation in enterprise decisions—once a key demand of the Polish labor movement.
The report features a long section discussing the relevance of industrial relations and practices to the "informal sectors" of newly industrializing and developing countries. The informal sector is defined as consisting of mostly self-employed urban residents, using rudimentary tools to produce low-quality goods in low quantities, and yielding low incomes; or offering services marginally needed and valued, and likewise yielding low incomes. There is little or no regulation of working conditions, and no publicity administered coverage protecting against loss of earning power.
The informal sector is in effect defined against the "formal" sector where stability of employment, wages, and benefits, as well as socially regulated protections represent an integral component of modern enterprise, with its backward and forward links to markets and government services. The formal sector, however, has been shrinking relative to the informal one. In Latin America, of the roughly 16 million jobs generated between 1990 and 1994, more than 8 in 10 arose in the informal sector. In much of Asia, this sector absorbs 40 to 50 percent of the urban labor force; in Africa, 61 percent. Its growth is attributable in part to the contraction of public employment owing to economic stabilization and restructuring programs; rural–urban migration; and deregulation compelled by global competition. (Public employment is in the formal sector; retrenched workers often seek their livelihood in the informal sector.)
The great diversity of informal-worker occupations, the manifold difficulties arising in this sector, and the associations formed by its workers are discussed in some detail in the report. The discussion is highly informative; it cannot be summarized here. Be it confined to a key point made by the authors. They write that nongovernment organizations believe that, in order to overcome the frequent indifference of policymakers to informal-sector workers, solutions to local problems should be pursued at the local level by empowering the poor. This would in time compel government to formulate and implement responsive policies. The ILO argues that empowerment of local groups is not sufficient; and that institutions must be built that facilitate dialogue and negotiations with policymakers—that is, that activity at the micro level be coordinated with macro-level policy. It insists upon the "relevance of industrial relations processes and instruments to informal sector workers."
The facts and discussion offered by ILO in reference to the informal sector do not offer much of a basis for this advice. As noted, the size and growth of this sector has been to some extent a function of the contraction of the formal sector. The trade unions, necessarily an integral component of the formal sector, have likewise declined. Trade union density in Mexico, for example, decreased by 43 percent between 1989 and 1991; by 37 percent in Columbia (1985–95); 43 percent in Venezuela (1988–95); and 18 percent in India (1980–91). These are all countries with substantial informal sectors. Such declines in the density of the trade unions, hence in their social and political weight, cannot but weaken the relevance of the tripartite industrial relations model envisioned by (and in fact at the basis of) ILO—the more so as it appears to be increasingly under pressure in the industrial countries.
Nevertheless, it is undeniable that the future of trade unions and of the labor movement they embody hinges on their untiring efforts to find paths to the inclusion, not only of regularly employed workers, but also of the growing work force employed at insecure, contingent jobs, and of the vast mass of the underemployed engaged in the informal sectors of developing countries.
Economic and social statistics
Central Bureau of Statistics, Monthly Bulletin of Statistics, January 1998, Jerusalem, Israel, Central Bureau of Statistics, 157 pp.
European Commission, National Transportation Measures Situation at First January 1998, Luxembourg, Belgium, European Commission, Office of Employment and Social Affairs, 1998, 181 pp.
Fairlie, Robert W. and Bruce D. Meyer, Does Immigration Hurt African-American Self-Employment? Cambridge, MA, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 1997, 54 pp. (Working Paper 6265.) $5 per copy, plus $10 for postage and handling outside the United States.
Frumkin, Norman, Tracking America’s Economy. 3d. ed., Armonk, NY, M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1998, 335 pp. $66.95, cloth; $24.95, paper.
Heckman, James J., Lance Lochner, Christopher Taber, Explaining Rising Wage Inequality: Explorations with a Dynamic General Equilibrium Model of Labor Earnings with Heterogeneous Agents. Cambridge, MA, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 1998, 82 pp. (Working Paper 6384.) $5 per copy, plus $10 for postage and handling outside the United States.
Economic growth and development
Berman, Eli and Linda T. Bui, Environmental Regulation and Labor Demand: Evidence from the South Coast Air Basin. Cambridge, MA, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 1997, 39 pp., (Working Paper 6299.) $5 per copy, plus $10 for postage and handling outside the United States.
Kremer, Michael, Patent Buy-Outs: A Mechanism for Encouraging Innovation. Cambridge, MA, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 1997, 54 pp., (Working Paper 6304.) $5 per copy, plus $10 for postage and handling outside the United States.
Storper, Michael, The Regional World: Territorial Development In a Global Economy. New York, The Guilford Press, 1997, 338 pp. $39.95, cloth; $18.95, paper.
Education
Tyler, John H., Richard J. Murnane, John B. Willett, Estimating the Impact of the GED on the Earnings of Young Dropouts Using a Series of Natural Experiments. Cambridge, MA, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 1998, 69 pp. (Working Paper 6391.) $5 per copy, plus $10 for postage and handling outside the United States.
U.S. Department of Education, Chartbook of Degrees Conferred, 1969–70 to 1993–94. Washington, U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, 1997, 280 pp. Stock No. 065–000–01094–1, $18. For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, Mail Stop: SSOP, Washington, DC 20402–9328.
National Education Goals Panel, The National Education Goals Report: Building a Nation of Learners, 1997. Washington, 1997, 339 pp. Stock No. 065–000–01077–1, $22. For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, Mail Stop: SSOP, Washington, DC 20402–9328.
_____Special Early Childhood Report, 1997. Washington, National Education Goals Panel, 39 pp.
Health and safety
Levinstein, Charles and John Wooding, eds., Work, Health, and Environment: Old Problems, New Solutions. New York, Guilford Press, 1997, 536 pp.
Yates, Elizabeth H. and John F. Burton, Jr. eds., International Examinations of Medical-Legal Aspects of Work Injuries: A Collection of Papers Presented at the Second International Congress on Medical-Legal Aspects of Work Injuries. Lanham, MD, The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1998, 338 pp. $50.
Industrial relations
Bales, Richard A., Compulsory Arbitration: The Grand Experiment In Employment. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1997, 233 pp.
Bronfenbrenner, Kate and others, eds., Organizing to Win: New Research on Union Strategies. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, ILR Press, 1998, 360 pp. $19.95, paper.
Gross, James A., Broken Promise: The Subversion of U.S. Labor Relations Policy, 1947–1994. Philadelphia, PA, Temple University Press, 1995, 404 pp.
Linder, Marc and Ingrid Nygaard, Void Where Prohibited: Rest Breaks and the Right to Urinate on Company Time. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1998, 244 pp. $27.50.
Lieberman, Myron, The Teacher Unions: How the NEA and AFT Sabotage Reform and Hold Students, Parents, Teachers, and Taxpayers Hostage to Bureaucracy. New York, The Free Press, 1997, 305 pp. $25, United States; $34, Canada.
Nissen, Bruce, ed., Unions and Workplace Reorganization. Detroit, MI, Wayne State University Press, 1997, 240 pp. $22.95.
Republic of China, Monthly Bulletin of Labor Statistics, Taiwan Area Republic of China, December 1997, Taiwan, Republic of China, Council of Labor Affairs, 213 pp.
Towers, Brian, The Representation Gap: Change and Reform In the British and American Workplace. New York, Oxford University Press, 1997, 294 pp. $19.95.
Turner, Lowell, ed., Negotiating the New Germany: Can Social Partnership Survive? Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1997, 271 pp. $45, cloth; $17.95, paper.
Labor and economic history
Brecher, Jeremy, Strike! Rev. ed. Boston, MA, South End Press, 1997, 421 pp. $22, paper.
Siebert, Horst, ed., Structural Change and Labor Market Flexibility: Experience in Selected OECD Economies. Kiel, Germany, University of Kiel, Institute of World Economics, 1997, 292 pp.
Labor force
Clarke, Simon, ed., Structural Adjustment without Mass Unemployment? Lessons from Russia. Northampton, MA, Edward Elgar, 1998, 355 pp.
Davis, Steven J., John C. Haltiwanger, and Scott Schuh, Job Creation and Destruction. Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1997, 260 pp. $30, cloth; $17.50, paper.
Fishback, Price V., Operations of ‘Unfettered’ Labor Markets: Exist and Voice in American Labor Markets at the Turn of the Century. Cambridge, MA, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 1997, 64 pp. (Historical Paper 1105.) $5 per copy, plus $10 for postage and handling outside the United States.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Projections and Training Data. Washington, 1998, Bulletin 2501, 73 pp.
Management and organization theory
Gubman, Edward L., The Talent Solution: Aligning Strategy and People to Achieve Extraordinary Results. New York, McGraw-Hill Co., Inc., 1998, 325 pp. $24.95.
Stone, Florence M., The Manager’s Balancing Act. New York, AMACOM, A Division of American Management Association, 1997, 216 pp. $24.95.
Monetary and fiscal policy
Brownlee, W. Elliot, Federal Taxation in America. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1996, 190 pp. $44.95.
Graham, Benjamin, Storage and Stability: The Original 1937 Edition. New York, McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 1998, 298 pp. $39.95.
Murray, Matthew N. and William F. Fox, eds., The Sales Tax In the 21st Century. Westport, CT, Praeger Publishers, 1997, 262 pp., bibliography. $75.
Solow, Robert M. and John B. Taylor, Inflation, Unemployment, and Monetary Policy. Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 1998, 120 pp. $20.
Prices and living conditions
Rubin, Rose M. and Michael L. Nieswiadomy, Expenditures of Older Americans. Westport, CT, Praeger Publishers, 1997, 153 pp., bibliography. $55.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Survey, 1994–95. Washington, 1997, Bulletin 2492, 274 pp. Stock No. 029–001–03273–1, $23. For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, Mail Stop: SSOP, Washington, DC 20402–9328
Productivity and technological change
Kochan, Thomas A., Russell D. Lansbury, and John Paul MacDuffie, eds., After Lean Production: Evolving Employment Practices in the World Auto Industry. Ithaca, NY, ILR Press, Cornell University Press, 1997, 349 pp. $47.50, cloth; $19.95, paper.
Lanjouw, Jean O., The Introduction of Pharmaceutical Product Patents in India: "Heartless Exploitation of the Poor and Suffering?" Cambridge, MA, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 1998, 53 pp. (Working Paper 6366.) $5 per copy, plus $10 for postage and handling outside the United States.
Social institutions and social change
Altonji, Joseph G. and Charles R. Pierret, Employer Learning and Statistical Discrimination. Cambridge, MA, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 1997, 64 pp. (Working Paper 6279.) $5 per copy, plus $10 for postage and handling outside the United States.
Glaeser, Edward L., Learning in Cities. Cambridge, MA, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 1997, 23 pp. (Working Paper 6271.) $5 per copy, plus $10 for postage and handling outside the United States.
Grogger, Jeff and Mike Willis, The Introduction of Crack Cocaine and the Rise of Urban Crime Rates. Cambridge, MA, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 1998, 36 pp. (Working Paper 6353.) $5 per copy, plus $10 for postage and handling outside the United States.
Meade, Jose and Joel Waldfogel, Do Sentencing Guidelines Raise the Cost of Punishment? Cambridge, MA, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 1998, 24 pp. (Working Paper 6361.) $5 per copy, plus $10 for postage and handling outside the United States.
Welfare programs and social insurance
Blank, Rebecca M., What Causes Public Assistance Caseloads to Grow? Cambridge, MA, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 1997, 67 pp. (Working Paper 6343.) $5 per copy, plus $10 for postage and handling outside the United States.
Dailey, Nancy, When Baby Boom Women Retire. Westport, CT, Praeger Publishers, 1998, 150 pp. $55.
Gruber, Jonathan, Social Security and Retirement in Canada. Cambridge, MA, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 1997, 30 pp. (Working Paper 6308.) $5 per copy, plus $10 for postage and handling outside the United States.
Handler, Joel F. and Yeheskel Hasenfeld, We the Poor People: Work, Poverty, and Welfare. New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 281 pp. $16, paper.
Neill, Jon, ed., Poverty and Inequality: The Political Economy of Redistribution. Kalamazoo, MI, W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 1997, 151 pp.
Nuemark, David and Elizabeth Powers, The Effect of Means-Tested Income Support for the Elderly on Pre-Retirement Saving: Evidence from the SSI Program in the U.S. Cambridge, MA, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 1997, 29 pp. (Working Paper 6303.) $5 per copy, plus $10 for postage and handling outside the United States.
Spulber, Nicolas, Redefining the State: Privatization and Welfare Reform in Industrial and Transitional Economies. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1997, 254 pp. $39.95.
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