Low-Wage Work in the Wealthy World

Foreword

Foreword The seal of the Russell Sage Foundation features the ambitious slogan : “For the Improvement of Social and Living Conditions.” For over a century, the research projects undertaken by the Foundation, whatever their specific aims, have also sought to serve this broader purpose. The Russell Sage–sponsored study of low-wage work, of which this volume is the culmination, is no exception. Indeed, this study returns to some of the Foundation’s earliest concerns. In 1907 the Russell Sage Foundation’s very first large grant financed an extensive survey of the harsh working and living conditions faced by steel workers and coal miners and their families in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Pittsburgh survey became a model for subsequent social surveys and helped energize Progressive Era reform initiatives that led eventually to occupational health and safety laws, workman’s compensation, and the regulation of hours, wages, and the workweek. Modern American workers are the beneficiaries of these reforms, which have vastly improved working conditions over the last hundred years. But recent decades have witnessed a troubling retrenchment, especially for workers in the lower tiers of the U.S. labor market. Joint Russell Sage/Rockefeller Foundation studies of some twenty- five American industries between 1999 and 2001, summarized in the RSF volume Low-Wage America, reveal a disturbingly common pattern : firms, facing intensifying economic pressures due to globalization , technological change, and other economic forces, have sought to hold the line on labor costs by freezing wages, cutting benefits, and reorganizing production, often in ways that intensify work and erode job quality. In the United States, where unions are weak, minimum wages are low, and workers with limited education are plentiful, the deterioration of low-wage work has been widespread. Exceptions have been few and far between and are found mainly where local labor market institutions make it difficult for firms to compete by reducing wages and job quality. Interestingly, in such cases firms have found other ways to compete successfully—often by making invest- ments in training or capital equipment to increase worker productivity and thereby bear the costs of maintaining higher wages and better working conditions. The coordinated international project reported in this volume compares these recent American developments with labor market trends in five European countries. The comparison builds on intensive study of frontline jobs in five industries, which are predominantly low-paying jobs in the United States. At issue is whether U.S. trends are the inexorable result of worldwide intensification of economic competition, or whether European institutions have been more successful in resisting economic forces and maintaining a higher level of pay and job quality for workers on the lower rungs of the labor market. The standard measures of a country’s economic performance—real income or consumption per person, output per hour worked, and the like—are important but incomplete. When Keynes remarked modestly that “economists are not the guardians of civilization, but they are the guardians of the possibility of civilization,” he had this incompleteness in mind. So did we in the planning of this project, even though it is focused on the characteristics of workers, jobs, and labor markets. There is more to a job than the money income that it brings in, though adequate wage income is clearly part of the “possibility of civilization.” Likewise, there is more to an economy than the surplus it generates for consumers. An economy affects the well-being of those who take part in it in many other ways as well; the quality of the environment is one, but so too is the quality of the jobs on offer. And job quality is no less real because it is invisible in national economic statistics. That is why this study of low-wage work in Europe and America was planned to augment the standard range of statistical information about low-wage workers and low-wage jobs with intensive case studies of low-wage work that involved site visits to multiple establishments in each industry and interviews with managers and workers. We speak of “job quality”—just as, in a still broader context, we speak of “the quality of life”—to refer to the nonpecuniary aspects of a job. It is impossible and unnecessary to give an exhaustive list of the components of job quality. The most important items would certainly include: safety and freedom from harmful physical dangers; a degree of job security; some certainty, continuity, and advance notice about hours of work; regular rest...