From Widgets to Digits: Employment Regulation for the Changing Workplace

by Katherine V. W. Stone

Overview

Although existing labor and employment laws were built on the assumption of long-term, stable relationships between employees and firms, this book explores the changing nature of the employment relationship and its implications for labor and employment law. The current challenge of labor regulations is to find a means to provide workers with continuity in wages, ongoing training opportunities, sustainable and transferable skills, unambiguous ownership of their human capital, portable benefits, and support structures to enable them to weather career transitions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521829106
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/02/2004
Pages:	314
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.33(h) x 0.91(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction; Part I. Labor Relations Regimes of the Past: 1. Artisanal production in the nineteenth century; 2. The labor system of the industrial era; 3. From scientific management to internal labor markets; Part II. The Digital Workplace: 4. The changing nature of employment; 5. The new employment relationship; Part III. Implications of Digital Job Structures for Labor and Employment Law: 6. Implications of the new workplace for labor and employment regulation; 7.Disputes over ownership of human capital; 8. The changing nature of employment discrimination; 9. Unionism in the boundaryless workplace; 10. Re-imagining employee representation; Part IV. Social Justice in the Digital Era: 11. The crisis in benefits and the collapse of the private welfare state; 12. The working rich and the working poor: income inequality in the digital era; Conclusion; Notes; Appendices.

Editorial Reviews

"Written by an internationally renowned labor scholar, this book documents the evolution of the employer-employee working relationship through three eras (artisanal, industrial, and digital production) and articulates the impact and policy implications of these changes...This is an insightful, readable, carefully researched resource likely to be of considerable interest to professionals and scholars across a wide range of disciplines."
T. Gutteridge, University of Toledo, Choice

"This is a formidable book. Katherine Stone has showed yet again that she is one of America's leading labour law scholars. What she has to say is imaginative and original, relevant, carefully researched and easily accessible to professions and scholars right across the spectrum of disciplines."
Harry Arthurs, York University

"Contemporary employment practices no longer fit the legal models that are supposed to regulate them. Katherine Stone, one of our most thoughtful and articulate labor scholars, shows in this book how the situation came about and what should be done to improve it. It's hard to imagine a sharper or more readable account of these issues."
William H. Simon, Columbia University

"An insightful, readable, carefully researched resource likley to be of considerable interest to professionals and scholars across a wide range of disciplines."
Choice

"From Widgets to Digits speaks to a [broad] audience, and indeed represents that rare effort that will serve as a university textbook ... as well as a challenge to the profession and to policymakers. Widgets is the best synthesis we now have of where we have been, where we are now, and where we might go with respect to the regulation of employment in the United States. Widgets to Digits is a work of grand synthesis. While other books have talked about the "new deal" imposed on workers by corporate employers, Stone has theorized and drafted what could realistically be put forth as a "New Deal" for workers in the larger political sense, should that needed organizational change "mechanism" appear, or should economic collapse once again force political change."
Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal

"This is a detailed and insightful work, which t houghtfully describes and contrasts the old and new workplace.' - Julissa Reynoso, Layer at a private litigation firm in New York City

From the Publisher