Book Talk: "Private Equity at Work: When Wall Street Manages Main Street"
2014-04-02 00:00 (America/Los_Angeles)

Book Talk: "Getting Back to Full Employment: A Better Bargain for Working People"
2014-04-09 12:30 - 14:00
While most people intuitively know that low unemployment is important to job seekers, they may not realize that high levels of employment actually would make an enormous difference in the lives of large segments of the workforce who already have jobs. Particularly in an era of historically high wage and income inequality, many in the workforce depend on full employment labor markets, and the bargaining power it provides, to secure a fair share of the economy’s growth. For the bottom third or even half of the wage distribution, high levels of employment are a necessary condition for improving wages, higher incomes, and better working conditions.
Getting Back to Full Employment is a follow-up to a book written a decade ago by the authors [Jared Bernstein and Dean Baker], The Benefits of Full Employment (Economic Policy Institute, 2003). It builds on the evidence presented in that book, showing that real wage growth for workers in the bottom half of the income scale is highly dependent on the overall rate of unemployment. In the late 1990s, when the United States saw its first sustained period of low unemployment in more than a quarter century, workers at the middle and bottom of the wage distribution were able to secure substantial gains in real wages. When unemployment rose in the 2001 recession, and again following the collapse of the housing bubble, most workers no longer had the bargaining power to share in the benefits of growth. The book also documents another critical yet often overlooked side effect of full employment: improved fiscal conditions (without mindless budget policies like the current sequestration). Finally, in this volume, unlike the earlier one, the authors present a broad set of policies designed to boost growth and get the unemployment rate down to a level where far more workers have a fighting chance of getting ahead.

"The Last Stronghold": Teachers' Unions and Dynamics of Labor Movement Strategy
2014-04-16 12:30 - 14:00
Following the recent economic recession, elected officials in many states used budget shortfalls as justification for anti-union legislation. Bills that would weaken or remove collective bargaining rights targeted public sector workers’ unions in particular. Additionally, K-12 teachers—the largest category of organized public sector employees—faced losing tenure protections. This talk will focus on electoral tactics, such as veto referenda or recall campaigns, as one approach to opposing such legislative threats. Methods of placing legislation on the ballot or bringing a vote on whether an elected official should stay in office exist in 34 states, yet teachers’ unions rarely used them in efforts against legislation threatening collective bargaining or tenure rights. Using qualitative comparative analysis, Pullum seeks to determine the causal conditions under which teachers’ unions did not use electoral tactics in states where they had the legal ability to do so. She argues that labor activists’ agency and capacity for strategic innovation was highly limited by state-level political and economic characteristics.

“Mexico as an aerospace competitor? Lessons from the aerospace cluster in Querétaro”
2014-04-30 10:30 - 12:30
For many years Mexico has been looking for a strategy to create economic growth and industrial development. The results have been less than positive, however, and at times the public policy in regards to industrial development seems directionless. The Maquiladora Model is an example of a model of industrialization that did not create development and, on the contrary, generated important social problems, especially in the north border area of the country. These facts lead to questioning if Mexico is destined to offer only competitive advantages related to low labor costs and governmental benefits, such as special tax regimens or the construction of productive infrastructure with almost no cost for firms. Given this context, it is necessary to analyze whether or not the current Aerospace Industry is only taking advantage of the same competitive advantages that the Maquiladora Model did in the 90’s, or whether this represents a real opportunity to create economic and social development. This talk is oriented to show the structure of the aerospace industry in Mexico and the performance of the aerospace cluster located in the State of Querétaro.
