David Weil served as President Barack Obama's Wage and Hour Administrator in the U.S. Department of Labor from May 2014 to January 2017. He currently is Peter and Deborah Wexler Professor of Management in the Department of Markets, Public Policy, and Law at Boston University Questrom School of Business and serves as a co-Director of the Transparency Policy Project at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
With insight and precision, David Weil has brought to light the
shell game played by so many modern business organizations. Today,
the company whose logo is on your work shirt, smock, or ID badge
may not be the one that recruits, hires, manages, pays, disciplines
and sometimes even houses you. This fracturing of the basic
employer–employee relationship is reshaping lives and industries.
If there’s one book you should read about work today, this is
it.
*Richard Trumka, President of the AFL–CIO*
The Fissured Workplace paints a striking picture of the underside
of the U.S. labor market: the workers who service expensive hotels
but need food stamps and income support for their families to
survive; the ‘independent contractors’ who clean office buildings
under contracts that pay below minimum wages; and hundreds of
thousands of others struggling in an economy where you work not for
branded name companies in the open light but for subcontractors
behind the scenes. Weil documents the growth of the fissured labor
market, tells us how it contributes to the impoverishment of
America, and offers ways to make matters better. You will think
differently about the world of work after reading this marvelous
book.
*Richard B. Freeman, Harvard University*
The book persuasively argues that widening income inequality has
less to do with technological innovations and more to do with
organizational innovations. The deep dive that Weil does on
subcontracting, franchising, and supply chains is a must-read for
anyone interested in how these practices have affected pay and
working conditions. He goes beyond just documenting what is
happening and presents a detailed proposal on how and why we need
to mend, through legislation and enforcement, the increasingly
fissured relationship between workers and their employers.
*Lisa M. Lynch, Dean, The Heller School for Social Policy and
Management at Brandeis University*
The kinds of workplace fissuring discussed here—subcontracting,
franchising and global supply chains—have been the subjects of a
number of studies detailing the employment effects that Weil
describes. The Fissured Workplace is unusual in bringing this
research together into an integrated, detailed and decidedly
policy-oriented analysis. Through linking organizational strategies
that share an underlying logic, it makes a compelling case that
workplace fissuring should be given a more prominent place in
analyses of the causes of growing inequality. Along the way, Weil
shows that fissuring constitutes a fundamental and formidable
challenge to existing employment regulations… It makes a convincing
case that the better regulation of fissured workplaces is a first
step towards reversing the erosion of pay and conditions at the
bottom of the labor market.
*Times Higher Education*
This book is an excellent application of institutional analysis in
economics. In exacting detail, Weil describes the process by which
employers subcontract business functions in pursuit of
efficiencies, but often at the expense of employees.
*Choice*
Authoritative… As inequality has drawn increased public debate,
most recently thanks to Thomas Piketty’s influential work, the
changing conditions of employment have gotten far too little
attention. Work remains the prime source of income for most people.
The fissuring of work, Weil finds, is one of the main factors in
the widening gap between productivity and earnings because it
allows corporations to batter down labor costs—people’s paychecks…
[The Fissured Workplace] shed[s] important new light on the
resurgence of the power of finance and its connection to the
debasement of work and income distribution.
*New York Review of Books*
This underappreciated book describes the ‘fissured workplace’: the
result of corporations increasingly distributing activities through
an extensive network of contracting, outsourcing, franchising, and
ownership. Workers are less likely to work for the corporation that
ultimately profits from their labor; instead, they work for a loose
network of middlemen or as independent contractors. Their work is
still monitored and controlled as closely as any other office
worker, but they lose the protections of labor law and the ability
to fully enjoy the rewards of economic growth. This is the new
reality for workers in the 21st century.
*The Nation*
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