Low-wage work and mobility policies in the United States: A structuralist-regulationist analysis

This dissertation is part of a long-term project that purports to offer a comprehensive positive and normative analysis of both the problem of low-wage work in the United States and of mobility policies---that is, human capital and other related policies that aim to help the disadvantaged move from unemployment or bad jobs to good jobs. Chapter 1 shows that low-wage work results in severe material deprivation for many millions of people and is, for a substantial share of workers, a long-term experience. Chapter 2 provides new quantitative evidence that the close link between overall labor productivity growth and earnings growth at the bottom of the job structure emblematic of the Fordist economy has been severed in the after-Fordist period, and critically examines the dominant neoclassical-economics-based account of this rupture. Chapter 3 describes the historical evolution of power-based, mobility and compensatory policies, emphasizing the development after the crisis of Fordism of an approach that combines (business-friendly) mobility and compensatory policies at the expense of (business-loathed) power-based policies. Chapter 4 argues that human capital policies have simply reshuffled low-wage jobs among disadvantaged workers, and that there are not good reasons to expect "new mobility policies" to contribute in a substantial way to the amelioration of the country's low-wage problem. Chapters 5 and 6 do some of the theoretical and methodological groundwork required to develop an alternative structuralist-regulationist approach for the study of low-wage labor markets. Chapter 5 characterizes labor market structuralism as a research tradition, and argues that the lack of theoretically, methodologically and pragmatically satisfactory models of the matching between people and jobs has constituted a formidable obstacle for the alignment between structuralism's ontology and methodology. Chapter 6 develops a two-sided queuing model of the matching between people and jobs, which can be estimated using indirect inference. Lastly, Chapter 7 advances and empirically tests a theoretical account of the evolution of the incidence of low-wage jobs in the employment structure that stresses the role that bargaining power of the most disadvantaged workers plays in shaping the relationship between average labor productivity and the incidence of low-wage jobs in the economy.