GENERAL OVERVIEWAlmost from its inc

GENERAL OVERVIEW
Almost from its inception (and especially during the post-World War II period), the analytical scope of labor economics mushroomed far outside the domain of traditional economics, making it a difficult field to define in a strict economic sense. Many labor economists caution that the word "labor" should not be understood as exclusively linked to the discipline of "economics." Instead, they advocate a more interdisciplinary approach that draws critically from insights provided by the disciplines of sociology, political science, psychology, and organizational theory and behavior. As a result, labor economics has concerned itself with a large range of topics, including race and gender discrimination; labor-management relations; demographic economics; personal or social expenditures on education, medical care, and training (referred to as human capital investments); and a multitude of issues surrounding behavior in the workplace, a subject area germane to industrial and human relations schools.

During the last two decades of the 20th century labor economics has been preoccupied with the problem of understanding and reversing a general economic productivity slowdown in the United States. As a proposed solution, a majority of labor economists and concerned others have recommended the widespread implementation of a "new" set of nonadversarial, democratic workplace industrial relations called labor-management cooperation schemes. Largely influenced by ideas gleaned from producer cooperative theory, future workplace relations under these schemes will be designed to "empower" workers in all facets of a firm's activities.

To solicit their participation in these new schemes, workers have been offered more than a token voice in shaping company policy, along with the right to exercise higher-level decision-making responsibilities formerly reserved for upper management. Labor-management schemes are also supposed to substantially reduce overall unit labor costs by eliminating management surveillance designed to detect on-the-job shirking. On the other hand, workers are expected to forego a rigid job classification system, and corresponding wage structure, and agree in turn to a more flexible job-assignment environment. The compelling argument is that worker satisfaction and motivation will increase with the challenge of learning and mastering new jobs, as opposed to the older environment of routine jobs that tended to lower morale over time. For unionized workplaces, this also means eliminating the traditional grievance procedures handled by elected union representatives in favor of nonelected joint labor-management committees that no longer have the option of turning to outside arbitrators to settle disputes.

Labor-management cooperation schemes are theoretically designed to flatten decision making so as to improve communication and spread technical knowledge without supervisory surveillance. Workers, imbued with a greater sense of self-determined voice and responsibility, should come to associate their own work efforts with their firm's success, from which individual or team rates of pay will be calculated. The influence of a more flexible job structure conducted according to democratic principles was expected to impart a long-term positive influence on productivity, but there have been problems after cooperation schemes were implemented. Because this new set of workplace relations often blurs the established, legally recognized separation between worker and management functions, a legal question has developed concerning whether these new types of relations are tantamount to "company unions," which are illegal under the National Labor Relations Act. Unions and management continue to struggle with this new environment.



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