Understanding Dual Labor Market System's Impact on Workers, Slides of Economic Sociology

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Segmented Labor Market

Major Issues

• Topic 4: Segmented Labor Market in a Nation: “Dual Labor Market” (Samuel Bowles and Richard Edwards’ research on 20 th. Century U. S. economy)
• Sexual and racial/ethnic segregated labor market
• Topic 5: discussion of labor market will be extended in the framework of global economy—International division of labor
• Theories of international division of labor: dependency theory and the world-system paradigm
• The International Division of Labor from W. W. II to the late 1970s., the New International Division of Labor from the 1980s (esp. economic ties between Taiwan and Hong Kong of the “four tigers” and the emerging economy of mainland China)

Dual Labor Market (2)

Independent

Primary Market

Secondary

Market

Subordinate

Primary Market

Job security

Vulnerable to be laid off

No job security at all

Good pay, bureaucratic rules, job ladder, high work autonomy and labor skills, “industrial citizenship”

Routinized work, low work autonomy, skill level: medium

Low skills, no union, poorly paid, no job ladder, no skill accumulated dead- end job

Dual Labor Market (3)

• The Independent Primary Market: include those bureaucratically organized jobs that offer stable employment with considerable job security, labor unions, clearly defined career paths, long job ladders, and relatively high pay--it contains mainly the jobs of craft, technical, professional, and lower-level supervisory workers - Job ladders: the institutional arrangement that link together a series of related jobs, in which a worker over the years climbs from one job to another and gains access to job higher on the ladder only by first succeeding in the lower job
• Such as bookkeepers, technicians, scientists, engineers, lower-level supervisors and managers, commercial artists, and craft-workers such as electricians, telephone linemen, machinists, hair stylists, and skilled ironworkers

Dual Labor Market (5)

• The Secondary Market: most remaining workers from the former two sectors
• They are highly diverse, unified only in that it is the preserve of workers who have few protections from worker rights and elaborate employer-imposed ways of organizing work
• Blue-collar workers in nonunion factories; non-union janitors, waitress, guards, retail sales clerks, typists, file clerks, and recordkeepers; seasonal or migrant farm workers; and most employees of small businesses
• Despotic control, no job security, no unionization, no job ladder, be poorly paid. Neither schooling nor seniority is rewarded

Dual Labor Market (6)

• Why would some people still work in the

secondary labor market?

• In the U. S., most workers in the

secondary market are women and

minority.

• Who were working in the secondary labor

market?

Indexes of Occupational Sex and

Race Segregation, 1900-

Padavic and Reskin (2002: 73) Docsity.com

Occupational-level Sex

Segregation (Top 10 occupations for men

and women in the U. S. today)

1. Secretaries
2. Cashiers
3. Registered nurses
4. Elementary school teachers
5. Nursing aides
6. Bookkeepers, accounting and auditing clerks
7. Waitress
8. receptionists
9. Supervisors and proprietors, sales occupations
10. Truck drivers
11. Janitors and cleaners
12. Carpenters
13. Cooks
14. Computer systems and analysts and scientist
15. Labor
16. supervisors, production occupations.

1 Managers and administrators 2

2. Supervisors and proprietors, sales occupation 4.

Based on Padavic and Reskin (2002: 60)

A commodity chain for athletic

shoes

• The U. S.-based athletic shoe industry:
• The initial labor is related to the symbolic side of the shoe design and marketing in the U. S.
• The labor of producing the synthetic materials (dyeing, cutting, and stitching, assembling, packing and transporting) is conducted by unskilled and predominant female workers in South Korea, Taiwan, China, Indonesia and Philippines
• Companies like Nike subcontract with such labor forces through local firms in the regional production sites
• A shoe that costs Nike $ 20 on export from South Korea may cost only $ 14 if made in Indonesia or China
• A $ 150 Nike trainer sold in the U. S. and Europe, was assembled by some 120,000 Indonesian contract workers earning less than $ 3 a day (the legal minimum wage in Indonesia)
• Cited from Philip McMichael, Development and Social Change, p. XXXV.