This volume considers the American manufacturing industry, and develops a statistical portait of the microeconomic adjustments that affect business and workers. The authors focus on the employer rather than worker side of the process aiming to show the processes that will be relevant to economists.

Experts discuss improving job quality in low-wage industries including retail, residential construction, hospitals and long-term healthcare, restaurants, manufacturing, and long-haul trucking. Americans work harder and longer than our counterparts in other industrialized nations. Yet prosperity remains elusive to many. Workers in such low-wage industries as retail, restaurants, and home construction live from paycheck to paycheck, juggling multiple jobs with variable schedules, few benefits, and limited prospects for advancement. These bad outcomes are produced by a range of industry-specific factors, including intense competition, outsourcing and subcontracting, failure to enforce employment standards, overt discrimination, outmoded production and management systems, and inadequate worker voice. In this volume, experts look for ways to improve job quality in the low-wage sector. They offer in-depth examinations of specific industries—long-term healthcare, hospitals and outpatient care, retail, residential construction, restaurants, manufacturing, and long-haul trucking—that together account for more than half of all low-wage jobs. The book's sector view allows the contributors to address industry-specific variations that shape operational choices about work. Drawing on deep industry knowledge, they consider important distinctions within and between these industries; the financial, institutional, and structural incentives that shape the choices employers make; and what it would take to make more jobs better jobs. Contributors Eileen Appelbaum, Rosemary Batt, Dale Belman, Julie Brockman, Françoise Carré, Susan Helper, Matt Hinkel, Tashlin Lakhani, JaeEun Lee, Raphael Martins, Russell Ormiston, Paul Osterman, Can Ouyang, Chris Tilly, Steve Viscelli

This publication highlights new evidence on policies to support job creation, bringing together the latest research on labour market, entrepreneurship and local economic development policy to help governments support job creation in the recovery.

This third edition of Job Creation and Local Economic Development examines the impact of technological progress on regional and local labour markets. It sheds light on widening regional gaps on job creation, workers education and skills, as well as inclusion in local economies.

This clear, accessible volume provides a comprehensive overview of the ongoing debate over the determining factors of and key influences on employment growth and labor market training, education, and related policies in the United States. Drawing on the work of distinguished labor economists, the chapters tackle questions posed by job and skill demands in the "new high-tech economy" and explore sources of employment growth; productivity growth and its implications for future employment; government mandates, labor costs, and employment; and labor force demographics, income inequality, and returns to human capital. These topics are central concerns for government, which must judge every prospective policy proposal by its effects on employment growth. Washington keeps at least one eye firmly on the jobs picture, and public officials at every level are constantly aware of the issues surrounding American job security. The jobs issue reaches beyond this focus on the unemployment rate and on total employment, including the rate at which employment is seen as growing, the growth of real wages, the security of employment, returns to human capital, uncertainty about the education and training best suited for a world of rapidly changing economic conditions, and the distribution of the gains from growth across economic classes and population groups.

The impact of COVID-19 on local jobs and workers dwarfs those of the 2008 global financial crisis. The 2020 edition of Job Creation and Local Economic Development considers the short-term impacts on local labour markets as well as the longer-term implications for local development.