As the current recession ends, many workers will not be returning to the jobs they once held--those jobs are gone. In The New Division of Labor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane show how computers are changing the employment landscape and how the right kinds of education can ease the transition to the new job market. The book tells stories of people at work--a high-end financial advisor, a customer service representative, a pair of successful chefs, a cardiologist, an automotive mechanic, the author Victor Hugo, floor traders in a London financial exchange. The authors merge these stories with insights from cognitive science, computer science, and economics to show how computers are enhancing productivity in many jobs even as they eliminate other jobs--both directly and by sending work offshore. At greatest risk are jobs that can be expressed in programmable rules--blue collar, clerical, and similar work that requires moderate skills and used to pay middle-class wages. The loss of these jobs leaves a growing division between those who can and cannot earn a good living in the computerized economy. Left unchecked, the division threatens the nation's democratic institutions. The nation's challenge is to recognize this division and to prepare the population for the high-wage/high-skilled jobs that are rapidly growing in number--jobs involving extensive problem solving and interpersonal communication. Using detailed examples--a second grade classroom, an IBM managerial training program, Cisco Networking Academies--the authors describe how these skills can be taught and how our adjustment to the computerized workplace can begin in earnest.

There has been a recent resurgence in interest in the theorization of labour regimes in various disciplines. This has taken the form of a concern to understand the role that labour regimes play in the structuring, organization and dynamics of global systems of production and reproduction. The concept has a long heritage that can be traced back to the 1970s and the contributions to this book seek to develop further this emerging field. The book traces the intellectual development of labour regime concepts across various disciplines, notably political economy, development studies, sociology and geography. Building on these foundations it considers conceptual debates around labour regimes and global production relating to issues of scale, informality, gender, race, social reproduction, ecology and migration, and offers new insights into the work conditions of global production chains from Amazon's warehouses in the United States, to industrial production networks in the Global South, and to the dormitory towns of migrant workers in Czechia. It also explores recent mobilizations of labour regime analysis in relation to methods, theory and research practice.

Labour stands at a decisive point in its history. A change of leadership can help reinvigorate the party, but winning a fourth term of government will be impossible unless Labour's ideological position and policy outlook are thoroughly refurbished. What form should these innovations take?

"The film industry in Hollywood now employs a global mode of production run by massive media conglomerates that mobilize hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers for each feature film or television series. Yet these workers and their labor remain largely invisible to the general audience. In fact, this has been a signal characteristic of Hollywood style for more than a hundred years: everything that matters happens onscreen, not off. Consequently, when it comes to movies and television, the voices heard most often are those belonging to talent and corporate executives. Those we hear least are the voices of labor, and it's that silence we aim to redress in the collection of interviews in this book. Drawing from the detailed and personal accounts in this collection, we offer three interrelated propositions about the current state and future prospects of craftwork and screen media labor: 1. Craftwork exists within an intricate and intimate matrix of social relations. 2. Hollywood craftwork today constitutes a regime of excessive labor. 3. Screen media production is a protean entity. We organized the collection into three sections: company town, global machine, and fringe city. The first section refers to Hollywood's historic roots as a core component of the motion picture business. The second section engages more directly with the spatial dynamics of film and television production to underscore the economic and political structures that are integrating distant locations into the studios' mode of production. We close with a section on the visual effects sector, in which stories shared by vfx artists, advocates, and organizers specifically illustrate how the industry today relies on marginal institutions to sustain its power and profitability"--Provided by publisher.