The Bureau of Labor Statistics is an agency with the Department of Labor, whose task it is to gather, analyze, and provide information on all aspects of labor, economics, and the workforce in the United States. The bureau was established by President Chester A. Arthur in 1884 as part of the Department of the Interior.
When labor is in the news media, it reveals – perhaps more than any other subject – the economic, political, and professional conflicts between the practice of journalism and the business of media. The problem of the news media’s coverage of organized labor is that the news media are both the social institutions designated to
Labor unions have been a feature on the world’s media landscape for close to two centuries. Depending on the era and the locale, they have certified the skills of content providers and production workers, bargained collectively for wages and benefits, trained and disciplined members of the craft, and fought with employers and the state over
Sweatshop labor describes work performed under conditions that violate normal standards of minimum wage, employment, worker treatment, and workplace health or safety. It is an issue of great concern to human resource professionals charged with implementing employment laws and policies. While the term is most often associated with globalization and the movement of relatively low-technology
Labor involves purposive effort, mental or physical, toward a goal. In studying labor, we should be particularly careful not to import the biases of our own economic culture. Labor is not always clearly segmented from other activities in daily life, although the wage labor system favors such segmentation; this confusion obscures unpaid labor within capitalism
Anthropologists refer to the division of labor as the different tasks that people do to provide for their physical needs and to reproduce their culture. We base these tasks on such criteria as age, gender, and skill. How this division is manifested varies across cultures and according to societal type. In the foraging, tribal, and
The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) is the basic federal law that governs unionization and collective bargaining in the United States. When it was originally enacted in 1935, the NLRA was called the Wagner Act, based on the name of its main sponsor, Senator Robert Wagner of New York. The NLRA underwent major amendments in
Organizations have always been faced with the dilemma of using external or internal labor markets. Hiring and promotion practices vary depending on whether firms use internal or external labor markets. External-labor-market firms concentrate on recruiting from the outside, while internal-labor-market firms concentrate on promotions from within. Organizations that depend on an internal labor market make hiring
The distinction between exempt and nonexempt employees, a familiar dichotomy indicating exemption from certain federal labor regulations, was created through the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938. The act instituted many taken-for-granted characteristics of employment in the United States: the five-day workweek, the 40-hour workweek, and overtime pay. The written intent of the act
When employees regulate their emotions in order to display the emotions that are expected of them in workplace interactions, they are performing emotional labor. They may do this by suppressing or hiding their real feelings and, instead, expressing emotions that they do not actually feel, that is, surface acting. Surface acting involves putting on an