U of Ideas in Business & Economics ó August 1998 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact: Mark Reutter, Business & Law Editor (217) 333-0568; [email protected]
LAW
Labor-Law Journal to Explore Issues of Interdependent World
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Are labor unions and ìlabor market rigidityî the root cause of EuropeÃs persistently high unemployment levels?
This view, a truism among American policymakers, is examined in a series of essays in the upcoming issue of the Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal. The publication offers extended comments from experts on both sides of the Atlantic, several who find other reasons for EuropeÃs sluggish growth after 1980, which reversed three decades of far lower unemployment rates than in the United States. Among the causes cited are state regulations that ìstifle productivityî to the thorny problems of reunifying Germany.
Such broad-ranging discussion is the aim of the journalÃs new co-editor, Matthew W. Finkin. ìWe want to be a forum for the ventilation of the economic, legal, labor and policy issues that are taking place in an increasingly interdependent world,î said Finkin, the Albert J. Harno Professor of Law at the University of Illinois.
Founded in 1976 as the Comparative Labor Law Journal, the journal has been renamed by Finkin to reflect its broader mission. He has invited Sanford M. Jacoby, professor of history, management and policy studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, to co-edit the publication.
Finkin said the journal is unique for American law schools because it is edited by faculty members rather than law students. All submissions are reviewed and edited by an advisory board of scholars from around the world.
The coming issue on Europe includes essays by Jan Herin, chief economist of the Swedish Employersà Confederation; Harry C. Katz, a professor of collective bargaining at Cornell University; John Addison, an economist based in England and Germany; Sheldon Friedman and Christian Weller, research economists at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C.; and Alan B. Krueger and Jorn-Steffen Pischke, economists at Princeton University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, respectively, who first disputed the labor market rigidities theory in a paper last year.
In its current issue, the journal tackles ìtriangular employment,î the little-noticed trend in which a worker is shared between two employers and may work at multiple work sites. Temporary employment agencies are prime exemplars of this international trend. Scholars from Canada, Europe and the United States examine what standards might be useful to guard against the development of a ìsecond-class work forceî with neither financial security nor standard benefits.
One of FinkinÃs eventual goals is to translate manuscripts and laws written in other languages for the publication. Translation is a major problem in the discipline of comparative labor law. He recently co-edited ìIntroduction to German Lawî with Werner Ebke, a law professor at the University of Konstanz.
-mr-
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