Institute for Research on Labor and Employment

I present a Marxist regulationist framework for analyzing job quality, distinguishing between Fordist and postfordist regimes in terms of institutional dynamics of competition. An aggregate analysis of the US shows that over a quarter of industries and occupations in the liberal postfordist employment structure are low-wage. I construct an analytical framework based on four general types of labor process: high-skill autonomous work, semi-autonomous, tightly-constrained and unrationalized labor intensive work. These are expanded into eighteen distinct work systems by elaborating them in terms of various configurations along four elements of job quality: wages, security, training and promotion opportunities, and work intensity. While the typology can be reduced to three job types (good jobs, bad jobs and humdrum-but-decent jobs), the expanded typology is useful for the qualitative analysis of the institution dynamics of competition within which any particular organization operates. I present two case studies of the downgrading of labor processes along the expanded typology in manufacturing and retail sales.