The New Employment Institutions

Historically, our field has organized its analysis of the institutions governing employment relations around three key "actors"—employers, government, and labor, which is broadly defined to encompass both the workers themselves and the unions that may represent them. Today, however, we need to make two additional modifications to shape the employment institutions of the future: (1) add a fourth set of actors— the growing number of labor market intermediaries, community groups, and organizations that help structure labor markets and work and that address the interdependencies of work and family life today; (2) envision markets (labor, product, and financial) and technology not as external to the actors but as socially constructed parts of the institutional structure itself. To be sure, markets and technologies are influenced by many factors outside of work and employment. But it is precisely because we have allowed these forces to remain outside of our intellectual thinking and institutional design that we have lost control over our destinies at work. We need to think how changes in markets and technologies can be harnessed to achieve the full range of objectives the different parties bring to work and employment relationships. In what follows, I present the outlines of a theory of complementary employment institutions, each with distinctive functions but engaged constructively with each other to meet the needs of the contemporary workforce and economy. As we will see, each of these institutions needs to recast its role and image and its relationships with the others.