Complicating the Labor Market as a Social Institution

Economic analyses of labor markets in the URPE tradition developed several key observations that have challenged mainstream analysis. First was the recognition that production is a social process that enmeshes its participants in conflicted social relationships based on power. Workers and employers meet in labor markets not simply as individuals but as classes. Furthermore, labor markets are segmented systematically by race and gender. The labor process is also divided between productive and unproductive labor. In the context of social structures of accumulation, the labor process and labor markets undergo periodic qualitative changes as capitalism resolves deep crises. These understandings have contributed to challenges to the supposed link between labor productivity and wages and the claimed power of education as a force to dissolve class differences. The paper concludes with a consideration of the role of anti-communism in shaping labor studies in the United States after World War II and a critique of the supposed sharp distinction between positive and normative economics.