Making Bad Jobs Good: Strategies for the Service Sector

Paul Osterman

Chapter 11 in Job Quality and Employer Behaviour, 2005, pp 237-252 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The question of services and service employment and what to do about it, is a fundamental issue. For example, in the United States 78% of all low wage women in America work in services. So services are clearly important as far as the issues of low earnings and poverty are concerned. I will begin by presenting some basic facts about service employment in America and what the trends have been and I will describe what I think are the essential features or characteristics of structural change in the US labour market. I will illustrate this by giving two examples from banking and hotels about how restructuring in services is taking place. I will then turn to the question of policy and describe the US policy environment, the role of some traditional policies which I think often get overlooked in the discussion and finally discuss what I regard as a kind of the frontier or the direction of some of the more innovative policy initiatives.

Keywords: Labour Market; Minimum Wage; Employment Growth; Business Service; Labour Market Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-37864-3_12

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9780230378643

DOI: 10.1057/9780230378643_12

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().