Books
Archived article from Nov 18, 2003
Also in this Article:
Black consciousness in Paris and Harlem between the wars
How technology and globalization impact the lives of low-income workers
Preserving a dictionary of an 18th-century wordsmith
Trouble in the mines
Exploring the lessons of the Silicon Valley job market
Silicon Valley is more than just a place in which a lot of people became very rich during the Internet boom. For decades, it has been a prototype for ways of working that have now become common throughout America: frequent job changes, short tenures, temporary employees, independent contracting and flexible compensation involving the use of stock options and other bonuses. Alan Hyde, professor of law and Sidney Reitman Scholar at the School of Law–Newark, has now written the first book, “Working in Silicon Valley: Economic and Legal Analysis of a High-Velocity Labor Market” (M.E. Sharpe, 2003), to look at the valley’s labor market.
Hyde believes that other high-tech areas, like New Jersey, and even other industries in which job changes are frequent and the employment relationship is loose, can gain important insights about the law and economic forces from the experiences of Silicon Valley.
Each chapter begins with a dispute or anecdote that sheds light on conflict over work relations in the new economy and possible legal interventions. These legal problems highlight the assumptions, common to both law and economics, that often hinder understanding of today’s labor markets. Among the issues addressed are:
•whether trade secret laws should give employers more power against departing employees or should be liberalized to facilitate startups
•why Silicon Valley employers use temporary help agencies at twice the national rate
•why so few Silicon Valley employees are represented by unions, and
•how well-compensated, highly mobile employees provide for retirement or health insurance.
As a result of his research, Hyde has become an advocate for high-velocity labor markets, albeit one with “a new respect for publicly funded national health insurance and retirement savings.” For the first time in his career, he writes, “I feel I am studying labor market institutions whose limits lie on the horizon, not in our face; that create wealth and jobs, not destroy them; that reward maturity, not dependence. Even if I am wrong about this, high-velocity labor markets are now part of life. Even if they never grow into a larger part of the general labor market, there is still much to be learned about how they work and how they could work better.”
— Janet Donohue
Black consciousness in Paris and Harlem between the wars
Paris has long fascinated Brent Hayes Edwards, associate professor of English. He lived there for more than a year before beginning graduate study at Columbia University, and much of his academic research has focused on the black intellectuals and artists from around the world who were drawn to the City of Lights in the 1920s and 1930s. His new book, “The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism” (Harvard University Press, 2003), is a comparative study of the relationships between writers, artists and intellectuals associated with the Harlem Renaissance in the United States and their African and Caribbean counterparts in Paris.
The Paris arts and intellectual scene after World War I was particularly rich, Edwards says, because of the influx of large numbers of French-speaking blacks from such countries as Martinique, Senegal and Madagascar. Many of these blacks, who were colonial subjects of France, had been conscripted to serve in the French workforce or military during the war and then remained in Paris afterward. African-Americans also spent time in the city, creating a dialogue on ways of writing about black art and life. Woven into “The Practice of Diaspora” is a discussion of the rise of black internationalism after the war. “It was an incredibly exciting moment in world politics,” Edwards says. “With the Russian Revolution and the forming of the League of Nations, Africans and African-Americans began to think that people could come together at a level beyond the nation-state in order to protect human rights and civil liberties on a global scale.” The book makes particularly good use of the full range of black periodicals produced during this era in both English and French to explore cultural perspectives across national and linguistic borders, and to discuss the role of translation in mediating ideas among various black communities.
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