A landmark new study reported that upward mobility in the Keystone State since the late 1990s exceeded that in most parts of the United States. This report, focused on more recent trends, contains some bad economic news. It shows that Pennsylvania's economy has performed poorly from the perspective of typical working families since the end of…

A study used data from the 1998 Current Population Survey to document job growth in the public and private sectors and examine the quality of jobs in terms of wages and benefits. Findings indicated public sector employment declined for both women and men during the period from 1979-98 with a somewhat sharper decline among men. In 1998, median…

Charges that laziness and indifference among some teachers are due to unions and that recent declines in the quality of education are due to unprofessional teachers are unfounded. School board and administrator leadership and responsibility, including higher teacher wages and mutual respect between administration and the teacher union, are needed.…

This report outlines the process involved in establishing a faculty union at the English Language Institute at the American University in Washington, D.C. The English Language Institute Faculty Association (ELIFA) is one of the few units to be certified at a private university since the 1980 Yeshiva Supreme Court decision. During the beginning…

A salary-schedule compression is the process of reducing the number of salary schedule steps while still giving annual salary increases. Explains what school districts can do during negotiations to compress a schedule without awarding greater increases than originally intended. A sidebar shows a table for relating years of teaching experience to…

Public employers, including school districts, are faced with unionized workers' demanding a larger share of public resources. The formation of regional bargaining associations for employers to counteract union demands is proposed. A case study of a successful association is provided. (MD)

While serving as the primary vehicle for reporting the results of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) annual survey of state departments of education, this report also relies on several other data sources. Data include national average salaries or earnings for teachers, other school employees, government workers, and professional employees…

This book presents an assessment of collective bargaining in education. During the 1970's, while student enrollment declined, organizations representing public school teachers grew. Both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers more than doubled their membership. Teacher contracts have expanded to include areas…

This volume attempts to measure and quantify 10 labor standards in the United States and Canada. Its two purposes are to begin to fill the gap in the research by developing a measure of labor standards that can be applied across countries and to apply that measure to the United States (U.S.) and Canada to test a popular hypothesis that Canada has…

Wage rates and earnings give misleading signals to public and private policymakers as to the benefits of certain kinds of education and training investments. These misleading signals result from the fact that (1) workers and employers prefer employment contracts that either do not recognize or only partially recognize differences in productivity…

This monograph summarizes 20 recently completed dissertations representative of research being done in employment and training. Each summary has this format: description of the framework into which the study fits, explanation of its purpose, summary of methodology and type of data, and author's findings and conclusions. Six studies in section I on…