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The aim of this paper is to show that the "Massachusetts miracle" is based on services sector job growth rather than on the manufacturing-based industrial policy to which it is usually attributed and to argue that in the new situation of very low levels of unemployment the priority is for an employment policy directed at the needs of low-paid service sector workers rather than further job creation. Authors start by providing a selective overview of Massachusetts industrial policy during politician Michael Dukakis' administrations. They then evaluate the Massachusetts miracle and attempt to delineate the contradictions between employment policy and industrial policy that are emerging in the full employment state. After considering at some length the political and ideological grounds for the manufacturing focus of state economic policy and the obstacles to services-based policy, they turn to the needs of the new workforce and a series of proposals that are currently. transforming the labor movement and policy agenda in Massachusetts.

This paper calculates the distribution of unemployment duration lengths and transition rates for Massachusetts workers in the late nineteenth century. Using data on time spent out of work and assuming that the spell durations followed a Weibull distribution, I parameterize a model of the timing of transitions from unemployment to employment and vice versa, I then simulate the employment experience of representative workers and construct distributions of completed spell lengths. The experience of most out-of-work workers in a year seems to have been in one rather long spell rather than in shorter multiple ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]