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Combining a governmentality reading with a Marxist theory of overdetermination, this essay examines the birth of labor statistics as a field, which first assumed institutional form in the establishment of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1869. It recaptures the climate in which the Bureau was created, including calls for statistics on the laboring class from corridors as politically divergent as Marxists to the predominantly bourgeois Massachusetts legislature, and resulting in replacement of the first, pro-labor chief by a bureau head whose “apolitical” data-collection model was widely adopted by kindred bureaus subsequently established in other states, at the federal level, and across the globe. Labor statistics participated in the larger project of rendering the population statistically cognizable, hence more easily and systematically governed. The shift to the notion of a “society” with statistical traits was no small cognitive reorientation, and studying these early debates in the labor statistics domain helps to illuminate the ways in which the contours of the field are, in the end, products of the dialectic of capital as well as planes for the reformatting of popular consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a series of charts and tables featuring comparative international data relating to economic, employment and human resources issues. The authors emphasize that the data presented in the article is comparable, illustrating patterns of continuity and change. According to the authors, it is helpful to collect data that are comparable when trying to provide a context for international human resource management and industrial relations issues. The authors also explain the methods between countries that might explain inconsistencies, and why they have chosen the sources they have, such as the International Labour Organization, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the US Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics.