Effects of Post-Fordism on Job Quality.

The literature on post-fordism or flexible specialization claims that changes in management strategy, production technology, and workplace practices are fundamentally altering the workplace. These changes include greater management focus on quality and innovation, production of customized and small batch goods, greater use of computers and automation, and adoption of employee involvement practices. Researchers holding this view argue the new production paradigm is becoming increasingly common and offers production workers the opportunity for more skilled, satisfying, and better-paid jobs. Labor economists seeking to explain the growth of wage inequality in the United States have also embraced this model, adding that its spread contributes to wage inequality insofar as large numbers of less skilled workers now find themselves shut out of jobs whose skill requirements have risen and their pay relative to upgraded jobs has fallen. Others dispute these views, but convincing tests of post-fordist claims have been hampered by the lack of data collected specifically to answer the issues raised by these debates. This paper analyzes a uniquely rich set of measures from sample of manufacturing plants designed to shed light on many of these questions. While the results do not all point in the same direction, they are considerably more mixed than proponents of the post-fordist model claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]