University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
504 E. Armory Avenue Champaign, IL 61820
Mar 11, 2017
11:00 PM (GMT-4)
Host:
School of Labor and Employment Relations, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's School of Labor and Employment Relations will host Dr. Eileen Appelbaum as featured speaker for the 2017 Milton Derber Lecture.
Appelbaum's talk, "Domestic Outsourcing, Rent Seeking, and Increasing Inequality," will address the increase in domestic outsourcing and the rise in networked forms of production as an important mechanism linking increasing rents and the rising earnings inequality among workers with similar skills. Production networks have become more prominent over the past three-and-a-half decades as firms have reorganized production processes to focus on maximizing shareholder value. This has multiplied the contractual relationships among producers and suppliers, conferring on them legal claims to the profit and rents produced by the network that reflect interfirm power relations. Firms with the greatest clout are able to claim the largest share of the rents and may share them with employees. The weakest organizations in a production network struggle to remain viable, and the wages of their workers take the largest hit.
The Annual Milton Derber Lecture was instituted in 1990 to honor Professor Emeritus Milton Derber and serve as a focal point for the intellectual enrichment for the school, its faculty and its students, as well as for the university community. Nationally known experts in a variety of employment relations subject areas are featured in this event, which is open to the public.
