From Widgets to Digits : Employment Regulation for the Changing Workplace

From Widgits to Digits focuses on several specific areas that require new policy directions - employment discrimination, post-employment restraints, employee representation, health and retirement benefits, and income distribution. In each area, the author proposes a framework for employment regulation that can redress the inequities and vulnerabilities created by the emerging workplace.

From Widgits to Digits is about the changing nature of the employment relationship and its implications for labor and employment law. For most of the twentieth century, employers fostered long-term employment relationships through the use of implicit promises of job security, well-defined hierarchical job ladders, and longevity-based wage and benefit schemes. Today's employers no longer value longevity or seek to encourage long-term attachment between the employee and the firm. Instead employers seek flexibility in their employment relationships. As a result, employees now operate as free agents in a boundaryless workplace, in which they move across departmental lines within firms, and across firm borders, throughout their working lives. Today's challenge is to find a means to provide workers with continuity in wages, on-going training opportunities, sustainable and transferable skills, unambiguous ownership of their human capital, portable benefits, and an infrastructure of support structures to enable them to weather career transitions.