Economic Life

Question 1

Minimum wage worker

Answer 1

The current federal minimum—$7.25 per hour—hasn’t changed since 2009.

Question 2

political movement to raise minimum wage

Answer 2

Government refers to the regular enactment of policies, decisions
workers who protested and walked off their jobs to seek influence

Question 3

paid vs. unpaid work

Answer 3

Nonpaid labor (such as repairing one’s own car or doing one’s own housework)
--domestic workers, the vast majority of whom are women

Question 4

occupation

Answer 4

any form of paid employment in which an individual regularly works

Question 5

technology

Answer 5

the application of knowledge of the material world to production

Question 6

examples of informal economy

Answer 6

refers to transactions outside the sphere of regular employment

• “hidden” cash transactions; not recorded in official employment statistics
• self-provisioning that people carry on inside and outside the home

Do-it-yourself activities with household appliances and tools, for instance, provide goods and services that would otherwise have to be purchased
house work

Question 7

housework

Answer 7

Unpaid work carried out in the home, usually by women; domestic chores such as cooking, cleaning, and shopping. Also called domestic labor.
usually unpaid

Question 8

division of labor (Durkheim)

Answer 8

The specialization of work tasks, by means of which different occupations are combined within a production system. All societies have at least some rudimentary form of division of labor, especially between the tasks allocated to men and those performed by women.

Division of Labor–> Economic interdependence–> Social Solidarity

Question 9

economic interdependence

Answer 9

The fact that with a division of labor, individuals depend on others to produce many or most of the goods they need to sustain their lives.

Question 10

industrial work

Answer 10

advantages that the division of labor provides in terms of increasing productivity
break down into simple operations that could be precisely timed and organized

Question 11

Alienation

Answer 11

Karl Marx: development of modern industry would reduce many people’s work to dull

The sense that our own abilities as human beings are taken over by others. Karl Marx used the term to refer to the loss of workers’ control over both the process and products of their labor

peasant farmers sometimes toiled from dawn to dusk. Yet peasants had control over their work, which required much knowledge and skill.

Question 12

strike

Answer 12

A temporary stoppage of work by a group of employees in order to express a grievance or enforce a demand.

Question 13

union

Answer 13

Organizations that advance and protect the interests of workers with respect to working conditions, wages, and benefits.

Question 14

reasons for decline in unions in U.S.

Answer 14

the outsourcing of once-unionized U.S. manufacturing jobs to low-wage countries around the world where independent unions are illegal
- weakened the bargaining power of unions in the manufacturing sector

The NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) has proven ineffective at protecting workers’ efforts to unionize their workplaces, often failing to take aggressive action when businesses harass or fire union organizers

Question 15

collective bargaining

Answer 15

The rights of employees and workers to negotiate with their employers for basic rights and benefits.

Question 16

Marx’s perspectives on work and alienation

Answer 16

Exploitation & Alienation–> Conflict–>Unionization

Karl Marx was one of the first writers to grasp that the development of modern industry would reduce many people’s work to dull, uninteresting tasks
work was often exhausting; peasant farmers sometimes toiled from dawn to dusk. Yet peasants had control over their work, which required much knowledge and skill. Many industrial workers, by contrast, have little control over their jobs, only contribute a fraction to the creation of the overall product, and have no influence over how or to whom it is eventually sold. Work thus appears as something alien, a task that the worker must carry out to earn an income but that is intrinsically unsatisfying.

Question 17

Capitalism and its subtypes (family, managerial, welfare, institutional, global)

Answer 17

Capitalism (Marx) : private ownership of the means of production; profit as incentive; competition for markets in which to sell goods, acquire cheap materials, and use cheap labor; and expansion and investment to accumulate capital; most widespread form of economic organization in the world.

• Family Capitalism: Capitalistic enterprises owned and administered by entrepreneurial families.
• Managerial capitalism: Capitalistic enterprises administered by managerial executives rather than by owners.
• Welfare capitalism: Practice in which large corporations protect their employees from the fluctuations of the economy.
• Institutional capitalism: Consolidated networks of business leadership in which corporations hold stock shares in one another, resulting in increased concentration of corporate power.
• Global capitalism: The current transnational phase of capitalism, characterized by global markets, production, and finances; a transnational capitalist class whose business concerns are global rather than national; and transnational systems of governance (such as the World Trade Organization) that promote global business interests.

Question 18

corporations

Answer 18

Business firms or companies.

Question 19

entrepreneur

Answer 19

The owner or founder of a business firm.

Question 20

monopoly vs. oligopoly

Answer 20

Monopoly: A situation in which a single firm dominates in a given industry.
Oligopoly: A situation in which a small number of firms dominates a given industry.

Question 21

transnational corporations

Answer 21

Business corporations located in two or more countries.

Question 22

automation

Answer 22

Production processes monitored and controlled by machines with only minimal supervision from people.

Question 23

knowledge economy

Answer 23

A society no longer based primarily on the production of material goods but based instead on the production of knowledge. Its emergence has been linked to the development of a broad base of consumers who are technologically literate and have made new advances in
computing, entertainment, and telecommunications part of their lives.

an economy in which ideas, information, and forms of knowledge underpin innovation and economic growth

Question 24

contingent workforce

Answer 24

Rise in contractual, unstable employment

• Uber, Lyft, etc.
• Adjunct faculty
• Seasonal amazon labor, etc.

Question 25

disparities in pay

Answer 25

There are significant differences in how people are compensated for their work throughout the U.S. economy
top and base workers; man and women; racial and ethnic groups

• one is that workers in other countries have more power (e.g., German)
• women are more likely to work in occupations characterized by part-time work
• wage earners of minority racial and ethnic groups typically have fewer years of formal education, work in lower-paying occupations, and often have less consistent workforce experience
• discrimination

Question 26

unemployment rates: trends and differentials solutions to unemployment

Answer 26

unemployment rates have fluctuated greatly since World War II, although they have generally trended upward.
-lacking sufficient resources to buy goods.
a decline in the number of people looking for work.
-demographic reasons (aging of the population, lingering effects of the recession)

-inject more money into the economy and thus increase the level of demand (e.g., investing in public works projects or cutting income taxes, leading to the creation of new jobs)

Question 27

3 major changes in work over the 20th century

Answer 27

global economic competition
the widespread introduction of information technology and computerization
the large-scale entry of women into the workforce

Question 28

future of work in the U.S.

Answer 28

• the average length of the working week has become shorter
  - Job sharing or flexible working hours
  working parents trying to balance the commitments of workplace and family, might become more common.