Times have changed since a 1930s Philadelphia dockyard foreman hired day labour by throwing apples over the front gate (Jacoby 1985, p. 13). Whoever waiting outside caught them passed the physical and the initiative test too. In the 1960s, Ford had a waiting lounge at its factory gate:
“If we had a vacancy, we would look outside in the plant waiting room to see if there were any warm bodies standing there. If someone was there and they looked physically OK and weren’t an obvious alcoholic, they were hired” (Murnane and Levy 1996, p. 19).
These rather casual approaches to the screening of applicant quality and job fit are well behind us.
There has been a revolution in how private and public employers husband employees at all pay grades. Human resource management gained ground in the 1980s at the expense of old style personnel management (Acemoglu 2002). Strategic human resource management stresses rigorous selection and recruitment, more training at induction and on the job, more teamwork and multi-skilling, better management-worker communication, the encouragement of employee suggestions and innovation, and common canteens and uniforms as unifying status symbols (Lazear 1998).
Modern human resource management strives for a single unified organisational culture made up of highly committed, capable workers who pull together at their own initiative (Baron and Kreps 1999). This pays because, for example, the share prices of firms rise on the announcement of family-friendly policies and the winning of good employer awards (Arthur and Cook, 2004, 2009).
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Recent Comments