The Solidarity of Skilled Workers: Creating a Logic of Particularism

Abstract The organization of workers into craft unions in the United States during the Gilded Age (1865–1900) can be interpreted as a search for viable strategy. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) successfully built a durable movement - based on the emergence, development, and consolidation of a distinctive 'logic of particularism'. Workers' strategic behavior was based on building and sustaining organizations able to survive periods of economic difficulty and political repression. The analysis shows that organized labor increasingly relied on exclusionary principles in which inclusion within the organized segment of the working class involved a repeated scaling down to a defensible core. This process also reflected the impact of macro-historical structural forces. The combination of strategic behavior and structural influences causally explains the establishment of a narrowly-based and emphatically particularistic working class movement.     

The multipolar regionalization of cities in multinational firms' networks

This article identifies the most cohesive multi‐polar regions of the network of world cities, which differ from the unipolar centre–periphery model largely created by the high weight of central city connections. We use a community detection algorithm that outlines the high densities of city networks (in relative weights). Various patterns of industries and services, which are divided into two skill levels, are identified. We use a global database of the network of 1.2 million direct and indirect ownership links between the 800,000 subsidiaries of the top 3000 multinational groups in 2013, allowing us to build four comparable networks of 503 metropolitan areas. Comparing the obtained partitions with continental, regional and economic benchmarks, classes of cities partially correspond to free trade zones (FTZs) but exhibit interesting cross‐continental patterns. A few cities, changing their classes according to the activities, are discussed in the light of the multinational firms' strategies.     

WHO IS AFRAID OF THE FRIEDMAN RULE?

We explore the connection between optimal monetary policy and heterogeneity among agents in a standard monetary economy with two types of agents where the stationary distribution of money holdings is nondegenerate. Sans type-specific fiscal policy, we show that the zero-nominal-interest rate policy (the Friedman rule) does not maximize type-specific welfare; it may not maximize aggregate ex ante social welfare either. Indeed, one or, more surprisingly, both types may benefit if the central bank deviates from the Friedman rule. ( JEL E31, E51, E58)