The School of Labor and Employment Relations is honored to welcome Dr. Eileen Appelbaum as our featured speaker for the 2017 Milton Derber Lecture.
Appelbaum is Senior Economist at the Center for Economic Policy and Research and Visiting Professor at the University of Leicester, UK. Her research has appeared in the Academy of Management Journal, Work and Occupations, Work, Employment and Society, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Human Resource Management Journal, and Industrial Relations among others.
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.
The 2017 Derber Lecture will be held on Monday, April 10, 2017, at 7 pm in the Wagner Education Center at LER, 504 East Armory Avenue, Champaign.
