Article by Brooklyn Dean Featured in Issue of Business Week

August 07, 2011

BROOKLYN, NY - August 8, 2011 - St. Josephs College is pleased to announce that Dr. Richard Greenwald, professor and academic dean at the Colleges Brooklyn Campus, was recently published in the August 8-14, 2011 issue of Business Week magazine. This essay, part of Dr. Greenwalds ongoing study of the transformation of work in America, discusses the need for labor law reform to address long-standing disparities for freelance and self-employed workers.

"What drove me to the topic is the transformation of how we work in America. Starting with the recession of the 1970s, globalization, and resulting corporate restructuring, thousands of white-collar jobs were lost, and, in the aftermath, many of those former white-collar workers became consultants, Dr. Greenwald said.

"Contingent labor is now about 30% of the workforce, and the fastest growing sector is what we would call the traditional white-collar sector. As a scholar of work, I am interested in how this transformation affects the way Americans look at work, how they define their professional lives, and how they balance work and home lives when they work from home.

By reforming the labor code and providing the benefits and protections afforded to salaried, employed workers, Greenwald argues, the non-traditional workforce sector will be freed to earn to their potential and create new jobs. "As these individuals represent the single greatest source of job creation todayand likely in the coming decadessupporting them will only strengthen the recovery, Dr. Greenwald said. "Easing their burdens might just help them make the leap from struggling solo businesses to healthy small employers, creating even more jobs.

Dr. Richard Greenwald is the academic dean and a professor of history and sociology at St. Josephs College. His most recent work, The Death of 9-to-5: Permanent Freelancers, Empty Offices and the New Way America Works, will be released in 2013 by Bloomsbury Press. Dr. Greenwald's scholarly interests are political economy, particularly the intersection of the workplace, business and American politics. He is the author of The Triangle Fire, the Protocols of Peace and Industrial Democracy in Progressive Era New York (2005), co-editor of Sweatshop USA: The American Sweatshop in Historical and Global Perspective (2003), and editor of Exploring America's Past: Essays in Social and Cultural History (1996). The New Press will be publishing his co-edited collection on the future of work in 2013.