The reviewer, Alfred Diamant, is a professor of political science and West European studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
This work will not attract a wide readership. It should, however, for it deals with one of the more intractable problems of the U.S. political economy. Moreover, Osterman examines crucial issues of the American educational system by stressing links among that system, its outputs, and the labor market. He does so in good part by a careful comparative study of labor-market functioning in Sweden and the Federal Republic of Germany.
The reason this book will not get the readership it deserves is twofold. It is a book for specialists, so that even social scientists fluent in other branches of these disciplines, such as this reviewer, find the going tough. Readability is further reduced by an uncompromisingly tight focus on the issues, with little effort to lighten the nonspecialist reader’s task. At the same time, the author works hard at summarizing preceding arguments and taking the reader over terrain that had previously been covered in the book. These might seem to be contradictory complaints, but they are not; the summarizing of earlier arguments is just as difficult to manage as their original presentation.
Yet, for the determined reader, the results are worth the effort, and anyone with serious concern for the continued well-being of the American political economy needs to tackle this book. It deals with central social concerns of the political economy: the human participants, especially those who seem to be getting the “short end of the stick.” Osterman’s book should be required reading for all the Pollyannas who consider such problems of minor significance in this seventh year of our “unprecedented peacetime bull market.”
One of the principal virtues of this study is that it seeks to link labor markets and public policy. This linkage might seem obvious and well established in just about all West European industrialized countries (or, more broadly, in all OECD member countries). But it is far from obvious and unproblematic in the U.S. In other industrialized countries, such as the two examined closely in this book (Sweden and the Federal Republic), public policy encompasses virtually every aspect of labor markets. In the U.S., however, public policy has been limited to addressing problems of marginal workers, and only in a haphazard and unsatisfactory manner. For Osterman the labor market-public policy linkage is a central concern. He draws very effectively on the Swedish and West German experience to fashion proposals that would advance U.S. public policy beyond its past and present marginal position concerning the shaping of labor markets, both within firms and in the broader economy.
At the outset Osterman articulates four themes: the dislocation of laid-off workers; the reorganization of work within firms; the persistent problems of low earnings and poverty; and the possibilities of an expanded and aggressive public policy to deal with these problems. These themes are developed in a series of chapters beginning, after an introduction, with the author’s treatment of the general dimensions of labor market problems. He seeks to explain why the labor market fares.
