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Revision as of 20:39, 6 April 2011 by Mlillich (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)Labor and Employment Relations Association Company type Labor Relations and Human Resources Professional Organization Founded 1947 Headquarters Champaign, Ill., USA Key people Gordon Pavy, President, AFL-CIO
David Lewin, President-Elect,UCLA,
Eileen Appelbaum, Past President, Center for Economic Policy and Research
Francoise Carre and Christian Weller, Editors in ChiefWebsite ]
The Labor and Employment Relations Association (LERA), founded in 1947, as the Industrial Relations Research Association (IRRA), is an organization for professionals in industrial relations and human resources. Headquartered at the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the national organization has more than 3,000 members. LERA is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that draws its members from the ranks of academia, management, labor and "neutrals." The organization uses the slogan "Advancing Workplace Relations."
LERA's constituencies are professionals in the areas of academic research and education, compensation and benefits, human resources, labor and employment law, labor and management resources, labor markets and economics, public policy, training and development, and union administration and organizing.
Past presidents of LERA include John T. Dunlop, Harvard economist, arbitrator and Secretary of Labor under President Gerald Ford. Dunlop advised 11 presidents, from Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, on labor and economic policy. Breaking Dunlop's presidential service record is highly improbable. One wag ventured that "the history of labor relations in the second half of the 20th century was in John Dunlop's Rolodex." George P. Shultz, W.J. "Bill" Usery Jr. and Ray Marshall were all LERA presidents who went on to serve as U.S. labor secretaries.
LERA organizational members include unions, management schools universities, and academic schools and departments, law firms and institutes.
LERA holds an annual membership and professional development meeting in January each year, as part of the Allied Social Sciences Association, and its National Policy Forum in alternate years in June in Washington, D.C.
In 2011, LERA held its 63rd annual meeting in Denver, Colo. The 2011 National Policy Forum (June 6-7)is entitled: Competition, Jobs, and Equity in the Economic Recovery.
At the 2011 annual meeting, LERA launched the Employment Policy Research Network Web site (EPRN). It originally consisted of about 100 researchers from 30 universities, including California-Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, Illinois, Massachusetts (several campuses), MIT, Michigan, Michigan State, Northeastern, Rutgers, Stanford and UCLA, as well as universities in Canada and the United Kingdom. In March, 2011, the first cohort of doctoral students from MIT and Cornell joined EPRN as graduate student researchers who are sponsored by EPRN researchers.
EPRN received startup funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and Russell Sage Foundation. The EPRN principal investigator is Thomas A. Kochan, George Maverick Bunker Professor of Management at MIT's Sloan School of Management and co-director of both the MIT Workplace Center and the Institute for Work and Employment Research.
The mission of EPRN is to replace ideology and partisan rhetoric in discussions of employment and work with facts and objective, evidence-based research. EPRN's goal is to provide the data, research, proposals and reasoning to improve national and state employment laws, policies and practices. Ultimately, EPRN means to contribute to healthier and more productive lives of American workers and their families and to promote general economic prosperity.
In addition to Kochan, other members of the EPRN Steering Committee include:
- Eileen Appelbaum, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C.
- Lawrence Katz, Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics at Harvard University
- David Lewin, Neil H. Jacoby Chair in Management at the UCLA Anderson School of Management
- Lisa Lynch, dean and Maurice B. Hexter Professor of Social and Economic Policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University
- Daniel J.B. Mitchell, professor emeritus at the Anderson Graduate School of Management and the School of Public Affairs, U.C.L.A.
- Andrew Sum, professor of labor economics and director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston.
EPRN divides the large subject of employment into 14 topics and research clusters of 20-40 researchers:
- Employment Regulations (David Weil, Boston University, topic leader)
- Equal Employment Opportunity (Fidan Ana Kurtulus)
- Globalization, Employment and Labor Standards (tba)
- Immigration (tba)
- Industry Studies/Strategies (Larry Hunter, University of Wisconsin, topic leader)
- Labor Force Demographics/Supply (Andrew Sum and Paul Harrington, Northeastern, topic leaders)
- Labor-Management Relations (Peter Berg, Michigan State, topic leader)
- Public-Sector Employment Issues (Jeffrey Keefe, Rutgers, topic leader)
- Regional Economic Development/Adjustment (Peter B. Doeringer, Boston University)
- Skills, Work and Technology (David Feingold, Rutgers; Stephen Barley, Stanford; topic leaders)
- Social Insurance (Christian Weller, University of Massachusetts Boston, topic leader)
- Unemployment - Jobs Deficit/Growth (Till von Wachter, Columbia, topic leader)
- Wages-Compensation (Frank Levy, MIT, topic leader)
- Work-Family Policy (Nancy Folbre, University of Massachusetts Amherst, topic leader)
EPRN researchers self post formal academic research, op-ed commentaries and blogs. During its first three months, EPRN researchers published three major in-depth research-policy briefs on unemployment, wage stagnationand collective bargaining. Columbia University economist Till von Wachter wrote the unemployment paper, "Jobs Deficit and Job Growth, Unemployment, and the Consequences for Workers." MIT's Frank Levy and Kochan wrote the wage-stagnation paper, "Addressing the Problem of Stagnant Wages."
UCLA's David Lewin was the lead writer of the collective-bargaining paper "Getting It Right: Empirical Evidence and Policy Implications from Research on Public-Sector Unionism and Collective Bargaining"; Kochan was co-author. Also contributing to the writing and editing were University of Illinois' Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld; New School for Social Research's Teresa Ghilarducci; Cornell's Harry Katz; Rutgers' Jeffrey Keefe; UCLA's Daniel J.B. Mitchell; Illinois' Craig Olson; Rutgers' Saul Rubinstein; and University of Massachusetts Boston's Christian Weller.LERA membership includes subscriptions to a number of publications, advance information and discounts on meetings, and many other opportunities to meet the leaders in the field and share ideas through participating in industry councils and interest sections.
LERA offers a number of awards, recognitions and grants each year. Its most prestigious award is the John T. Dunlop Scholar Award. Two Dunlop Scholar Awards are given each year. One goes to an academic who makes the best contribution to international and/or comparative labor and employment research. A second award recognizes an academic for research that addresses an industrial relations/employment problem of national significance in the United States. Other awards include:
Thomas A. Kochan and Stephen R. Sleigh Best Dissertation Award Chapter Merit Awards Excellence in Education Awards LERA Fellows Lifetime Achievement Award James G. Scoville Best International Paper Award John T. Dunlop Scholar Awards Outstanding Practitioner Award Susan C. Eaton Scholar-Practitioner Award Susan C. Eaton Scholar-Practitioner Grant Michael R. Losey Human Resource Research Award Sloan Industry Fellowships Woodrow Wilson Women's Studies Dissertation Grant
LERA publishes a number of research reports and books, as well as an annual compendium of research, an annual proceedings, a newsletter and a membership director. It also publishes the biannual journal, Perspectives on Work. The LERA Labor and Employment Law Section publishes a monthly online newsletter that is posted on the LERA website and distributed through the main LERA listserve.
The Labor and Employment Relations Association has more than 50 local chapters where members meet colleagues in the private, public and federal sectors, as well as faculty from local universities and third-party neutrals. Local chapter members value the opportunity to learn about matters of importance in their area and to exchange observations and ideas informally with chapter speakers and members.
External links
- and Employment Relations Association
- of Labor and Employment Relations, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Employee Relations Specialist Career Information
- Employment Policy Research Network
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