Dual Labor Markets Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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“Dual labor markets” was a concept developed to address the organizational structuring of labor markets, as white male workers were preferentially recruited to jobs offering training, pay gains, promotion and job security within internal labor markets. Meanwhile women and minority groups were often confined to insecure, low-paid, dead-end jobs in the external labor market. This contested standard economic models of the allocation of workers to jobs according to individual skills and preferences, as organizational structures and management decisions generated a division between primary and secondary labor markets which operated according to different logics. There were, however, different analyses of the sources of dualism. Some emphasized contrasting policies of large employers and small competitive enterprises. Some suggested managers constructed primary labor markets to retain relatively skilled workers with firm-specific training. Others suggested dualism was the result of management tactics of divide and rule, rather than calculations about protecting investment in training.

These analyses were designed to explain the persistence of labor market dualism, rather than to explain change. However, recent organizational restructuring has involved a reduction in stable routes of career progression and a growth in less secure forms of employment, while skills shortages and equal opportunities policies have opened some doors for qualified but hitherto excluded groups. These developments have prompted more complex analyses of labor market segmentation. This has involved identifying multiple and shifting labor market segments characterized by changing clusters of opportunities and insecurities, rather than a stable dualism or a uniform movement towards flux and insecurity. Such segmentation models have been underpinned by analyses of the varied and changing social organization of both the demand for labor and the supply of labor. While management decisions are pivotal on the demand side, changing family and household relations are central to the supply side, while state policies help to structure both.

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