UCL Labour Rights Institute and UCL Institute for Human Rights Lecture

Globalisation and the Middle Class

Speaker: 
Prof. Katherine Stone
(Arjay & Frances Miller Distinguished Professor of Law,
UCLA School of Law)

Chair:
Dr Virginia Mantouvalou (UCL)

on 14 November, from 6-7.30pm

About this talk:
The most important question for social policy today is: Can the United States participate in global trade while maintaining a robust middle class? Or does expanded global trade necessarily mean doom for the U.S. middle class and others in advanced industrial nations? This question might have sounded provocative, incendiary, or just plain silly a decade ago, but it can no longer be ignored. Several different approaches have been advocated to preserve the living standards of the middle class in advanced countries in the face of expanded global trade. This talk examines three clusters of policies that are the most promising, policies to (1) encourage a race to the top that can counterbalance a race to the bottom; (2) promote the creation of local and regional agglomeration economies that will act as counterweights to a race to the bottom, and (3) foster firm-level innovation and develop the skills and human capital of the local population. It concludes that we adopt policies that braid these three together in order to preserve the U.S. middle class.

About the speaker: 
Professor Katherine Stone is the Arjay and Frances Fearing Miller Professor of Law at UCLA. She is also Visiting Professor at UCL in November 2012 and is on the advisory board of the UCL Labour Rights Institute. Professor Stone is a leading expert in labor and employment law in the United States. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship Award in 2008 and a Russell Sage Fellowship for 2008-2009 for her work on the changing nature of employment and the regulatory implications. Professor Stone's recent book, From Widgets to Digits: Employment Regulation for the Changing Workplace (Cambridge University Press in 2004) won the 2005 Michael Harrington Award from the American Political Science Association for the "outstanding book that best links scholarship to struggles for justice in the real world." The book was also the Finalist (Second Place) for the C. Wright Mills Award from the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Her forthcoming book, Globalization and Flexibilization: The Remaking of the Employment Relationship in the 21st Century, will examine the changing employment landscape in Japan, Australia, and Europe.

Venue:
UCLFaculty of Laws
Bentham House
Endsleigh Gardens
London WC1H 0EG 

Queries: 
Contact Lisa Penfold at UCL Faculty of Laws
lisa.penfold@ucl.ac.uk 

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