Trump and Clinton want to bring back millions of outsourced jobs – here’s why they can’t

By Stephan Manning and Marcus M. Larsen.

One of the big themes in the current presidential race is how decades of free trade have dealt a heavy blow to the American worker as millions of jobs were shipped overseas to take advantage of cheap labor.

That’s even turned some pro free-trade Republicans into protectionists. As a result, the candidates are promising to bring these jobs back to the U.S. – whether by lowering taxes (Donald Trump), improving skills (Hillary Clinton) or building infrastructure (Bernie Sanders).

But can all these manufacturing, service and knowledge-intensive jobs that were outsourced or offshored to China, India and other places really be “brought back,” as the candidates seem to believe?

Corporate Power in an Age of Global Value Chains

By David Levy.

Gerald Davis and Israel Drori make the provocative argument in their thoughtful piece, After the Collapse of the Large Corporation – Progressivism 2.0?, that the era of powerful, large corporations able to provide long-term economic security for employees is over. If the corporate giants of the last century required a strong, centralized government to provide adequate regulation and countervailing power, Davis and Drori contend that we need new models of governance for an era of fragmented, networked economic forms. While it’s undoubtedly true that economic activity has become more disaggregated in the internet age, the demise of the large corporation, and more importantly, of corporate power, has been greatly exaggerated.

The flexibility debate: A morass of gendered assumptions, poor evidence, and imprecision

By Mary Still

Two high-powered, high-tech executives have reignited glass ceiling debates recently, with workplace flexibility emerging as a central issue in the conversation. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s edict that the company’s “work from home” program end sparked considerable outrage nationwide, as did Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s exhortation that women must “lean in” to fight workplace barriers preventing gender parity.