Practical ways to tackle manufacturing’s labor crunch
A panel of practitioners explores how to solve worker shortages and offers three best practices for success.
Faculty
Thomas A. Kochan is the Post-Tenure George Maverick Bunker Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a faculty member in the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research.
Kochan focuses on the need to update America's work and employment policies, institutions, and practices to catch up with a changing workforce and economy. His recent work calls attention to the need for a new social contract at work, one that anticipates and engages current and future technological changes in ways that build a more inclusive economy and broadly shared prosperity. Through empirical research, he demonstrates that fundamental changes in the quality of employee and labor‐management relations are needed to address America's critical problems in industries ranging from healthcare to airlines to manufacturing. His most recent book is Shaping the Future of Work: A Handbook for Action and a New Social Contract (Routledge, 2021).
He is a member of the National Academy of Human Resources, the National Academy of Arbitrators, and past president of the International Industrial Relations Association and the Industrial Relations Research Association. Currently he is member of the MIT Task Force on Work of the Future.
Kochan holds a BBA in personnel management as well as an MS and a PhD in industrial relations from the University of Wisconsin.
Thomas Kochan, Janice R. Fine, Kate Bronfenbrenner, Suresh Naidu, Jacob Barnes, Yaminette Diaz-Linhart, Johnnie Kallas, Jeonghun Kim, Arrow Minster, Di Tong, Phela Townsend, and Danielle Twiss. Cambridge, MA: June 2022.
Hertel-Fernandez, Alex, William Kimball, and Thomas Kochan. ILR Review Vol. 75, No. 2 (2022): 267-294. Appendix.
Bellace, Janice, Andrew Minster, Karen Scott, Erin L. Kelly, Thomas A. Kochan, Mari Sako, and Bruce E. Kaufman. ILR Review Vol. 74, No. 3 (2021): 798-826.
Kochan, Thomas. AI Magazine, April 2021. Download Preprint.
Kochan, Thomas, and Lee Dyer. New York, NY: Routledge, 2021.
Kochan, Thomas and Barbara Dyer. The Hill, November 25, 2020.
A panel of practitioners explores how to solve worker shortages and offers three best practices for success.
Guided by a new social contract, here’s how companies can develop working models that deliver for shareholders, employees, and global communities.
"People want to have more of a voice and they want to have it on a range of issues that are relevant to today's workforce."
Unions could be a way to prevent more overreach from the federal government, said Prof. Thomas Kochan.
Thomas Kochan described the new social contract as an agreement that both parties "are held accountable for meeting each other's expectations."
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This course aims to prepare you, and your organization, for an evolving workplace as it investigates its impact on social, legal, and economic policy. Over six weeks, you’ll explore the reasons why workplace advancements require a new, updated social contract — the mutual expectations and obligations workers, employers, and society have for work relationships — so that the quality of jobs can be improved, inequalities can be addressed, and everyone can prosper.
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