Is There a Wage Payoff to Innovative Work Practices?

During the 1980s, wage inequality increased dramatically, and the economy lost many high-wage jobs that had provided middle-class incomes to less skilled workers, increasingly restricting these workers to low-wage jobs lacking union or other institutional protections. A number of scholars have suggested that a new paradigm of work, often called high performance, is emerging that offers such workers more skilled jobs and higher wages. Using a unique national dataset, we find little evidence that practices associated with high-performance work systems are associated with higher wages