President's Column

Dear LERA members,

In my previous letter to the membership I emphasized the importance of renewing your LERA membership — and I’m doing so again here. Membership is the lifeblood of the LERA. Click here to join or renew your individual LERA membership. Click here for organizational membership information.

Your individual and organizational memberships benefit LERA and keeps the LERA organization strong, credible and relevant. In this election year and beyond, we need to be part of the dialog on public policies involving jobs, income and labor-management relations.

In this letter, I want to encourage LERA national members and chapter members to get involved in planning our new annual meeting separate from the Allied Social Sciences Association-American Economic Association. The first new such meeting, the 65th Annual Meeting, "The Future of Work," will take place in St. Louis during June 6-9, 2013. Calls for papers and panel proposals have already gone out. The deadline for submissions is October 5, 2012.

Some LERA members — mostly economists — will continue to present papers and participate in panels at the January ASSA-AEA meeting, the next one of which will be held in San Diego during January 4-6, 2013. But there will be no formal LERA organizational presence, LERA hotels, dinners or awards at that meeting. All of these Annual Meeting components will move to the new June, 2013 LERA meeting date. The formerly biennial LERA Policy Forum will also move to the June 2013 meeting.

There are more opportunities for LERA members to become involved in planning the new annual meeting because of the four main focal interests that will be represented at that meeting, which are academic, professional development (practitioners/chapters), public policy, and LERA communities (industry councils and interest sections).

I'd also like to encourage the membership to keep posting events, queries, resources, etc. to LERA-L listserv and to keep discussing the important employment-related news of the day on the LERA Dialog listserv.

I urge you to regularly check out the LERA and Employment Policy Research Network web sites. On the LERA site you’ll find colleagues and friends who have written new books, been quoted in the press, and won research, practice and service awards.

EPRN is where to go for leading-edge thinking by our LERA academics, especially on policy-related issues. We've just added a 16th EPRN research topic: Sustainable entrepreneurship, a Tom Kochan-led, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation-funded exploration of best practices for high-tech startups to provide the good jobs of the future. You can also find video clips from an MIT Sloan School of Management panel on the EPRN site.

We now have 150 EPRN researchers from 50 universities who have posted more than 500 research papers, op-eds and blogs on the EPRN web site. There's a revolving carousel of the latest postings at the top of the EPRN homepage. The most-recent EPRN paper and blog postings also show up in the middle of the LERA homepage. So, give these posts a look and a read. Even better, log in and make a comment.

Don't hesitate to send me your LERA ideas, inspirations and reflections. Click here to email me. Send your news and photos to LERA e-newsletter editor Mike Lillich. Remember that we're all in this together and that the future of the LERA is at stake.

LERA President David Lewin, the Neil H. Jacoby Chair in Management at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, has been a LERA member since 1967.