The structural complexity of the labor force and labor market can be studied from many viewpoints and in this chapter I focus on two changes with considerable importance to the evolution of the entire economic system. The first is the shift of the labor force toward information-intensive sectors and occupations. This indicates an increase in the direct informational requirements of the system, one of the three aspects of structural complexity offered in the first chapter. The second is a change in the structure of labor–management relations occasioned by the decline of unionization of the labor force. From at least one important perspective, this change represents a decline in structural complexity because it indicates fewer interactions between key economic institutions comprising the system. This change in interactions within the system is another of the three aspects of structural complexity.

The information sector contains those workers engaged in creating, processing, and interpreting the information necessary for the economy to operate. Its relative size provides a sensitive indicator of both information flows and interrelations between different parts of the economic system. The information sector can be measured in terms either of specific industries or of specific occupations dealing with information flows. Although this compositional change of the labor force is, in part, also manifested by the well-known increase in the share of the labor force in the service sector, the underlying causes of this changes are controversial. I argue in the following discussion that future shifts toward the information sector should be slower in the future than in the past.

In one important sense the organization of labor–management relations has become structurally less complex since the labor unions, a major actor in the system, represent a declining share of the labor force.