[NJFAC] shift from salaries to bonus-based pay

The Big Shift From Salaries to Bonus-Based Pay, Fuhrmans, WSJ 9/24

More Americans are in jobs where a chunk of their pay isn't guaranteed.

In incentive pay programs, base salaries are often fleshed out with monthly or quarterly bonuses conditional on hitting certain targets. Twenty-eight percent of more than 300 companies surveyed said they were building incentive pay into new roles, according to a 2024 survey by revenue-management consulting firm Alexander Group.

The practice has long been common for salespeople and top brass. Yet apart from the yearly raise—and for some, an annual bonus—the vast majority of the workforce makes the same amount every payday.

Now, more companies are trying to get the most out of rising payroll costs by making a part of workers' pay contingent on completing prescribed goals.

Employers say the new way to pay professionals from accountants and human-resource managers to marketing assistants can fuel greater productivity. Plenty of overachievers say they are relishing the often-rich upside potential. Yet some workers say they are making less than they bargained for.

"There's absolutely risk, but in my experience there's been more reward," says Hannah Brown, 32, a chief of staff at business-software company WalkMe.....

Jobs close to the sales process, such as marketing and after-sales support, are the most likely to be swept up into pay-for-performance plans. But some firms, such as WalkMe, are using short-term bonuses to shape pay for everyone from accountants to human-resources managers.....

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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[NJFAC] former prisoners find work by composting waste

Recycling the Discarded By Damon Orion, originally published by Resilience.org September 12, 2024

This article was produced by Local Peace Economy.

The stigma of a criminal conviction can be a major barrier to community reentry for recently released prisoners. A December 2021 report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics highlighted the employment barrier faced by the more than 50,000 who were incarcerated, with 33 percent of them being unable to find any employment "over four years" after their release from prison in 2010.

Meanwhile, a 2002 study by the U.S. Department of Justice of employers in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, found that

"ex-offenders… [were] one-half to one-third as likely to receive initial consideration from employers relative to equivalent applicants without criminal records."

In 2018, the Prison Policy Initiative reported that more than 27 percent of formerly incarcerated individuals were unemployed—a figure "higher than the total U.S. unemployment rate during any historical period, including the Great Depression."....

The Compost Co-op, a worker-owned service in Greenfield, Massachusetts, offers formerly incarcerated individuals an alternative to this path. Its workers collect compost from customers' curbsides and bring them to western Massachusetts's largest commercial composting site, Martin's Farm. This enables staff members to earn a living wage through meaningful work.....

Positive Environmental Impact

With 30-40 percent of food in the U.S. going into the trash—nearly 60 million tons per year—the Compost Co-op serves as a model for food waste reduction. It also promotes environmental health. As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency notes, composting reduces greenhouse gas emissions and "improves a community's ability to adapt to adverse climate impacts by helping soil absorb water and prevent runoff of pollutants during floods. It also helps soil hold more water for longer, mitigating the effects of drought."....

link from nakedcapitalism.com

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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[NJFAC] Ending special tax treatment afforded to superrich can cover estimated climate finance needs

Countries can raise $2 trillion by copying Spain's wealth tax, study finds Ending special tax treatment afforded to superrich can cover estimated climate finance needs

....

The study documents that previous tax reforms targeting the superrich did not result in the superrich relocating to other countries, despite media headlines claiming the contrary. Just 0.01% of the richest households relocated after wealth tax reforms targeting the richest households were implemented in Norway, Sweden and Denmark.

Crucially, the extreme accumulation of wealth doesn't just create extreme imbalances that have harmful consequences, it renders that accumulated wealth less economically productive – for example by diverting disproportionally more wealth towards speculative derivatives instead of goods and services in the "real" economy.¹⁶ The Tax Justice Network's spokesperson attributes this to "why the world might not feel any richer today despite there being more wealth than ever before."....

"There's this idea that billionaires earn wealth like everybody else, they're just better at it. This is bogus. It's impossible to earn a billion dollars. The average US worker would have to work for a stretch of time 13 times longer than humans have existed to earn as much as wealth as the world's richest man has today. Salaries don't make billionaires, dividends and rent money do. But we tax dividends and rent money much less than we tax salaries, and this is destabilising the earner model our economies are based on....

Read the report

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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[NJFAC] Meaning of the jobs data revisions--Dean Baker

Mixed Story: What the Revision to the Jobs Data Means

August 21, 2024 Dean Baker

First, the people complaining that this downward revision exposes cooked jobs data in prior months need to get their heads screwed on straight. Let's just try a little logic here.

If the Biden-Harris administration had the ability to cook the job numbers, do we think they are too stupid to realize that they should keep cooking them at least through November? Seriously, do we think they are total morons? If you've been cooking the numbers for twenty months, wouldn't you keep cooking them until Election Day?

Okay, but getting more serious here, the staff of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is a professional outfit that does exactly what we want it to do. They produce the data about the economy as best they can in a completely objective way. And they use methods that are completely transparent.....

Every year the BLS adjusts the data from the survey based on state unemployment insurance (UI) filings which have data from nearly every employer in the country. These UI filings are a near census for all payroll employment. If the UI data gives a different picture than the survey of employers, then the filings are almost certainly right and BLS revises it data accordingly.

For reasons that we can only speculate about, there was an unusually large gap this year. Many economists and statisticians will spend many hours trying to figure out why this is the case. But one thing we should be confident of is that no one cooked the data. BLS did the best they could in structuring their survey of employers. If they can find ways to improve it, they will, as they have in the past.

What Does This Tell Us About the Economy?

Turning briefly to the substance of the revision, I realize many people will be quick to say that this is bad news for our picture of the economy. That is not clear at all.

First, we should be clear that even with the revision the economy still created jobs at a very rapid pace in the period covered, from March 2023 to March 2024. While BLS had previously reported that we created 2.9 million jobs over this period, or 242,000 a month. The revision means we created 2.1 million jobs or 172,000 jobs a month. By comparison, in the three years prior to the onset of the pandemic, we created jobs at a rate of 179,000 a month. Even with the downward revision, we were still creating jobs at a very healthy pace.....

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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[NJFAC] Manufacturing Jobs: Unions Made Them Good, Not the Factories--Dean Baker

Manufacturing Jobs: Unions Made Them Good, Not the Factories--Dean Baker

The effort to bring back manufacturing jobs has been a major theme in the 2024 election. Both parties say they consider this a high priority for the next administration. However, there is a notable difference in that the Biden-Harris administration has actively supported an increase in unionization, while the Republicans have indicated, at best, neutrality if not outright hostility towards unions.

This distinction is important in the context of manufacturing jobs. Many people seem to assume that manufacturing jobs are automatically good jobs, paying more than non manufacturing jobs.

While that was true four decades ago, before the massive job loss of manufacturing jobs due to trade, it is not clear this is still the case. The figure below shows the average hourly pay, in 2024 dollars, for production and non supervisory workers in manufacturing and elsewhere in the private sector.[1]

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics and author's calculations.

As can be seen, workers in manufacturing had a substantial edge in pay at the start of this period, earning a premium of more than 5.0 percent over their counterparts in other industries. However, this flipped in 2006, and since then pay for non manufacturing workers has outpaced pay for workers in manufacturing. In the most recent data, non manufacturing workers get almost 9.0 percent more in hourly pay than workers in manufacturing.

To be clear, this is not a comprehensive comparison of relative pay. A full comparison would have to incorporate benefits and also adjust for differences in the workforce, such as education and location. An analysis done by Larry Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute in 2018 found that there was still a substantial premium for manufacturing workers over the years 2010-2016 when controlling for these factors. A more recent analysis from the Federal Reserve Board found that this premium had disappeared altogether, even when controlling for these factors.

While further research may produce different results, there is little doubt that the manufacturing premium has been sharply reduced, if not eliminated altogether, over the last four decades. The main reason for the decline in the premium is not a secret. There has been a huge drop in the percentage of manufacturing workers who are unionized.

In 1980, 32.3 percent of manufacturing workers were union members. This compares to a unionization rate of 15.0 percent for the rest of the private sectors. By comparison, in 2023 just 7.9 percent of manufacturing workers were union members, only slightly higher than the 5.9 percent rate for the private sector as a whole.

The implication of the loss of the wage premium coupled with the decline in unionization rates is that there is little reason to believe that an increase in the number of manufacturing jobs will mean more good jobs unless they are also unionized. It is not the factories that make these jobs good jobs, it is the unions.

[1] The category of production and non supervisory workers includes roughly 80 percent of the workforce. It excludes managers and highly paid professionals, so changes in pay at the top end will not have much impact on these data.

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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[NJFAC] Effect of AI Adoption on Jobs

The Effect of AI Adoption on Jobs: Evidence from USCommuting Zones August 12, 2024 Bonfiglioli, Crinò, Gancia, & Papadakis, Voxeu 8/24 Harnessing the potential of artificial intelligence has become one of the top priorities for policymakers around the world. Yet, doing so first requires a thorough understanding of the effects of these technologies on labour markets. Using data across US commuting zones over the period 2000-2020, this column presents evidence that AI adoption has reduced employment, except in high-paying occupations and those requiring a degree in STEM disciplines.

....

Between 2000 and 2020, the employment share of AI-related occupations has almost doubled in the US, rising from 0.14% to 0.20%. Most of this increase has taken place after 2010. There are sizable differences in the diffusion of AI technologies across industries. AI adoption is most prevalent in the service sector, especially in advanced branches such as information, professional, scientific and business services. It is also important in some utilities, such as electricity, and in some areas of the public sector, such as national security and international affairs. Conversely, AI adoption is still limited in manufacturing. This feature distinguishes AI adoption from the use of industrial robots, which is mostly concentrated in the manufacturing sector (Acemoglu and Restrepo 2020).....

Conclusions

Recent improvements in the field of AI have triggered much hype about the future of work. While nobody can predict the exact direction that new innovations and applications will take, we think that it is important to start from understanding the consequences that these technologies have already had. Our results point toward robust negative effects of AI adoption on employment for most workers and sectors. While more micro-level evidence is needed to precisely identify the mechanism through which these negative effects unfold, our evidence is nevertheless consistent with the view that AI is contributing to the automation of jobs and to widening inequality.

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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[NJFAC] Eliminating non-competes improves workplace conditions

Are Non-Competes Really Ending?

The Federal Trade Commission proposed a full ban in April. What's the status of that ban? Plus, more than a dozen states have acted after the effort of journalists, lawyers, regulators, and citizens.

Matt Stoller Aug 2 "My employer comes far too close to owning me than should be possible in a 'free' country." - Anonymous commenter to the FTC Over the past year, lawyers and human resource experts are starting to recommend an unusual strategy for corporate America. Treat your employees better. A few months ago, for instance, James Moore & Co., an accounting and services corporation, suggested to clients that they start the "enhancing workplace conditions, offering competitive compensation packages and providing opportunities for career development and advancement." In late July, Steven Clark of Wealth Management magazine wrote that "firms may need to focus more on creating a positive work environment and attractive compensation packages to retain talent." Why? Because non-compete agreements, which are standard contractual provisions for tens of millions of employees that lock them to their current employer, are getting harder and harder to impose and enforce. Firms are removing non-competes from employment contracts, big law lawyers are launching complex sites for their clients on how to track what contracts are outlawed, corporate CEOs are starting to brag that they do not force employees to sign non-competes, and creative labor-focused lawyers like Matt Bruenig are taking on cases and voiding these provisions in front of newly sympathetic judges.....

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
http://www.njfac.org

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