[NJFAC] the rise of the precariat

Economic Questions: Guy Standing and the Rise of the Precariat 

From the Guardian last month:

The report, published by the Institute of Policy Studies, focuses on 20 of the S&P 500 corporations that have primarily US-based workforces and report the lowest median wages of the group.

Collectively, this “Low-Wage 20” employs 6.7 million people in the US. The median pay at a majority (75%) of the companies is lower than the income minimum for a family of three to be eligible for Medicaid in most states. At 13 of the companies, median pay was also lower than the Supplemental Nutrition Assistant Program income threshold for a family of three.

Nearly a quarter of Walmart employees (29.3%) and half of Amazon workers (48.4%) in the Nevada – which collects Medicaid enrollment numbers among employees at large companies – were on Medicaid in 2024, according to the report.....

Guy Standing identified the precariat as a class characterised by uncertainty. Members of the precariat often experience:

• short-term or zero-hours contracts, fluctuating income, limited access to benefits or protections, lack of occupational identity, and minimal control over working conditions.

This is not simply low pay. It is a condition of permanent instability. The precariat cannot plan, save, or build a secure future.

Guy argues that this condition is becoming the norm rather than the exception....

Note that Standing advocates a guaranteed basic income, not a job guarantee, the  NJFAN  policy position. jz

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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[NJFAC] military spending now more detached from civilian use....

Satyajit Das: The Wages of War 

Yves here. Satyajit Das provides a high-level look at the costs and benefits of militarization. There may have been a time when manufacturing was less specialized (think 1930s and 1940s machine shops) where bulking up for huge production of weaponry required only some investment in specialized components. But modern war, particularly when fought US-style, with lots of fussy high priced kit, means single-purpose investment, which Das argues, also have limited spill-over benefits.

Mind you, it may not have to be that way even now. Russia in its Ukraine war production expansion, is endeavoring to have as much of its new capacity as possible be dual-use, as able to later or contemporaneously make civilian goods.

By Satyajit Das, a former banker and author of numerous technical works on derivatives and several general titles: Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives (2006 and 2010), Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk (2011) and A Banquet of Consequence – Reloaded (2016 and 2021). His latest book is on ecotourism – Wild Quests: Journeys into Ecotourism and the Future for Animals (2024). This piece was first published in the New Indian Express.....

Second, defence spending may not generate economic activity. Beyond the initial expenditure, there is minimal multiplier effects as most goods have limited consumption or investment value. It is spent on items which become obsolete if unused or destroyed if deployed in combat. There is a diversion of resources and talent. In the longer term, any stimulatory effects of increased military spending are outweighed by higher inflation, budget deficits, and higher taxes which require painful adjustments. If a state does not have the required indigenous industries, then defence spending mainly benefits foreigners, primarily major armaments exporters like the US, Russia, China, France, and Germany. Then, there is human and material costs of wars.....

Third, the effectiveness of defence spending is uncertain. Given that the required capabilities are a function of the adversary, the type of conflict and its duration, it is unclear what target fixed percentage of GDP is appropriate or sufficient.  As the Ukraine war illustrates, no matter how high the state of preparedness, actual conflict requires armaments of different type and a scale of output which is difficult.

The money is frequently eaten up by salaries, pensions, and administration costs. More than one-third and one-half of US and European defence spending, respectively, goes on personnel. Less than 30 percent and 20 percent of US and European spending is on investment.

Advanced weapon systems, the now favoured strategy, are often duds.....

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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[NJFAC] Letter to NY Times in response to oped on those stuck in part-time jobs

Congratulations to Adelle Waldman and Matt Bruenig for calling attention to the plight of millions of Americans who are stuck in part-time jobs. In February, 4.4 million Americans were working part-time because they couldn't find full-time work. Had the Department of Labor counted these involuntary part-timers as unemployed, the number officially  unemployed would have jumped from 7.6 million to 12.0 million people, a 58% increase.  And how about the number of people who have full-time,  year-round work but earn less than the four-person poverty standard--16.3 million men and women in 2023, when the poverty standard was $31,200 for a family of four (latest  figures available)?  Why stop at a guarantee of full-time work for involuntary part-timers when there are millions unemployed or earning poverty wages for full-time work? How about a federal guarantee of the right to living-wage work for all who want to work?

Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg

Chair, National Jobs for All Network 

Prof. Emerita of Social Work and Social Policy, Adelphi University

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June Zaccone
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[NJFAC] NAFTA effects on mortality

Trading Goods for Lives: NAFTA's Mortality Impacts and Implications Amy Finkelstein, Matthew J. Notowidigdo & Steven X. Shi

Working Paper 34855 DOI 10.3386/w34855 Issue Date February 2026

We estimate the mortality impact of local labor market exposure to the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as well as to other local area shocks, and provide a parsimonious empirical explanation for differently-signed mortality estimates across different sources of local labor market contractions. Leveraging spatial variation in exposure to Mexican important competition from NAFTA, we find that more exposed areas experienced larger increases in mortality. In the 15 years post-NAFTA, an area with average NAFTA exposure experienced an increase in annual, age-adjusted mortality of 0.68 percent (standard error = 0.19), an increase that more than erases prior estimates of the welfare gains from NAFTA's nationwide economic benefits. Mortality increases appear across all broad age by sex groups, but are particularly pronounced among working-age men, a demographic that also experienced disproportionate NAFTA-induced declines in (primarily manufacturing) employment. Additional evidence from other local labor market shocks reveals a systematic pattern: declines in local area manufacturing employment increase mortality, while declines in local area non-manufacturing employment decrease mortality. These findings suggest that the sign and magnitude of any mortality impacts of future economic shocks likely depends critically on the extent to which employment declines are concentrated in the manufacturing sector.

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June Zaccone
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[NJFAC] More than 2.1 billion of world’s 3.6 billion workers are in the informal economy, according to ILO

The International Labour Organisation's Employment and Social Trends 2026 report paints a stark picture of the conditions facing most of the world's workers.

More than 2.1 billion of the world's 3.6 billion workers—around 60 percent—labour in the informal economy. They work on a casual basis for low pay, often in hazardous conditions and without legal rights, job security or social protection, including sick pay, medical or disability insurance, unemployment benefits or pensions.

Informal or casual work is the dominant form of employment in much of the global South. In sub-Saharan Africa, informal employment reaches around 90 percent; in South and South-East Asia, it is similarly pervasive, accompanied by widespread poverty and severe decent-work deficits.

Informalisation is growing in the advanced economies, where migrant labour is widely used in agriculture, care work, hospitality and construction, and where "off-the-books" subcontracting has expanded in logistics and delivery through the platform or gig economy.....

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2026/03/04/hlnv-m04.html

Executive summary: https://researchrepository.ilo.org/view/delivery/41ILO_INST/13147301360002676?bypassKey=492dd5a5-3f7a-45de-9fa7-2d91f07c5f19

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June Zaccone
National Jobs for All Network
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[NJFAC] Why Your Boss Can Block Your Unemployment Benefits

Why Your Boss Can Block Your Unemployment Benefits And what it means for worker wellbeing and access to the safety net  Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Alix Gould-Werth  2/10/26

When you lose your job, applying for unemployment insurance should be straightforward: you file a claim, the state verifies you're eligible, and you start receiving benefits to keep you afloat while you search for new work. But there's a player in this process most people don't know about until it's often too late: your former employer, who has both the right and a powerful financial incentive to fight your claim.....

Follow the Money

The U.S. unemployment insurance system has an unusual method of funding benefits that exists virtually nowhere else among other rich democracies: "experience rating." Under experience rating, employers generally pay payroll taxes that fund UI benefits, and those tax rates rise when their former workers successfully claim benefits. (Only one state–Alaska–uses a different system in which employer taxes rise in proportion to their layoffs, rather than benefit claims.) It's like car insurance: more claims mean higher premiums for employers.

The original theory behind this system was elegant: employers would avoid unnecessary layoffs if doing so raised their tax bill. In addition, employers would help "police" the system to ensure that only eligible workers receive benefits.

But experience rating creates another incentive too—one the program's designers perhaps didn't fully anticipate. Employers can also lower their tax burden by contesting their workers' legitimate and illegitimate claims, making it harder for laid-off employees to receive benefits in the first place.

Indeed, the experience rating system has spawned a growing industry of "claims management" consultants who market their services by promising to reduce employers' UI tax bills through more aggressive contestation. As one journalist put it, these firms have turned fighting unemployment claims into a "boom industry."....

Important recent work on one state (Washington) shows that employers strongly influence worker access to UI benefits. The authors find that "if all employers [in Washington in their sample from 2005 to 2013] with below-median claim effects moved to the median, then the UI claim rate would increase by 6 percentage points." The authors also find that employer effects help explain the income gradient in UI benefit access, with higher-earning workers more likely to receive benefits because their employers are less likely to contest their claims. But we do not have a national perspective.

A Quarter of Claims Face Employer Pushback

To tackle this absence of national evidence, we drew from an original nationally representative survey of workers who experienced unemployment between 2019 and 2024. In that survey, we asked unemployed workers who filed for UI benefits if their employer fought their claim. We find that about 26 percent of UI applicants reported having their claim contested by their employer. That's far higher than the 4-8 percent suggested by earlier studies that focused on one state (Washington) where researchers can access detailed UI records.....

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June Zaccone
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[NJFAC] pace of US wealth concentration

@gabriel_zucman The pace at which US wealth concentration is rising is simply staggering The concentration of AI wealth into the hands of a few tech barons + plutocratic capture ==> unchartered territory

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June Zaccone
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