Saturday, September 27, 2014

[NJFAC] Rich Gain More Ground in Every US Expansion

"The Most Remarkable Chart I've Seen in Some Time": Rich Gain More Ground in Every US Expansion 

  September 25, 2014 

If you had any doubt the US economy had been rearchitected to favor the haves versus the have-lesses, this chart by Pavlina Tcherneva should settle it. Justin Wolfers, hardly a raging liberal, just tweeted:


​While the overall trend is dramatic enough, you can also see two major shifts: the big change with the Reagan era, with its higher-income and capital-favoring tax cuts, of the top 10% suddenly reaping vastly disproportionate gains relative to the rest of the distribution.

The Bush Administration, with even more changed in taxes that shifted income to the rich, is another big ratchet. But arguably the most dramatic change is under the Obama Adminstration, where the top echelon's gains came in part at the expense of everyone else.

Matt Stoller was early to notice this change. As he wrote in 2012:

A better puzzle to wrestle with is why President Obama is able to continue to speak as if his administration has not presided over a significant expansion of income redistribution upward.  The data on inequality shows that his policies are not incrementally better than those of his predecessor, or that we're making progress too slowly, as liberal Democrats like to argue.  It doesn't even show that the outcome is the same as Bush's.  No, look at this table, from Emmanuel Saez (h/t Ian Welsh).  Check out those two red circles I added.

Yup, under Bush, the 1% captured a disproportionate share of the income gains from the Bush boom of 2002-2007.  They got 65 cents of every dollar created in that boom, up 20 cents from when Clinton was President.  Under Obama, the 1% got 93 cents of every dollar created in that boom.  That's not only more than under Bush, up 28 cents.  In the transition from Bush to Obama, inequality got worse, faster, than under the transition from Clinton to Bush.  Obama accelerated the growth of inequality.

A bit hat tip to Pavlina, who has put this data together in a simple but powerful way that makes it hard to ignore how the rich really have gotten richer. And before you argue that this is the result of a technology (as opposed to rentier) driven transformation, please read the post yesterday, Is Rising Inequality Inevitable? Its conclusion: "Rising inequality is therefore not inevitable — it is a political choice."

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Thursday, September 25, 2014

[NJFAC] prime working-age men ages 25 to 54 dropping away from the U.S. labor force

Missing Men in U.S. Workforce Risk Permanent Separation , Bloomberg, Sep 18, 2014

Too few men... are returning to work in a decades-long puzzle about prime working-age males ages 25 to 54 falling away from the U.S. labor force. Their participation rate slid to 88.4 percent in August in a steady decline from 97.9 percent in 1954. Over the last 10 years, the slump was the steepest for those ages 25 to 34.

About 7 million male Americans waste their best years of wealth formation not employed or even trying to find work. The pattern will persist, economists say, putting some men -- particularly those without a college degree -- at risk of permanent isolation from the job market.

The pace of decline was among the fastest during the last two contractions and the drop has continued in the current expansion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg from Labor Department reports. This shows the labor-market recovery isn't strong enough for some men to find jobs or even continue looking.

Gradual Disappearance

A key reason is the change in labor demand: the gradual disappearance of construction and manufacturing positions, especially those demanding relatively few skills, such as furniture, shoe or leather-goods making, said David Autor, professor of economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

"The trend will remain downward," Autor said in a phone interview. "I don't see any recovery for low-skilled labor demand coming. There's never going to be a great time in America again to be a high-school dropout."

A fall in inflation-adjusted earnings for less-educated men, more stay-at-home dads and a surge in the number of veterans with military-service disability benefits also contribute to the decline, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics economist Steve Hipple.

The number of veterans receiving such assistance rose 42 percent to 3.7 million in 2013 from 2.6 million in 2005, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs data show. About 40 percent were 54 years old or younger, and about 89 percent were men.

Falling Wages

Inflation-adjusted earnings fell 5.4 percent between 2007 and 2013 for men ages 25 and older who have a high-school education, according to the BLS data. For those with less schooling, wages dropped 7.4 percent.

Still, the lure of a paycheck can be enough to encourage some young men not to pursue higher education, said Anthony P. Carnevale, director and research professor of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce in Washington.

"They can still get a job that pays enough for them to move out of their parents' house and get a car," he said. "But it's seductive, because by the time they are in their mid-thirties, they're not really improving their earnings anymore."

....


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Tuesday, September 16, 2014

[NJFAC] America's Top Execs Seem Ready to Give UP on American Workers

America's Top Execs Seem Ready to Give UP on American Workers, Jim Tankersly, Wash. Post, 9/11/14

Three years ago, Harvard Business School asked thousands of its graduates, many of whom are leaders of America's top companies, where their firms had decided to locate jobs in the previous year. The responses led the researchers to declare a "competitiveness problem" at home: HBS Alumni reported 56 separate instances where they moved 1,000 or more U.S. jobs to foreign countries, zero cases of moving that many jobs in one block to America from abroad, and just four cases of creating that many new jobs in the United States. Three in four respondents said American competitiveness was falling.

Harvard released a similar survey this week, which suggested executives aren't as glum about American competitiveness as they once were; a majority of alums now say competitiveness is improving or treading water. Three years of economic growth and record corporate profits will do that for you.

Companies don't appear any more keen on American workers today, though. The Harvard grads are down on American education and on workers' skill sets, but they admit they're just not really engaged in improving either area. Three-quarters said their firms would rather invest in new technology than hire new employees. More than two-thirds said they'd rather rely on vendors for work that can be outsourced, as opposed to adding their own staff. A plurality said they expected to be less able to pay high wages and benefits to American workers.

....


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Friday, September 12, 2014

[NJFAC] temporary work reaches an all-time high, despite more than 5 years of "recovery"


A recent report on temporary work by the National Employment Law Project finds:

The number of U.S. workers in temporary help jobs has reached an all-time
high. Fully 2.8 million Americans are currently employed in temporary
help services, which constitute the majority of staffing industry jobs.

The industry has shifted from largely clerical to largely industrial.
In 2013, production and material moving jobs made up 42 percent of the industry,
while office and administrative jobs made up just 21 percent.

Major corporations now use staffing as a permanent feature of their business
model. Seventy-seven percent of Fortune 500 firms now use third-party
logistics firms, who may then contract out to an army of smaller firms to
move their goods.

Staffing agencies often hire the most vulnerable. Latinos make up 16 percent
of employed workers, and African Americans, 11 percent, but each group
accounts for 20 percent of the staffing industry. Research shows that up to
40 percent of former welfare recipients who became employed after 1996
reform legislation obtained jobs in temporary help services.

Staffing work has serious impacts on workers' health. A 2010 analysis of
Washington State data found that workers employed by temporary
help agencies reported higher rates of injury than workers in standard
employment arrangements.

Staffing work means a pay cut for workers. The median worker in the staffing
industry earns $12.40 an hour, compared to an hourly wage of $15.84
earned by all private-sector workers, regardless of industry—a whopping
22 percent wage penalty.

The pressure to deliver more for less leads some staffing agencies to break the
law. In a recent Massachusetts case for unpaid overtime, the staffing
agency defendant claimed it was unable to pay overtime because of the
low rates paid to it by the host company.

Staffing workers are effectively excluded from the right to organize and
bargain with their employers under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA).
Where working conditions and wages are poor, workers can normally
come together to negotiate with their employers and try to improve
them. This is not true for staffing agency workers. A 2004 National Labor
Relations Board decision requiring consent from the staffing agency and
host employer makes it next to impossible for staffing workers to take
advantage of their rights under the NLRA.

Despite these barriers, however, staffing workers are coming together
and developing new forms of organizing.....

Woman Working Four Part-Time Jobs Dies in Car While Trying to Nap


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Saturday, September 6, 2014

[NJFAC] Unemployed Workers Leaving The Labor Force

In my roundup of Friday's jobs report, I noted that, once again, more unemployed workers gave up looking for jobs than found work. I included this chart, versions of which we've run several times before:



It's a good question. As I've written before, the aging of the baby boom generation explains much — though certainly not all — of the steep decline in the labor-force participation rate, the share of the population that's working or looking for work. It's reasonable to suspect that the same trend is driving unemployed workers out of the labor force.

But while the aging population may be a contributing factor, it isn't the primary explanation. A breakdown by age shows that most of the unemployed workers leaving the labor force aren't boomers. In fact, only 5 percent are of retirement age (65 or older), and most aren't even close.



This shouldn't be too surprising. Unemployment is concentrated among the young: The unemployment rate for Americans younger than 25 was 13 percent in August, compared to 4.6 percent for those 55 and older. So it makes sense that younger workers would make up an outsize share of those abandoning their job searches.

Of course, these figures only look at people who were unemployed, meaning they were actively searching for work. If you look instead at people who left the labor force after being employed, the numbers are much more skewed toward retiring boomers.

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Thursday, September 4, 2014

[NJFAC] "40-Hour" Workweek for Full-time work Is Actually Longer

The "40-Hour" Workweek Is Actually Longer -- by Seven Hours

Full-time U.S. workers, on average, report working 47 hours weekly

by Lydia Saad, Gallup August 29, 2014

PRINCETON, NJ -- Adults employed full time in the U.S. report working an average of 47 hours per week, almost a full workday longer than what a standard five-day, 9-to-5 schedule entails. In fact, half of all full-time workers indicate they typically work more than 40 hours, and nearly four in 10 say they work at least 50 hours.

Average Hours Worked by Full-Time U.S. Workers, Aged 18+

The 40-hour workweek is widely regarded as the standard for full-time employment, and many federal employment laws -- including the Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare" -- use this threshold to define what a full-time employee is. However, barely four in 10 full-time workers in the U.S. indicate they work precisely this much. The hefty proportion who tell Gallup they typically log more than 40 hours each week push the average number of hours worked up to 47. Only 8% of full-time employees claim to work less than 40 ho

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