Friday, January 30, 2015

[NJFAC] What people do for a living, and where they are on the income ladder

Jobs Up And Down The Income Ladder

this graph shows the 10 most popular jobs in each income bracket. Click on each job to see where it appears in different income brackets.

It shows that, at least nationally, the conventional idea of what people do for a living still holds.

Looking across incomes and rankings there are a couple of interesting things to note:

It's good to be the boss: Being a manager is the most common job from the 70th percentile up to the 99th.
Doctors and lawyers are only found in the top two brackets. (There's a reason our grandmothers wanted us to go to med school or law school.)
Sales supervisors are well-represented across all groups. It's a broad job title that applies to people making as little as $12,000 a year all the way up to six figures.

The data come from the American Community Survey using individual income from wages and salaries. We restricted the sample to adults ages 25 to 65 and who worked at least three months in the past year.

National Jobs for All Coalition
http://www.njfac.org/

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Friday, January 23, 2015

[NJFAC] Union membership 2014: 14.6 million, 11.1% , down 0.2 percentage points

UNION MEMBERS -- 2014      In 2014, the union membership rate--the percent of wage and salary workers who were  members of unions--was 11.1 percent, down 0.2 percentage point from 2013, the U.S.  Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. The number of wage and salary workers  belonging to unions, at 14.6 million, was little different from 2013. In 1983, the  first year for which comparable union data are available, the union membership rate  was 20.1 percent, and there were 17.7 million union workers.     The data on union membership are collected as part of the Current Population Survey  (CPS), a monthly sample survey of about 60,000 households....     Highlights from the 2014 data:       --Public-sector workers had a union membership rate (35.7 percent), more       than five times higher than that of private-sector workers (6.6 percent).       (See table 3.)       --Workers in education, training, and library occupations and in protective       service occupations had the highest unionization rate, at 35.3 percent for       each occupation group. (See table 3.)       --Men had a higher union membership rate (11.7 percent) than women       (10.5 percent) in 2014. (See table 1.)       --Black workers were more likely to be union members than were white, Asian,       or Hispanic workers. (See table 1.)       --Median weekly earnings of nonunion workers ($763) were 79 percent of       earnings for workers who were union members ($970). (The comparisons of       earnings in this release are on a broad level and do not control for many       factors that can be important in explaining earnings differences.)       (See table 2.)       --Among states, New York continued to have the highest union membership rate       (24.6 percent), and North Carolina again had the lowest rate (1.9 percent).       (See table 5.)

see much more information at http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm

National Jobs for All Coalition
http://www.njfac.org/

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

[NJFAC] no evidence of superior private sector efficiency in privatization or outsourcing

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTOR EFFICIENCY

European Federation of Public Service Unions

It is often assumed that privatisation or PPPs will result in greater levels of

technical efficiency. That is, the private sector can always deliver a given level

of service with less input costs than the public sector.

Politicians, media, academics and consultants frequently refer to 'private sector efficiency'.
This assumption is often shared even by critics of privatisation.

But there is now extensive experience of all forms of privatisation, and researchers
have published many studies of the empirical evidence on comparative technical efficiency.

The results are remarkably consistent across all sectors and all forms of privatisation
and outsourcing: there is no empirical evidence that the private sector is intrinsically more efficient.

The same results emerge consistently from sectors and services which are subject to outsouring,
such as waste management, and in sectors privatised by sale, such as telecoms.

The importance of comparative efficiency

The comparative efficiency of the public and private sector is an important part

of the arguments over privatisation and outsourcing, for two major reasons.

Firstly, the empirical evidence undermines a fundamental part of the argument

for privatisation and use of the private sector. If private companies are no

more efficient on a technical level, then the usual case for privatisation collapses.

This is because privatisations, outsourcing and PPPs are at a clear disadvantage

in relation to most other economic criteria. The biggest single disadvantage is

that the cost of investment finance is nearly always significantly more expensve
with private operators, because of higher profits for shareholders, and

lower credit ratings–which means private companies pay higher interest

rates. Unless the private sector can deliver real substantial savings from efficiency,
then it is invariably worse value.

....

National Jobs for All Coalition
http://www.njfac.org/

Tuesday, January 13, 2015

[NJFAC] Why the Tech Elite Supports Universal Basic Income: killing social programs

Why the Tech Elite Is Getting Behind Universal Basic Income

January 6, 2015 By Nathan Schneider
....
Basic income, it turns out, is in the peculiar class of political notions that can warm Leninist and libertarian hearts alike. Though it's an essentially low-tech proposal, it appeals to Silicon Valley's longing for simple, elegant algorithms to solve everything. Supporters list the possible results: It can end poverty and inequality with hardly any bureaucracy. With more money and less work to do, we might even spew less climate-disrupting carbon. ....

Chris Hawkins, a 30-year-old investor who made his money building software that automates office work, credits Manna as an influence. On his company's website he has taken to blogging about basic income, which he looks to as a bureaucracy killer. "Shut down government programs as you fund redistribution," he told me. Mothball public housing, food assistance, Medicaid, and the rest, and replace them with a single check. It turns out that the tech investors promoting basic income, by and large, aren't proposing to fund the payouts themselves; they'd prefer that the needy foot the bill for everyone else.

"The cost has to come from somewhere," Hawkins explained, "and I think the most logical place to take it from is government-provided services."

This kind of reasoning has started to find a constituency in Washington. The Cato Institute, Charles Koch's think tank for corporate-friendly libertarianism, published a series of essays last August debating the pros and cons of basic income. That same week, an article appeared in the Atlantic making a "conservative case for a guaranteed basic income." It suggested that basic income is actually a logical extension of Paul Ryan's scheme to replace federal welfare programs with cash grants to states—the Republican Party's latest bid to crown itself "the party of ideas." Basic income is still not quite yet speakable in the halls of power, but Republicans may be bringing it closer than they realize. ....

If a basic income were too low, people wouldn't be able to quit their jobs, but employers would still lower their wages. It could incline more businesses to act like Walmart, letting their workers scrape by on government programs while they pay a pittance. Workers might get money for nothing, but they'd also find themselves with dwindling leverage in their workplaces.

If we were to fund basic income only by gutting existing welfare, and not by taxing the rich, it would do the opposite of fixing inequality; money once reserved for the poor would end up going to those who need it less. Instead of being a formidable bulwark against poverty, a poorly funded basic-income program could produce a vast underclass more dependent on whoever cuts the checks. And as out-there as the idea can seem, Weeks's leftist critics complain that it's still a tweak, a reform. "It's not going to signal the end of capitalism," she recognizes.

Like pretty much all the shortcut solutions Silicon Valley offers, basic income would have its perks, but it isn't enough to solve our real problems on its own. There's still no substitute for organizing more power in more communities—the power to shape society, not just to fiddle with someone else's app. Social Security, for instance, came to be thanks to the popular struggles of the 1930s, and it carried huge swaths of old people out of poverty. Obamacare, a set of reforms mostly written by the industry it was meant to regulate, has turned out to be a far more mixed bag.

A basic income designed by venture capitalists in Silicon Valley is more likely to reinforce their power than to strengthen the poor. But a basic income arrived at through the vision and the struggle of those who need it most would help ensure that it meets their needs first. If we're looking for a way through the robot apocalypse, we can do better than turn to the people who are causing it.

National Jobs for All Coalition
http://www.njfac.org/

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

[NJFAC] A Political History of American Inequality,

Growing Apart: A Political History of American Inequality, Gordon 9/14

Conclusion

Growing Apart develops an historical explanation for our growing divide. The early chapters trace the dimensions of American inequality and discount the importance of the "usual suspects" in this story: globalization, technology, and demography. (Because these trends have been experienced generally and gradually across the democratic and industrialized world, they are not much help in explaining either the uneven historical trajectory of American inequality or the gap between the United States—where inequality is especially stark—and most of its peers.) The chapters that follow turn their attention to the politics of American inequality, developing the argument that policy and political choices—including our political responses to the challenges listed above—make up a more important part of the story.

A crude schematic of that political explanation would go something like this. Union decline (especially for men) and the declining value of the minimum wage (especially for women) drove inequality at the bottom of the wage spectrum in the 1970s and 1980s. This collapse in bargaining power was compounded by the meagerness of U.S. social programs (most pronounced after the end of the AFDC program in 1996), the steady decline in job-based benefits, and the determination (since the 1970s) to sacrifice full employment on the altar of price stability at every dip in the business cycle. As the floor of the midcentury social compact collapsed, economic rewards were increasingly hoarded at the top—an advantage hardened (especially across the last twenty years) by financialization, shifts in the tax burden, and the collapse of meaningful corporate governance. Simply put, public policy narrowed the ability of ordinary Americans to bargain for their fair share while widening the opportunity afforded the richest Americans to extract extraordinary rewards.....

Some good charts related to the paper.

http://scalar.usc.edu/works/growing-apart-a-political-history-of-american-inequality/chartbook
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National Jobs for All Coalition
http://www.njfac.org/