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/

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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/

Monday, December 29, 2014

[NJFAC] McKinsey: Automation, jobs, and the future of work

Interview| McKinsey Global Institute

Automation, jobs, and the future of work December 2014

A group of economists, tech entrepreneurs, and academics discuss whether technological advances will automate tasks more quickly than the United States can create jobs.

The topic of job displacement has, throughout US history, ignited frustration over technological advances and their tendency to make traditional jobs obsolete; artisans protested textile mills in the early 19th century, for example. In recent years, start-ups and the high-tech industry have become the focus of this discussion. A recent Pew Research Center study found that technology experts are almost evenly split on whether robots and artificial intelligence will displace a significant number of jobs over the next decade, so there is plenty of room for debate.
.....

Matt Slaughter:....It's quite clear, in the US in recent years, that we're not creating enough good jobs. People care a lot about their W-2s—what incomes are they earning? If you segment this by educational attainment, 96.2 percent of the US workforce since 2000 is in an educational cohort whose total money earnings, inflation adjusted, have been falling, not rising.

That includes even people with four-year-college degrees and nonprofessional advanced degrees. The only ones that have been rising are the PhDs, on average, and then the professional degrees: the doctors, the lawyers, and the MBAs. So that's a little sobering if you think about whether we are going to create good jobs. And a big open question that we'll probably talk about—and our panelists already rightly pointed to—is public policies.

Laura Tyson: I am with Matt on this. We live in a market economy. Supply and demand ultimately determine the level of employment. So a number of jobs will be created, but the quality of jobs is a huge question, I think. What's happening with the technology, which is skill biased and labor saving, is that it's eliminating middle-income jobs but is complementary to high skills. The jobs are high-income jobs because some smart people have to work with the technology. But there's a very large number of people who are being pushed down into lower-income jobs.

The second thing that's really important—it's been with us for a long time—is the growing gap between productivity and wages. And you can see this in the gap between productivity, a measure of the bounty of brilliant machines, and how it's being distributed in terms of wages.

If we had an inflation-adjusted, productivity-adjusted minimum wage today, it would be something like $25 [an hour]. We would not be arguing about $10. Public policy is, if anything, moving backward. It's certainly not moving forward at the level of the race. So the policy makers lose the race, and a lot of displaced workers, a lot of American families, lose the race. And that is my concern.

We're talking about machines—machines displacing people, machines changing the ways in which people work. Who owns the machines? Who should own the machines? Perhaps what we need to think about is the way in which the workers who are working with the machines are part owners of the machines.

....

Job quality and fiscal policy

Martin Baily: I was struck recently by learning that in one of our largest banks, the turnover rate for bank tellers is 50 percent a year. So, being a bank teller now is no longer a sort of skilled job; it's no longer really a well-paid job. We've had this change in technology, obviously. We've put a lot of the intelligence into the IT systems, so we don't need such skilled bank tellers. But if you ever go inside a bank, you sort of long for the days when the bank teller was more skilled.

The banks obviously have decided, as have Walmart and many, many other companies, that it's more cost effective to use workers that don't have much training, that probably don't have a lot of education—although I think training is more important—but instead to build productivity into the production system. They're very good at that. But it does create a huge number of not-very-good jobs, together with a set of jobs for the conceptualizers, the people that can take advantage of the technology, that have high incomes.

So this has obviously created a problem of inequality in our society. But also we're seeing that people who cannot get or don't have the gumption to get—you can go both ways on this—a good job are actually deciding not to work at all. So they're ending up unemployed. They're ending up on disability. They're ending up leaving the labor force.

.....

Watch the extended version of this roundtable discussion at Silicon Valley's Churchill Club on YouTube.

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

Thursday, December 18, 2014

[NJFAC] safety net helps people to take a job

A Big Safety Net and Strong Job Market Can Coexist. Just Ask Scandinavia. Neil Irwin, NY Times, Dec 18, 2014

It is a simple idea supported by both economic theory and most people's intuition: If welfare benefits are generous and taxes high, fewer people will work. Why bother being industrious, after all, if you can get a check from the government for sitting around — and if your choice to work means that much of your income will end up in the tax collectors' coffers?

Here's the rub, though: The idea may be backward. Some of the highest employment rates in the advanced world are in places with the highest taxes and most generous welfare systems, namely Scandinavian countries. The United States and many other nations with relatively low taxes and a smaller social safety net actually have substantially lower rates of employment.

More People Work in Countries With High Taxes and Generous Welfare

Contrary to what theory might predict, the countries with the highest rates of participation in the labor force tend to have higher taxes and more extensive social welfare spending.

30%

85%

Effective tax rate

Employment rate

Denmark

Germany

Japan

U.K.

United States

Sweden

Norway

In Denmark, someone who enters the labor force at an average salary loses 86 percent of earnings to a combination of taxes and lost eligibility for welfare benefits; that number is only 37 percent in the United States. Yet the percentage of Danes between the ages of 20 and 59 with a job is 10 percentage points higher than in the United States.

In short, more people may work when countries offer public services that directly make working easier, such as subsidized care for children and the old; generous sick leave policies; and cheap and accessible transportation. If the goal is to get more people working, what's important about a social welfare plan may be more about what the money is spent on than how much is spent.

That is the argument that Henrik Jacobsen Kleven, a professor at the London School of Economics, offers to explain the exceptional rates of participation in the work force among citizens of Sweden, Norway and his native Denmark.....

National Jobs for All Coalition

http://www.njfac.org/

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

[NJFAC] The top .1% and the disappearance of good jobs, Lazonick

"The Top .1% and the Disappearing Middle Class" William LAZONICK

ABSTRACT

The ongoing explosion of the incomes of the richest households and the erosion of

middle-class employment opportunities for most of the rest have become

integrally related in the now-normal operation of the U.S. economy.

Since the beginning of the1980s, employment relations in U.S. industrial corporations have undergone three major

structural changes–summarized as "rationalization," "marketization," and "globalization"–

that have permanently eliminated middle-class jobs in the United States. From the

early 1980s, rationalization, characterized by plant closings, terminated the jobs of high-

school educated blue-collar workers, most of them well-paid union members.

From the early 1990s, marketization, characterized by the end of a career with one company as

an employment norm, placed the job security of middle-aged white-collar workers, many

of them college educated, in jeopardy.

From the early 2000s, globalization, characterized by the movement of employment offshore to
lower-wage nations, left all members of the U.S. labor force, whatever their educational credentials and work

experience, vulnerable to displacement. Initially, these structural changes in employment

could be justified as business responses to changes in technologies, markets, and

competition. Once U.S. corporations transformed their employment relations, however,

they often pursued rationalization, marketization, and globalization to cut current costs

rather than to reposition themselves to produce competitive products. Defining

superior corporate performance as ever-higher quarterly earnings per share, companies turned to

massive stock repurchases to "manage" their own corporations' stock prices. Trillions of

dollars that could have been spent on innovation and job creation in the U.S. economy

over the past three decades have instead been used to buy back stock for the purpose

of manipulating stock prices. Legitimizing this financialized mode of corporate resource

allocation has been the ideology, itself a product of the 1980s and 1990s, that a

business corporation should be run to "maximize shareholder value."

Through their stock options and stock awards, corporate executives who make these

resource-allocation decisions are themselves prime beneficiaries of the focus on rising stock

prices as the sole measure of corporate performance. While rationalization,

marketization, and globalization undermined stable and remunerative employment

structures, the "financialization" of the U.S. corporation entailed the distribution of

corporate cash to shareholders through stock repurchases, often in addition to

generous cash dividends, and, incentivizing these distributions, the stock-based

remuneration of top corporate executives.

In this essay, I review evidence on the fundamental structural changes

related to rationalization, marketization, and globalization that, since the early

1980s, have eroded U.S. middle-class employment opportunities. Then,

I analyze how, in many different ways and in many different industries, this financialized mode of

corporate resource allocation has undermined the prosperity of the U.S. economy.

I go on to show how justified by the ideology that companies should be run

to "maximize shareholder value", this financialized behavior boosts the remuneration of top corporate

executives, providing a major explanation for the increasing concentration of income

among the top 0.1% of U.S. households that is, through the very way it is achieved,

based on the systemic destruction of middle-class employment opportunities

available to Americans.

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