Wednesday, August 23, 2017

[NJFAC] The Affordable Care Act as a Job-Creation Program by Frank Stricker

Despite conservative assertions, there is not much evidence that employers decided not to grow their businesses because of the mandate that all but small businesses provide health insurance. Nor does it seem that employers disrupted their organizations by shifting employees from full to part-time to limit the reach of the mandate. There is at least anecdotal evidence that Obamacare made it easier for some people to work as independent entrepreneurs because they did not have to join a large company to get a deal on health insurance.

The big-picture on jobs is that the ACA can be considered as something of a model of a centrist job-creation program. First, it subsidizes useful activities that improve the quality of life for dozens of millions of people. Second, in a saner political atmosphere than the one we inhabit today, the ACA would have broad appeal, even to centrist-conservatives. It does not eliminate private-sector insurers and it includes mandates that were once championed by the extremely conservative Heritage Foundation and by Republican Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts. Third, the left should be happy that the ACA is partly financed by progressive taxes on the wealthy; from the most affluent it takes dollars that may be doing nothing useful and uses them to expand health care access and create new jobs. And that brings us to the fourth point: the ACA gave an already expanding job sector a shot of adrenaline, adding as many as 500,000 health-care jobs.

On the profoundly negative side is the fact that the ACA did nothing to control the costs of health insurance, drugs and medical care. And as a job program the ACA creates many good jobs for nurses and doctors but also many that are not so good. A $15 federal minimum wage would be a good start here and it would help many more people than trying to open a couple of coal mines. Democrats ought to present a program to lift health care workers, control the cost of drugs, and lift the income levels at which families get a subsidy of some kind. Some day the Trumpian dirt and dust might settle. Democrats ought to be ready. They should be broadcasting a strong message about the minimum wage and about useful reforms to Obamacare in preparation for the 2018 elections. Not having much of an economic program did not work in 2016.

Notes: Nelson D. Schwartz and Reed Abelson, "Health Act Repeal Could Threaten Job Engine," New York Times, May 7, 2017, 1, 14; Dan Mangan, "500,000 Jobs Added to Health-Care Sector under Obamacare, Goldman Sachs Estimates," March 23, 2017, accessed 8/5/2017, at cnbc/2017/03/23/500000-jobs-added-to-health-sector-under-obamacare-goldman; and Vann R. Newskirk II, "Repealing Obamacare Could Kill Jobs," The Atlantic, January 10, 2017, accessed 8/5/2017, at theatlantic.com/politics/archive/ 2017/01/obamacare-economic-effects-repeal.

Frank Stricker has just completed What Ails the American Worker? Unemployment and Crummy Jobs: History, Explanations, Solutions. He is a member of NJFAC and Emeritus Professor of History, Labor Studies, and Interdisciplinary Studies, California State University, Dominguez Hills.

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Tuesday, August 8, 2017

[NJFAC] The poor need a good job

The "Success Sequence" Is About Cultural Beefs Not Poverty Matt Bruenig

....

full-time work is responsible for the low-poverty results of the various Success Sequences [Graduate high school; Get a full-time job; Get married before having children] But you don't even need to do that. It's perfectly obvious if you just think about it for a second.

A full-time worker who is paid the $7.25 minimum wage has an annual income of $15,080. If they live alone, the poverty line for their one-person family is $12,486. Since $15,080 is greater than $12,486, no full-time worker who lives alone is in poverty, at least as poverty is measured in the official statistics. What this means is: a person can only be in poverty (1) if they do not work full time or (2) if they live with other people who do not work full time.

If the Success Sequence was not just a vehicle for litigating cultural beefs, what it would really say is that individuals wanting to minimize their risk of poverty should work full time and live alone. Or, if individuals insist on living with others, they should only live with other full-time workers, such as in a double-income-no-kid (DINK) arrangement. Stay away from children, individuals with a work-limiting disability, elderly people, students, unpaid family carers, and those prone to joblessness. If you keep these types of people out of your household and make sure you work full time, you will never be in poverty. That's the truth.

Despite what the Success Sequence says, marriage does not help you except insofar as marrying adds another full-time worker to the family. If it does not do that because the person you are marrying has a disability or some other work limitation, then marriage will actually increase your risk of poverty.

A high school degree does not do much for you either. It might help you get a higher wage, but minimum wage keeps you out of poverty anyways. A minimum wage could leave you in poverty if you have dependents you are caring for (such as children), and in those cases a higher wage driven by a high school degree might pull you out of poverty. But if you have found yourself in a household with dependents, you are already ignoring the most correct wisdom about staying out of poverty, which is to never live with non-workers.

To be clear, I am not actually saying people should pursue a life where they either live alone or only with other full-time workers. My personal view here is that our economic institutions, and especially our welfare state, should be designed to ensure that nobody is in poverty and that people can form the families they would like. But in our current economic system, it is the no-dependent lifestyle described above that actually minimizes your risk of poverty, not the lifestyle envisioned by the Success Sequence.

What About the System?...

the way we have set up the economic system to distribute income in society is a necessary cause of any observed poverty.....

Fifty years from now, conservatives will write op-eds saying the real trick to staying out of poverty is a college degree, cohabitation, and delaying child birth to age 30. No Success Sequence will stay around if it stops describing most middle class lives or if it begins to describe too many poor lives. The goalposts will shift constantly but the conclusion will always remain the same: the poor did this to themselves and the rich should be spared from higher taxes.

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

Tuesday, July 25, 2017

[NJFAC] 80% of US households had stagnant incomes from 2005 to 2012-14

https://www.ft.com/content/1c7270d2-6ae4-11e7-b9c7-15af748b60d0?mhq5j=e3

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

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

[NJFAC] Are Real Wages Finally Taking Off? By Frank Stricker

Are Real Wages Finally Taking Off? By Frank Stricker

Journalists keep searching for an affirmative answer, and sometimes they find a little evidence and sometimes they cannot. What are the facts, measuring real (after-inflation) pay from June to June in recent years? Since 2008, when the Great Recession began, real hourly wages have gone this way: a little jump in 2009, stagnation or decline from 2010 through 2013, and then increases of almost 2% a year until this last year. From June 2016 to June 2017, real average hourly wages increased 0.9%. That's better than falling wages, but surely, at less than 1%, it is nothing to write home about.

And there is so much catching up to do. When we look at the bigger picture, things are about as bad as many people feel they are. Despite recent increases, the average wage for average workers in June of 2017 was about $22 an hour. Not great, not terrible. But dozens of millions of people are below even that so-so level of pay. And the story is worse if we look at the historical evidence. In terms of an hour's worth of purchasing power, the average worker is earning almost exactly what he or she earned in 1972. It's true. No progress for workers in forty-five years. Despite brilliant successes for the minimum wage movement, despite the fact that we are beginning the ninth year of economic recovery, and in part because high income households have been doing very, very well for decades, average workers are right where they were in 1972.

******************************************************************************

Based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, including "Current and real (constant 1982-1984 dollars) earnings for production and nonsupervisory employees on private nonfarm payrolls, seasonally adjusted," and the annual Economic Report of the President, for historical tables including "Hours and Earnings in Private Nonagricultural Industries."

Frank Stricker is on the board of NJFAC and has just written What Ails the American Worker? Unemployment and Crummy Jobs: History, Explanations, and Remedies.

Tuesday, July 4, 2017

[NJFAC] Economics of the populist backlash, Dani Rodrik

Rodrik uses some interesting economic theory to undercut the story that globalization benefits everyone, and those who object to it are misinformed. j
Economics of the populist backlash Dani Rodrik 03 July 2017
....The Stolper-Samuelson theorem assumes very specific conditions. But there is one Stolper-Samuelson-like result that is extremely general, and which can be stated as follows. Under competitive conditions, as long as the importable good(s) continue to be produced at home – that is, ruling out complete specialisation – there is always at least one factor of production that is rendered worse off by the liberalisation of trade. In other words, trade generically produces losers. Redistribution is the flip side of the gains from trade; no pain, no gain.
Economic theory has an additional implication, which is less well recognised. In relative terms, the redistributive effects of liberalisation get larger and tend to swamp the net gains as the trade barriers in question become smaller. The ratio of redistribution to net gains rises as trade liberalisation tackles progressively lower barriers.....

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

Tuesday, June 27, 2017

[NJFAC] Fwd:

Another Way To Subordinate Workers Frank Stricker

There are so many ways that American employees are disempowered today that it is hard to keep up with them. We all know about employer resistance to unionism, inadequate enforcement of labor laws, and employers' threats to move businesses elsewhere if workers don't knuckle under. But there's one gimmick that imprisons a fifth of work force and has received less attention: non-compete clauses.

New employees, sometimes on their first day of work--that is, after they've said good-bye to other job offers--are pressed to agree in writing that they will not take a job with a competitor for a specified number of years. The benevolent interpretation of this is that companies have a right to protect trade secrets. But in fact such contracts make it hard for workers to move with useful work experience and improved general skills--not trade secrets--to other companies or even to start their own businesses. Not all states have non-compete laws, but where they exist they tend to keep employee compensation down. If you cannot try for a better job at another company in your industry, you will have to change lines of work, accept what you get where you work, or dig ditches--unless you are a digger who has signed a non-compete clause. And the latter case is not a joke. These issues are discussed in a long, thoughtful piece by Conor Dougherty at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/13/business/noncompete-clauses.html

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Frank Stricker is on the board of NJFAC and is completing a book entitled What Ails the American Worker? Unemployment and Crummy Jobs: History, Explanations, and Remedies.

Tuesday, June 13, 2017

[NJFAC] Infrastructure proposals include selling off public assets to finance them.

Trump advisers call for privatizing some public assets to build new infrastructure By Michael Laris May 23, 2017 Wash. Post

The Trump administration, determined to overhaul and modernize the nation's infrastructure, is drafting plans to privatize some public assets such as airports, bridges, highway rest stops and other facilities, according to top officials and advisers.

In his proposed budget released Tuesday, President Trump called for spending $200 billion over 10 years to "incentivize" private, state and local spending on infrastructure.

Trump advisers said that to entice state and local governments to sell some of their assets, the administration is considering paying them a bonus. The proceeds of the sales would then go to other infrastructure projects. Australia has pursued a similar policy, which it calls "asset recycling," prompting the 99-year lease of a state-owned electrical grid to pay for improvements to the Sydney Metro, among other projects....

This is a version of a failed Australian experiment. Asset recycling may look new and exciting. But it's the last gasp of a failed model, John Quiggan

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