Re: underemployment
Jim Devine wrote, ... It's bad for the left for there to be a bunch of disaffected educated people who can't get decent jobs who join the obscurantist right. Maybe we can draw them into our camp, but in order to do so, we have to pay attention to them. ... we need to increase the demand for educated people. What is an educated person? What is a decent job? Why would an educated person join the obscurantist right? Where is our camp? How does one pay attention? What does it mean to increase the demand for educated people? How does one do that? Who is the we that needs to do it?
RE: Re: underemployment
Title: RE: [PEN-L:29450] Re: underemployment I wrote: ... It's bad for the left for there to be a bunch of disaffected educated people who can't get decent jobs who join the obscurantist right. Maybe we can draw them into our camp, but in order to do so, we have to pay attention to them. ... we need to increase the demand for educated people. Tom W. writes: What is an educated person? As with the article under discussion, I was using the usual, credentialist, definition, even though I know from experience that folks with high degrees are often ignorant and/or stupid. It's the usual definition that is relevant to the issue of people getting Ph.D.s and then being unable to find a job in their home country (e.g., England as in the article or Egypt as in my reference). What is a decent job? Again, this is something that can't be defined abstractly by a theorist in his or her office. It's socially defined: most people define it in terms of job security, decent health care benefits, adequate wages, etc. (in the primary labor market), which are themselves defined socially. In England or Egypt, people who have advanced degrees know when they don't have decent jobs, i.e., when they're under-employed. (Academics can't measure under-employment, while it seems very subjective and thus fuzzy and to be avoided by those social scientists with physics envy, but it's a real phenomenon for those who suffer from it, as with Ph.D.s driving cab because there are no jobs teaching philosophy.) Why would an educated person join the obscurantist right? Why would William Shockley, co-inventor of the transistor and a co-winner of a Nobel Prize, embrace the genetic-determinist theory of IQ and all sorts of racist nonsense? Again, just because one's socially-defined as educated doesn't guarantee knowledge outside one's specialty and/or intelligence and/or sanity. Throw in social stressors such as under-employment, and the bigotry is more likely to come out. (When the Ayatollahs took over, one of the members of my department (a highly educated man) took his entire family back to Iran, because he wanted his wife and kids to obey him. Or least I am told, since this occurred before I worked here.) Where is our camp? the left's camp is obviously very small and divided. Please don't remind me. (BTW, I was using the word camp as a metaphor.) How does one pay attention? using reading and other ways of inputting information, by thinking about it. If possible, by doing something about it. (For a country like Egypt, I argue that education resources should be going for literacy more than for producing more high-level credentials.) What does it mean to increase the demand for educated people? How does one do that? If educated people are defined as having exalted credentials, it's obvious that raising the demand for them involves more government efforts to do research on science and the like, to provide public services such as medical care, to provide education itself, etc. If there are more folks with basic education, this indirectly helps create a demand for highly credentialed folks. Who is the we that needs to do it? The government, but of course it won't do so unless there are large numbers of people pressuring it to do so. In a country like Egypt, the focus on elite education is a result of the power of the richer classes. This needs to be counteracted. Jim
Re: RE: Re: underemployment
Devine, James wrote: What does it mean to increase the demand for educated people? How does one do that? If educated people are defined as having exalted credentials, it's obvious that raising the demand for them involves more government efforts to do research on science and the like, to provide public services such as medical care, to provide education itself, etc. If there are more folks with basic education, this indirectly helps create a demand for highly credentialed folks. A project such as the WPA is as utopian under present circumstances as would be the demand for Communism (advanced) by 3:00 a.m. tomorrow. Nevertheless, the principle of the WPA -- create the job that fits what the applicant has to offer -- would be the core answer to this need. All those people who can't read or can't read well and all those brillian Ad agency types who ought to be unemployed: mix them together. And I bet some math Ph.D.s driving taxis (some were in the late '60s) would be delighted, were condtions right, to run a _real_ head start program. Hah! :-/ Carrol
RE: underemployment?
Title: RE: [PEN-L:29425] underemployment? We have to watch this. One fuel for Al Quaida, I believe, was the existence of a bunch of underemployed college grads in Egypt and Saudi Arabia... Jim -Original Message- From: Ian Murray To: pen-l Sent: 8/13/2002 8:00 PM Subject: [PEN-L:29425] underemployment? Down the brain drain Too many graduates are chasing too few high-skill jobs. Is the government's plan to increase the number of university places sensible? Simon Parker Wednesday August 14, 2002 The Guardian Remember the one about the three students? The science graduate asks, Why does it work? The engineer asks, How does it work? And the student with a 2:1 in English literature asks, Do you want fries with that? That joke is wearing thinner than ever. New research suggests that England might reach a point where its universities and colleges will be pumping out more highly skilled workers than the country's economy knows what to do with, leading to underemployment and economic exclusion for some. Findings from Local Futures, an independent thinktank, show that the proportion of the workforce with degrees and other high-level qualifications is growing far faster than the number of jobs being created in the so-called knowledge economy. Expanding this group of graduate-intensive industries, including cultural, business and financial services, education and science-based businesses, is one of the holy grails of government policy. Ministers want to see more people going to university and coming out with qualifications that suit the demands of the knowledge economy. By 2010 Margaret Hodge, the higher education minister, wants 50% of under-30s to take a degree - seven times the proportion in the 1960s. But the Local Futures research questions whether we need so many graduates. The thinktank analysed the skills profiles of the nine English regions and found that even in Greater London, the hub of these much-hyped, knowledge-driven industries, the number of high-skilled jobs is failing to keep pace with rising qualifications. Between 1994-2000, a period of healthier economic growth, the proportion of workers in the capital who had a degree or equivalent rose by over 22%. The number of jobs in the most graduate-intensive industries - those whose workforce contains at least 40% high-skilled workers - rose at little more than a fifth of that rate. The number of jobs in sectors that employ an above average number of graduates (25%-40%), including nurses, actually fell by more than 10%. The mismatch is repeated around the country. As a whole, the British graduate labour pool grew by 23% between 94-00, while knowledge intensive industries raised their share of national employment from 48% to 50%, an increase of less than 5%. In the north-east, an area with a relatively poorly developed knowledge economy, the proportion of the workforce with graduate-level qualifications rose by 17.5% between 94-00. In the same period, the number of jobs in the most graduate-intensive industries rose by only 1.6%. Mike Collier, the chief executive of the area's regional development agency, admits: It's been a persistent issue in the region. For many years we've created more graduates than can be absorbed in our own economy. The brain drain from the regions to London and its surrounding counties has accelerated. This is happening to the extent that the government wants to build at least 43,000 houses in the south-east every year until 2016. This migration contributes to London's well-publicised house price inflation and pushes key public sector workers, who often have intermediate skills levels, out of the market. But London faces more serious social problems than that. The capital's workforce has become polarised between the skills haves and have-nots. In 2000, when roughly a third of the capital's resident workforce had degree-level qualifications, another third struggled to secure a C grade GCSE pass. Fortunately, the long-term trends show that skills poverty is decreasing, but this still leaves a huge group being excluded from the affluent and expensive London being created by their well-educated counterparts. Mark Hepworth, the director of Local Futures, highlights a Dickensian gap between the relatively highly skilled white workers of south London, with an employment rate of around 80%, and the poorly skilled Pakistanis and Banglandeshis of the East End, who have an employment rate of under half that figure. Older workers could also be excluded. Across Great Britain, those aged between 45-64 are employed in significantly fewer knowledge-intensive industries than those aged 25-44. This at a time when a looming pensions crisis means the elderly might have to compete with their younger counterparts long after traditional retirement age. Does the government's target of 50% make any sense in economic terms? Many think not. In a recent report, the Institute of Directors described the plans
Re: RE: underemployment?
"Devine, James" wrote: We have to watch this. One fuel for Al Quaida, I believe, was the existence of a bunch of underemployed college grads in Egypt and Saudi Arabia... Jim Are we watching this for Ashcroft? What's that 800 number again? What do you mean by "watching this"? When Reagan was governor of California he was worried about this problem, and education took a hit. Do you propose the same? Don't educate and we'll be safe? What about the severe shortage of educated labor I've read about for the past ten years? Employers couldn't fill jobs with qualified people, or so they (always) claim. I remember reading when I was a kid about the frightening threat to the USA that the shortage of machinists posed. Gene Coyle -Original Message- From: Ian Murray To: pen-l Sent: 8/13/2002 8:00 PM Subject: [PEN-L:29425] underemployment? Down the brain drain Too many graduates are chasing too few high-skill jobs. Is the government's plan to increase the number of university places sensible? Simon Parker Wednesday August 14, 2002 The Guardian Remember the one about the three students? The science graduate asks, "Why does it work?" The engineer asks, "How does it work?" And the student with a 2:1 in English literature asks, "Do you want fries with that?" That joke is wearing thinner than ever. New research suggests that England might reach a point where its universities and colleges will be pumping out more highly skilled workers than the country's economy knows what to do with, leading to underemployment and economic exclusion for some. Findings from Local Futures, an independent thinktank, show that the proportion of the workforce with degrees and other high-level qualifications is growing far faster than the number of jobs being created in the so-called "knowledge economy". Expanding this group of graduate-intensive industries, including cultural, business and financial services, education and science-based businesses, is one of the holy grails of government policy. Ministers want to see more people going to university and coming out with qualifications that suit the demands of the knowledge economy. By 2010 Margaret Hodge, the higher education minister, wants 50% of under-30s to take a degree - seven times the proportion in the 1960s. But the Local Futures research questions whether we need so many graduates. The thinktank analysed the skills profiles of the nine English regions and found that even in Greater London, the hub of these much-hyped, knowledge-driven industries, the number of high-skilled jobs is failing to keep pace with rising qualifications. Between 1994-2000, a period of healthier economic growth, the proportion of workers in the capital who had a degree or equivalent rose by over 22%. The number of jobs in the most graduate-intensive industries - those whose workforce contains at least 40% high-skilled workers - rose at little more than a fifth of that rate. The number of jobs in sectors that employ an "above average" number of graduates (25%-40%), including nurses, actually fell by more than 10%. The mismatch is repeated around the country. As a whole, the British graduate labour pool grew by 23% between 94-00, while knowledge intensive industries raised their share of national employment from 48% to 50%, an increase of less than 5%. In the north-east, an area with a relatively poorly developed knowledge economy, the proportion of the workforce with graduate-level qualifications rose by 17.5% between 94-00. In the same period, the number of jobs in the most graduate-intensive industries rose by only 1.6%. Mike Collier, the chief executive of the area's regional development agency, admits: "It's been a persistent issue in the region. For many years we've created more graduates than can be absorbed in our own economy." The brain drain from the regions to London and its surrounding counties has accelerated. This is happening to the extent that the government wants to build at least 43,000 houses in the south-east every year until 2016. This migration contributes to London's well-publicised house price inflation and pushes key public sector workers, who often have intermediate skills levels, out of the market. But London faces more serious social problems than that. The capital's workforce has become polarised between the skills haves and have-nots. In 2000, when roughly a third of the capital's resident workforce had degree-level qualifications, another third struggled to secure a C grade GCSE pass. Fortunately, the long-term trends show that skills poverty is decreasing, but this still leaves a huge group being excluded from the affluent and expensive London being created by their well-educated counterparts. Mark Hepworth, the director of Local Futures, highlights a "Dickensian" gap between the relatively highly skilled white workers of south London, with an employment rate of around 80%, and th
RE: Re: RE: underemployment?
Title: RE: [PEN-L:29441] Re: RE: underemployment? I wrote: We have to watch this. One fuel for Al Quaida, I believe, was the existence of a bunch of underemployed college grads in Egypt and Saudi Arabia... Gene asks:Are we watching this for Ashcroft? What's that 800 number again? no, for the left's sake. It's bad for the left for there to be a bunch of disaffected educated people who can't get decent jobs who join the obscurantist right. Maybe we can draw them into our camp, but in order to do so, we have to pay attention to them. What do you mean by watching this? When Reagan was governor of California he was worried about this problem, and education took a hit. Do you propose the same? Don't educate and we'll be safe? no, we need to increase the demand for educated people. For poor countries, however, education resources should be going into basic education instead of elite education. Come to think of, it we need many more resources in basic education here in the US of A. These California kids can't read. Hopefully that doesn't mean fewer funds for higher education -- i.e., my salary -- but the US educational situation is becoming like that of an underdeveloped country. What about the severe shortage of educated labor I've read about for the past ten years? Employers couldn't fill jobs with qualified people, or so they (always) claim. the article was about England, while you're referring to the US. Jim
underemployment?
Down the brain drain Too many graduates are chasing too few high-skill jobs. Is the government's plan to increase the number of university places sensible? Simon Parker Wednesday August 14, 2002 The Guardian Remember the one about the three students? The science graduate asks, Why does it work? The engineer asks, How does it work? And the student with a 2:1 in English literature asks, Do you want fries with that? That joke is wearing thinner than ever. New research suggests that England might reach a point where its universities and colleges will be pumping out more highly skilled workers than the country's economy knows what to do with, leading to underemployment and economic exclusion for some. Findings from Local Futures, an independent thinktank, show that the proportion of the workforce with degrees and other high-level qualifications is growing far faster than the number of jobs being created in the so-called knowledge economy. Expanding this group of graduate-intensive industries, including cultural, business and financial services, education and science-based businesses, is one of the holy grails of government policy. Ministers want to see more people going to university and coming out with qualifications that suit the demands of the knowledge economy. By 2010 Margaret Hodge, the higher education minister, wants 50% of under-30s to take a degree - seven times the proportion in the 1960s. But the Local Futures research questions whether we need so many graduates. The thinktank analysed the skills profiles of the nine English regions and found that even in Greater London, the hub of these much-hyped, knowledge-driven industries, the number of high-skilled jobs is failing to keep pace with rising qualifications. Between 1994-2000, a period of healthier economic growth, the proportion of workers in the capital who had a degree or equivalent rose by over 22%. The number of jobs in the most graduate-intensive industries - those whose workforce contains at least 40% high-skilled workers - rose at little more than a fifth of that rate. The number of jobs in sectors that employ an above average number of graduates (25%-40%), including nurses, actually fell by more than 10%. The mismatch is repeated around the country. As a whole, the British graduate labour pool grew by 23% between 94-00, while knowledge intensive industries raised their share of national employment from 48% to 50%, an increase of less than 5%. In the north-east, an area with a relatively poorly developed knowledge economy, the proportion of the workforce with graduate-level qualifications rose by 17.5% between 94-00. In the same period, the number of jobs in the most graduate-intensive industries rose by only 1.6%. Mike Collier, the chief executive of the area's regional development agency, admits: It's been a persistent issue in the region. For many years we've created more graduates than can be absorbed in our own economy. The brain drain from the regions to London and its surrounding counties has accelerated. This is happening to the extent that the government wants to build at least 43,000 houses in the south-east every year until 2016. This migration contributes to London's well-publicised house price inflation and pushes key public sector workers, who often have intermediate skills levels, out of the market. But London faces more serious social problems than that. The capital's workforce has become polarised between the skills haves and have-nots. In 2000, when roughly a third of the capital's resident workforce had degree-level qualifications, another third struggled to secure a C grade GCSE pass. Fortunately, the long-term trends show that skills poverty is decreasing, but this still leaves a huge group being excluded from the affluent and expensive London being created by their well-educated counterparts. Mark Hepworth, the director of Local Futures, highlights a Dickensian gap between the relatively highly skilled white workers of south London, with an employment rate of around 80%, and the poorly skilled Pakistanis and Banglandeshis of the East End, who have an employment rate of under half that figure. Older workers could also be excluded. Across Great Britain, those aged between 45-64 are employed in significantly fewer knowledge-intensive industries than those aged 25-44. This at a time when a looming pensions crisis means the elderly might have to compete with their younger counterparts long after traditional retirement age. Does the government's target of 50% make any sense in economic terms? Many think not. In a recent report, the Institute of Directors described the plans as ludicrous. They want to turn the clock back to the 1970s, with 15-20% of people going to university and many of the others going into tough vocational apprenticeships. The IoD's Ruth Lea said: The current obsession with sending as many young people as possible into higher education
[PEN-L:606] Re: Query on underemployment
Doug Henwood wrote, I talked to a guy at the BLS once who basically said - in more polite bureacratic language - that they don't count underemployment because they have no way to measure what its opposite would be, just-right employment or whatever you want to call it. A cellist might feel underemployed driving a taxi, but she may be a crappy cellist. This is an extremely interesting -- and tendentious -- interpretation. What the guy at the BLS implied then is that the employment/unemployment dichotomy is, BY CONTRAST, relatively clear cut. This apparent obviousness of the employment/unemployment dichotomy is achieved by sleight of hand. The employment/unemployment pair is only "unambiguous" in comparison to a supposedly "more ambiguous" concept of underemployment. Underemployment is more ambiguous because it has no opposite. But employment is only the "opposite" of unemployment because we have prima facie disallowed the concept of underemployment. In other words, the whole rigamarole of ambiguity and unambiguity is the result of an arbitrary and self-justifying set of definitions. The lousy cellist may be an even lousier taxi driver. A better taxi driver may be playing even worse cello in the philharmonic. The guy from the BLS may be a superb cellist, taxi-driver and statistician who is underemployed because -- instead of crunching numbers all day long -- he should be driving taxi in the morning, crunching numbers in the afternoon and playing cello in the evening. Regards, Tom Walker ^^^ #408 1035 Pacific St. Vancouver, B.C. V6E 4G7 [EMAIL PROTECTED] (604) 669-3286 ^^^ The TimeWork Web: http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/
[PEN-L:604] Re: Re: Re: Query on underemployment
I talked to a guy at the BLS once who basically said - in more polite bureacratic language - that they don't count underemployment because they have no way to measure what its opposite would be, just-right employment or whatever you want to call it. A cellist might feel underemployed driving a taxi, but she may be a crappy cellist. Doug
[PEN-L:601] re underemployment
This is something re unemployment that the Baltimore Sun published back when George Bush was still President. Maybe I was too critical -- those folks in prison are all getting their Ph. D.s at the expense of those who played by the rules. (Who talks about playing by the rules?) Gene Coyle The Army, a job or prison for young black men? by Eugene P. Coyle The terrible job market black men face was brought into public focus by the war in the Persian Gulf. 25% of the US military force in the Gulf are blacks,1 a rate double the black share of the population. Explanations for this range from the "patriotism" asserted by President Bush to the liberals' claim that it is " their only chance for advancement." Neither explanation is credible when we look at the facts. For most black enlistees military service is their only chance for a job, never mind advancement. The brutal truth is that for many it may be their only chance for survival outside of prison. The 1990 unemployment rate for African American males aged 20 to 24 years was 20.2%.2 (The comparable rate for whites was 8.1%.) The official unemployment statistics would be dreadful enough, but the numbers hide the reality these men face. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) definitions of unemployment are notorious for understating by half-- for whites as well as blacks -- the real extent of the hardship in finding jobs. For African Americans another factor conceals how desperate the situation is: an astonishing 12% of those men in their twenties and not in the military are in jail or prison.3 It is reasonable to say that the policy during the Reagan-Bush years is to warehouse black unemployed men in prisons, rather than to run the economy in a way that would put people to work. A straightforward calculation of black men in the prime work years of 20 - 24 shows that the number unemployed is more than 30% higher than the reported BLS figures. Historically the growth in the prison population has been 2.2% per year.4 But during the Reagan-Bush decade the inmate population grew by 10.3% annually, to about a million and a quarter, including about 558,000 black men. If the historical growth had continued in the '80's, about 300,000 fewer black men would have been incarcerated in 1990. If men in the community can't find jobs, it is clear that no jobs are available for the men now in prison. Adding the portion of the "extra" black males in the 20 - 24 age bracket to the officially unemployed raises that group's unemployment rate to 26.4%. This still significantly understates the misery. Both white and black unemployment is minimized by the BLS statistics. Not counted as unemployed are those not looking for work, realistically believing there is none to be found. Not counted are those preferring to be called retired rather than unemployed, though they'd jump at a chance to re-enter the work force. These are predominantly middle-aged white men, involuntarily disappearing from the labor force. Part-timers wanting full time jobs, even those working as little as one hour in a week, are called employed, not unemployed.The homeless don't and can't enter the statistics at all, because the BLS samples at randomly picked homes. It is likely that the homeless are unemployed at a rate higher than the housed. The BLS itself makes alternative calculations to measure some of these omissions. The data for BLS adjustments are not disaggregated by race and age, so that a strict comparison can't be made. It is clear, however, that reflecting all the unemployed young black men of an age to start careers and families, men who would work if it were available, would boost unemployment rate for the 20 to 24 year olds to the neighborhood of 30% or more. Keep in mind, furthermore, that the unemployment numbers here are chronic, raised only slightly by the current recession. Against this background to call African American military enlistments "voluntary" is to encourage self-deception in the rest of us. An American President who explains a racially distorted enlistment rate by calling it "patriotism" is a President betraying men he sent to the front lines. A government spending over 1.1 billion dollars a year* building prisons while simultaneously running the economy in a way that fills the prisons and not jobs is a government not fit to lead. An economy unable to employ its people is sick, but not as sick as a government that hides that fact behind prison walls. 1 NY Times, 2/26/91, Andrew Rosenthal, citing Defense Dept. Statistics. 2 Employment And Earnings, January 1991, U. S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Table 3, page 166. 3 Calculation by the author. See worksheets. 4 Calculated from Historical Statistics on Prisoners in State and Federal Institutions, Yearend 1925-86, U. S. Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics. 1925-1980 compound
[PEN-L:595] Re: Re: Query on underemployment
Dear June: Many thanks! Both underemployment and subemployment categories not only are measurement problems, but more important, political problems--governments are not pleased to acknowledge higher unemployment. I'd be interested to know about the disagreements you mention. Agreed completely. Here "unemployment" is very low, aourn 4-5%. "Underemployment", as we are estimating it, runs high. We did a nifty coversion to suggest how much "unemployment" all that "underemployment" might actually represent, and came up with about 30%! Details later, as we prepare the results. Tom Tom Kruse / Casilla 5812 / Cochabamba, Bolivia Tel/Fax: (591-4) 248242 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:572] Query on underemployment
Todya I read: Labor statisticians from around the world meeting in Geneva agree on new global standards for reporting income from employment and on-the-job injuries. The statisticians had more difficulty, however, in dealing with a new proposal for measuring underemployment, with officials from the United States and other industrialized regions failing to come to an agreement with developing country representatives on how to define the term. Anybody out there have any papers, books, citations on how underemployment is measured, the controversies, etc.? ANYTHING would be greatly appreciated (the nearest reaserach library of any value is in Santiago, about 6 hours and $500 from here). Tom Tom Kruse / Casilla 5812 / Cochabamba, Bolivia Tel/Fax: (591-4) 248242 Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
