Arthur,
At 20:19 31/08/2010 -0400, you wrote:
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This has been going on for some time, but the NY Times is just beginning
to acknowledge the 2 tier society.
Yes, this is the true situation which has been going on since about the
mid-1980s, together with other collateral events (e.g. massive growth in
credit and subsequent debt, massive growth in derivatives as pseudo money,
massive growth in government debt, no more uniquely new consumer goods to
drive Western economic growth, deepening lack of credibility of politicians
[and "growth economists" for that matter!] by the public, dramatic dive in
births to less than replacement level). All this bespeaks a major
running-down of the industrial-consumer revolution and Western urbanized
society as we have known it for the past 250 years or so.
Keith
Arthur
===============================
August 31, 2010 NY Times
New Job Means Lower Wages for Many
By
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/l/michael_luo/index.html?inline=nyt-per>MICHAEL
LUO
Correction Appended
After being out of work for more than a year, Donna Ings, 47, finally
landed a job in February as a home health aide with a company in
Lexington, Mass., earning about $10 an hour.
Chelsea Nelson, 21, started two weeks ago as a waitress at a truck stop in
Mountainburg, Ark., making around $7 or $8 an hour, depending on tips,
ending a lengthy job search that took her young family to California and back.
Both are ostensibly economic success stories, people who were able to find
work in a difficult labor market. Ms. Ingss employer,
<http://www.homeinstead.com/home.aspx>Home Instead Senior Care, a company
with franchises across the country, has been expanding assertively. Ms.
Nelsons restaurant, Silver Bridge Truck Stop, recently reopened and hired
about 20 people last month in an area thirsty for jobs.
Both women, however, took large pay cuts from their old jobs Ms. Ings
worked for a wholesale tuxedo distributor, Ms. Nelson was a secretary. And
both remain worried about how they will make ends meet in the long run.
With the country focused on job growth and with unemployment continuing to
hover above 9 percent, comparatively little attention has been paid to the
quality of the jobs being created and what that might say about the
opportunities available to workers when the recession finally settles.
There are reasons for concern, however, even in the early stages of a
tentative recovery that now appears to be barely wheezing along.
For years, long before the recession began, job growth had become
increasingly polarized in this country. High-paid occupations that require
significant amounts of education and training grew rapidly alongside
low-wage, service-type jobs that do not, according to David Autor, a labor
economist at the
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/massachusetts_institute_of_technology/index.html?inline=nyt-org>Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
The growth of these low-wage jobs began in the 1980s, accelerated in the
1990s and began to really take off in the 2000s. Losing out in the
shuffle, Dr. Autor said, were jobs that he described as middle-skill,
middle-wageentry-level white-collar positions, like office and
administrative support work, and certain blue-collar jobs, like assembly
line workers and machine operators.
The recession appears to have magnified that trend, Dr. Autor wrote in a
<http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/04/pdf/job_polarization.pdf>recent
paper, released jointly by the <http://www.americanprogress.org/>Center
for American Progress, a left-leaning policy group, and the
<http://www.brookings.edu/projects/hamiltonproject/About-Us.aspx>Hamilton
Project, which has a more centrist reputation. From 2007 to 2009, the
paper said, there was relatively little net change in total employment for
both high-skill and low-skill occupations, while employment plummeted in
so-called middle-skill occupations.
A
<http://www.nelp.org/page/-/Justice/2010/WhereTheJobsAreAugust2010.pdf?nocdn=1>new
analysis by the <http://nelp.org>National Employment Law Project, a
liberal advocacy group, takes a different approach, identifying industries
that have experienced job growth in 2010 and examining their median wages.
It is a blunter measurement because it focuses on whole industries, within
which there is often great diversity in income. Economists also cautioned
that it was still too early to know exactly which sectors would eventually
lead the way in a sustained recovery.
Nevertheless, the law project analysis offers a snapshot of where the
employment growth has been so far. It found that job expansion to this
point had been skewed toward industries with median wages that are low to
middling, with a disproportionate share of job growth happening in
industries whose median wages fell below $15 an hour.
Theres a striking contrast so far between which industries have lost jobs
and which ones are growing,said Annette Bernhardt, policy director for the
law project. If this kind of bottom-heavy job creation continues, it could
pose a real challenge to restoring consumer demand and making sure working
families have a way to support themselves.
Both studies are disquieting because of the potential import for many who
had once scratched out middle-class livings and are now looking for work.
A unifying theme is the stubborn march of labor-intensive, low-paying
service jobs, like the ones Ms. Ings and Ms. Nelson found.
There is typically a downward slide during recessions, said Till von
Wachter, a
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/c/columbia_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>Columbia
University economist, in which higher-skilled and higher-educated workers
are re-employed first, often landing jobs for which they are
overqualified, squeezing out the lesser skilled and lesser educated.
Indeed, in the current downturn, the unemployment rate has climbed the
most for the least-educated workers, suggesting they have been hit the
hardest.
However, while
<http://www.columbia.edu/%7Evw2112/papers/displskills_vonwahandw_30dec09.pdf>researching
workers who lost their jobs in California in the 1990s, Dr. Wachter found
that people who fell in the middle when it came to their educational
background possessing high school degrees or some college and to the
skills required for their occupation tended to experience larger and
longer lasting income losses after job loss than people on both the lower
and higher end of the scale.
Ms. Ings had worked in a variety of office and administrative roles in the
wholesale tuxedo industry. Her wages of just over $16 an hour were enough
to build a relatively comfortable life for her and her daughter, Jillian,
now 21 and in college.
During her whole growing up, I never got child support,Ms. Ings said. I
always had to try to find a job that paid well to help support her. Thats
my job, being a mother.
When Ms. Ings was laid off in March 2009, she dove into finding another
corporate job.But she found that nearly everyone seemed to be looking for
people with at least a college degree, if not more. She had only a high
school diploma.
As a teenager, Ms. Ings had worked in a nursing home and enjoyed it. So,
after getting her certified nursing assistant license, she applied at the
<http://www.homeinstead.com/aboutus/default.aspx>Home Instead office in
Lexington, which has been steadily hiring, said Jack Cross, the franchise
owner. Nationally, the company has created more than 2,400 jobs this year,
and home health aides are one of the countrys fastest growing occupations.
Ms. Ings adores her job, but her finances remain taut, even though she is
working 50 hours a week. She had been without health insurance for her
first few months, but soon the company will begin deducting for it a
further pinch on her already meager paycheck.
Im going to be coming home with nothing,she said.
In Arkansas, Ms. Nelson has been hampered by her decision several years
ago to quit college after a semester. She has worked a variety of jobs,
including a three-year stint as a secretary, earning about $12 an hour.
Last year, she and her husband, Kenneth, and their son, Riley, now almost
2, moved to Colton, Calif., where they had relatives and believed the job
market would be better. They moved back to Arkansas this year, however,
after struggling to find steady work.
He quickly accepted a factory job at $8 an hour, but she got rejection
after rejection trying to find office work.
Ms. Nelson eventually gave up and took up waitressing. The couple is
living with her mother, trying to save enough for their own place.
I dont know, with the jobs we have, if were ever going to be able to make
it on our own,Ms. Nelson said.
============================
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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