Tag Archives: jobs

Decrease in office romances

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Businessweek suggests that office romances are on the decline because of a confluence of lawsuits and third party discrimination claims, which may be linked to pressures from the current recession. But there are those who argue that such romances are actually good for productivity and for businesses:

A once-amorous workforce already seems to be feeling the effects. This February, 75 percent of U.S. workers surveyed by job search website Monster.com (MWW) believed a workplace relationship could bring a conflict. Sixty-two percent said they felt office romances were a distraction from job performance. Careerbuilder.com’s annual Valentine’s Day romance poll has shown an alarming decline in reported office trysts. In 2006, 50 percent of respondents claimed to have partaken in a workplace relationship during their career. Earlier this year, the number dropped to 37 percent.

This is disturbing news not only for employees but also for their bosses. Some management experts believe that a workplace fling can “greatly increase something called ‘engagement,’ ” says Stephanie Losee, co-author of Office Mate, a guide to finding love in the workplace. “That’s when you’re excited to come in and work and you care about your company.” For these reasons, National Public Radio, Princeton Review (REVU), Pixar (DIS), and Southwest Airlines (LUV) encourage in-house matchmaking. Frederick S. Lane III, author of The Naked Employee, argues that co-worker couples spend more time at work, take fewer sick days, and are less likely to quit.

So if office romance is down due to economic pressures, are people now building romantic relationships elsewhere? Or are people just less likely to pursue romantic relationships when economic instability is present?

Additionally, I don’t envy managers who have to look out for and monitor such relationships. Such situations seem ripe for Michael Scott-type awkwardness.

An interactive look at job loss by sector

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The Wall Street Journal features an interactive timeline that shows job growth and loss by sector for each month since December 2007. The big losers: construction, manufacturing, retail, and business services. The winners (and only three sectors experienced job growth): health care, education, and federal and state government.

h/t Instapundit

Job outlook: either high-paying or low-paying, few in between

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Perhaps adding to the bleak economic outlook, some economists are suggesting that future jobs will fall into two categories: high-paying or low-paying with few jobs in the middle.

This would have implications for the size of different classes within the United States. To have a high-paying job, employees will generally need higher-education or specialized degrees. Having a service job means struggling to make ends meet. In this scenario, what kinds of industries or sectors might provide more middle-class jobs?

Male/female wage gap reversed for “unmarried, childless women under 30 who live in cities”

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The gap between male and female earnings has been a persistent feature in American society for decades. However, recent research suggests that a certain group of women are now outearning men:

[A]ccording to a new analysis of 2,000 communities by a market research company, in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group. In two cities, Atlanta and Memphis, those women are making about 20% more. This squares with earlier research from Queens College, New York, that had suggested that this was happening in major metropolises.

Here’s the slightly deflating caveat: this reverse gender gap, as it’s known, applies only to unmarried, childless women under 30 who live in cities. The rest of working women — even those of the same age, but who are married or don’t live in a major metropolitan area — are still on the less scenic side of the wage divide.
The article discusses the main causal factors identified by authors: “a growing knowledge-based economy, the decline of a manufacturing base and an increasing minority population.”
At first glance, this may not be that surprising considering the number of women enrolling in and earning degrees at college. Additionally, the restructuring of the American economy away from manufacturing jobs and toward a service/knowledge economy has hit male dominated fields hard.
This bears watching.

Decrease in illegal immigration between 2007 and 2009

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Based on data from the US Census Bureau, a new report from the Pew Hispanic Center says illegal immigration has recently dropped with a 67% decrease for the years 2007 and 2009 (about 300,000 people a year) compared to the years 2000 to 2005 (about 850,000 people a year).

A Washington Post piece explores the reasons for the decline:

Douglas Massey, a Princeton University sociologist who studies migration, said the recession and lack of jobs are major factors in the decline of those entering the country illegally.

The unemployment rate for unauthorized immigrants is 10.4 percent higher than that of either U.S.-born residents or legal immigrants, the Pew report said.

Massey said other likely reasons for the decline include an increase in law enforcement and deportations, and enactment of stricter legislation against illegal immigrants. He also pointed to more guest-worker spots, from 104,000 in 2000 to 302,000 in 2009 — allowing more immigrants to come to the United States legally.

While these results are open to some interpretation (the article includes several perspectives), the economic situation has to play a big role. For all immigrants, a weaker American economy likely has a big impact on decisions about whether to come to the United States. Without plentiful jobs, the “land of opportunity” has less to offer.

One way to help assess the impact of economics on illegal immigration would be to see whether immigration of all kinds is down over this same time period.

Predicting working class job growth

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Richard Florida (of The Rise of the Creative Class fame) writes at Atlantic.com about where working class jobs will increase in the future.

The largest metro areas are expected to have the greatest amount of blue-collar job growth. Why these places are expected to have this kind of growth is left unexplained.

Overall, Florida describes the situation:

The good news is that the U.S. will continue to create relatively high-paying working class jobs. These jobs will continue to provide good livelihoods for the workers fortunate enough to have them. The bad news is that their rate of growth will be sluggish and not nearly enough to provide the amount of good, family-supporting jobs required to undergird a middle class of lower-skilled workers.

Takeaway: there will be some good blue collar jobs in the future – but they will be limited.

The impact of war on veteran’s job prospects

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While time spent in the military can be cast as a good stepping stone to a career or an education, a new study in American Sociological Review argues that veterans who spent time in combat had damaged job prospects for the rest of their lives.

According to Businessweek:

“Veterans who saw combat started their work lives at a relative disadvantage that they were unable to overcome. Soldiers exposed to combat were more likely than non-combat veterans to be disabled and unemployed in their mid-20s and to remain so throughout their worklife,” Alair MacLean, an assistant professor in the sociology department at Washington State University Vancouver, said in an American Sociological Association news release.

MacLean and colleagues analyzed data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a long-term survey of individuals and families conducted annually since 1968. The researchers focused on veterans and non-veterans who would have been between the ages of 25 and 55 in any year between 1968 and 2003…

Combat veterans had higher rates of employment than the other groups in the initial years included in the study but had significantly higher levels of unemployment in most years after 1975.

All in all, evidence of the toll war can exact from those who fight it.

Matching workers to job slots in the American economy

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In economic times like the United States is in now, it would seem logical that all open jobs would attract workers. But this is not the case, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal. Economic changes have “created a glut of people who can’t qualify for highly skilled jobs but have a hard time adjusting to low-pay, unskilled work.”

One way to think of the job market is a process where workers are matched with job slots. If the workers change or the job slots change, the system can get out of whack. From the article:

Matching people with available jobs is always difficult after a recession as the economy remakes itself. But Labor Department data suggest the disconnect is particularly acute this time around. Since the economy bottomed out in mid-2009, the number of job openings has risen more than twice as fast as actual hires, a gap that didn’t appear until much later in the last recovery. The disparity is most notable in manufacturing, which has had among the biggest increases in openings. But it is also appearing in other areas, such as business services, education and health care.

If the job market were working normally—that is, if openings were getting filled as they usually do—the U.S. should have about five million more gainfully employed people than it does, estimates David Altig, research director at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. That would correspond to an unemployment rate of 6.8%, instead of 9.5%.

So it is not as easy turning around the economy by simply creating jobs – there also have to be workers to fill these slots. This is a process that involves workers acquiring particular educations and skills and employers shifting their expectations for employees to take advantage of who may be available to work at that time.

Stress and social hierarchy

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The latest issue of Wired has a fascinating article about stress. In addition to its effect on our physical bodies, the articles examines how stress is produced from being part of a social hierarchy. According to some studies cited in the article, being at the bottom of a social ladder produces harmful stress. This is not just because of the work but because those at the bottom have less control over their work. Those who we might consider to have “high-stress jobs,” such as doctors or lawyers, don’t feel the same negative effects of this stress since they have more control over their daily activities. Those working low-trust jobs, particularly in bureaucratic organizations, have higher death rates than those at the top, even controlling for other factors.

Apparently, the article is not available online but you can read some of the opening here on a Wired blog.

Searching for skilled factory workers

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The New York Times reports on a problem for some factories: finding workers that have enough skills to operate more complicated machinery. An anecdote from a company outside Cleveland illustrates the issue:

All candidates at Ben Venue must pass a basic skills test showing they can read and understand math at a ninth-grade level. A significant portion of recent applicants failed, and the company has been disappointed by the quality of graduates from local training programs. It is now struggling to fill 100 positions.

“You would think in tough economic times that you would have your pick of people,” said Thomas J. Murphy, chief executive of Ben Venue.

Many factory jobs today aren’t just manual labor jobs. An education is not just for office jobs; it is helpful or required for most sectors of the economy.