Tag Archives: jobs

McArdle: real 21st century problem is providing meaningful jobs for all

Posted on by

Megan McArdle considers the recent rioting in Sweden and suggests developed nations have a long-term problem of finding meaningful jobs for all:

In too many places, for too many people, the modern industrialized democracies are not working. People can live, but they are cut off from the broader society. And the number of these people seems to be increasing. It’s too hard for many people to find a decent job. And taking from the rich to buy them health care and day care and subsidized housing does not repair the hole this leaves in their lives.

It looks to me as if the great task of the next few decades will be to find ways to employ all the people on the margins productively, and with dignity. But this is not, mostly, the question that most public policy debates are engaged in addressing. That question is hard, and no one has a good answer, so instead we debate technical questions about stimulus multipliers and minimum wages, and have the occasional knock down, drag out fight about who has a moral right to how much cash. There’s nothing wrong with those debates, and I myself have been a spirited participant. But the harder questions have much more important answers.

Interesting analysis. Simply providing a safety net may not be enough moving forward. Expectations have changed, both for those receiving government or private aid and those providing the aid. People expect to have an opportunity to make decent money as well as pursue something that interests them.

It boils down to this: what happens if you have developed societies with relatively high unemployment, particularly for disadvantages groups, for decades with little change?

h/t Instapundit

More women now sole breadwinner (23%) or earn more of two working spouses (28%)

Posted on by

USA Today takes a look at recent Census data and finds women’s status as breadwinner continues to grow:

A USA TODAY analysis of Census Bureau data reveals a revolution in the traditional roles of men and women that extends from college campuses to the workplace to the neighborhoods across this nation. Today, when one spouse works full-time and the other stays home, it’s the wife who is the sole breadwinner in a record 23% of families, the analysis finds. When the Census started tracking this in 1976, the number was 6%.

Just as telling, wives outearn their husbands 28% of the time when both work, up from 16% 25 years ago. This means the wife is bringing home the bacon — or at least more bacon than her husband — in more than 12 million American families.

Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg (author of Lean In, which explores workplace biases) and Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer (who limited the company’s telecommuting policy) have stirred debate about the complex choices occurring as women push themselves higher and higher up the economic ladder. The earning superiority of women over men isn’t the rule, but it is increasingly common.

This is a consequential shift.

I do think the rest of the article illustrates the difference between journalism and sociology. The article goes on to give 12 brief overviews of couples where the woman is the primary breadwinner. They try to break down a few patterns. However, after seeing these statistics, I want to see more data (12 cases doesn’t cut out) and a more rigorous analysis (more statistics over time, more social forces that these changes affect).

Joel Kotkin links population increases in Sunbelt, Great Plains, and Mountain West with positive business climates

Posted on by

Joel Kotkin argues the recent population growth and population loss in certain regions of the U.S. is related to business climate:

These trends point to a U.S. economic future dominated by four growth corridors that are generally less dense, more affordable, and markedly more conservative and pro-business: the Great Plains, the Intermountain West, the Third Coast (spanning the Gulf states from Texas to Florida), and the Southeastern industrial belt.

Overall, these corridors account for 45% of the nation’s land mass and 30% of its population. Between 2001 and 2011, job growth in the Great Plains, the Intermountain West and the Third Coast was between 7% and 8%—nearly 10 times the job growth rate for the rest of the country. Only the Southeastern industrial belt tracked close to the national average…

Energy, manufacturing and agriculture are playing a major role in the corridor states’ revival. The resurgence of fossil fuel–based energy, notably shale oil and natural gas, is especially important. Over the past decade, Texas alone has added 180,000 mostly high-paying energy-related jobs, Oklahoma another 40,000, and the Intermountain West well over 30,000. Energy-rich California, despite the nation’s third-highest unemployment rate, has created a mere 20,000 such jobs. In New York, meanwhile, Gov. Andrew Cuomo is still delaying a decision on hydraulic fracturing…

Since 2000, the Intermountain West’s population has grown by 20%, the Third Coast’s by 14%, the long-depopulating Great Plains by over 14%, and the Southeast by 13%. Population in the rest of the U.S. has grown barely 7%. Last year, the largest net recipients of domestic migrants were Texas and Florida, which between them gained 150,000. The biggest losers? New York, New Jersey, Illinois and California.

As a result, the corridors are home to most of America’s fastest-growing big cities, including Charlotte, Raleigh, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City and Denver. Critically for the economic and political future, the growth corridor seems particularly appealing to young families with children.

This is part of a larger demographic trend that has taken place in the last 50 years in the United States: larger population growth in the Sunbelt and West. This has been accompanied by the growth of major cities, particularly places like Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, and Phoenix, and the movement of jobs to these areas.

It would be interesting to view these struggles as part of a larger power struggle between regions. It is obvious to pick up on the political implications but we could also look at economic, social, cultural, and religious implications. These growing Sunbelt cities don’t quite have the global status several of the northern cities do. Is this a function of time or can they catch up? Where does Washington D.C. fit into this – still a compromise city between North and South? How different are everyday lives in these different parts of the country? How much do businesses who relocate to these areas like the regions beyond the bottom-line considerations?

h/t Instapundit

More companies hiring through internal referrals, online applications carry a stigma

Posted on by

This might help explain why the ranks of long-term unemployed have risen: more companies are finding new employees through referrals from current employees.

The trend, experts say, has been amplified since the end of the recession by a tight job market and by employee networks on LinkedIn and Facebook, which can help employers find candidates more quickly and bypass reams of applications from job search sites like Monster.com.

Some, like Ernst & Young, the accounting firm, have set ambitious internal goals to increase the proportion of hirings that come from internal referrals. As a result, employee recommendations now account for 45 percent of nonentry-level placements at the firm, up from 28 percent in 2010…

The company’s goal is 50 percent. Others, such as Deloitte and Enterprise Rent-A-Car, have begun offering prizes like iPads and large-screen TVs in addition to traditional cash incentives for employees who refer new hires.

This sounds like a sort of Granovetter social network job hunt run amok: companies are looking for ways to minimize bad hires but in doing so, they are relying more and more on their current employees which freezes out people outside these social networks. But, it also suggests a job hunting strategy beyond Internet sites: people looking for work should look to impress their contacts who are currently working. This could be helpful to a lot of job searchers as it would cut down on online applications, cover letters, and the “black hole” (as it is called in the article) where applicants get very little feedback.

Here is a little bit about the advantages of companies hiring referred employees:

Referral programs carry important benefits for big companies. Besides avoiding hefty payouts to recruiters, referred employees are 15 percent less likely to quit, according to Giorgio Topa, one of the authors of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York study.

Social networks improve business efficiency…but might also leave certain people out in the cold.

The differences by race in using social networks to find a job

Posted on by

Unemployment rates are quite different for whites and blacks. Social networks may be the reason why:

But this stubborn fact remains: The African-American jobless rate is about twice that of whites, a disparity that has barely budged since the government began tracking the data in 1972. In last week’s jobs report, the black unemployment rate was 13.2 percent, while the white rate stood at 6.8 percent.

Discrimination has long been seen as the primary reason for this disparity, which is evident among workers from engineers to laborers. But fresh research has led scholars to conclude that African-Americans also suffer in the labor market from having weaker social networks than other groups.

Having friends and relatives who can introduce you to bosses or tell you about ripe opportunities has proved to be one of the most critical factors in getting work. Such connections can also help people hold on to their jobs, researchers say.

“It is surprising to many people how important job networks are to finding work,” said Deirdre Royster, a New York University sociologist. “The information they provide help people make a good first impression, get through screening and get hired.”

Considering sociologist Mark Granovetter’s oft-cited piece on how weak ties help people find jobs, perhaps this shouldn’t be too surprising. Social capital can go a long way toward accessing opportunities in society. Also, Royster’s book Race and the Invisible Hand is an interesting look at how this played out in one Baltimore vocational high school as faculty members tended to give white students access to their social networks while not giving the same privileges to black students.

Rahm Emanuel: Chicago the model for pro-growth policies

Posted on by

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel had an op-ed in the Washington Post on Friday where he explained how his city could show America the way toward growth:

While infrastructure improvements have been neglected on a federal level for decades, Chicago is making one of the nation’s largest coordinated investments, putting 30,000 residents to work over the next three years improving our roads, rails and runways; repairing our aged water system; and increasing access to gigabit-speed broadband. We are paying for these critical improvements through a combination of reforms, efficiencies and direct user fees, as well as creating the nation’s first city-level public-private infrastructure bank. Democrats should champion these kinds of innovative financing tools at a national level.

If we want to build a future in which the middle class can succeed, we must continue the push for reform that the president began with Race to the Top, bringing responsibility and accountability to our teachers and principals.

Chicago has adopted its own Race to the Top for early childhood education, allowing public schools, Head Start, charters and parochial schools to compete for dollars by improving the quality of their pre-kindergarten programs. In addition, this year Chicago Public Schools put into effect a 30 percent increase in class time, which means that when today’s kindergartners graduate high school, they will have benefited from 2½ more years’ worth of education.

In partnership with leading private-sector companies, we reengineered our six community colleges to focus each on skills training for jobs in one of Chicago’s six key growth fields. Democrats can be the party that closes the nation’s skills gap by making our community colleges a vital link between people looking for jobs and companies looking for skilled workers.

The strength of these investments is proven in the number of people we’re putting back to work: Chicago is first in the nation in terms of increase in employed residents, and for several months we have led the nation in year-over-year employment increases. We added 42,500 residents to the workforce in the past year alone — 8,000 more than the next highest U.S. city…

If Democrats develop innovative policies that help Americans compete in a global economy, we will outperform Republicans on Election Day. It’s that simple.

I’ve made this argument before (see here): Rahm Emanuel is more of a pro-business Democrat. As he notes in this article, he is in the mold of Bill Clinton who was willing to do what it takes to add jobs and fuel growth (illustrated by his recent push for digital billboards on city property alongside busy highways). And thus far, Emanuel has been able to push through his agenda in Chicago.

However, two things might hold back his arguments on the national level:

1. How much do Democrats and other Americans want government  to work closely private firms and corporations? Emanuel is a fan of public-private partnerships but people on both sides may not like this idea much.

2. Critics will charge that Chicago is hardly a model for others to emulate. Crime? Residential segregation? Massive budget issues? Battles with local unions? Underperforming schools?

I imagine some other big-city mayors might argue their cities could provide better models for the whole country. It would be fascinating to see a number of them respond with different visions.

(One last question: how much of this argument is simply boosterism from the mayor of the city’s third largest city?)

Increasing racial segregation in the American workplace

Posted on by

Two sociologists argue there is evidence that some American workplaces have become more racially segregated in recent decades:

The results of our research found in part that there has been a trend toward racial re-segregation among white men and black men since 2000 and increased segregation since 1970 between black women and white women in American workplaces — so much so that it has eliminated progress made in the late 1960s. This is not simply an academic question, but a fundamental problem with American society. While most of us morally embrace equal opportunity and race and gender equality, we find that America is still a long way from those commitments. Only by confronting our shortcomings as a society can we address them…Distressingly, 19 of the 58 industries we surveyed — nearly one-third of all industries — showed a trend toward racial re-segregation between white men and black men over the last dozen years. Transportation services, motion pictures, construction, securities and commodities brokerages are some of the sectors that reflect this trend. In addition, re-segregation since 1970 between black and white women in workplaces has eliminated progress made in the late 1960s.

Transportation services, railroads, publishing and many low-wage manufacturing industries show increased segregation between black and white women. Unfortunately, increased access to private sector managerial jobs for black men and black women came to a grinding halt more than 30 years ago as well. Meanwhile, black women’s employment segregation from white women has actually grown somewhat, as white women made continued gains into traditionally white male jobs…

Where has there been progress? In general, African Americans tend to do better in workplaces that use formal credentials to make hiring decisions. Minorities and white women have made the most progress in professional jobs. These occupations require specific educational credentials to be considered for employment. African Americans also progress in those relatively rare large, private-sector firms that monitor their managers diversity track record.

It sounds like jobs based on social networks tend to be more segregated while jobs based on credentials allow more opportunities for non-whites. This reminds me of the sociological study Race and the Invisible Hand: How White Networks Exclude Black Men From Blue-Collar Jobs. Royster found in studying vocational schools that although black and white students were getting similar educations, the instructors and school gave white students more access to the primarily white social networks in the vocational trades while black students were left more to fend for themselves.

 

I would be curious to know how job segregation lines up with residential segregation, one of the more persistent features of American life in the last century. In other words, are workplaces in more diverse areas less segregated?

Since having a good job is tied to income, building wealth, accessing social networks and social capital, and new opportunities, this is important information. Also, this is a reminder fighting segregation is not a linear process.

 

Creative class fared better in economic crisis than working and service classes

Posted on by

Richard Florida discusses how the creative class weathered the economic crisis better than blue-collar workers:

The crisis hit hardest at blue-collar workers, while creative class workers and metros with higher shares of creative class jobs fared considerably better. The unemployment rate for creative class workers, which was 1.9 percent in 2006 before the crisis, increased to just 4.1 percent in the years following the recession’s official end — an increase of 2.2 percentage points. The unemployment rate for workers in blue-collar jobs increased from from 6.5 percent before the onset of crisis to 14.6 percent at its end, more than three times higher than that for creative class workers and a jump of more than 8 percentage points. The unemployment rate for workers in routine service jobs increased from 5 percent to 9.3 percent at its end, more than double that for creative class workers a 4.3 percent jump…

Even after controlling for all those things, the analysis found that having a creative class job dramatically reduced a person’s chance of being unemployed over the course of the crisis. All others things being equal, we found that having a creative class occupation reduced an individual’s probability of being unemployed by 2.0 percentage points between 2006 and 2011. Having a creative class job had a bigger effect on the probability of being unemployed than holding a college diploma and about the same effect as having an advanced degree…

The study also found that while unemployment rates were lower in metros with higher shares of creative class jobs, the biggest benefit for creative class workers came in regions with lower shares of creative class jobs. The impact of having a creative occupation on the likelihood of being unemployed, the study found, was slightly stronger in metropolitan areas with lower shares of creative workers…

These results, along with our findings related to the other major occupational groups, are indicative of a structural change taking place in the U.S. economy. This shift is characterized by high — and growing — unemployment in Working Class occupations, whereas the relative position of creative workers improved in the years following the recession.

These final sentences are key: the economic crisis exposed some of the larger structural issues in the American and global economy. The creative class, those with education, social status, and access to the white-collar and high-tech jobs often found in certain metropolitan areas that are producing a lot of wealth, did better in the economic crises. It didn’t mean that no creative class jobs were lost but relatively fewer jobs were lost. On the other hand, more working-class jobs were lost. On top of this, the working and service class didn’t have the same resources to weather the economic storm. When the value of investments, such as housing values and retirement plans, shrunk and jobs dried up, there wasn’t much to fall back on.

This situation is not likely to be fixed quickly. For example, it takes time to get education and only roughly a third of American adults have a college degree. It also takes time for a broader economy to shift away from a service and consumption oriented economy to one that creates more high-paying, information-age jobs.

Faculty advice column: for the “average student,” sociology might not be most practical way to get a job

Posted on by

Choosing a college major is definitely a charged subject today, particularly when discussing potential earnings. Here is some interesting advice given by a faculty member to an undergraduate interested in sociology:

Anonymous asks, “I’m an undecided freshman. My parents want me to choose a ‘practical major’ like engineering, but I think I would be more passionate about a sociology major. Should I study what my parents want me to study, or should I do what I want?”

Hmmm. You should choose sociology! Or any CHASS major! (Just kidding, sort of, I need to make up for last time.) Honestly, in this current job and economic climate I think it would be foolish to not at least strongly consider the employment prospects of one’s chosen major. That said, employment means doing something at least 40 hours/week for many, many years. The last thing you want to do is choose an area which will be drudgery instead of fulfillment. While engineering is particularly practical for the current job market, that does not mean sociology (or any other major) is impractical. As I mentioned in an earlier column, social sciences are great for developing critical thinking skills and good writing skills. These are most definitely highly-valued skills by many employers.

That said, if you choose a more passion-based major, you really need to invest your passion in it because it probably will not be as easy to find a job as if you had a mechanical engineering degree. Don’t take classes because you were told they were easy. Take them because they have a great professor who will challenge you to think and learn in new ways. Don’t shy away from the classes with 20 page papers — take them and hone your writing skills. Be proactive in working with faculty, researching with faculty, and in building relationships. Work with a local non-profit or government agency that fills your passion and build your job-market skills.

For the average student, sociology may not be as practical as a degree with a more obvious and direct pipeline to employment, but if you put your heart into it, develop your skills, abilities and maturity, you will come out just as employable — if not more so — than if you chose a practical major to which you found you could not truly dedicate yourself.

These are common ideas: certain majors lead more easily to jobs while sociology and other social science majors don’t lead as easily to jobs but students majoring in them can gain valuable skills that employers want.

However, the last paragraph is key here: the suggestion is that sociology students should be more dedicated to their major/field because they will have to overcome the difference in practicality compared to other majors. This is interesting because sociology is often considered an easier major. But, this professor suggests sociology majors should be even more interested and devoted to the major to be able to compete on the job market. Does this mean sociology majors should be higher caliber students?

Portland: the city where the young retire/are underemployed

Posted on by

Researchers have found that Portland, Oregon is indeed a place where young workers are often underemployed:

Portland may not be “a city where young people go to retire,” but it’s the place they go to be underemployed, a new study found.

A famous quip by Fred Armisen on the television show “Portlandia” led Portland State University researchers to investigate the reality behind the comment. The quirky IFC network series pokes fun at the Oregon city’s many eccentricities.

The researchers’ review found that Portland is a magnet for the young and college educated from across the country, even though a disproportionate share of them are working part-time or holding jobs that don’t require a degree.

In short, young college grads are moving here, and staying, because they like the city’s amenities and culture, not because they’re chasing jobs. Their participation in the labor force tracks with other cities, but they make 84 cents on the dollar when compared to the average of the 50 largest metropolitan areas, the research found.

Not exactly a shining place for the “creative class.” I don’t remember Richard Florida talking much about the employment or economic struggles of the creative class; rather, such cities are often depicted as tech hubs with lots of exciting companies and opportunities. A city may be a cultural magnet but it also has to have enough jobs so that people can stay.

What is most interesting to me about this is that it appears the migration of young adults to Portland has continued in the last few decades even when there are not enough full-time jobs. Is there a threshold point when people will stop going to Portland? At what point do economic realities trump the cultural vibrancy of Portland?