Campaign News

Jared Bernstein Blog - March 3, 2015 - As a tireless (some would say tiresome) advocate for full employment and the benefits it yields for working people, you can imagine how I was thrown by this NYT headline over a piece by economics reporter Bin Appelbaum:

Black jobless rates remain high, but Fed can’t do much to help.

“Shots fired!” as the kids say.

I find this hard to believe in the following sense. Black unemployment has averaged almost twice that of overall unemployment since the monthly data begin in 1972 (avg: 1.9, with standard deviation of 0.15, so not a ton of variation around that mean). Crudely, that implies that if overall unemployment fell from 6% to 5%, the black rate might fall more in percentage point terms, from 12% to 10%.

Next, if the Fed can push down the overall unemployment rate, which is certainly within its purview and, at a time like this, its job description, then the headline seems off.

Now, there are important nuances in play here.

First, these relationships are not always so clean. Over the long, strong recovery of the 1990s, black unemployment fell 4.5 points compared to 2.1 points for whites (and 2.5 points overall). Over the 1980s recovery, black unemployment—which was about 20% at the end of the deep early 1980s recession—fell 8.5 points compared to 4.7 for whites.

Those comparatively big declines show the disproportionate benefits that blacks reap from lower unemployment and, conditional on the Fed’s ability to lower unemployment, they belie the NYT headline. I could make similar claims based on wages and incomes, but I’m bound by secrecy for now (more on that in a moment).

However, more recently, that relationship isn’t generating such impressive results. Over this recovery, black and white unemployment have declined by similar amounts (4.5 points for blacks; 3.8 for whites). And, as Appelbaum points out, real median wages have fallen twice as much for blacks as for whites.

But that’s kinda the point: until recently this has been a uniquely weak recovery, and as such, tells us little yet about the extent to which full employment will lift the relative economic fortunes of black workers.

If we get to and stay at full employment, I’m confident it will work as it has in the past, based both on the history briefly cited above and on some truly exciting results from a new paper we’ve commissioned for our full employment project on the benefits of full employment to black workers, written by the economist Valarie Wilson from the Economic Policy Institute.

Valerie will be highlighting the results at an event we’re holding in DC on March 30th so far be it from me to steal her thunder. But she’s got some panel data regressions (which provide lots more observations and variance than the simple time series comparisons noted above) showing the impact of lower unemployment on black compared to white median wages, and man…all’s I can say is I’m employing great restraint not to just print them right here and now!

Here’s another point worth considering. Various economists on team full employment have been trying to get the Fed to hold off on its interest rate liftoff, but Appelbaum writes: “It’s not obvious, however, that holding down borrowing costs for a little longer would be an effective way to address the underlying problem. Indeed, the problem is a good illustration of the limits of monetary policy.”

That may be true in the following sense: if the Fed raises rates a little bit in 2015q4 instead of 2015q3, I doubt it will matter that much to anyone in the real economy (though financial markets would make a huge deal out of it). Similarly, if they hold to a 5.4% full employment rate and a firm 2% inflation ceiling that mustn’t be breached, or if they shift from being data driven to shooting at the phantom menace of inflation that’s allegedly hiding out of sight from the data just around the corner—well then, yeah, they won’t much help those who depend on lasting full employment to catch a break.

He’s also got a point re underlying problems. Even full employment may not be enough to reach the millions of workers with criminal records who face uniquely high barriers to the job market. I’ve written about fair-hiring policies to reach these workers, and so has Appelbaum.

But check this out: I mentioned our March 30 event. Well, another speaker on the panel that morning will be the guy from whom I learned all I know about fair-hiring, Maurice Emsellem from the National Employment Law Project.

I know what you’re thinking: what about macro, what about Fed policy? How can you call yourself a full employment maven and leave that out? Did I forget to mention our keynote speaker? A fella named Bernanke…Ben Bernanke. Here’s the flyer. Be there and be square.

Source

The Guardian - July 23, 2014, by Jana Kasperkevic - Part-time jobs are becoming the source of an employment crisis in the US, as they take the place of full-time jobs for many Americans. That puts many employees at the mercy of erratic part-time schedules, in which they never know what their hours will be from one week to the next.

Congress is making the rare move of taking action on a major employment issue. Representatives George Miller and Rosa L DeLauro introduced a Schedules That Work Act on Tuesday.

There's another version of the bill brewing in the Senate. Senators Tom Harkin and Elizabeth Warren are the sponsors of the Senate’s version of the bill. Carrie Gleason, co-founder of Retail Action Project, said the Warren will introduce the Senate version in upcoming weeks.

“A single mom working two jobs should know if her hours are being canceled before she arranges for daycare and drives halfway across town to show up at work,” said Warren. “This is about some basic fairness in work scheduling so that both employees and employers have more certainty and can get the job done.”

According to the National Women’s Law Center’s summary of the Schedules That Work bill, it would have several goals: to provide employees with the right to request and receive a flexible, predictable or stable work schedule; ensure that employees who show up for a scheduled shift, only to be sent home, receive at least four hours’ worth of pay; and ensure that if employees’ schedule were to change, they are to be notified with a new schedule at two weeks before it goes into effect. It would also prevent employers from retaliating against employees who ask for schedule changes.

A week before the introduction of the legislation, Miller expressed scepticism over the likelihood of its passing the Republican-controlled House. According to the New York Times, the California lawmaker “acknowledges that his bill is unlikely to be enacted anytime soon – partly because of opposition from business”, but hopes that the bill will bring attention to these unfair scheduling practices. That alone says a lot about the current political climate within the US.

Part-time is the new full-time

The growing scale of part-time work suggests it merits closer regulation, or at least scrutiny. Earlier this month, when the US Department of Labor announced that US had added 288,000 jobs and that the unemployment rate dropped to 6.1%, many were quick to point out that one of the contributing factors was that part-time jobs were on the rise.

Currently, there are 7.5 million “involuntary part-time” workers in the US. These are workers who weren’t able to find a full-time job or whose hours have been cut back. In June alone, about 275,000 of such part-time jobs were created. Struggling to make ends meet, about 1.89m Americans are currently working two part-time jobs.

About 52% of retail workers and 40% of janitors and housekeepers know their schedule only a week or less in advance, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Retail Action Project found that about 20% of workers got their schedule just three days in advance.

Lack of stable, reliable schedules for part-time workers is "a growing national crisis in the American workplace", according to The Center for Popular Democracy. In addition to the weekly schedule changes, part-time workers are often victims of last-minute schedule changes as well.

“Workers need scheduling predictability so they can arrange for child care, pick up kids from school, or take an elderly parent to the doctor," said Miller.

Women and part-time work

"Like too many others, this is a problem that primarily affects women," DeLauro said when introducing the Schedules That Work Act with Miller.

Last-minute schedule changes are especially difficult on mothers with young children that cannot be left on their own. Out of 200 mothers with young children working in the hospitality industry, just 56% had a predictable work schedule, found ROC-United. For those 46% with un-predictable work-schedule, 39% had a schedule that changes weekly. The remaining 5% had a schedule that might change from day to day.

Four out of 10 mothers said last-minute changes affected their child-care needs. Some had to call in a back-up babysitter, like the mother above. Others, at 29%, had to pay a fine to their childcare provider, due to these schedule changes. Another 20% of mothers lost their child care provider because of their erratic schedule.

State laws go a little way

Since it might be a while yet before Congress takes up the issue, states can step up and take the lead on this issue. Seven states and District of Columbia already have a “reporting time pay” laws in place. Oregon has one as well, but it’s applicable only to minors, according to Retail Action Project.

Currently enacted state laws specifically protect workers who were scheduled for work, but were sent home upon arrival. For example, in New Hampshire, such workers must be paid at least two hours’ pay if this occurs. In other states like Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New York, they have to be paid for at least three hours.

Source

When I worked my way through college with a job at Chipotle, I often worked a so-called "clopen shift." I was closing the store I managed at 2 a.m. and returning to open the restaurant at 6 a.m. The work schedule didn't leave much time for sleep, let alone schoolwork. But with graduation around the corner, I figured that soon everything was going to change.

I would graduate, and I would get a job that would allow me to pay the bills, take care of my 8-year old daughter, and sleep at night.

But, since graduating this past spring, I have sent out 75 resumés but have only been invited for one interview. I’m looking for jobs that just aren’t there.

When the Federal Reserve gathers Thursday at their Federal Open Market Committee meeting to decide whether or not they will raise the interest rate, I hope they will keep me and others like me in mind.

Congress created the Federal Reserve with a two-pronged mission: to control inflation andto promote maximum employment. All the data shows that there is no risk of inflation – in fact, inflation is still running well-below the Fed’s own conservative target. But the Fed is still considering raising the interest rates, even though raising rates would do real harm to American workers who are still looking for jobs or working for low-wages, like me.

A higher interest rate means that fewer jobs will be created, and that the wages of workers at the bottom will remain too low to live on. That’s because when the Fed raises rates, they are deliberately trying to slow down the economy. They’re saying that there are too many jobs and wages are too high. They’re saying that the economy is exactly where it should be, that people like me are exactly where we should be.

It was not supposed to be this way – after all, I have a business management degree. If the Fed chooses to slow down the economy I may have to give up on getting a job I'm qualified for – the kind of job that I went to school for. I could find a job at McDonalds or Taco Bell, and go back to a work life that will leave me sleepless and struggling to support my daughter. That would be painful for me and my family and bad for the economy. I cannot imagine that this is what Fed officials are looking to do.

And yet, the Fed is considering a rate increase, even though working families – especially Black and Latino working families –are still struggling. Today, 19.5 percent of Black people are unemployed or underemployed, and 15.8 percent of Latinos are unemployed and underemployed. For Black high school graduates in the 17-20-year-old range who haven’t enrolled in college, the unemployment rate is over 50 percent.

If the Fed raises interest rates, we are ones who lose.

That the conservative powers in the Federal Reserve would even consider raising the interest rates shows us a lot about who they’re prioritizing in their decision. It shows us who the Fed is looking out for: the wealthy, Wall Street, and bankers. They are willing to sacrifice the livelihoods and aspirations of young people like me, whole communities of color, and low-income workers all purportedly to fight an inflation threat that doesn’t even exist.

The Fed’s decision on Thursday should be simple. One of the Fed’s mandates is to foster full employment, and wages still have not shown signs of significant growth since the financial crash. That’s a clear sign that America is far from full employment — and the Fed has not yet fulfilled its mandate.

Many in the Fed are claiming that our economy is in recovery, but for who? For Black and Latino Americans, the recovery hasn’t come yet. This week, we’ll see if the Fed is serious about promoting maximum employment for all Americans or just watching out for the few who are already doing well.

Source: CommonDreams

An investigation into a term that seems to perfectly capture the indignities and absurdities of the modern economy...

Read the ful article here.