Times remain hard, especially for low-wage workers [feedly]

Times remain hard, especially for low-wage workers
https://economicfront.wordpress.com/2020/09/08/times-remain-hard-especially-for-low-wage-workers/

The current economic crisis has hit workers hard.  Unemployment rates remain high, with total weekly initial claims for unemployment insurance benefits continuing to grow.  Recent reports of a sharp rise in median earnings for full-time workers appear to complicate the picture.  However, a more detailed examination of worker earnings and employment not only helps to sharpen our understanding of the devastating nature of the current crisis for working people, but makes clear that low wage workers are the hardest hit.

Earnings growth

The labor department recently published data showing wages skyrocketing.  As Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco researchers reported in a recent Economic Letter:

Recent data show that median usual weekly earnings of full-time workers have grown 10.4 percent over the four quarters preceding the second quarter of 2020. This is a 6.4 percentage point acceleration compared with the fourth quarter of 2019. The median usual weekly earnings measure that we focus on here is not an exception. Other measures of wage growth—like average hourly earnings and compensation per hour—show similar spikes.

The spike can be seen in the movement in the blue line in the figure below (which is taken from the Economic Letter).  As we can see, nominal average weekly earnings for full-time employees grew by 10.4 percent between spring of 2019 and spring of 2020, the fastest rate of growth in nearly 40 years.

While this earnings trend suggests a strong labor market, it is, as the researchers correctly note, highly misleading.  The reason is that this measure has been distorted by the massive loss of jobs disproportionally suffered by low wage full-time workers.  The decline in the number of full-time low wage workers has been large enough to change the earnings distribution, leading to a steadily growing value for the median earnings of the remaining full-time workers.

In other words, the spike in median earnings is not the result of currently employed workers enjoying significant wage gains.  This becomes clear when we adjust for the decline in employment by only considering the nominal median earnings of those workers that remained employed full-time throughout the past year.  As the downward movement in the green line in the above figure shows, the gains in medium earnings for those continuously employed has been small and falling.

Disproportionate job losses for full-time low-wage workers

The researchers confirmed that it was low-wage workers that have disproportionately suffered job losses by calculating the earnings distribution of the full-time workers forced to exit to, in the words of the researchers, "nonemployment" – by which they mean either unemployment or nonparticipation — each month over the past two decades.

They began by estimating the yearly share of full-time worker exits to unemployment and nonparticipation.  As we see in the figure above, in non-recession years, about 7 percent of those with full-time jobs become nonemployed each year—2 percent become unemployed and 5 percent leave the labor force.  During the Great Recession, nonemployment peaked in August 2009 at 11 percent, with most of the increase driven by a sharp rise in unemployment (as shown by the big bump in green area).  There was little change in the rate at which full-time workers dropped out of the labor force.

The severity of our current crisis is captured by the dramatic rise in the share of workers exiting full-time employment beginning in March 2020.  Exits to nonemployment peaked in May 2020 at 17 percent, with 9 percent moving to unemployment and 8 percent to nonparticipation. Not only is this almost twice as high as during the Great Recession, the extremely challenging state of the labor market is underscored by the fact that the share of nonemployed who chose nonparticipation and thus exit from the labor market was almost as great as the share who remained part of the labor force and classified as unemployed.

The next figure shows the share of workers exiting to nonemployment by their position in the wage distribution. The three areas depict exits by workers in the lowest quarter of the earnings distribution, the second lowest quarter, and the top half, respectively.

As the researchers explain,

In the months following the onset of COVID-19, workers in the bottom 25 percent of the earnings distribution made up about half of the exits to nonemployment. In contrast, the top half of the distribution only accounted for about a third of the exits. . . .

Therefore, the recent spike in aggregate nominal wage growth does not reflect the benefits of pay raises and a strong labor market for workers. Instead, it is the result of the high levels of job loss among low-income workers since the start of the pandemic.

Tragically, low wage workers have not only suffered disproportional job losses during this pandemic. Those who remain employed are increasingly being victimized by wage theft.  As Igor Derysh, writing in Salon, notes: "A paper released this week by the . . . Washington Center for Equitable Growth found that minimum wage violations have roughly doubled compared to the period before the pandemic."

These are indeed hard times for almost all working people but, perhaps not surprisingly, those at the bottom of the wage distribution are suffering the most.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

No Class: Why You Should Be Getting Your Labor News from Teen Vogue [feedly]

No Class: Why You Should Be Getting Your Labor News from Teen Vogue
https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2020/08/31/no-class-why-you-should-be-getting-your-labor-news-from-teen-vogue/

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

No Class: Why You Should Be Getting Your Labor News from Teen Vogue [feedly]

No Class: Why You Should Be Getting Your Labor News from Teen Vogue
https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2020/08/31/no-class-why-you-should-be-getting-your-labor-news-from-teen-vogue/

Last Wednesday NBA players refused to take the court for their playoff games in order to protest the latest police shooting of an unarmed Black man, Jacob Blake of Kenosha, Wisconsin, who survived the shooting but is now paralyzed. In response, the Milwaukee Bucks refused to play their scheduled game. This shocking announcement reverberated throughout the sports world, and the Bucks were soon joined by all the other NBA playoff teams, the Women's NBA, Major League Soccer (MLS), and several Major League Baseball (MLB) teams.

Most media outlets didn't know how to respond to the job action. They couldn't even figure out what to call it. Many journalists described it as a boycott, while others simply reported that the games had been 'canceled' or 'postponed.'

You might be surprised to hear about one publication that covered the NBA action with speed and accuracy: Teen Vogue. On Thursday, August 27, Teen Voguereported that, "[p]layers in four major sports leagues have refused to play games in one of the most high-profile wildcat strikes in modern history." And, just in case a the average Teen Vogue reader doesn't know what a strike is, let alone a wildcat strike, the article ends with a link to the magazine's labor columnist Kim Kelly's explainer from 2019, "Everything You Need to Know about a General Strike."

Teen Vogue cover, January 2017

Yes, that's right, Teen Voguehas a labor column. You might have heard about other artifacts of Teen Vogue's jaw dropping wokeness, from stories calling Trump the "gaslighter-in-chief," to Teen Vogue's guide to anal sex, to their column praising Karl Marx on his 200^th birthday in May of 2018. I was gobsmacked by the Karl Marx piece, and nearly equally stunned when, earlier this summer, Teen Vogue labor columnist Kelly explained the importance of class solidarity. I know this, but how does Teen Vogue?

The answer has a lot to do with Kelly herself. She grew up without cable, without the internet, or even the occasional rap CD in Chatsworth, NJ, a place she describes as a "poor, working class, white rural community." Born in the late 1980s to a working-class family (her dad and her uncles are in construction), she became a devoted fan of heavy metal music in her teen years. As Kelly told me, "Heavy metal is the music of the disaffected working class, and it is not very well understood. Heavy metal was forged in a factory. It is an outcast and underappreciated art form, often trashed by mainstream music critics."

While working toward her goal of writing about heavy metal for a living, Kelly did virtually every job in the industry, from band PR to merchandise sales, all the while contributing to college papers, zines, and blogs. Eventually she got a job as the heavy metal editor for Vice magazine.

Kelly's interest in the labor movement started the old-fashioned way: she joined it. According to New Labor Forum, not long after Kelly became a "permalancer" at Vice, a co-worker reached out to her about the idea of unionizing the online publication, and she was "immediately on board." It took them just two weeks to get a majority of Vice writers to sign union cards, joining up with the Writers Guild of America. The next thing she knew, Kelly was on the bargaining committee and was helping to negotiate their first contract.

A few years later, after doing some freelance work for Teen Vogue, Kelly pitched the magazine a profile of the Gilded Age labor organizer and hell-raiser, Mother Jones. Her editor suggested that the Teen Vogue readers might need an explainer on unions before she could tackle a profile of Jones. And that was how "No Class," Kelly's regular labor column for Teen Vogue, was born. This summer alone she has written about embattled postal workers, the need for class solidarity, left and right politics in the building trades, and Rebecca Harding Davis's classic work, Life in the Iron Mills. She's also written an explainer on capitalism and a persuasive argument against police unions.

Kelly understands that the magazine's target audience, young women between 13 and 24, are part of an extremely well informed and politically active generation. She points to phenomena like IRA TikTok and Communist TikTok. "There are kids on Twitter who know more about anarchist theory than I ever will. You can stream any record you want in the course of an afternoon. Information access is contributing to the politization of teens," she says.

Teen Vogue has come under attack from conservative media personalities such as Tucker Carlson. It has also been called out for turning wokeness into a slick commodity. But the quality — and the success — of the Teen Vogue labor column points to some long-standing contradictions within corporate media, as well as emerging phenomena in American society.

First, the contradiction: capitalist media, especially in times of extreme competition, will sponsor content that undermines and/or contradicts some of the goals of a capitalist agenda. This contradiction allows Teen Vogue/Condé Nast to pay Kelly to write a labor column in which she critiques capitalism while also selling ad space to Target, IBM, Verizon, Light Life Plant Based Burgers, Ulta, and Tressemé (to name a few), all of which hope to win new converts among  young feminists, teens of color, LBGTQ youth, adolescent Democratic Socialists, tween anarchists, and those Communist-curious who are still too young to drink.

The emerging phenomena include a new hunger among younger Americans for useful, accessible information about how to organize. After all, Teen Vogue'saudience today is tomorrow's labor force. The American working class is, no longer, as Kelly, quipped, "male, pale and stale." Working-class Americans are younger, and they include a majority of women workers, more workers who identify as LGBTQ, more immigrants, and more workers who are black, indigenous, people of color (BIPOC). As Kelly puts it, there are "a million ways to be working class."

As a union member herself, Kelly doesn't just come from a working-class background. She is a leader of the new working class. And she is gaining positive attention for her work. Since she started contributing to Teen Vogue she has been interviewed by the State of the Union podcast and  the Real News Network, and she has been called the "coolest person on the internet." This summer she signed a book deal with One Signal to write a history of the labor movement, Fight Like Hell. She plans to feature the labor struggles of women, immigrants, people of color, and LGBTQ workers that do not always get covered in mainstream, academic labor tomes.

As Mother Jones famously said, "Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living." And, while you're at it, read some of Kim Kelly's "No Class." Her labor columns are some of the most inspiring writings on class that I've read in a long time.

Kathy M. Newman, Carnegie Mellon University

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Enlighten Radio:Talkin Socialism: The Fascist Threat: Anything goes?

The Red Caboose has sent you a link to a blog:



Blog: Enlighten Radio
Post: Talkin Socialism: The Fascist Threat: Anything goes?
Link: https://www.enlightenradio.org/2020/09/talkin-socialism-fascist-threat.html

--
Powered by Blogger
https://www.blogger.com/

Enlighten Radio:Talkin Socialism: The Fascist Threat: Anything goes?

The Red Caboose has sent you a link to a blog:



Blog: Enlighten Radio
Post: Talkin Socialism: The Fascist Threat: Anything goes?
Link: https://www.enlightenradio.org/2020/09/talkin-socialism-fascist-threat.html

--
Powered by Blogger
https://www.blogger.com/

https://equitablegrowth.org/research-paper/women-and-the-future-of-work-in-the-united-states/

https://equitablegrowth.org/research-paper/women-and-the-future-of-work-in-the-united-states/

This report details the conversations, research questions, and policy proposals discussed during the "Women and Future of Work Convening" held in 2019 and compiled as a report in early 2020. The first section reviews the substance of the conversation among leading scholars and policy experts on what research reveals about the intersection between technology, labor, and gender, identifying risks and opportunities for new workplace tools to help achieve greater gender equity. Technology is already changing the way people find employment opportunities, are hired, supervised, trained, and treated at work. Using a gender lens to examine how these changes may impact the future U.S. labor market is essential to build more equitable, safe, and productive workplaces. In the second section of the report we turn to the convening discussion of policy solutions as the way forward for women and the future of work. Policies and labor regulations play a central role in shaping the way technology impacts workers, highlighting the need to incorporate workers' input into the design and implementation of new workplace tools, expand rights and regulations that protect all workers from abuses facilitated by technology, and use innovation to create opportunities and better economic outcomes for women.

Download FileWOMEN AND THE FUTURE OF WORK IN THE UNITED STATES

READ THE FULL PAPER

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Because women and men are overrepresented and underrepresented in different types of work, analyses of the impact of automation on employment must consider how gender interacts with the U.S. occupational structure.
• The gig economy creates new avenues for alternative work arrangements, but the lack of benefits and labor protections can leave many workers, especially women of color, unprotected in the face of health and security concerns, workplace abuses, and economic insecurity.
• New online tools are changing the way workers are hired, monitored, and evaluated, raising concerns about employers' abilities to breach employees' privacy, make hiring and promotion decisions through algorithms that replicate gender and racial biases, and cut costs via labor-optimizing technology that can diminish job security.
• Education and lifelong learning via the digital delivery of training and education can complement traditional learning methods and provide workers with greater opportunity when combined with a broad policy agenda to address underlying structural inequities and power imbalances.
• Employers' surveillance of workers and the information technologies available to do so more easily and stealthily can entrench power asymmetries between workers and employers, but technology can also increase labor's power and foster gender equity by creating new opportunities to organize and train for highly demanded jobs.

Updated state unemployment data: Congress has failed to act as jobless claims remain high and workers scrape by on inadequate unemployment benefits [feedly]

Updated state unemployment data: Congress has failed to act as jobless claims remain high and workers scrape by on inadequate unemployment benefits
https://www.epi.org/blog/updated-state-unemployment-data-congress-has-failed-to-act-as-jobless-claims-remain-high-and-workers-scrape-by-on-inadequate-unemployment-benefits/

The most recent unemployment insurance (UI) claims data released on Thursday show that another 1.4 million people filed for UI benefits last week. For the past four weeks, workers have gone without the extra $600 in weekly UI benefits—which Senate Republicans allowed to expire—and are instead typically receiving around 40% of their pre-virus earnings. This is far too meager to sustain workers and their families through lengthy periods of joblessness.

In a largely unserious stunt, the Trump administration has issued an executive order that, at best, will slash the benefit in half to $300. On its own, this cut will cause such a huge drop in spending that it will cost 2.6 million jobs over the next year. In addition to being woefully insufficient, this aid will take many weeks to reach jobless workers, exclude low-wage workers, and only last through September with its current funding. Furthermore, it is distracting from the dire need for Congressional action to strengthen UI benefits.

To give a sense of how many workers the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress are leaving behind, Figure A shows the share of workers in each state who either made it through at least the first round of state UI processing (these are known as "continued" claims) or filed initial UI claims in the following weeks. The map includes separate totals for regular UI and Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), the new program for workers who aren't eligible for regular UI, such as gig workers.

The map also includes an estimated "grand total," which includes other programs such as Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC), Extended Benefits (EB), and Short-Time Compensation (STC). The vast majority of states are reporting that more than one in 10 workers are claiming UI. Ten states and the District of Columbia report that more than one in five of their pre-pandemic labor force is now claiming UI under any of these programs. The components of this total are listed in Table 1.1

Three states had more than 1 million workers either receiving regular UI benefits or waiting for their claim to be approved: California (3.1 million), New York (1.5 million), and Texas (1.2 million). Three additional states had more than half a million workers receiving or awaiting benefits: Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Georgia.

Figure A also displays the numbers of workers in each state who are receiving or waiting for regular UI benefits as a share of the pre-pandemic labor force in February 2020. In four states and the District of Columbia, more than one in seven workers are receiving regular UI benefits or waiting on their claim to be approved: Hawaii (18.3%), the District of Columbia (16.4%), California (15.8%), New York (15.8%), and Nevada (14.8%).

Nine states reported that more than one in 10 workers are currently claiming PUA: California (18.0%), Rhode Island (17.6%), Kansas (16.8%), Hawaii (15.1%), Pennsylvania (15.1%), Michigan (14.5%), New York (14.3%), Massachusetts (13.4%), and Arkansas (10.9%). This underscores the importance of extending benefits to those who would otherwise not have been eligible, including self-employed and low-wage workers and people who are looking for part-time work.

Figure A

With the pandemic and economic crisis persisting through the summer, workers have been experiencing long-term unemployment. As a result, workers are increasingly relying on PEUC, the 13 additional weeks of benefits available to workers who have exhausted the 26 weeks of regular benefits. However, even the cumulative 39 weeks of benefits have not been enough for some workers, so policymakers should extend the valuable PEUC program. During the week ending August 8, PEUC claims increased by more than 100,000 nationwide, as did claims under the Extend Benefits program, which provides another 13 weeks of benefits to workers (after PEUC is exhausted) in states that meet a threshold of high unemployment. Currently, the requirements for this program have been triggered in every state, meaning that workers who have exhausted PEUC can turn to the Extended Benefits program. There are now 203,188 workers claiming Extended Benefits, the highest number so far this recession.

As we look at the aggregate measures of economic harm, it is also important to remember that this recession is deepening racial inequalities. Black communities are suffering more from this pandemic—both physically and economically—as a result of, and in addition to, systemic racism and violence. Both Black and Latinx workers are more likely than white workers to be worried about exposure to the coronavirus at work and bringing it home to their families, and Latinx workers face higher death rates from COVID-19 than white workers. Cutting off the $600 UI benefit will deepen existing racial inequalities, since Black and Latinx workers have higher unemployment rates than white workers.

In addition to extending the additional weekly $600 benefit that they have allowed to expire, Congress should provide substantial aid to state and local governments, where some workers have already lost their jobs. Without this aid, a prolonged depression is inevitable, especially if state and local governments make the same budget and employment cuts that slowed the recovery after the Great Recession. More than 5 million workers would likely lose their jobs by the end of 2021, harming women and Black workers in particular since they are disproportionately likely to work for state and local governments.

Where policymakers have failed, workers have demonstrated their power to come together and advocate for the common good, whether they are ensuring that essential workers receive the proper protective equipment or going on strike to protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake. Unions allow workers to better their working conditions and strengthen their collective political voice, but many essential jobs are not unionized and these workers are at an even greater risk. Congress should pass policies that bolster unions in both the public and private sector. And in the long term, they must strengthen the institutions that allow us, collectively, to promote the general welfare, including unemployment insurance, public health insurance, and unions.

Table 1

Notes

1. That total is more of an upper bound, and you should exercise caution when interpreting it for three reasons: (1) It includes initial claims, which represent people who have not yet made it through the first round of processing; (2) Some individuals may be being counted twice. Regular state UI and PUA claims should not be overlapping—that is how the Department of Labor (DOL) has directed state agencies to report them—but some states may be misreporting; (3) Some states are likely including some back weeks in their continuing PUA claims, which would also lead to double counting (the discussion around Figure 3 in this paper covers this issue well). Those limitations are the reason that we have so far hesitated to publish this estimate of total claims by state. DOL has worked to overcome misreporting issues and has had enough success that we are now comfortable enough to report the totals here. However, it is clear that there is still some misreporting. Unless otherwise noted, all numbers are as reported by DOL.

Enjoyed this post? Sign up for the Economic Policy Institute's newsletter so you never miss our research and insights on ways to make the economy work better for everyone.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed