The Pandemic Recession: What Was Different in Labor Markets? [feedly]

The Pandemic Recession: What Was Different in Labor Markets?
https://conversableeconomist.wpcomstaging.com/2021/08/16/the-pandemic-recession-what-was-different-in-labor-markets/

A detailed look at current unemployment vs "labor force participation rates.from Tiim Taylor

It felt back in September 2008, at least to me, as if the Great Recession erupted all at once. Sure, there had been some earlier warning signs about financial markets and subprime mortgages in late 2007, but in spring 2008, the consensus view (for example, in Congressional Budget Office forecasts) was that these housing market blips were only a modest threat to the overall US economy. But by comparison with the pandemic recession, the Great Recession practically happened in slow motion.

Here's a figure showing the monthly unemployment rate since 1970. The shaded areas show recessions, and you can see the rise in unemployment during each recession. The rise during the pandemic is much higher and faster; conversely, the decline in unemployment from its peak has was also much faster–indeed, unemployment in July 2021 was down to 5.4%, which is conventionally considered to be pretty good.

But the pandemic recession also had a shocking effect on labor force participation rates. To be counted as "unemployed," you need to be "in the labor force," which means that you either have a job or are looking for a job. If you aren't looking for a job, you are "out of the labor force" and thus are not counted as "unemployed." There are good reasons for this distinction about being in and out of the labor force: in conventional times, it wouldn't make sense to count, say, retirees or parents who are voluntarily staying home and looking after children as "unemployed," because they aren't looking for work. (Over time, the big inverted-U shape of labor force participation largely reflects the entry of women into the (paid) labor force, which topped out in the late 1990s, and then a gradual decline for both men and women since then.) But the pandemic recession is not a conventional time, and the sharp drop in labor force participation–together with what is so far only a very partial recovery–raises the likelihood that at least some of these people do want to get jobs in the future, when the time is right.

For completeness, here's a figure showing the rate of real (that is, adjusted for inflation) GDP growth, measured as the change from 12 months earlier (with data through the second quarter of 2021). Again, the pattern of a remarkably sharp drop and then a sharp recovery is apparent.

In the Summer 2021 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Stefania Albanesi and Jiyeon Kim take a deeper dive into some aspects of the pandemic recession and the US labor market in "Effects of the COVID-19 Recession on the US Labor Market: Occupation, Family, and Gender." (Full disclosure: I've been the Managing Editor of the JEP since the first issue in 1987.) They are focused in particular on what happened in 2020. But the evolution of the labor market at that time also suggests some of the future challenges. Here are a few themes that emerge.

In previous recent recessions, job losses for men tended to be greater than those for women. Indeed, married women usually increase their efforts in the (paid) labor market during recessions, which can be thought of as a way in which families adjust to the risk of income loss. But in the pandemic recession, women were more likely to lose jobs than men. For some discussion of this theme in earlier recessions in in JEP, see Hilary Hoynes, Douglas L. Miller, and Jessamyn Schaller. 2012. "Who Suffers during Recessions?" Journal of Economic Perspectives, 26 (3): 27-48.

The types of occupations where jobs were lost were different in the pandemic recession. For example, back in the Great Recession there was a large loss of construction jobs, which disproportionately affected men. Forsome discussion of the job losses for men in the Great Recession in JEP, see Charles, Kerwin Kofi, Erik Hurst, and Matthew J. Notowidigdo. 2016. "The Masking of the Decline in Manufacturing Employment by the Housing Bubble." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 30 (2): 179-200.

Here's a sample of the discussion from Albanesi and Kim:

During 2020, women—especially those with children—experienced a substantial reduction in employment compared to men, contrary to the pattern that prevailed in previous recessions. Both labor demand and supply factors likely contributed to this behavior. Women are more likely to be employed in service-providing industries and service occupations. These tend to be less cyclical compared to goods-producing industries and production occupations that employ a larger share of men, and Albanesi and S¸ahin (2018) show that this accounts for most of the difference in the loss
of employment during recessions since 1990. … However, during the COVID-19, infection risk was most severe in the service sector, leading to a large reduction in demand for services, due to government imposed mitigation measure and customer response to infection risk. The
overrepresentation of women in service jobs likely accounts for a sizable fraction of their decline in employment relative to men.

Another unique factor associated with the pandemic recession was the increased childcare needs associated with the disruptions to school activities, which may have contributed to a reduction in labor supply of parents. Why was it mothers in particular who responded to the lack of predictable in-person schooling activities in households where fathers were also present? Gender norms likely played a role. But from the perspective of an economic model of the family, this response should
also be driven by differences in the opportunity cost as measured by wages. In the United States and other advanced economies, there is a substantial "child penalty" that reduces wages for women when, and even before, they become mothers and throughout the course of their lifetime. The penalty is driven by a combination of occupational choices, labor supply on the extensive and intensive margin, that begin well before women have children (Kleven, Landais, and Søgaard 2019; Adda, Dustmann, and Stevens 2017). … In a recent sample of such work, Cortes and Pan (2020) estimate that the long-run child penalty—three years or more after having the first child—for US mothers is 39 percent, and they also find that child-related penalties account for two-thirds of the overall gender wage gap in the last decade. Given the child penalty, most working mothers at the start of the pandemic were likely to be earning less than their partners, and for those couples the optimal response to the increased child supervision needs was for mothers to reduce labor supply.

What do these patterns imply for the prospects of a more complete labor market recovery?

1. The pandemic-related decline in service jobs has also offered a strong incentive to push harder toward automating such jobs where this is possible. As a result, the labor market recovery from the pandemic will not be as simple as employers just restoring the previous jobs as demand increases.
2. The question of parents, day-care, and schools seems likely to remain fraught into this next school year, which will affect ability and willingness of parents to work.
3. The sudden shift to home-based work cuts in several directions. On one hand, the greater availability of working-from-home may benefit certain workers, and parents in particular, by offering more flexibility. On the other side, one can imagine a two-tier labor market emerging, where the jobs that are viewed by employers as of central importance happen with a large component of personal interaction at an office, and the jobs that are viewed as peripheral, using short-term contracts, happen at home.

The US labor market is not just recovering from the pandemic recession, but along dimensions of occupation, family, and gender, it may also be reshaping itself in ways that are very much still evolving.

I should add that the Summer 2021 issue of JEP includes two other articles about the pandemic recession.

Marcella Alsan, Amitabh Chandra, and Kosali Simon discuss "The Great Unequalizer: Initial Health Effects of COVID-19 in the United States" (Journal of Economic Perspectives, 35:3, 25-46). Everyone knows that the pandemic hit the elderly harder. These authors point out that if you look at "excess deaths" by age group, the pandemic hit tended to hit hardest among those that were already disadvantaged–which is a common pattern in past pandemics, too.

Joseph Vavra writes about "Tracking the Pandemic in Real Time: Administrative Micro Data in Business Cycles Enters the Spotlight" (Journal of Economic Perspectives, 35:3, 47-66). His essay focuses on how economists have been making increasing use of private-sector real-time data. He writes:

Thus, a number of economists turned to private-sector micro data to try to understand the recession while it was still unfolding: for example, data on employment patterns from the payroll processing firm ADP and the scheduling firm Homebase, data on bank accounts and credit card payments from sources like the JPMorgan Chase Institute and firms that provide financial planning services like mint.com and SaverLife, and even data on locations of cell phone users from firms like PlaceIQ and SafeGraph. The use of administrative micro data from these and other sources allowed pandemic-related research to be produced in nearly real-time and the scope for analysis of individual behavior, which would be impossible using traditional aggregate data.

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Playing the capitalist game: heads they win, tails you lose [feedly]

Playing the capitalist game: heads they win, tails you lose
https://economicfront.wordpress.com/2021/08/11/playing-the-capitalist-game-heads-they-win-tails-you-lose/

ccording to an Economic Policy Institute report, between 28 and 47 percent of U.S. private sector workers are subject to noncompete agreements.  In brief, noncompete agreements (or noncompetes) are provisions in an employment contract that ban workers from leaving their job to work for a "competitor" that operates in the same geographic area, for a given period of time.  In a way, it's an attempt to recreate the power dynamics of the employer-dominated company towns of old—with workers unable to change employers if they want to continuing working in the same industry.

It is not just top executives that are forced to accept a noncompete agreement.  Companies also use them to restrict the employment freedom of many low wage workers, including janitors, security guards, fast food workers, warehouse workers, personal care aids, and room cleaners.  In fact, the Economic Policy Institute estimates that almost a third of all businesses require that all of their workers sign noncompetes, regardless of their job duties or pay.

As for the impact of these agreements, a number of studies have found that noncompetes lower wages for all workers in the industry, even those not subject to noncompetes.  And then there is this from CBS News:

"In the context of the pandemic, which caused millions of people to be laid off, it's safe to say at least a share of those workers are constrained [by noncompetes] in pursuing other opportunities during this crisis," said John Lettieri, head of the Economic Innovation Group, a think tank that advocates against noncompetes. 

Indeed, at least four employers — including an accounting firm and a real estate brokerage — have tried to enforce noncompetes against workers they've laid off, with the lawsuits making their way through the courts.

On July 9, 2021 President Biden signed an executive order on "Promoting Competition in the American Economy" that, among other things, calls upon the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to work "with the rest of the Commission to exercise the FTC's statutory rulemaking authority under the Federal Trade Commission Act to curtail the unfair use of non-compete clauses and other clauses or agreements that may unfairly limit worker mobility."  While it seems likely that the FTC will take some action, the scope of that action remains uncertain.

Noncompetes and their use

There are no federal rules governing the use of noncompetes.  It is up to the states to decide how to regulate their use.  California, North Dakota, and Oklahoma are the only states with outright bans on their use; Washington DC also outlaws them.  Several states have placed limits on the use of non-competition agreements.  Illinois, Maryland, Nevada, Oregon, and Virginia all prohibit the use of noncompetes with low wage workers.  Washington state banned noncompetes for those earning under $100,000. Hawaii has prohibited noncompetes for tech workers only.  On the other hand, there are some states, like Idaho, which have actually passed laws making it easier for companies to enforce noncompete agreements.

Most workers live in states where there are few if any restrictions on the use of noncompete agreements.  And as the results of a national survey that included firms with at least 50 employees show, the use of noncompetes is common in workplaces with low pay (see the table below).  As the Economic Policy Institute report points out, although "the use of noncompetes tends to be higher for higher-wage workplaces than lower-wage workplaces . . . it is striking that more than a quarter—29.0%—of responding establishments where the average wage is less than $13.00 use noncompetes for all their workers."

Popular outrage has sometimes forced companies to change their policies or state authorities to intervene on behalf of workers.  An example of the former: in 2015 Amazon began requiring its warehouse workers to sign noncompetes.  As The Verge reported:

The work is repetitive and physically demanding and can pay several dollars above minimum wage, yet Amazon is requiring these workers — even seasonal ones — to sign strict and far-reaching noncompete agreements. The Amazon contract, obtained by The Verge, requires employees to promise that they will not work at any company where they "directly or indirectly" support any good or service that competes with those they helped support at Amazon, for a year and a half after their brief stints at Amazon end. Of course, the company's warehouses are the beating heart of Amazon's online shopping empire, the extraordinary breadth of which has earned it the title of "the Everything Store," so Amazon appears to be requiring temp workers to foreswear a sizable portion of the global economy in exchange for a several-months-long hourly warehouse gig.

The company has even required its permanent warehouse workers who get laid off to reaffirm their non-compete contracts as a condition of receiving severance pay. 

The company eventually ended the practice after its actions were widely reported in the media, generating bad publicity for the company.

Jimmy John's offers an example of state action. In 2016, the attorneys general of New York and Illinois, reacting to public anger, forced Jimmy John to stop its franchises from using noncompetes that forbid its employees from working at any other sandwich shop within a 3-mile radius of the franchise for two years.

The cost of noncompetes to workers

When noncompetes are banned, worker pay rises.  One of the most detailed and complete studies of the wage consequences of such a change is based on Oregon's 2008 decision to ban noncompetes (NCAs) for hourly wage workers.  As the authors of the study explain:

We find that banning NCAs for hourly workers increased hourly wages by 2-3% on average. Since only a subset of workers sign NCAs, scaling this estimate by the prevalence of NCA use in the hourly-paid population suggests that the effect on employees actually bound by NCAs may be as great as 14-21%, though the true effect is likely lower due to labor market spillovers onto those not bound by NCAs. While the positive wage effects are found across the age, education and wage distributions, they are stronger for female workers and in occupations where NCAs are more common. The Oregon low-wage NCA ban also improved average occupational status in Oregon, raised job-to-job mobility, and increased the proportion of salaried workers without affecting hours worked."

Earlier studies of the consequence of changes in the use of noncompetes in other states produced similar results. For example, a study of Hawaii's 2015 decision to ban noncompetes for tech workers showed a 4.2% pay bump for new hires and a 12% increase in worker mobility.

But even a change in law doesn't necessarily bring an end to the practice, as highlighted by the California experience.  California courts will not enforce a noncompete contract, but that hasn't stopped many California businesses from including them in their employment contracts.  One reason according to worker advocates, as reported by CBS News, is that most workers don't know that noncompetes are banned in California: 

As a result, employers in California use these restrictive contracts just as much as employers elsewhere in the U.S., and they have their desired effect: scaring workers away from leaving for better jobs. 

"There's no disincentive for the employer to include it in the employment contract. The worst thing that would happen is a court would declare [the noncompete] void," said Harvard's Gerstein. "There needs to be a disincentive to employer overreach."

Possible federal action

President Biden pledged during his campaign to "eliminate all non-compete agreements, except the very few that are absolutely necessary to protect a narrowly defined category of trade secrets."  On the other hand, his executive order speaks to "curtailing" their use.  The best outcome would be an FTC ban on the use of non-competes in all situations and for all workers; noncompetes are just another tool that businesses can use to exploit their workers.

But it may be that the FTC will instead seek to place limits on the use of such agreements, perhaps outlawing their use with low wage workers or establishing federal regulations that restrict their scope and duration.  Although such a step would be an improvement over the current situation, where most states do little to restrict the use of noncompetes, it may well result in an unsatisfying patchwork regulatory framework, much like that of our current unemployment system.

No matter how the FTC rules on the use of noncompete agreements, there are two other actions it should take that would significantly strengthen worker rights. Currently, many workers only learn they are subject to a noncompete agreement after they have already accepted a job.  The FTC should mandate that employers include any noncompete requirements in all job postings.

And as the California experience shows, companies will continue to use noncompetes even if they are not enforceable, relying on ignorance, intimidation, as well as the financial costs of court proceedings, to get workers to accept their terms.  Therefore, the FTC should also allow workers to sue for damages if a business is illegally attempting to enforce a noncompete agreement.

In the meantime, while we await FTC action, the greater the public knowledge about, and voiced opposition to the use of noncompetes, the better. 

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