Saturday, July 25, 2020

Crowds Gather in Chengdu to Watch American Diplomats Evacuate [feedly]

Crowds Gather in Chengdu to Watch American Diplomats Evacuate
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-25/closure-of-u-s-consulate-in-chengdu-draws-wide-attention

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The industries that shepherd goods around the world on ships, planes and trucks acknowledge they aren't ready to handle the challenges of shipping an eventual Covid-19 vaccine from drugmakers to billions of people.

Already stretched thin by the pandemic, freight companies face problems ranging from shrinking capacity on container ships and cargo aircraft to a lack of visibility on when a vaccine will arrive. Shippers have struggled for years to reduce cumbersome paperwork and upgrade old technology that, unless addressed soon, will slow the relay race to transport fragile vials of medicine in unprecedented quantities.

Making a vaccine quickly is hard enough but distributing one worldwide offers a host of other variables, and conflicting forces may work against the effort: The infrastructure powering the global economy is scaling down for a protracted downturn just as pharmaceutical companies need to scale up for the biggest and most consequential product launch in modern history.

"We're not prepared," Neel Jones Shah, global head of air carrier relationships at San Francisco-based freight forwarder Flexport, said during a webinar this week with other logistics executives.

"Let's all be honest here, vaccine supply chains are exponentially more complex than PPE supply chain," he said, referring to personal protective equipment like surgical masks and gloves. "You can't ruin PPE by leaving it on the tarmac for a couple of days. You will destroy vaccines."

8,000 Cargo Planes

Julian Sutch, head of Emirates SkyCargo's pharmaceutical division, estimated recently that a single Boeing Co. 777 freighter can carry 1 million individual doses of a vaccine. That means airlifting double-dose regimens to protect half the world's population would require the space in about 8,000 cargo planes.

It's doable, but not without a coordinated global strategy. For now, what's helping to free up air freight capacity is retrofitting idled passenger planes so they can carry products ranging from medical gear to mangoes. Emirates is using 70 passenger 777s to move cargo, according to Sutch.

The cost of air freight from Hong Kong to North America has declined

Another capacity issue involves refrigeration. Health officials have said a vaccine that eventually comes to market will likely need to be maintained at 2 to 8 degrees Celsius (35.6 to 46.4 degrees Fahrenheit) throughout the shipping process. Some newer technologies could require more advanced freezers that can keep them at a frigid minus 80 degrees Celsius. Any deviation can ruin the shots.

Among the big questions involving fairness and accessibility: Exactly how will medicine requiring such delicate and expensive transportation reach remote, impoverished areas where drones are now used to distribute pharmaceuticals?

Such details aren't sorted out yet and shippers are aware of the need to get organized. But they're waiting on signals from the drugmakers.

Shah said Flexport is in early discussions with a number of pharmaceutical companies involved in vaccine manufacturing that are still unsure about what they're going to need. "To a T, they're all extremely nervous about being able to bring these to market as quickly as people might expect," he said.

There are more than 160 coronavirus vaccines in development, according to the World Health Organization, though only 25 are currently in human studies. The candidates furthest along are now launching late-stage trials, and have ambitions of securing an emergency use authorization from regulators before year end. That could allow for a limited availability of shots for health-care workers and other vulnerable groups.

Targeting 2021

Ultimately, countries will need far broader access to Covid-19 shots to halt the virus that has devastated economies and so far taken more than 633,000 lives globally. But by all accounts that's not likely to occur until well into 2021 at the earliest.

In the meantime, manufacturing deals are being clinched, and facilities are getting retrofitted to produce the still-experimental shots at the risk they fail in the clinic. Though the science underscoring the inoculations is still unproven, and mass production remains a daunting task, top pharmaceutical executives speculate that distribution will pose the greatest challenge of all.

"Often people are talking about the scientific conundrum of coming forward with a vaccine that works. In some ways, maybe even a harder problem is what you just put your finger on, which is distribution," Merck & Co. Chief Executive Officer Kenneth Frazier said in an interview on Leadership Live With David Rubenstein on Bloomberg Television. "None of us are safe until all of us are safe, so it's got to be given broadly to humanity. We need a vaccine that we can make and distribute around the world."

Throughout nearly six months of the crisis, the closing and reopening of economies has thrown out of sync the usual seasonal flow of goods from China and other large manufacturing hubs, rendering forecasts useless for shipping plans. Making the future even harder to predict is the wide time range health experts are discussing for the arrival of an antidote to the coronavirus.

Airport Readiness

"I don't think we're ready because I don't think we know what to expect," said Emir Pineda, manager of aviation trade and logistics at Miami International Airport, which is among a limited number of airports around the world with carriers certified to handle pharmaceuticals. "If all of a sudden 20 to 30 charter flights land at Miami International Airport full of pharmaceuticals for distribution throughout the Americas, we're going to have a challenge."

Another complicating factor could be the behavior of some protectionist governments intent on hobbling international cooperation by exerting sovereignty over supply chains.

That attitude was on display this week at a hearing in Washington before a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee, where some lawmakers grilled executives of AstraZeneca PlcJohnson & Johnson, Merck, Moderna Inc. and Pfizer Inc. about whether their vaccines would be made in the U.S., and what countries they would acquire materials from.

"Systemic health threats are the least promising subjects for global cooperation," said Simon Evenett, a professor at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland who tracks trade barriers.

If private industry doesn't rise to the delivery task, one option is outright government intervention. In the U.S., for instance, the Pentagon can call on commercial airlines contracted as part of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet, a program established in 1951 after the Berlin airlift that can be invoked in peacetime for national security reasons.

Amid the political noise is the steady hum of economies trying to recover, and the busy time of year for companies to stock up ahead of the end-of-year holidays typically is in August and September. Vaccine distribution aside, already elevated shipping prices may stay that way and remain more volatile than ever given the capacity shortages and the demand uncertainty.

"We are going to see spikes driven by commercial freight" over the next several months, said Michael Steen, executive vice president and chief commercial officer at the Purchase, New York-based shipping company Atlas Air Worldwide. "The typical calendar peak will be strong -- that's what we're expecting."

Steps Toward a Vaccine

The race to develop a Covid-19 inoculation must go through many stages

Source: World Health Organization, compiled by Bloomberg (vaccine candidates by region)

The branded and generic drug industry has already stomached the high cost of transportation as the pandemic has thrown the airline industry into chaos. Even at the outset of February, industry trade groups and nonprofits struggled to help drug companies navigate the dearth of commercial and cargo flights.

"This is an issue of demand where the pricing is four, five, ten times of what they normally would be," said Anne McDonald Pritchett, the senior vice president of policy and research for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, during a virtual meeting meeting on supply-chain hurdles in June.

Companies are getting creative, with some going through Canada and using trucks to haul products into the U.S. Others have chartered private planes to deliver finished therapeutics into the country. Those quick-fix, costly solutions aren't likely to work when combined with the complex transport requirements of a coronavirus vaccine.

Hence the urgent need for a game plan.

"We're not planning proactively for accommodating that vaccine distribution going forward because the various parties here are not connecting," Steen said Thursday during the industry webinar, hosted by STAT Media Group, a trade industry publisher in Mumbai. "Shippers and manufacturers are not connecting."

The good news, he said, is that drug manufacturers, companies along the distribution chain and governments still have time to understand how to "take this very scarce capacity and support the distribution of those vaccines in order to stimulate the economies and most importantly make people healthy again."


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Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Essential—and Expendable—Mexican Labor (Part 1) [feedly]

Essential—and Expendable—Mexican Labor (Part 1)
http://triplecrisis.com/essential-and-expendable-mexican-labor-part-1/

On both sides of the border, Mexican workers are now essential—to U.S. corporations.
By Mateo Crossa and James M. Cypher (guest post)

This article is in the July/August issue of Dollars & Sense.

Lear Corporation—one of the world's largest auto parts manufacturers—rose to position 148 on Fortune magazine's famous list of the 500 largest firms in 2018. It operates with roughly 148,000 workers spread across 261 locations. Its largest presence is in Mexico, where approximately 40,000 low-paid workers make seats and labor-intensive electronic wiring systems to be used, primarily, by the U.S. auto giants in auto-assembly plants on both sides of the border. The largest share of these workers slog away in three huge Lear plants located in the notoriously dangerous border town of Ciudad Juárez in Mexico.

On April 10, 2020 a worker named Rigoberto Tafoya Maqueda died from Covid-19, which had swept in from the north. He had been diagnosed in Lear's clinic with a mild allergy and was forced to continue working without a face mask, gloves, or hand sanitizer. A short time later, he went to the government's Social Security hospital, on foot, where he died. Four days later, according to Lear, 13 more workers at the plant had died—but the workers' labor union claimed that the actual number of work-related deaths from the pandemic was 30. Lear claimed it was not responsible in the least, while offering hollow condolences to surviving family members.

As of late May, no investigation of the workplace had been conducted and no legal charges of negligence had been raised against Lear or any of the other 320 maquiladoras—also known as maquilas, or more recently, by outraged workers, as "makilladoras"—that employ approximately 230,000 in Juárez where workers have been sickened. By early May, 104 of these workers had perished, by early June the estimated number of worker deaths was above 200. In all of Mexico, this city, with the largest concentration of low-wage assembly plants, had the highest incidence of pandemic deaths—a mortality rate 2.5 times the national average.

Tijuana is the city with the second largest number of maquilas in Mexico. There, one in four "formal" sector workers (workers with registered jobs and certain rights to health care) work as low-wage laborers producing components for automobiles and many other industries. Tijuana is located in the state of Baja California in Mexico, where the highest number of pandemic deaths—519—had been recorded as of May 15. Of those deceased, 432 were maquila workers. By June 4, Tijuana had the highest number of Covid-19 deaths, 671, of any city in Mexico.

 

U.S. Business, U.S. State Department Demand: The Maquilas Must Open

Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana are tangible symbols of the imposed power structures under which transnational corporations operate throughout the global South, most particularly in Mexico. In these two border cities, 1,000 miles apart, we find nearly one-fifth of the maquila workforce—500,000 out of a total of 2.6 million workers. Here, in response to corporations' treatment of workers during the pandemic, the scene has included bitter strikes, social outrage, and numerous well-attended protests all aimed at imposing plant closures and paid leave. The plant owners have refused to assume any responsibility whatsoever for their negligence, insisting that the work must go on. Instead, they have pressured local and federal governmental agencies to ensure that, in spite of an unsanitary environment, no new safety and health regulations of the workplace will be imposed. After reopening in late May, the plants have taken some measures to reduce health risks among the workers, including the use of masks and plastic dividers at workstations (see photo of seat assembly) and in company lunchrooms.

At the same time, plants have increased the pace of production exponentially. Even with the measures taken, there have continued to be outbreaks of Covid-19 at the assembly plants. Indeed, the long-powerful U.S. National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) has used every opportunity to ensure that no sustained period of plant closures be implemented—including sending an unprecedented letter to Mexico's president on April 22, signed by 327 corporate titans who enjoy the lucrative benefits of sweating Mexican workers. Signatories included the heads of 3M Corporation ($32 billion in sales in 2019), Arcelor/Mittal USA ($15 billion in sales 2019), and Caterpillar ($54 billion in sales 2019). Using a lot of imagination, and no small amount of chutzpah, these captains of industry demanded that President Andrés Manual Lopéz Obrador (or AMLO, as he is known)—who had declared at the start of his presidency that the neoliberal era that had defined Mexico's economy since 1986 was over—declare that Mexican autoworkers were engaged in an "essential activity." The letter demanded that the president assure that "all interruptions in the North American manufacturing supply chain would be minimized in these critical moments." AMLO responded immediately by stating that Mexico and the United States would come to an agreement and that "there were exceptional questions" to resolve with the United States.

Has there ever been an occasion when a president of a sovereign nation has been told that its populace—beset by a vicious pandemic—would have to march into poisoned plants in order to maintain the profit margins of foreign-owned corporations?

If that was not enough, Christopher Landau, the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, gave himself a pat on the back in late April by declaring via Twitter, "I'm doing all I can to save supply chains between Mexico, the United States, and Canada." Immediately joining the fray, the employers' and manufacturers' "peak business organizations"—long the real rulers of Mexico—began to lobby and orchestrate political pressure to guarantee that maquila output would not be interrupted. The large owners associations included the Consejo Coordinador Empresarial (CCE), which is comprised of the largest Mexican firms, and the arch-conservative Mexican Employers Association (COPARMEX), which was formed in 1929 by the anti-union oligarchy based in industrial Monterrey, echoed the arguments presented by the NAM. Also joining in was the Association of the Mexican Auto Industry (which was founded in 1951 by Chrysler, Ford, General Motors, Nissan, and Volkswagen, and lists no Mexican-owned companies as members).

 

A National Security Issue?

At this point, an unexpected actor entered the scene: The Undersecretary of Defense of the United States, Ellen Lord, declared to reporters in late April, "I think one of the key things we have found out are some international dependencies…" adding that "Mexico right now is somewhat problematic for us." In her remarks, Lord said nothing about Mexican workers becoming deathly ill, or worse, that toil in the maquilas, now located throughout the country (not just on the U.S.-Mexican border). She also added the "National Security" argument to her framing of the pandemic's impact on U.S.-Mexico supply chains: "these companies are especially important for our U.S. airframe production." And, indeed, over the past 20 years the United States has outsourced a modest amount of aerospace production: in Mexico this consists of labor-intensive components that are used by the U.S. civilian aviation firms, along with some Pentagon military contractors, and are typically manufactured in maquilas. One example of this minor sideline of maquila manufacturing—and the conditions that workers face at these factories—is a Honeywell plant in Juaréz where, on April 22, workers engaged in a three-day wildcat strike after learning that Covid-19 had spread into the plant, killing at least one worker.
One protesting worker summarized the situation:
They do not want to give us [sick] days, we are worried because of the pandemic, management does not listen to us, they only tell us [to keep working] and they will give us a bonus of $18-$31.50 [dollars per week] but they will not respond to our demands, we have been on strike three days but the truth is that they are paying no attention to us.

 

Inaugurating the USMCA

The U.S. pressure game got quick results: on May 12 the Mexican government declared that the aerospace maquilas (which, as of 2020, had only 57,000 direct employees) and the very large auto parts and auto assembly industry—which employs nearly 960,000 workers and is a mainstay of the "export-at-all-costs" neoliberal model—were "essential" industries. With this decree the alarm bells ceased in the United States. Further, the Mexican government set June 1, 2020 as the date to return to full operation in the auto industry, which ensured that the beginning of the NAFTA-II Agreement (officially the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or the USMCA) was still on track for July 1, 2020. President Donald Trump will undoubtedly use the official launch of the USMCA to maximum effect as he hones his electoral strategy. AMLO supports this new agreement to "help stop the fall of the economy" and promote new foreign investments.

The list of transnational firms that are already in production—or will shortly resume— where Covid-19 has spread is a long one, and includes such companies as: Lear Corporation, Honeywell, Syncreon Borderland, Foxconn, Plantronics, Leoni, Rockwell, Mahle, Electrocomponentes de México, Electrolux, Hubbell, Commscope, Toro Company, Ethicon, Cordis, Syncreon, Flex, Keytronic, Optron, TPI, and APTIV. In April, shutdowns affected approximately 60% of all maquiladora workers in Juarez—a situation that was probably representative for the entire industry—suggesting that as many as 3,000 of the 5,162 maquiladorafirms operating in April temporarily closed. The companies that are reopening are doing so without regard for the deaths of hundreds of their plant workers (some registered, some not). These firms have been the most enthusiastic advocates of restarting production as they have sought to drown out the resistance of their workers. On May 10, the maquila association (Index) reported 55% of the maquilasin operation. On May 19, as a great number of plants reopened, maquila workers in Jauréz and Matamoros marched to demand the closure of many plants, including those operated by Foxconn in Santa Teresa (where there were six Covid-19-related deaths, according to the workers), Electrocomponentes de México (10 deaths), Lear (30 deaths), Electrolux (seven deaths), Toro (two deaths), and Regal (13 deaths). The workers asserted that none of these operations—which make a range of products, from snow removal equipment to home appliances —were essential and that none of them had met the sanitation requirements as mandated two months earlier. In Juaréz, 66 maquilas that make neither auto parts nor aviation parts (i.e., those never categorized as "essential") have remained in operation throughout the health crisis.

All across the borderland, from Tijuana (with an estimated 1,000 maquilas) through Mexicali in Baja California to Nogales, Sonora (with 70% of maquilas in operation on May 18), and on to Juaréz, Chihuahua, and then to Ciudad Acuña, Cohauila (where 23,000 workers returned to their plants on May 20) and to the other end of the border in Matamoros, Tamaulipas (where the hospitals were full of dying workers) these states, and 269 municipal governments, had capitulated to the pressure from the United States to reopen. Meanwhile, the Mexican federal government refused to impose its own hygienic measures.

 

NAFTA: Myth of Development, Reality of Deindustrialization

The destructive impact of the pandemic on Mexico reveals further the direct consequences of 26 years of neoliberalism under NAFTA, which exacerbated inequality and largely destroyed the nation's public health system, while imposing a new regime of food precarity as once nationally-produced grains sold at controlled prices are now imported. This shift away from producing staple foods in Mexico has resulted in the displacement of millions of peasant cultivators—many of whom eventually migrated to the United States to work in the dirtiest, hardest, most unstable, and unrewarded jobs available.
What's more, despite the increased prosperity that NAFTA promised, throughout the NAFTA era average workers' wages—measured in terms of their purchasing power of basic goods—have generally declined. Over the past nearly three decades, exports have surged (especially in auto and auto parts manufacturing), and Mexico has been forced to de-industrialize as the domestic market has drowned in a sea of cheap imports. As a result, the industrial share of the GDP fell from 36.2% in 1993 (the last year before NAFTA took effect) to only 29.6% in 2017 as manufacturing ceased to be the driving force of the economy. In the period from 2003–2016, national content (with value originating in Mexico) across Mexico's broad manufacturing export sector averaged only 41%. Using cheap labor to process imported inputs (59% of the value of manufacturing exports does not originate in Mexico) into goods that are largely exported to the United States now defines Mexico's ever-plodding economy. A large portion of the millions of manufacturing sector jobs that were lost in the United States after 1993 were transferred to Mexico where an enormous army of impoverished wage workers crowded into the maquiladora firms—which, as mentioned, now directly employ 2.6 million throughout Mexico.

As was the case in 1992–1993, when the business and political elites of Mexico opened the road to NAFTA—portraying the agreement as a much-needed lever to promote development—these same forces are now eagerly awaiting the USMCA. This delusionary enthusiasm found its way into an essay written by AMLO and published by the office of the president on May 16, 2020:

To be the neighbor of the most powerful economy in the world under the current circumstances of global recession will help us to drive forward our productive activities and create new jobs. It is a fact that the agreement will attract more foreign investment to our industrial export sector.

But the rage of the maquila workers has further unmasked this myth of economic development, despite the fact that, after some attention received in April, the media has largely ceased coverage of labor strife on the border. On the first of May, International Workers Day, the streets of Ciudad Juárez woke up to graffiti proclaiming "STOP MAKILLAS." In this manner a diverse collective of workers began a campaign to raise awareness about perilous workplace conditions—announcing that "el virus es la makilla" (the virus is the maKILLa) and that "la makilla te aniquila" (the maKILLa will annihilate you)—and to demand new protections centered on Salud, Trabajo y Dignidad (Health, Work, and Dignity). Through these protests, they were able to communicate to the nation the completely arbitrary and unaccountable manner in which the transnational firms were operating along the border and throughout the country. The current policy is for these firms to force workers into the plants (lest they literally starve) on the pretext that they are involved in "essential" activities. Firms expect workers to continue doing their jobs without sanitary protections, given that distancing in these factories is impossible. Indignant workers have drawn attention to those who have been summarily fired, without justification as required by the labor law, when they resisted being forced into the deadly plants. These workers were then denied their indemnification for losing their jobs. (The labor law requires that employers pay workers fired without cause three months of salary plus 20 days of pay for every year of service, and a number of other smaller payments.)
"STOP MAKILLAS!" was also the cry heard on May 12, when the Mexican government declared that maquila workers in the aerospace and the auto industries were "essential" (essential to the United States) and had to be forced to work, regardless of the utter absence of health and safety protections for workers. The workers responded by demanding they be put on leave at full pay (as well as that all necessary sanitary measures be taken).

But workers' concerns and their demands are clearly unimportant to the U.S. government and hundreds of U.S. companies operating in Mexico. U.S. Ambassador Landau was blunt in his advocacy of reopening in his widely circulated statement:

We have to protect [people's] health without destroying the economy. It's not impossible. … I'm here to look for win-win solutions. On both sides of the border, investment = employment = prosperity.

And so, only four weeks after shutting their doors, the maquilas were open without any clear information as to which, if any, measures had been taken to protect the returning workers. Most workers were forced back onto the shop floor (although some large export firms delayed until June 1). The agencies of the Mexican government (at all levels) and the company-controlled unions had fallen over backwards to ensure that the profits would soon again be flowing, primarily to the United States. In the border state of Chihuahua, for example, 93% of the 122 "essential" workplaces inspected were approved for operation by June 1. However, two weeks later, additional plant inspections resulted in the closure of 44 out of 208 maquiladoras for lack of compliance with sanitation requirements.

In Part 2, the authors examine how Mexican workers on the U.S. side of the border have been pressed into "essential" work in meatpacking plants through Trump's invocation of the Defense Production Act.

MATEO CROSSA is a researcher based in Mexico City. He received a Ph.D. from the  doctoral program in Development Studies, Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, Mexico.
JAMES M. CYPHER is an emeritus professor of economics in the doctoral program in Development Studies, Universidad Autónoma de Zacatecas, Mexico.

Sources: De la Redacción, "Industriales de EU piden a México reabrir fábricas" La Jornada, April 23, (journada.com.mx); Manuel Fuentes, "Maquiladoras, a laborar por órdenes del Norte," La Silla Rota, May 20, 2020 (lasillarota.com); Joe Gould, "COVID closed Mexican factories that supply US defense industry. The Pentagon wants them opened" Defense News, April 21, 2020 (defensenews.com); Paola Gamboa, "Un bono de 700 pesos no vale más que mi vida" El Heraldo de Juárez, April 20 2020 (elheralddejuarez.com.mz); Patricia Mayorga, "Indiferencia gubernamental y empresarial expone a obreros de maquilas al COVID-19," La Verdad, June 19, 2020 (laverdadjuarez.com); "Iztapalapa y Tijuana, cerca de los 700 muertos por COVID-19; ¿qué municipios registran más contagios?," MedioTiempo, June 6, 2020 (mediotiemp.com); "Piden cerrar maquiladoras en frontera mexicana por la pandemia de COVID" INFOBE: México , May 19, 2020 (infobae.com); Marco Antonio López, "Empleados acusan que los obligan a trabajar pese a muertes por COVID en maquiladoras de Chihuahua" Animal Político, May 18, 2020 (animalpolitico.com); René Villareal, "Comercio exterior y el desarrollo de capacidades" Comercio Exterior, Oct.-Dec. 2018; Andrés Manual Lopéz Obrador, "The New Political Economy in the time of the Corona Virus," Office of the President, May 16, 2020 (lopezobrador.org.mx); Alberto Morales, "AMLO comparte ensayo "la nueva política económica en los tiempos del coronavirus" El Universal, May 16, 2020 (eluniversal.com.mx).

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Xi's Radical Stock Market Reforms Shield China Firms From U.S [feedly]

Xi's Radical Stock Market Reforms Shield China Firms From U.S
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-21/xi-s-radical-stock-market-reforms-shield-china-firms-from-u-s

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Enlighten Radio:End of the Road: Who Ya Gonna Call?

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Monday, July 20, 2020

Equitable Growth: A college degree is not the solution to U.S. wage inequality [feedly]

A college degree is not the solution to U.S. wage inequality
https://equitablegrowth.org/a-college-degree-is-not-the-solution-to-u-s-wage-inequality/

Overview

Relatively stagnant or declining wages for the vast majority of U.S. workers became a feature of the U.S. economy after the 1970s, along with a shift to "lousy" and low-wage jobs and rising wage and income inequality despite increasing productivity.

One of the explanations for this job-quality crisis is that not enough workers have the skills required for an increasingly digital and technologically advanced jobs market, leading to a widening gap between the rising wages of the highest-paid workers and everyone else. The concept of a skills gap was likewise blamed for high unemployment after the Great Recession ended in July 2009 and is now cited as the key challenge facing low-wage workers amid the current coronavirus recession. The proposed solutions to closing this apparent gap center around education and training for low-wage workers, often with a focus on getting more workers to obtain college degrees, so they can fill these high-wage, high-demand jobs.

Yet this focus on individual workers misses the structural conditions that constrain workers' options and ability to share in economic growth. This issue brief examines recent data-driven research that demonstrates the skills gap is only a small and relatively unimportant explanation for the college wage premium because it fails to account for declining worker power and the role of monopsony in the labor market. These more important explanations for the college wage premium—and its recent decline—underscore why policymakers need to improve the underlying labor market conditions for all workers, instead of shifting responsibility to those already struggling in an uneven playing field.

The college wage premium can't explain the ongoing rise in wage inequality

A recent National Bureau of Economics Research working paper by economists David Autor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (and a member of Equitable Growth's Research Advisory Board) and Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz (also an Advisory Board member) of Harvard University demonstrates how the college wage premium changed over time in response to labor market changes and policy shifts affecting worker power. While the paper itself is based in a skills-focused framework, its findings show that even this framing falls short when attempting to explain the rise in wage inequality since 2000.

The paper is part of a series of research that assumes employers' demand for skilled labor is driven by "skill-biased technological change." This framework holds that technological advancements—such as computers or robotics—improve the productivity of workers with the skills and education necessary to use the technology more than they improve the productivity of less-skilled workers. The result is a "race" between technology and education, where technological advancements lead employers to require more highly educated workers, but immediate shortages in the supply of educated workers result in higher wages for the college-educated candidates already in the workforce.

This framework is premised on a simplistic supply-and-demand model of the market that supposes wages are purely a result of demand for worker attributes and those attributes explain wage levels for individual workers. In framing wage distribution and outcomes in this way, it overlooks other important factors such the influence of institutions, including unions, and the relative power of workers and employers in changing labor markets.

The new paper expands on previous research, including a 2007 paper by Goldin and Katz, "The Race Between Education and Technology," which tracked the differences in wages for workers with different education levels from 1890 to 2005. This paper combines several data sources to extend that analysis to look at the relationship between years of schooling and wages over the period from 1825 to 2017.

In line with previous research, the latest paper by Autor, Goldin, and Katz finds that when demand for educated workers is high and supply is low, such as in the late 1800s, the wage premium for educated workers—defined as the average difference between their wages and those of less-educated workers—is high. When the supply of educated workers increases, as it did over the early part of the 20th century, the wage premium falls. The definition of a relatively eduated or skilled worker shifts over time, of course, depending on eduation trends and available data sources, beginning with those who did clerical work (which generally required a high school background) prior to 1914 and then tracking those with high school and college degrees or equivalents.

Since the beginning of the 20th century, the three researchers find that a 10 percent increase in the relative supply of college-educated workers leads to a 6 percent reduction in the college wage premium. The paper argues that models using this framework can explain most of the wage premium for educated workers—but only until the 2000s, when other factors appear to play a larger role.

As the authors note, the wages of educated workers only describe one side of the education wage premium. Because wage premiums refer to the difference between earnings for educated and less-educated workers, they depend not only on the added value for educated workers but also the opportunities for workers without that educational background. The strong decline in wage premiums for high school and college educations in the 1940s probably did not happen because the supply of educated workers increased dramatically—in 1940, the reach of high school education had expanded, but only 6 percent of men and 4 percent of women had completed 4 years of college. Instead, the authors write, the lower relative returns to education in the 1940s were "likely driven by strong unions, tight labor markets, and government wage pressures during World War II."

Likewise, the three authors find that the strength of American unions and a robust national minimum wage also contributed to a decline in the college wage premium in the late 1970s. This happened because wages improved for those in occupations that did not require a college degree.

When the three authors examine more recent wage patterns, they find that wage inequality rose at roughly the same rate between 1980 and 2000 as it did between 2000 and 2017, but also that the college wage premium could explain 75 percent of this increase in the first time period and only 38 percent in the second time period. Furthermore, wage inequality increased within college degree holders since 2000, and workers with advanced post-college degrees earned even greater wage premiums.

The authors conclude that the framework of a race between education and technology "remains relevant in the 21st century, but needs some tweaks" to fully capture the drivers behind the rising wage inequality the United States experienced since 2000.

Rising education requirements are not necessarily due to increasingly skilled work, and the returns of a college education are often less for the workers who need it most

One of the factors complicating a straightforward interpretation of the college wage premium is that employers often require college degrees for positions for reasons other than the content of the role's duties. One way this is evident is when employers often raise job education requirements during times of high unemployment, when there are many candidates for jobs, but may also drop these requirements when the labor market tightens. Over time, as a greater share of workers earns college degrees, education requirements may continue to rise—but, crucially, not because the duties of the job require greater skill or education levels.

As a paper by Paul Beaudry of the University of British Columbia and the National Bureau of Economic Research, David A. Green of the University of British Columbia and Institute for Fiscal Studies, and Benjamin M. Sand of York University found, the decline in demand for college degrees since 2000 led many college-educated workers to take jobs that did not require a degree, which, in turn, pushed workers without degrees down into even lower-wage jobs. The Roosevelt Institute also notes that requiring unnecessary degrees drives more students to attend college, often taking on large amounts of debt in the process, because they've been told they can't afford not to.

The evidence is clear that while a college degree is increasingly a requirement for middle- and high-wage jobs, it is not a guarantee of higher earnings, especially for people of color. Discrimination and occupational segregation continue to limit wages and economic opportunity for Black and Latinx workers and intersect with gender discrimination to additionally lower wages for Black women and Latinas. The new NBER working paper by Autor, Goldin, and Katz examined in the previous section of this issue brief did not break out college wage premiums by race and ethnicity, but other research shows that Black and Latinx workers with college degrees continue to earn lower wages than White workers with college degrees.

In addition, Black workers with college degrees experience higher unemployment rates compared with White workers with college degrees, as shown by economists Jhacova Williams and Valerie Wilson of the Economic Policy Institute. The two economists also find that Black workers are more likely to be underutilized in jobs that do not require a college degree.

Then, there's evidence that shows how external factors limit the role of a college degree in driving economic mobility. As economist Brad Hershbein writes for The Brookings Institution, a college degree is still associated with higher earnings, on average, but actually benefits the wages of those from lower-income backgrounds less. Hershbein finds that college graduates from very low-income backgrounds—those from families below 185 percent of the federal povery level—see less of a relative income bump from their degree over the course of their careers than college graduates from higher-income backgrounds.

College graduates from very low-income families go on to earn 91 percent more than people from the same income background who only graduated high school, but college graduates from families with higher incomes earned 162 percent more compared with high school graduates from that income background. If the content of a college degree is the key to skilled work and greater economic mobility, then these findings should be the reverse. Instead, these findings—along with research on the role of household wealth and of student debt—show that the college wage premium is not a straightforward story.

The skills gap framing ignores the underlying dynamics of job quality and worker power

The new NBER paper by Autor, Goldin, and Katz demonstrates that the college wage premium declined when unions were strong and the real minimum wage was at its peak. The research shows that the college wage premium is less a story of supply and demand—let alone about the inherent value of a college degree—and more about other U.S. labor market factors such as the underlying dynamics of job quality and worker power. It is also the story of the opportunities for workers without a degree and the protections they have.

We see the importance of these factors in another recent NBER working paper, by Matthias Doepke of Northwestern University and Ruben Gaetani of the University of Toronto, which sheds more light on the intersection of skills, job quality, and worker protections. Comparing college differentials in the United States and Germany since 1980, the paper's findings suggest that a major reason why the college wage premium has risen in our nation compared to Germany is that German employment protections reduce the number of worker separations from their employers and encourages employers to invest in workers.

Doepke and Gaetani's model suggests that the very precarity and lower-quality of jobs in the United States do not allow these workers to develop skills over time in the same way that college-educated workers can. This bolsters the idea that part of the cause for the college wage premium is higher-wage workers' bargaining power.

Ultimately, the skills-focused competitive market approach needs more than a tweak to fully capture the forces shaping earnings for workers. As Equitable Growth Labor Market Policy Director Kate Bahn explains, the idea that a skills gap is at the root of wage inequality ultimately ignores the role of unions, worker power, and the broader policy decisions affecting low-wage workers. In a recent Equitable Growth working paper by Bahn and Mark Stelzner of Connecticut College, the authors demonstrate how barriers to job search by race and ethnicity, particularly lack of access to wealth for workers of color and women workers, means that these workers face more difficulty managing their lives and job searches while being unemployed longer without earnings.

Because workers from marginalized groups can't afford to wait for better job opportunities, employers wield a greater ability to offer lower (discriminatory) wages. Fostering worker bargaining power through pro-labor institutions, such as supporting union organizing and enforcing anti-discrimination laws, reduces the ability of employers to use their monopsony power to exploit workers by race and gender. Similarly, other research shows that raising the minimum wage directly benefits low-wage workers, reducing income inequality and narrowing racial wage disparities.

To reduce wage inequality, improve conditions for all workers, not just those at the top

As Equitable Growth noted in 2014, one of the results of assuming that education differences provide the main explanation for rising wage inequality in the United States is to lead policymakers to view college as a blanket solution for inequality. But the evidence from the Great Recession shows that the apparent skills gap is often driven by greater employer power in times of high unemployment, and that a college degree does not protect workers from low-paying, low-quality job options with no bargaining power and no opportunities to learn and grow. Focusing on education as the first and leading solution to wage inequality ignores the larger issues that undercut workers' options and further racial disparities. While education and training are often part of what workers need to access quality jobs, they will not be sufficient without worker power to ensure they share in the productivity gains their value-added inputs create.

If past trends continue, policymakers can expect employers to respond to the current record-setting unemployment levels by continuing to raise education requirements. And many policymakers will attempt to respond to this sudden skills gap with calls for more education and training. But the solution to today's dismal jobs numbers is not tell workers to go into debt acquiring credentials only to be rehired at the same types of jobs that had not previously required a degree. Instead, policymakers need to address the structural conditions shaping jobs and wages across the board, focusing on the needs of workers at the bottom of the income ladder. This will require raising the minimum wage to improve outcomes for the country's most vulnerable workers, actually enforcing anti-discrimination laws to reduce pay disparities by race and gender, strengthening unions to give workers a voice in their working conditions and training opportunities, and checking the rising monopsony power that prevents workers from sharing economic growth.


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[The Washington Post] A revealing map of the world’s most and least ethnically diverse countries

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/05/16/a-revealing-map-of-the-worlds-most-and-least-ethnically-diverse-countries/

Ethnicity, like race, is a social construct, but it's still a construct with significant implications for the world. How people perceive ethnicity, both their own and that of others, can be tough to measure, particularly given that it's so subjective. So how do you study it?

When five economists and social scientists set out to measure ethnic diversity for a landmark 2002 paper for the Harvard Institute of Economic Research, they started by comparing data from an array of different sources: national censuses, Encyclopedia Brittanica, the CIA, Minority Rights Group International and a 1998 study called "Ethnic Groups Worldwide." They looked for consistence and inconsistence in the reports to determine what data set would be most reliable and complete. Because data sources such as censuses or surveys are self-reported – in other words, people are classified how they ask to be classified – the ethnic group data reflects how people see themselves, not how they're categorized by outsiders. Those results measured 650 ethnic groups in 190 countries.

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One thing the Harvard Institute authors did with all that data was measure it for what they call ethnic fractionalization. Another word for it might be diversity. They gauged this by asking an elegantly simple question: If you called up two people at random in a particular country and ask them their ethnicity, what are the odds that they would give different answers? The higher the odds, the more ethnically "fractionalized" or diverse the country.

I've mapped out the results above. The greener countries are more ethnically diverse and the orange countries more homogenous. There are a few trends you can see right away: countries in Europe and Northeast Asia tend to be the most homogenous, sub-Saharan African nations the most diverse. The Americas are generally somewhere in the middle. And richer countries appear more likely to be homogenous.

This map is particularly interesting viewed alongside data we examined yesterday on racial tolerance, as measured by the frequency with which people in certain countries said they would not want a neighbor from a different racial group.

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Before we go any further, though, a few important caveats, all of which appear in the original research paper as well. Well, all except for the report's age. It's now 11 years old. And given the scarcity of information from some countries, some of the data are very old, dating from as far back as the early 1990s or even late 1980s. Conceptions of ethnicity can change over time; the authors note that this happened in Somalia, where the same people started self-identifying differently after war broke out. And so can the actual national make-ups themselves, due to immigration, conflict, demographic trends and other factors. It's entirely possible, then, that some of these diversity "scores" would look different with present-day data.

Another caveat is that people in different countries might have different bars for what constitutes a distinct ethnicity. These data, then, could be said to measure the perception of ethnic diversity more than the diversity itself; given that ethnicity is a social construct, though those two metrics are not necessarily as distinct as one might think. Finally, as the paper notes, "It would be wrong to interpret our ethnicity variable as reflecting racial characteristics alone." Ethnicity might partially coincide with race, but they're not the same thing.

Now for the data itself. Here are a few observations and conclusions, a number of which draw from the Harvard Institute paper:

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• African countries are the most diverse. Uganda has by far the highest ethnic diversity rating, according to the data, followed by Liberia. In fact, the world's 20 most diverse countries are all African. There are likely many factors for this, although one might be the continent's colonial legacy. Some European overlords engineered ethnic distinctions to help them secure power, most famously the Hutu-Tutsi division in Rwanda, and they've stuck. European powers also carved Africa up into territories and possessions, along lines with little respect for the actual people who lived there. When Europeans left, the borders stayed (that's part of the African Union's mandate), forcing different groups into the same national boxes.

• Japan and the Koreas are the most homogenous. Racial politics can be complicated and nasty in these countries, where nationalism and ethnicity have at times gone hand-in-hand, from Hirohito's Japan to Kim Il Sung's North Korea. The lack of diversity perhaps informs these politics, although it's tough to say which caused which.

• European countries are ethnically homogenous. This is, to me, one of the most interesting trends in the data. A number of now-global ideas about the nation-state, about national identity as tied to ethnicity and about nationalism itself originally came from Europe. For centuries, Europe's borders shifted widely and frequently, only relatively recently settling into what we see today, in which most large ethnic groups have a country of their own. That developed, painfully, over a very long time. And while there are still some exceptions – Belgium has ethnic Walloons and Dutch, for example – in most of Europe, ethnicity and nationality are pretty close to the same thing.

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• The Americas are often diverse. From the United States through Central America down to Brazil, the "new world" countries, maybe in part because of their histories of relatively open immigration (and, in some cases, intermingling between natives and new arrivals) tend to be pretty diverse. The exception is South America's "southern cone," where Argentines and Chileans, many of whom originally come from the same handful of Western European countries, tend to be more homogenous. I was surprised to see Canada rate as more diverse than the United States or even Mexico; it's possible that the survey counted Quebecois as ethnically distinct, although I can't say for sure.

• Wide variation in the Middle East. The range of diversity from Morocco to Iran is a reminder that this part of the world is much less monolithic than we sometimes think. North African countries include large Berber minorities, for example, as well as some sub-Saharan ethnic groups, particularly in Libya. The diversity of Jordan and Syria are reminders of their internal complexity. Iran, with large Azeri, Kurdish and Arab populations, is one of the region's most diverse.

• Diversity and conflict. Internal conflicts appear on first blush to be more common in greener countries, which might make some intuitive sense given that groups with comparable "stakes" in their country's economics and politics might be more willing or able to compete, perhaps violently, over those resources. But there's enough data here to draw a lot of different conclusions. One thing to keep in mind is that ethnicity might not be static or predetermined. In other words, as in the case of Somalia, maybe worsening economic conditions or war make people more likely to further divide along ethnic fractions.

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• Diversity correlates with latitude and low GDP per capita. The report notes, "our measures of linguistic and ethnic fractionalization are highly correlated with latitude and GDP per capita. Therefore it is quite difficult to disentangle the effect of these three variables on the quality of government." As above, keep in mind that correlation and causation aren't the same thing.

• Strong democracy correlates with ethnic homogeneity. This does not mean that one necessarily causes the other; the correlation might be caused by some other factor or factors. But here's the paper's suggestion for why diversity might make democracy tougher in some cases:

The democracy index is inversely related to ethnic fractionalization (when latitude is not controlled for). This result is consistent with theory and evidence presented in Aghion, Alesina and Trebbi (2002). The idea is that in more fragmented societies a group imposes restrictions on political liberty to impose control on the other groups. In more homogeneous societies, it is easier to rule more democratically since conflicts are less intense.

Here's the money quote on the potential political implications of ethnicity:

In general, it does not matter for our purposes whether ethnic differences reflect physical attributes of groups (skin color, facial features) or long-lasting social conventions (language, marriage within the group, cultural norms) or simple social definition (self-identification, identification by outsiders). When people persistently identify with a particular group, they form potential interest groups that can be manipulated by political leaders, who often choose to mobilize some coalition of ethnic groups ("us") to the exclusion of others ("them"). Politicians also sometimes can mobilize support by singling out some groups for persecution, where hatred of the minority group is complementary to some policy the politician wishes to pursue.

The Economic Recovery is Faltering, Say C.E.O.s [feedly]

The Economic Recovery is Faltering, Say C.E.O.s
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/business/dealbook/coronavirus-economy-recovery-companies.html

Hong Kong, considered an exemplar of coronavirus containment, is seeing a surge in infections — a warning for the rest of the world. And a new study in South Korea suggests that children older than 10 can spread the virus as readily as adults, which could complicate school reopenings. More on that below. (Want this delievered to your inbox each day? Sign up here.)

C.E.O.s are worried

America's corporate chiefs are steeling themselves for prolonged economic disruption and the prospect of a slow, halting recovery, The Times's David Gelles writes. Several C.E.O.s he spoke with were in a gloomy mood about the road ahead.

Fear of illness, arguments over masks and an uncertain future is taking its toll. "It's a grind on the organization's psyche," Brian Niccol of Chipotle told David. He and other leaders also bemoaned a lack of consistent communication from the government. Julia Hartz of Eventbrite said, "The uncertainty and the wildly varying mandates are not helping anybody."

C.E.O.s are losing confidence in the recovery. "I'm less optimistic today than I was 30 days ago," Arne Sorenson of Marriott International said. "I have a more cautious view than I did four weeks ago," Ed Bastian of Delta Air Lines noted.



Now what? "Getting this wrong — overreacting or acting irresponsibly — could be far more devastating to the global economy and the health of Americans," Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan said. "Open intelligently. Treat your fellow Americans respectfully. Start slow."

• Rich Lesser of Boston Consulting Group has perhaps the most eye-catching proposal: The federal government should distribute masks, increase testing and distribute food to vulnerable populations at a cost of up to $100 billion a month. That's a lot of money, but it could reduce hospitalizations by as much as 70 percent, he said, while costing less than the $1 trillion a month that the government spent on relief efforts from March through May.


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