XPost: alt.society.liberalism, sac.politics, alt.politics.republicans
XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh
The U.S. labor market is hot. Unemployment is at 3.8 percent, a level
it’s hit only once since the 1960s, and many industries report deep
labor shortages. Old theories of what’s wrong with the labor market —
such as a lack of people with necessary skills — are dying fast.
Earnings are beginning to pick up, and the Federal Reserve envisions a
steady regimen of rate hikes.
So why does a large subset of workers continue to feel left behind? We
can find some clues in a new 296-page report from the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a club of advanced and
advancing nations that has long been a top source for international
economic data and research. Most of the figures are from 2016 or
before, but they reflect underlying features of the economies analyzed
that continue today.
In particular, the report shows the United States’s unemployed and
at-risk workers are getting very little support from the government,
and their employed peers are set back by a particularly weak collective-bargaining system.
Those factors have contributed to the United States having a higher
level of income inequality and a larger share of low-income residents
than almost any other advanced nation. Only Spain and Greece, whose
economies have been ravaged by the euro-zone crisis, have more
households earning less than half the nation’s median income — an
indicator that unusually large numbers of people either are poor or
close to being poor.
Joblessness may be low in the United States and employers may be
hungry for new hires, but it’s also strikingly easy to lose a job
here. An average of 1 in 5 employees lose or leave their jobs each
year, and 23.3 percent of workers ages 15 to 64 had been in their job
for a year or less in 2016 — higher than all but a handful of
countries in the study.
If people are moving to better jobs, labor-market churn can be a
healthy sign. But decade-old OECD research found that an unusually
large amount of job turnover in the United States is due to firing and
layoffs, and Labor Department figures show the rate of layoffs and
firings hasn’t changed significantly since the research was conducted.
The United States and Mexico are the only countries in the entire
study that don't require any advance notice for individual firings.
The U.S. ranks at the bottom for employee protection even when mass
layoffs are taken into consideration as well, despite the 1988 Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act's requirement that
employers give notice 60 days before major plant closings or layoffs.
And when you lose your job in the United States, it’s harder to find
another. Fewer than half of displaced workers find a job within a
year, the researchers found — that puts the United States near the
bottom of the five countries for which the researchers provided recent
data. Japan’s rate was similar to the U.S., but Finland, Australia and
Denmark were well ahead. Furthermore, the report’s authors find that
“two in three families with a displaced worker fall into poverty for
some time.”
Even when Americans do find another job, their earnings don’t recover.
After four years, displaced workers are still about 6 percent behind
their peers in terms of annual earnings. In countries such as Finland
and Denmark, workers more or less recover completely over that time
period.
These gaps at the lower end of the labor market can be traced back to
weak government programs and hamstrung union bargaining, the report
says. The United States spends less of its economic wealth on active
efforts to help people who either don’t have a job or who are at risk
of becoming unemployed than almost any other country in the study.
The unemployed, in particular, receive relatively little assistance.
U.S. unemployment benefits provide less support in the first year of unemployment than those in any other country in the study, and the
maximum length of benefits in a typical U.S. state, 26 weeks, is
shorter than in all but a handful of countries. In some states, the
maximum benefit length is less than half of that.
Only 12 percent of U.S. workers were covered by collective bargaining
in 2016 — among all the nations the OECD tracks, only Turkey,
Lithuania and South Korea have been lower at any point this
millennium. And, based on an OECD review of almost four decades of
data, countries that have decentralized collective-bargaining systems,
like the United States, tend to have slower job growth and, in most
cases, higher unemployment than other advanced nations.
These collective bargaining and government support systems might have
something to do with another report finding as well: Workers’ share of
national income dropped about eight percentage points between 1995 and
2013, faster than anywhere but Poland and South Korea over that time.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/07/04/is-it-great-to-be-a-worker-in-the-u-s-not-compared-to-the-rest-of-the-developed-world/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.b381abbac959
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