Call it the automation paradox: The infusion of artificial intelligence, robotics and big data into the workplace is elevating the demand for people’s ingenuity, to reinvent a process or rapidly solve problems in an emergency. The new blue-collar labor force will need four “distinctively more human” core competencies for advanced production: complex reasoning, social and […]
Unfilled jobs in the U.S. exceeded the number of unemployed Americans by more than one million as the summer came to a close, a sign it is increasingly difficult for employers to find workers. There were a seasonally adjusted 7.01 million job openings on the last business day of September, the Labor Department said Tuesday. […]
So there it is – seemingly unleavened good economic news. Record numbers of Californians are working and earning livings for themselves and their families. However, there are some dark clouds on the horizon. For one thing, data from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reveal that California has one of the nation’s highest rates of […]
Despite strong economic growth and historically low unemployment, a government report released Thursday pointed to an important missing ingredient so far in the U.S. expansion: worker-productivity improvements. Output per hour for workers in nonfarm businesses rose 1.3% in the third quarter from a year earlier, marking the 32nd straight quarter of yearly growth below 2%, […]
Hiring accelerated in October and the unemployment rate held at a 49-year low, signs of a strengthening labor market that delivered U.S. workers the best pay raises in nearly a decade. U.S. nonfarm payrolls increased a seasonally adjusted 250,000 in October, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate held steady at 3.7%, matching lowest […]
If you are not familiar with PAGA, it stands for the Private Attorney General Act, a law referred to as the “sue your boss law”. It was enacted in 2004 and California is the only state in the union that has such a law. When the law was created there was a budget deficit in […]
Almost all news coverage of the current election season has focused on cultural issues such as gender, race, and immigration. What the media have missed are deep socioeconomic trends driving parts of the country in divergent political directions. President Trump has overseen a significant transformation in the geography of the nation’s growth and prosperity. Instead […]
Economic activity in the Twelfth District continued to expand at a moderate pace during the reporting period of September through early October. Conditions in the labor market tightened noticeably, and wage pressures picked up. Price inflation increased moderately. Sales of retail goods picked up slightly, while activity in consumer and business services was solid. Activity […]
Using administrative employment data from the state of Washington, we use short-duration longitudinal panels to study the impact of Seattle’s minimum wage ordinance on individuals employed in low-wage jobs immediately before a wage increase. We draw counterfactual observations using nearest-neighbor matching and derive effect estimates by comparing the “treated” cohort to a placebo cohort drawn […]
For most of the last two decades, the share of women participating in the U.S. labor force was in decline, puzzling demographers and economists since female participation was rising in many other developed economies. Thanks to a strong economy, that long-running decline shows signs of reversing. Labor-force participation among prime-age U.S. women aged 25 to […]
The federal government’s most powerful economic weapon is the tax code, and its most pressing problem is the ailing American Dream. Enter “opportunity zones,” economically distressed communities where new investments can receive preferential tax treatment. The incentives were quietly inserted into last year’s tax-reform bill. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin recently predicted they could prompt $100 […]
California was built by people with aspirations, many of them lacking cultural polish or elite educations, but dedicated to hard work, innovation, family and community. A large number came from other countries or poor backgrounds: sharecroppers from the South, campesinos from Mexico, people fleeing communism and poverty in Asia, escapees from Hitler’s Europe or Okies […]
To Moenius, the rise of robots in warehouses, factories and fast-food restaurants presents danger for places like the Inland Empire, where most residents work in logistics and the service industry and just 21% of adults have a four-year degree. As technology transforms the nature of work in California, how do people most at risk find […]
As Reason chronicled in a feature story in our July 2016 issue, the real world impact of the unionization drive, the lawsuits, and the $15 minimum wage has been mainly to push car washes to automate and to close down. Two years later, there are more unintended consequences. The $15 minimum wage is fostering a […]
Commentators and political factions blame these labor market problems on everything from bad trade deals, to declines in manufacturing jobs, to corporate greed, to outsourcing, to an uncompetitive tax and regulatory environment, to lax immigration policy. But there is another contributing factor that receives less attention: the weaknesses of secondary, postsecondary, and job-training systems in […]