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Welcome to Our Generation USA!
Labor
covers all forms and sectors of jobs, whether public or private,white collar or blue collar, full-time or part-time, and including management. Further, Labor covers unemployment (e.g., due to automation) and its solutions (e.g., vocational training programs, including government programs in cooperation with businesses to help re-train workers who lost their jobs).
Employment In the United States
YouTube Video: Try This! Working with Bureau of Labor Statistics Databases
Pictured: Employment in the USA covering the Private Sector Jobs
Employment is a relationship between two parties, usually based on a contract where work is paid for, where one party, which may be a corporation, for profit, not-for-profit organization, co-operative or other entity is the employer and the other is the employee.
Employees work in return for payment, which may be in the form of an hourly wage, by piecework or an annual salary, depending on the type of work an employee does and/or which sector she or he is working in. Employees in some fields or sectors may receive gratuities, bonus payments or stock options.
In some types of employment, employees may receive benefits in addition to payment. Benefits can include health insurance, housing, disability insurance or use of a gym. Employment is typically governed by employment laws or regulations and/or legal contracts.
Employees and employers:
Further information: List of largest employers, List of professions, and Tradesman
An employee contributes labor and expertise to an endeavor of an employer or of a person conducting a business or undertaking and is usually hired to perform specific duties which are packaged into a job. In a corporate context, an employee is a person who is hired to provide services to a company on a regular basis in exchange for compensation and who does not provide these services as part of an independent business.
Employer-worker relationship:
Employer and managerial control within an organization rests at many levels and has important implications for staff and productivity alike, with control forming the fundamental link between desired outcomes and actual processes. Employers must balance interests such as decreasing wage constraints with a maximization of labor productivity in order to achieve a profitable and productive employment relationship.
Finding employees or employment:
The main ways for employers to find workers and for people to find employers are via jobs listings in newspapers (via classified advertising) and online, also called job boards. Employers and job seekers also often find each other via professional recruitment consultants which receive a commission from the employer to find, screen and select suitable candidates.
However, a study has shown that such consultants may not be reliable when they fail to use established principles in selecting employees. A more traditional approach is with a "Help Wanted" sign in the establishment (usually hung on a window or door or placed on a store counter).
Evaluating different employees can be quite laborious but setting up different techniques to analyze their skill to measure their talents within the field can be best through assessments. Employer and potential employee commonly take the additional step of getting to know each other through the process of job interview.
Training and development
This refers to the employer's effort to equip a newly hired employee with necessary skills to perform at the job, and to help the employee grow within the organization. An appropriate level of training and development helps to improve employee's job satisfaction.
Remuneration:
There are many ways that employees are paid, including by hourly wages, by piecework, by yearly salary, or by gratuities (with the latter often being combined with another form of payment.
In sales jobs and real estate positions, the employee may be paid a commission, a percentage of the value of the goods or services that they have sold.
In some fields and professions (e.g., executive jobs), employees may be eligible for a bonus if they meet certain targets. Some executives and employees may be paid in stocks or stock options, a compensation approach that has the added benefit, from the company's point of view, of helping to align the interests of the compensated individual with the performance of the company.
Employee benefits:
These are various non-wage compensation provided to employee in addition to their wages or salaries. The benefits can include:
In some cases, such as with workers employed in remote or isolated regions, the benefits may include meals. Employee benefits can improve the relationship between employee and employer and lowers staff turnover.
Organizational justice is an employee's perception and judgement of employer's treatment in the context of fairness or justice. The resulting actions to influence the employee-employer relationship is also a part of organizational justice.
Workforce organizing:
Employees can organize into trade or labor unions, which represent the work force to collectively bargain with the management of organizations about working, and contractual conditions and services.
Ending employment:
Usually, either an employee or employer may end the relationship at any time, often subject to a certain notice period. This is referred to as at-will employment. The contract between the two parties specifies the responsibilities of each when ending the relationship and may include requirements such as notice periods, severance pay, and security measures. In some professions, notably teaching, civil servants, university professors, and some orchestra jobs, some employees may have tenure, which means that they cannot be dismissed at will.
Wage Labor:
Wage labor is the socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer, where the worker sells their labor under a formal or informal employment contract. These transactions usually occur in a labor market where wages are market determined. In exchange for the wages paid, the work product generally becomes the undifferentiated property of the employer, except for special cases such as the vesting of intellectual property patents in the United States where patent rights are usually vested in the original personal inventor.
A wage laborer is a person whose primary means of income is from the selling of his or her labor in this way. In modern mixed economies such as that of the OECD countries, it is currently the dominant form of work arrangement.
Although most work occurs following this structure, the wage work arrangements of CEOs, professional employees, and professional contract workers are sometimes conflated with class assignments, so that "wage labor" is considered to apply only to unskilled, semi-skilled or manual labor.
Employment contract:
In the United States, the standard employment relationship is considered to be at-will, meaning that the employer and employee are both free to terminate the employment at any time and for any cause, or for no cause at all.
However, if a termination of employment by the employer is deemed unjust by the employee, there can be legal recourse to challenge such a termination. Unjust termination may include termination due to discrimination because of an individual's race, national origin, sex or gender, pregnancy, age, physical or mental disability, religion, or military status.
Additional protections apply in some states, for instance in California unjust termination reasons include marital status, ancestry, sexual orientation or medical condition. Despite whatever agreement an employer makes with an employee for the employee's wages, an employee is entitled to certain minimum wages set by the federal government.
The states may set their own minimum wage that is higher than the federal government's to ensure a higher standard of living or living wage for those who are employed.
Under the Equal Pay Act of 1963, an employer may not give different wages based on sex alone.
Employees are often contrasted with independent contractors, especially when there is dispute as to the worker's entitlement to have matching taxes paid, workers compensation, and unemployment insurance benefits. However, in September 2009, the court case of Brown v. J. Kaz, Inc. ruled that independent contractors are regarded as employees for the purpose of discrimination laws if they work for the employer on a regular basis, and said employer directs the time, place, and manner of employment.
In non-union work environments, in the United States, unjust termination complaints can be brought to the United States Department of Labor.
U.S. Federal income tax withholding:
For purposes of U.S. federal income tax withholding, 26 U.S.C. § 3401(c) provides a definition for the term "employee" specific to chapter 24 of the Internal Revenue Code:
"For purposes of this chapter, the term “employee” includes an officer, employee, or elected official of the United States, a State, or any political subdivision thereof, or the District of Columbia, or any agency or instrumentality of any one or more of the foregoing. The term “employee” also includes an officer of a corporation."
This definition does not exclude all those who are commonly known as 'employees'. “Similarly, Latham’s instruction which indicated that under 26 U.S.C. § 3401(c) the category of ‘employee’ does not include privately employed wage earners is a preposterous reading of the statute. It is obvious that within the context of both statutes the word ‘includes’ is a term of enlargement not of limitation, and the reference to certain entities or categories is not intended to exclude all others.”
Labor Unions in The United States:
Labor unions are legally recognized as representatives of workers in many industries in the United States. Their activity today centers on collective bargaining over wages, benefits, and working conditions for their membership, and on representing their members in disputes with management over violations of contract provisions. Larger unions also typically engage in lobbying activities and electioneering at the state and federal level.
Most unions in America are aligned with one of two larger umbrella organizations: the AFL-CIO created in 1955, and the Change to Win Federation which split from the AFL-CIO in 2005. Both advocate policies and legislation on behalf of workers in the United States and Canada, and take an active role in politics. The AFL-CIO is especially concerned with global trade issues.
For further amplification, click on any of the following hyperlinks:
Employees work in return for payment, which may be in the form of an hourly wage, by piecework or an annual salary, depending on the type of work an employee does and/or which sector she or he is working in. Employees in some fields or sectors may receive gratuities, bonus payments or stock options.
In some types of employment, employees may receive benefits in addition to payment. Benefits can include health insurance, housing, disability insurance or use of a gym. Employment is typically governed by employment laws or regulations and/or legal contracts.
Employees and employers:
Further information: List of largest employers, List of professions, and Tradesman
An employee contributes labor and expertise to an endeavor of an employer or of a person conducting a business or undertaking and is usually hired to perform specific duties which are packaged into a job. In a corporate context, an employee is a person who is hired to provide services to a company on a regular basis in exchange for compensation and who does not provide these services as part of an independent business.
Employer-worker relationship:
Employer and managerial control within an organization rests at many levels and has important implications for staff and productivity alike, with control forming the fundamental link between desired outcomes and actual processes. Employers must balance interests such as decreasing wage constraints with a maximization of labor productivity in order to achieve a profitable and productive employment relationship.
Finding employees or employment:
The main ways for employers to find workers and for people to find employers are via jobs listings in newspapers (via classified advertising) and online, also called job boards. Employers and job seekers also often find each other via professional recruitment consultants which receive a commission from the employer to find, screen and select suitable candidates.
However, a study has shown that such consultants may not be reliable when they fail to use established principles in selecting employees. A more traditional approach is with a "Help Wanted" sign in the establishment (usually hung on a window or door or placed on a store counter).
Evaluating different employees can be quite laborious but setting up different techniques to analyze their skill to measure their talents within the field can be best through assessments. Employer and potential employee commonly take the additional step of getting to know each other through the process of job interview.
Training and development
This refers to the employer's effort to equip a newly hired employee with necessary skills to perform at the job, and to help the employee grow within the organization. An appropriate level of training and development helps to improve employee's job satisfaction.
Remuneration:
There are many ways that employees are paid, including by hourly wages, by piecework, by yearly salary, or by gratuities (with the latter often being combined with another form of payment.
In sales jobs and real estate positions, the employee may be paid a commission, a percentage of the value of the goods or services that they have sold.
In some fields and professions (e.g., executive jobs), employees may be eligible for a bonus if they meet certain targets. Some executives and employees may be paid in stocks or stock options, a compensation approach that has the added benefit, from the company's point of view, of helping to align the interests of the compensated individual with the performance of the company.
Employee benefits:
These are various non-wage compensation provided to employee in addition to their wages or salaries. The benefits can include:
- housing (employer-provided or employer-paid),
- group insurance (health, dental, life etc.),
- disability income protection,
- retirement benefits,
- daycare,
- tuition reimbursement,
- sick leave,
- vacation (paid and non-paid),
- social security,
- profit sharing,
- funding of education,
- and other specialized benefits.
In some cases, such as with workers employed in remote or isolated regions, the benefits may include meals. Employee benefits can improve the relationship between employee and employer and lowers staff turnover.
Organizational justice is an employee's perception and judgement of employer's treatment in the context of fairness or justice. The resulting actions to influence the employee-employer relationship is also a part of organizational justice.
Workforce organizing:
Employees can organize into trade or labor unions, which represent the work force to collectively bargain with the management of organizations about working, and contractual conditions and services.
Ending employment:
Usually, either an employee or employer may end the relationship at any time, often subject to a certain notice period. This is referred to as at-will employment. The contract between the two parties specifies the responsibilities of each when ending the relationship and may include requirements such as notice periods, severance pay, and security measures. In some professions, notably teaching, civil servants, university professors, and some orchestra jobs, some employees may have tenure, which means that they cannot be dismissed at will.
Wage Labor:
Wage labor is the socioeconomic relationship between a worker and an employer, where the worker sells their labor under a formal or informal employment contract. These transactions usually occur in a labor market where wages are market determined. In exchange for the wages paid, the work product generally becomes the undifferentiated property of the employer, except for special cases such as the vesting of intellectual property patents in the United States where patent rights are usually vested in the original personal inventor.
A wage laborer is a person whose primary means of income is from the selling of his or her labor in this way. In modern mixed economies such as that of the OECD countries, it is currently the dominant form of work arrangement.
Although most work occurs following this structure, the wage work arrangements of CEOs, professional employees, and professional contract workers are sometimes conflated with class assignments, so that "wage labor" is considered to apply only to unskilled, semi-skilled or manual labor.
Employment contract:
In the United States, the standard employment relationship is considered to be at-will, meaning that the employer and employee are both free to terminate the employment at any time and for any cause, or for no cause at all.
However, if a termination of employment by the employer is deemed unjust by the employee, there can be legal recourse to challenge such a termination. Unjust termination may include termination due to discrimination because of an individual's race, national origin, sex or gender, pregnancy, age, physical or mental disability, religion, or military status.
Additional protections apply in some states, for instance in California unjust termination reasons include marital status, ancestry, sexual orientation or medical condition. Despite whatever agreement an employer makes with an employee for the employee's wages, an employee is entitled to certain minimum wages set by the federal government.
The states may set their own minimum wage that is higher than the federal government's to ensure a higher standard of living or living wage for those who are employed.
Under the Equal Pay Act of 1963, an employer may not give different wages based on sex alone.
Employees are often contrasted with independent contractors, especially when there is dispute as to the worker's entitlement to have matching taxes paid, workers compensation, and unemployment insurance benefits. However, in September 2009, the court case of Brown v. J. Kaz, Inc. ruled that independent contractors are regarded as employees for the purpose of discrimination laws if they work for the employer on a regular basis, and said employer directs the time, place, and manner of employment.
In non-union work environments, in the United States, unjust termination complaints can be brought to the United States Department of Labor.
U.S. Federal income tax withholding:
For purposes of U.S. federal income tax withholding, 26 U.S.C. § 3401(c) provides a definition for the term "employee" specific to chapter 24 of the Internal Revenue Code:
"For purposes of this chapter, the term “employee” includes an officer, employee, or elected official of the United States, a State, or any political subdivision thereof, or the District of Columbia, or any agency or instrumentality of any one or more of the foregoing. The term “employee” also includes an officer of a corporation."
This definition does not exclude all those who are commonly known as 'employees'. “Similarly, Latham’s instruction which indicated that under 26 U.S.C. § 3401(c) the category of ‘employee’ does not include privately employed wage earners is a preposterous reading of the statute. It is obvious that within the context of both statutes the word ‘includes’ is a term of enlargement not of limitation, and the reference to certain entities or categories is not intended to exclude all others.”
Labor Unions in The United States:
Labor unions are legally recognized as representatives of workers in many industries in the United States. Their activity today centers on collective bargaining over wages, benefits, and working conditions for their membership, and on representing their members in disputes with management over violations of contract provisions. Larger unions also typically engage in lobbying activities and electioneering at the state and federal level.
Most unions in America are aligned with one of two larger umbrella organizations: the AFL-CIO created in 1955, and the Change to Win Federation which split from the AFL-CIO in 2005. Both advocate policies and legislation on behalf of workers in the United States and Canada, and take an active role in politics. The AFL-CIO is especially concerned with global trade issues.
For further amplification, click on any of the following hyperlinks:
- Age-related issues
- Working poor
- Models of the employment relationship
- Academic literature
- Globalization and employment relations
- Alternatives
- See also
- Notes and references
- Bibliography
- External links
Unemployment in the United States and its Causes, along with eligibility to realize unemployment benefits through the Federal Unemployment Insurance Program.
Pictured below: Graph illustrating that increased job growth has lowered the unemployment rate fron 10% in 2010 to 4.9% through 2014
- YouTube Video: President Obama Speaks on the Economy 2/5/16 that unemployment has dropped to 4.9%.
- YouTube Video: Asking Robert Reich* about Technological Unemployment and Unconditional Basic Income
Pictured below: Graph illustrating that increased job growth has lowered the unemployment rate fron 10% in 2010 to 4.9% through 2014
Unemployment in the United States discusses the causes and measures of U.S. unemployment and strategies for reducing it. Job creation and unemployment are affected by factors such as economic conditions, global competition, education, automation, and demographics. These factors can affect the number of workers, the duration of unemployment, and wage levels.
Unemployment generally falls during periods of economic prosperity and rises during recessions, creating significant pressure on public finances as tax revenue falls and social safety net costs increase.
For example, employment expanded consistently during the 1990s, but has been inconsistent since due to recessions in 2001 and 2007-2009. As of May 2016, the employment recovery relative to the December 2007 (pre-recession) level was mixed.
Variables such as the unemployment rate (U-3) and number of employed have improved beyond their pre-recession levels. However, the wider U-6 unemployment rate, measures of labor force participation (even among the prime working age group), and the share of long-term unemployed were worse than pre-crisis levels. Further, the mix of jobs has shifted, with a larger share of part-time workers than pre-crisis.
Government spending and taxation decisions (fiscal policy) and U.S. Federal Reserve interest rate adjustments (monetary policy) are important tools for managing the unemployment rate.
There may be an economic trade-off between unemployment and inflation, as policies designed to reduce unemployment can create inflationary pressure, and vice versa. The U.S. Federal Reserve (the Fed) has a dual mandate to achieve full employment while maintaining a low rate of inflation.
Debates regarding monetary policy during 2014-2015 centered on the timing and extent of interest rate increases, as a near-zero interest rate target had remained in place since the 2007-2009 recession. Ultimately, the Fed decided to raise interest rates marginally in December 2015.
The major political parties debate appropriate solutions for improving the job creation rate, with liberals arguing for more government spending and conservatives arguing for lower taxes and less regulation.
Polls indicate that Americans believe job creation is the most important government priority, with not sending jobs overseas the primary solution. Much of the 2012 Presidential campaign focused on job creation as a first priority, but the fiscal cliff and other fiscal debates took precedence in 2012 and early 2013.
Critics argued prioritizing deficit reduction was misplaced, as there was no immediate fiscal crisis but there was a high level of unemployment, particularly long-term unemployment.
Unemployment can be measured in several ways. A person is unemployed if they are jobless but looking for a job and available for work. People who are neither employed nor unemployed are not in the labor force.
For example, as of December 2015, the unemployment rate in the United States was 5.0% or 7.9 million people, while the government's broader U-6 unemployment rate, which includes the part-time underemployed was 9.9% or approximately 16.4 million people.
These figures were calculated with a civilian labor force of approximately 157.8 million people, relative to a U.S. population of approximately 323 million people. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes a monthly "Employment Situation Summary" with key statistics and commentary.
In 2014, Williams County, North Dakota had the lowest percentage of unemployed people of any county or census area in the United States, at 1.2 percent, while Wade Hampton Census Area, Alaska had the highest, at 23.7 percent.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for further amplification:
Causes of Unemployment in the United States
Causes of Unemployment in the United States discusses the causes of U.S. unemployment and strategies for reducing it. Job creation and unemployment are affected by factors such as economic conditions, global competition, education, automation, and demographics. These factors can affect the number of workers, the duration of unemployment, and wage levels.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for amplification:
Unemployment generally falls during periods of economic prosperity and rises during recessions, creating significant pressure on public finances as tax revenue falls and social safety net costs increase.
For example, employment expanded consistently during the 1990s, but has been inconsistent since due to recessions in 2001 and 2007-2009. As of May 2016, the employment recovery relative to the December 2007 (pre-recession) level was mixed.
Variables such as the unemployment rate (U-3) and number of employed have improved beyond their pre-recession levels. However, the wider U-6 unemployment rate, measures of labor force participation (even among the prime working age group), and the share of long-term unemployed were worse than pre-crisis levels. Further, the mix of jobs has shifted, with a larger share of part-time workers than pre-crisis.
Government spending and taxation decisions (fiscal policy) and U.S. Federal Reserve interest rate adjustments (monetary policy) are important tools for managing the unemployment rate.
There may be an economic trade-off between unemployment and inflation, as policies designed to reduce unemployment can create inflationary pressure, and vice versa. The U.S. Federal Reserve (the Fed) has a dual mandate to achieve full employment while maintaining a low rate of inflation.
Debates regarding monetary policy during 2014-2015 centered on the timing and extent of interest rate increases, as a near-zero interest rate target had remained in place since the 2007-2009 recession. Ultimately, the Fed decided to raise interest rates marginally in December 2015.
The major political parties debate appropriate solutions for improving the job creation rate, with liberals arguing for more government spending and conservatives arguing for lower taxes and less regulation.
Polls indicate that Americans believe job creation is the most important government priority, with not sending jobs overseas the primary solution. Much of the 2012 Presidential campaign focused on job creation as a first priority, but the fiscal cliff and other fiscal debates took precedence in 2012 and early 2013.
Critics argued prioritizing deficit reduction was misplaced, as there was no immediate fiscal crisis but there was a high level of unemployment, particularly long-term unemployment.
Unemployment can be measured in several ways. A person is unemployed if they are jobless but looking for a job and available for work. People who are neither employed nor unemployed are not in the labor force.
For example, as of December 2015, the unemployment rate in the United States was 5.0% or 7.9 million people, while the government's broader U-6 unemployment rate, which includes the part-time underemployed was 9.9% or approximately 16.4 million people.
These figures were calculated with a civilian labor force of approximately 157.8 million people, relative to a U.S. population of approximately 323 million people. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) publishes a monthly "Employment Situation Summary" with key statistics and commentary.
In 2014, Williams County, North Dakota had the lowest percentage of unemployed people of any county or census area in the United States, at 1.2 percent, while Wade Hampton Census Area, Alaska had the highest, at 23.7 percent.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for further amplification:
- Definitions of unemployment
- U.S. employment history: Jobs created by Presidential term
- Recent employment trends
- Causes of unemployment
- Fiscal and monetary policy
- Political debates
- Solutions for creating more U.S. jobs
- Analytical perspectives
- Labor market recovery following 2007-2009 recession
- Comparison of employment recovery across recessions and financial crises
- Share of full-time and part-time workers
- What job creation rate is required to lower the unemployment rate?
- International labor force size comparisons
- Effect of disability recipients on labor force participation measures
- Effects on health and mortality
- Effects of healthcare reform
- Job growth projections 2014-2024
- Obtaining data
- Historical unemployment rate charts
- See also:
Causes of Unemployment in the United States
Causes of Unemployment in the United States discusses the causes of U.S. unemployment and strategies for reducing it. Job creation and unemployment are affected by factors such as economic conditions, global competition, education, automation, and demographics. These factors can affect the number of workers, the duration of unemployment, and wage levels.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for amplification:
- Overview
- Domestic factors
- Cyclical vs. structural unemployment
- Demographics and labor force participation rate
- Education and training
- Skills gap
- Long-term unemployment
- Labor unions
- Industry consolidation
- Income and wealth inequality
- Government hiring trends
- Policies regarding full employment
- Unemployment among younger workers
- Job openings relative to unemployed
- Trends in alternative (part-time) work arrangements
- Global factors
- Automation and technology change
- The "Access" or "On Demand" economy
- Immigration
- Trade deals -- NAFTA
- Other factors
The Labor force in the United States
YouTube Video of "The Great Divide" with Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Reich
Pictured: U.S. Labor Trends from 2000 to 2016 (BLS)
The labor force is the actual number of people available for work. The labor force of a country includes both the employed and the unemployed. The labor force participation rate, LFPR (or economic activity rate, EAR), is the ratio between the labor force and the overall size of their cohort (national population of the same age range).
The unemployment rate in the United States is estimated by a household survey called the Current Population Survey, conducted monthly by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The unemployment rate is calculated by dividing the number of unemployed persons by the size of the workforce and multiplying that number by 100, where an unemployed person is defined as a person not currently employed but actively seeking work. The size of the workforce is defined as those employed plus those unemployed.
By BLS definitions, the labor force is the following: "Included are persons 16 years of age and older residing in the 50 States and the District of Columbia who are not inmates of institutions (for example, penal and mental facilities, homes for the aged), and who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces."
The labor force participation rate is the ratio between the labor force and the overall size of their cohort (national population of the same age range). In the West during the later half of the 20th century, the labor force participation rate increased significantly, largely due to the increasing number of women entering the workplace.
Gender and the United States Work Force:
In the United States, there were three significant stages of women’s increased participation in the labor force. During the late 19th century through the 1920s, very few women worked.
Working women were often young single women who typically withdrew from labor force at marriage unless their family needed two incomes. These women worked primarily in the textile manufacturing industry or as domestic workers. This profession empowered women and allowed them to earn a living wage. At times, they were a financial help to their families.
Between 1930 and 1950, female labor force participation increased primarily due to the increased demand for office workers, women participating in the high school movement, and electrification which reduced the time spent on household chores. In the 1950s to the 1970s, most women were secondary earners working mainly as secretaries, teachers, nurses, and librarians (pink-collar jobs).
Claudia Goldin and others, specifically point out that by the mid-1970s there was a period of revolution of women in the labor force brought on by different factors. Women more accurately planned for their future in the work force, choosing more applicable majors in college that prepared them to enter and compete in the labor market. In the United States, the labor force participation rate rose from approximately 59% in 1948 to 66% in 2005, with participation among women rising from 32% to 59% and participation among men declining from 87% to 73%.
A common theory in modern economics claims that the rise of women participating in the US labor force in the late 1960s was due to the introduction of a new contraceptive technology, birth control pills, and the adjustment of age of majority laws. The use of birth control gave women the flexibility of opting to invest and advance their career while maintaining a relationship.
By having control over the timing of their fertility, they were not running a risk of thwarting their career choices. However, only 40% of the population actually used the birth control pill. This implies that other factors may have contributed to women choosing to invest in advancing their careers.
Another factor that may have contributed to the trend was the The Equal Pay Act of 1963, which aimed at abolishing wage disparity based on sex. Such legislation diminished sexual discrimination and encouraged more women to enter the labor market by receiving fair remuneration to help raise children.
The labor force participation rate can decrease when the rate of growth of the population outweighs that of the employed and unemployed together. The labor force participation rate is a key component in long-term economic growth, almost as important as productivity.
The labor force participation rate explains how an increase in the unemployment rate can occur simultaneously with an increase in employment. If a large amount of new workers enter the labor force but only a small fraction become employed, then the increase in the number of unemployed workers can outpace the growth in employment
See Also:
The unemployment rate in the United States is estimated by a household survey called the Current Population Survey, conducted monthly by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The unemployment rate is calculated by dividing the number of unemployed persons by the size of the workforce and multiplying that number by 100, where an unemployed person is defined as a person not currently employed but actively seeking work. The size of the workforce is defined as those employed plus those unemployed.
By BLS definitions, the labor force is the following: "Included are persons 16 years of age and older residing in the 50 States and the District of Columbia who are not inmates of institutions (for example, penal and mental facilities, homes for the aged), and who are not on active duty in the Armed Forces."
The labor force participation rate is the ratio between the labor force and the overall size of their cohort (national population of the same age range). In the West during the later half of the 20th century, the labor force participation rate increased significantly, largely due to the increasing number of women entering the workplace.
Gender and the United States Work Force:
In the United States, there were three significant stages of women’s increased participation in the labor force. During the late 19th century through the 1920s, very few women worked.
Working women were often young single women who typically withdrew from labor force at marriage unless their family needed two incomes. These women worked primarily in the textile manufacturing industry or as domestic workers. This profession empowered women and allowed them to earn a living wage. At times, they were a financial help to their families.
Between 1930 and 1950, female labor force participation increased primarily due to the increased demand for office workers, women participating in the high school movement, and electrification which reduced the time spent on household chores. In the 1950s to the 1970s, most women were secondary earners working mainly as secretaries, teachers, nurses, and librarians (pink-collar jobs).
Claudia Goldin and others, specifically point out that by the mid-1970s there was a period of revolution of women in the labor force brought on by different factors. Women more accurately planned for their future in the work force, choosing more applicable majors in college that prepared them to enter and compete in the labor market. In the United States, the labor force participation rate rose from approximately 59% in 1948 to 66% in 2005, with participation among women rising from 32% to 59% and participation among men declining from 87% to 73%.
A common theory in modern economics claims that the rise of women participating in the US labor force in the late 1960s was due to the introduction of a new contraceptive technology, birth control pills, and the adjustment of age of majority laws. The use of birth control gave women the flexibility of opting to invest and advance their career while maintaining a relationship.
By having control over the timing of their fertility, they were not running a risk of thwarting their career choices. However, only 40% of the population actually used the birth control pill. This implies that other factors may have contributed to women choosing to invest in advancing their careers.
Another factor that may have contributed to the trend was the The Equal Pay Act of 1963, which aimed at abolishing wage disparity based on sex. Such legislation diminished sexual discrimination and encouraged more women to enter the labor market by receiving fair remuneration to help raise children.
The labor force participation rate can decrease when the rate of growth of the population outweighs that of the employed and unemployed together. The labor force participation rate is a key component in long-term economic growth, almost as important as productivity.
The labor force participation rate explains how an increase in the unemployment rate can occur simultaneously with an increase in employment. If a large amount of new workers enter the labor force but only a small fraction become employed, then the increase in the number of unemployed workers can outpace the growth in employment
See Also:
- Workforce
- Unemployment
- Employment-to-population ratio
- List of countries by labor force
- Proletariat
- Feminization of poverty
Five Facts about Income Inequality by PEW Research Center (1/7/2014)
Fact #1: By one measure, U.S. income inequality is the highest it’s been since 1928.
In 1982, the highest-earning 1% of families received 10.8% of all pretax income, while the bottom 90% received 64.7%, according to research by UC-Berkeley professor Emmanuel Saez. Three decades later, according to Saez’ preliminary estimates for 2012, the top 1% received 22.5% of pretax income, while the bottom 90%’s share had fallen to 49.6%.
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Fact #2: The U.S. is more unequal than most of its developed-world peers. According to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. ranked 10th out of 31 OECD countries in income inequality based on “market incomes” — that is, before taking into account the redistributive effects of tax policies and income-transfer programs such as Social Security and unemployment insurance. After accounting for taxes and transfers, the U.S. had the second-highest level of inequality, after Chile.
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Fact #3: The black-white income gap in the U.S. has persisted. The difference in median household incomes between whites and blacks has grown from about $19,000 in 1967 to roughly $27,000 in 2011 (as measured in 2012 dollars). Median black household income was 59% of median white household income in 2011, up modestly from 55% in 1967; as recently as 2007, black income was 63% of white income.
Fact #4: Americans are relatively unconcerned about the wide income gap between rich and poor. Americans in the upper fifth of the income distribution earn 16.7 times as much as those in the lowest fifth — by far the widest such gap among the 10 advanced countries in the Pew Research Center’s 2013 global attitudes survey. Yet barely half (47%) of Americans think the rich-poor gap is a very big problem. Among advanced countries, only Australians expressed a lower level of concern, but in Australia the top fifth earned just 2.7 times the income of the bottom fifth.
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Fact #5: Wealth inequality is even greater than income inequality. NYU economist Edward Wolff has found that, while the highest-earning fifth of U.S. families earned 59.1% of all income, the richest fifth held 88.9% of all wealth.
The Negative Impact of Technology on Jobs
YouTube Video: Top 10 Jobs Most Likely to be Replaced by Robots by WatchMojo
Pictured: In the 21st century, robots are beginning to perform roles not just in industry, but in the service sector, working as entertainers and careers. (Courtesy of jk (talk) - self-made, CC BY 3.0)
Unemployment created by Automation Technology is the loss of jobs caused by technological change. Such change typically includes the introduction of labour-saving "mechanical-muscle" machines or more efficient "mechanical-mind" processes (automation).
Just as horses employed as prime movers were gradually made obsolete by the automobile, humans' jobs have also been affected throughout modern history. Historical examples include artisan weavers reduced to poverty after the introduction of mechanized looms.
During World War II, Alan Turing's Bombe machine compressed and decoded thousands of man-years worth of encrypted data in a matter of hours.
A contemporary example of technological unemployment is the displacement of retail cashiers by self-service tills.
That technological change can cause short-term job losses is widely accepted. The view that it can lead to lasting increases in unemployment has long been controversial. Participants in the technological unemployment debates can be broadly divided into optimists and pessimists. Optimists agree that innovation may be disruptive to jobs in the short term, yet hold that various compensation effects ensure there is never a long-term negative impact on jobs.
Whereas pessimists contend that at least in some circumstances, new technologies can lead to a lasting decline in the total number of workers in employment. The phrase "technological unemployment" was popularised by John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s. Yet the issue of machines displacing human labour has been discussed since at least Aristotle's time.
Prior to the 18th century both the elite and ordinary people would generally take the pessimistic view on technological unemployment, at least in cases where the issue arose. Due to generally low unemployment in much of pre-modern history, the topic was rarely a prominent concern.
In the 18th century fears over the impact of machinery on jobs intensified with the growth of mass unemployment, especially in Great Britain which was then at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution.
Yet some economic thinkers began to argue against these fears, claiming that overall innovation would not have negative effects on jobs. These arguments were formalised in the early 19th century by the classical economists. During the second half of the 19th century, it became increasingly apparent that technological progress was benefiting all sections of society, including the working class. Concerns over the negative impact of innovation diminished. The term "Luddite fallacy" was coined to describe the thinking that innovation would have lasting harmful effects on employment.
The view that technology is unlikely to lead to long term unemployment has been repeatedly challenged by a minority of economists. In the early 1800s these included Ricardo himself.
There were dozens of economists warning about technological unemployment during brief intensification of the debate that spiked in the 1930s and 1960s. Especially in Europe, there were further warnings in the closing two decades of the twentieth century, as commentators noted an enduring rise in unemployment suffered by many industrialised nations since the 1970s.
Yet a clear majority of both professional economists and the interested general public held the optimistic view through most of the 20th century.
In the second decade of the 21st century, a number of studies have been released suggesting that technological unemployment may be increasing worldwide. Further increases are forecast for the years to come.
While many economists and commentators still argue such fears are unfounded, as was widely accepted for most of the previous two centuries, concern over technological unemployment is growing once again. A report in Wired in 2017 quotes knowledgeable people such as economist Gene Sperling and management professor Andrew McAfee on the idea that handling existing and impending job loss to automation is a "significant issue".
Regarding a recent claim by a political appointee that automation is not “going to have any kind of big effect on the economy for the next 50 or 100 years,” says McAfee, “I don’t talk to anyone in the field who believes that.” Innovations like IBM's Watson have the potential to render humans obsolete with the professional, white-collar, low-skilled, creative fields, and other "mental jobs".
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Unemployment created by Automation Technology:
Just as horses employed as prime movers were gradually made obsolete by the automobile, humans' jobs have also been affected throughout modern history. Historical examples include artisan weavers reduced to poverty after the introduction of mechanized looms.
During World War II, Alan Turing's Bombe machine compressed and decoded thousands of man-years worth of encrypted data in a matter of hours.
A contemporary example of technological unemployment is the displacement of retail cashiers by self-service tills.
That technological change can cause short-term job losses is widely accepted. The view that it can lead to lasting increases in unemployment has long been controversial. Participants in the technological unemployment debates can be broadly divided into optimists and pessimists. Optimists agree that innovation may be disruptive to jobs in the short term, yet hold that various compensation effects ensure there is never a long-term negative impact on jobs.
Whereas pessimists contend that at least in some circumstances, new technologies can lead to a lasting decline in the total number of workers in employment. The phrase "technological unemployment" was popularised by John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s. Yet the issue of machines displacing human labour has been discussed since at least Aristotle's time.
Prior to the 18th century both the elite and ordinary people would generally take the pessimistic view on technological unemployment, at least in cases where the issue arose. Due to generally low unemployment in much of pre-modern history, the topic was rarely a prominent concern.
In the 18th century fears over the impact of machinery on jobs intensified with the growth of mass unemployment, especially in Great Britain which was then at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution.
Yet some economic thinkers began to argue against these fears, claiming that overall innovation would not have negative effects on jobs. These arguments were formalised in the early 19th century by the classical economists. During the second half of the 19th century, it became increasingly apparent that technological progress was benefiting all sections of society, including the working class. Concerns over the negative impact of innovation diminished. The term "Luddite fallacy" was coined to describe the thinking that innovation would have lasting harmful effects on employment.
The view that technology is unlikely to lead to long term unemployment has been repeatedly challenged by a minority of economists. In the early 1800s these included Ricardo himself.
There were dozens of economists warning about technological unemployment during brief intensification of the debate that spiked in the 1930s and 1960s. Especially in Europe, there were further warnings in the closing two decades of the twentieth century, as commentators noted an enduring rise in unemployment suffered by many industrialised nations since the 1970s.
Yet a clear majority of both professional economists and the interested general public held the optimistic view through most of the 20th century.
In the second decade of the 21st century, a number of studies have been released suggesting that technological unemployment may be increasing worldwide. Further increases are forecast for the years to come.
While many economists and commentators still argue such fears are unfounded, as was widely accepted for most of the previous two centuries, concern over technological unemployment is growing once again. A report in Wired in 2017 quotes knowledgeable people such as economist Gene Sperling and management professor Andrew McAfee on the idea that handling existing and impending job loss to automation is a "significant issue".
Regarding a recent claim by a political appointee that automation is not “going to have any kind of big effect on the economy for the next 50 or 100 years,” says McAfee, “I don’t talk to anyone in the field who believes that.” Innovations like IBM's Watson have the potential to render humans obsolete with the professional, white-collar, low-skilled, creative fields, and other "mental jobs".
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Unemployment created by Automation Technology:
Designation of Workers by Collar Color, including:
- White Collar Workers,
- Blue Collar Workers,
- Pink Collar Workers,
- Gold Collar Workers,
- Grey Collar Workers,
- Green Collar Workers,
- The Ten Most Stressful White Collar Jobs
- Blue Collar Jobs are on the Decline
- More Men Entering "Pink Collar Jobs"
- What is a Gold-collar Worker?
- Grey Collar Workers: Paramedics: Emergency Response - Dangers of the Job
- Green Collar Jobs: Helping WWF create a sustainable workspace for the future
Designation of Workers by Collar Color:
Groups of working individuals are typically classified based on the colors of their collars worn at work; these can commonly reflect one's occupation or sometimes gender:
White Collar Workers:
In many countries (such as Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and United States), a white-collar worker is a person who performs professional, managerial, or administrative work.
White-collar work may be performed in an office or other administrative setting. Other types of work are those of a blue-collar worker, whose job requires manual labor and a pink-collar worker, whose labor is related to customer interaction, entertainment, sales, or other service-oriented work. Many occupations blend blue, white and pink (service) industry categorizations.
The term refers to the white dress shirts of male office workers common through most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Western countries, as opposed to the blue overalls worn by many manual laborers.
The term "white collar" is credited to Upton Sinclair, an American writer, in relation to contemporary clerical, administrative, and management workers during the 1930s, though references to white-collar work appear as early as 1935.
Demographics:
Formerly a minority in the agrarian and early industrial societies, white-collar workers have become a majority in industrialized countries due to modernization and outsourcing of manufacturing jobs.
The blue-collar and white-collar descriptors as it pertains to work dress may no longer be an accurate descriptor as office attire has broadened beyond a white shirt and tie. Employees in office environments may wear a variety of colors, may dress business casual or wear casual clothes altogether.
In addition work tasks have blurred. "White-collar" employees may perform "blue-collar" tasks (or vice versa). An example would be a restaurant manager who may wear more formal clothing yet still assist with cooking food or taking customers' orders or a construction worker who also performs desk work.
Health Effects:
Less physical activity among white-collar workers has been thought to be a key factor in increased life-style related health conditions such as:
Workplace interventions such as alternative activity workstations, sit-stand desks, promotion of stair use are among measures being implemented to counter the harms of sedentary workplace environments.
A Cochrane systematic review published in 2018 concluded that "At present there is low-quality evidence that the use of sit-stand desks reduce workplace sitting." Also, evidence was lacking on the long term health benefits of such interventions.
See also: ___________________________________________________________________________
Blue-Collar Worker:
In many countries, a blue-collar worker is a working class person who performs manual labor. Blue-collar work may involve skilled or unskilled jobs in:
Blue-collar work often involves something being physically built or maintained.
Blue-collar work is often paid hourly wage-labor, although some professionals may be paid by the project or salaried. There is a wide range of payscales for such work depending upon field of specialty and experience.
The term blue collar was first used in reference to trades jobs in 1924, in an Alden, Iowa newspaper. The phrase stems from the image of manual workers wearing blue denim or chambray shirts as part of their uniforms. Industrial and manual workers often wear durable canvas or cotton clothing that may be soiled during the course of their work.
Navy and light blue colors conceal potential dirt or grease on the worker's clothing, helping him or her to appear cleaner. For the same reason, blue is a popular color for boilersuits which protect workers' clothing. Some blue collar workers have uniforms with the name of the business and/or the individual's name embroidered or printed on it.
Historically the popularity of the color blue among manual laborers contrasts with the popularity of white dress shirts worn by people in office environments. The blue collar/white collar color scheme has socio-economic class connotations. However, this distinction has become blurred with the increasing importance of skilled labor, and the relative increase in low-paying white-collar jobs.
Educational Requirements:
Since many blue-collar jobs consist of mainly manual labor, educational requirements for workers are typically lower than those of white-collar workers. Often, only a high school diploma is required, and many of the skills required for blue-collar jobs will be learned by the employee while working.
In higher level jobs, vocational training or apprenticeships may be required, and for workers such as electricians and plumbers, state-certification is also necessary.
Blue collar shift to developing nations:
See also: Deindustrialization
With the information revolution, Western nations have moved towards a service and white collar economy. Many manufacturing jobs have been offshored to developing nations which pay their workers lower wages. This offshoring has pushed formerly agrarian nations to industrialized economies and concurrently decreased the number of blue-collar jobs in developed countries.
In the United States, blue collar and service occupations generally refer to jobs in precision production, craft, and repair occupations; machine operators and inspectors; transportation and moving occupations; handlers, equipment cleaners, helpers, and laborers.
In the United States an area known as the Rust Belt comprising the Northeast and Midwest, including Western New York and Western Pennsylvania, has seen its once large manufacturing base shrink significantly.
With the de-industrialization of these areas starting in the mid-1960s cities like Cleveland, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Buffalo, New York; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Erie, Pennsylvania; Youngstown, Ohio; Toledo, Ohio, Rochester, New York, and St. Louis, Missouri, have experienced a steady decline of the blue-collar workforce and subsequent population decreases. Due to this economic osmosis, the rust belt has experienced high unemployment, poverty, and urban blight.
Automation and the Future:
Due to many blue-collar jobs involving manual labor and relatively unskilled workers, automation poses a threat of unemployment for blue-collar workers. One study from the MIT Technology Review estimates that 83% of jobs that make less than $20 per hour are threatened by automation.
Some examples of technology that threaten workers are self-driving cars and automated cleaning devices, which could place blue-collar workers such as truck drivers or janitors out of work.
Others have suggested that technological advancement will not lead to blue-collar job unemployment, but rather shifts in the types of work that blue-collar workers currently do.
Some foresee computer coding as becoming the blue-collar job of the future. Proponents of this idea view coding as a skill that can be learned through vocational training, and suggest that more coders will be needed in a technologically advancing world.
Others see future of blue-collar work as humans and computers working together to improve efficiency. Such jobs would consist of data-tagging and labeling.
Electoral Politics:
Blue-collar workers have played a large role in electoral politics. In the 2016 United States Presidential election, many attributed Donald Trump’s victories in the states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan to blue-collar workers, who overwhelmingly favored Trump over opponent Hillary Clinton.
Amongst white-working class citizens, Trump won 64% of the votes, compared to only 32% for Clinton. This was the largest margin of victory amongst this group of voters for any presidential candidate since 1980.
Many attributed Trump’s success amongst this bloc of voters to his opposition of international trade deals and environmental regulations, two of the largest threats to blue-collar employment.
Opponents of this view believe Trump’s success with this bloc had more to do with an anti-immigrant and nationalist platform that supports deportation and discourages investment in higher education.
See also: ___________________________________________________________________________
Pink Collar Workers:
In the United States and (at least some) other English-speaking countries, a pink-collar worker refers to someone working in the care-oriented career field or in jobs historically considered to be "women’s work." This may include jobs in nursing, teaching, secretarial work, waitressing, or child care. While these jobs may be filled by men, they are typically female-dominated and may pay significantly less than white-collar or blue-collar jobs.
The term "pink-collar" was popularized in the late 1970s by writer and social critic Louise Kapp Howe to denote women working as nurses, secretaries, and elementary school teachers.
The term's origins, however, go back to the early 1970s, to when the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was placed before the states for ratification. At that time, the term was used to denote secretarial staff as well as non-professional office staff, all of which were largely held by women.
These positions were not white-collar jobs, but neither were they blue-collar, manual labor. Hence, the creation of the term "pink-collar," which indicated it was not white-collar, was nonetheless an office job and one that was overwhelmingly filled by women.
Occupations:
Pink-collar occupations tend to be personal-service-oriented worker working in retail, nursing, and teaching (depending on the level), are part of the service sector, and are among the most common occupations in the United States.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that, as of May 2008, there were over 2.2 million persons employed as servers in the United States. Furthermore, the World Health Organization's 2011 World Health Statistics Report states that there are 19.3 million nurses in the world today.
In the United States, women comprise 92.1% of the registered nurses that are currently employed:
Pink-collar occupations include:
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Pink Collar Workers: ___________________________________________________________________________
Groups of working individuals are typically classified based on the colors of their collars worn at work; these can commonly reflect one's occupation or sometimes gender:
White Collar Workers:
In many countries (such as Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, United Kingdom, and United States), a white-collar worker is a person who performs professional, managerial, or administrative work.
White-collar work may be performed in an office or other administrative setting. Other types of work are those of a blue-collar worker, whose job requires manual labor and a pink-collar worker, whose labor is related to customer interaction, entertainment, sales, or other service-oriented work. Many occupations blend blue, white and pink (service) industry categorizations.
The term refers to the white dress shirts of male office workers common through most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Western countries, as opposed to the blue overalls worn by many manual laborers.
The term "white collar" is credited to Upton Sinclair, an American writer, in relation to contemporary clerical, administrative, and management workers during the 1930s, though references to white-collar work appear as early as 1935.
Demographics:
Formerly a minority in the agrarian and early industrial societies, white-collar workers have become a majority in industrialized countries due to modernization and outsourcing of manufacturing jobs.
The blue-collar and white-collar descriptors as it pertains to work dress may no longer be an accurate descriptor as office attire has broadened beyond a white shirt and tie. Employees in office environments may wear a variety of colors, may dress business casual or wear casual clothes altogether.
In addition work tasks have blurred. "White-collar" employees may perform "blue-collar" tasks (or vice versa). An example would be a restaurant manager who may wear more formal clothing yet still assist with cooking food or taking customers' orders or a construction worker who also performs desk work.
Health Effects:
Less physical activity among white-collar workers has been thought to be a key factor in increased life-style related health conditions such as:
- fatigue,
- obesity,
- diabetes,
- hypertension,
- cancer,
- and heart disease.
Workplace interventions such as alternative activity workstations, sit-stand desks, promotion of stair use are among measures being implemented to counter the harms of sedentary workplace environments.
A Cochrane systematic review published in 2018 concluded that "At present there is low-quality evidence that the use of sit-stand desks reduce workplace sitting." Also, evidence was lacking on the long term health benefits of such interventions.
See also: ___________________________________________________________________________
Blue-Collar Worker:
In many countries, a blue-collar worker is a working class person who performs manual labor. Blue-collar work may involve skilled or unskilled jobs in:
- manufacturing,
- mining,
- sanitation,
- custodial work,
- textile manufacturing,
- commercial fishing,
- food processing,
- oil field work,
- waste disposal and recycling,
- construction,
- mechanic,
- maintenance,
- warehousing,
- technical installation,
- and many other types of physical work.
Blue-collar work often involves something being physically built or maintained.
Blue-collar work is often paid hourly wage-labor, although some professionals may be paid by the project or salaried. There is a wide range of payscales for such work depending upon field of specialty and experience.
The term blue collar was first used in reference to trades jobs in 1924, in an Alden, Iowa newspaper. The phrase stems from the image of manual workers wearing blue denim or chambray shirts as part of their uniforms. Industrial and manual workers often wear durable canvas or cotton clothing that may be soiled during the course of their work.
Navy and light blue colors conceal potential dirt or grease on the worker's clothing, helping him or her to appear cleaner. For the same reason, blue is a popular color for boilersuits which protect workers' clothing. Some blue collar workers have uniforms with the name of the business and/or the individual's name embroidered or printed on it.
Historically the popularity of the color blue among manual laborers contrasts with the popularity of white dress shirts worn by people in office environments. The blue collar/white collar color scheme has socio-economic class connotations. However, this distinction has become blurred with the increasing importance of skilled labor, and the relative increase in low-paying white-collar jobs.
Educational Requirements:
Since many blue-collar jobs consist of mainly manual labor, educational requirements for workers are typically lower than those of white-collar workers. Often, only a high school diploma is required, and many of the skills required for blue-collar jobs will be learned by the employee while working.
In higher level jobs, vocational training or apprenticeships may be required, and for workers such as electricians and plumbers, state-certification is also necessary.
Blue collar shift to developing nations:
See also: Deindustrialization
With the information revolution, Western nations have moved towards a service and white collar economy. Many manufacturing jobs have been offshored to developing nations which pay their workers lower wages. This offshoring has pushed formerly agrarian nations to industrialized economies and concurrently decreased the number of blue-collar jobs in developed countries.
In the United States, blue collar and service occupations generally refer to jobs in precision production, craft, and repair occupations; machine operators and inspectors; transportation and moving occupations; handlers, equipment cleaners, helpers, and laborers.
In the United States an area known as the Rust Belt comprising the Northeast and Midwest, including Western New York and Western Pennsylvania, has seen its once large manufacturing base shrink significantly.
With the de-industrialization of these areas starting in the mid-1960s cities like Cleveland, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Buffalo, New York; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Erie, Pennsylvania; Youngstown, Ohio; Toledo, Ohio, Rochester, New York, and St. Louis, Missouri, have experienced a steady decline of the blue-collar workforce and subsequent population decreases. Due to this economic osmosis, the rust belt has experienced high unemployment, poverty, and urban blight.
Automation and the Future:
Due to many blue-collar jobs involving manual labor and relatively unskilled workers, automation poses a threat of unemployment for blue-collar workers. One study from the MIT Technology Review estimates that 83% of jobs that make less than $20 per hour are threatened by automation.
Some examples of technology that threaten workers are self-driving cars and automated cleaning devices, which could place blue-collar workers such as truck drivers or janitors out of work.
Others have suggested that technological advancement will not lead to blue-collar job unemployment, but rather shifts in the types of work that blue-collar workers currently do.
Some foresee computer coding as becoming the blue-collar job of the future. Proponents of this idea view coding as a skill that can be learned through vocational training, and suggest that more coders will be needed in a technologically advancing world.
Others see future of blue-collar work as humans and computers working together to improve efficiency. Such jobs would consist of data-tagging and labeling.
Electoral Politics:
Blue-collar workers have played a large role in electoral politics. In the 2016 United States Presidential election, many attributed Donald Trump’s victories in the states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan to blue-collar workers, who overwhelmingly favored Trump over opponent Hillary Clinton.
Amongst white-working class citizens, Trump won 64% of the votes, compared to only 32% for Clinton. This was the largest margin of victory amongst this group of voters for any presidential candidate since 1980.
Many attributed Trump’s success amongst this bloc of voters to his opposition of international trade deals and environmental regulations, two of the largest threats to blue-collar employment.
Opponents of this view believe Trump’s success with this bloc had more to do with an anti-immigrant and nationalist platform that supports deportation and discourages investment in higher education.
See also: ___________________________________________________________________________
Pink Collar Workers:
In the United States and (at least some) other English-speaking countries, a pink-collar worker refers to someone working in the care-oriented career field or in jobs historically considered to be "women’s work." This may include jobs in nursing, teaching, secretarial work, waitressing, or child care. While these jobs may be filled by men, they are typically female-dominated and may pay significantly less than white-collar or blue-collar jobs.
The term "pink-collar" was popularized in the late 1970s by writer and social critic Louise Kapp Howe to denote women working as nurses, secretaries, and elementary school teachers.
The term's origins, however, go back to the early 1970s, to when the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) was placed before the states for ratification. At that time, the term was used to denote secretarial staff as well as non-professional office staff, all of which were largely held by women.
These positions were not white-collar jobs, but neither were they blue-collar, manual labor. Hence, the creation of the term "pink-collar," which indicated it was not white-collar, was nonetheless an office job and one that was overwhelmingly filled by women.
Occupations:
Pink-collar occupations tend to be personal-service-oriented worker working in retail, nursing, and teaching (depending on the level), are part of the service sector, and are among the most common occupations in the United States.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that, as of May 2008, there were over 2.2 million persons employed as servers in the United States. Furthermore, the World Health Organization's 2011 World Health Statistics Report states that there are 19.3 million nurses in the world today.
In the United States, women comprise 92.1% of the registered nurses that are currently employed:
Pink-collar occupations include:
- Car attendant / Washroom attendant
- Meter Maid / Parking lot attendant
- Librarian / Teacher-librarian
- Library assistant / Library technician
- Preschool teacher / Early childhood educator / Kindergarten teacher
- Special education teacher
- Teaching assistant
- Nurse / Registered nurse / Wet nurse
- Dental assistant / Medical assistant / Pharmacy assistant
- Dental hygienist
- Rehabilitation specialist
- Nutritionist / Dietitian
- Hospital attendant / Hospital service worker / Nurse's aide
- Advertising and promotions managers
- Bank teller
- Bookkeeper
- Marketing coordinator / Marketing assistant
- Human resources manager
- Legal secretary
- Paralegal
- Public relations manager
- Receptionist / Secretary / Administrative Assistant / Information clerk
- Hairstylist / Barber / Hair colorist
- Dressmaker / Costume designer / Tailor / Image consultant
- Cosmetologist / Make-up artist / Nail technician / Perfumer / Esthetician
- Model
- Personal stylist / Fashion stylist
- Buyer
- Valet
- Waitress / Barista / Bartender
- Flight attendant / stewardess
- Museum docents / Tour guide
- Casino host
- Babysitter / Day care worker / Nanny / Child-care provider / Caregiver
- Maid / Domestic worker / Governess
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Pink Collar Workers: ___________________________________________________________________________
Gold Collar Workers:
Gold-collar worker (GCW) is a neologism which has been used to describe either young, low-wage workers who invest in conspicuous luxury, or highly skilled knowledge workers, traditionally classified as white collar, but who have recently become essential enough to business operations as to warrant a new classification.
The main challenge faced by gold-collar workers is the short-lived nature of their financial security. More often than not, these people marry and have children, and take on additional financial responsibilities such as mortgages and health insurance.
With partial or no higher education, however, their job prospects could be viewed as narrow and fairly restricted.
Gold Collar often refers to entry level workers (or unskilled workers from middle-class families), in their twenties who want flex time hours, self-control, independence, empowerment, to furnish their own offices, a signing bonus, full tuition reimbursement, flex benefits, to work as a team, casual Friday every day, to work from home, to have fun, and don't want to feel loyal to the company.
Overview:
It has been reported that the term 'gold-collar worker' was first used by Robert Earl Kelley in his 1985 book The Gold-Collar Worker: Harnessing the Brainpower of the New Work Force.
Here he discussed a new generation of workers who use American business' most important resource, brainpower.
A quote from the book summary states, "They are a new breed of workers, and they demand a new kind of management. Intelligent, independent, and innovative, these employees are incredibly valuable. They are scientists and mathematicians, doctors and lawyers, engineers and computer programmers, stock analysts and even community planners. They are as distinct from their less skilled white-collar counterparts—bank tellers, bookkeepers, clerks, and other business functionaries—as they are from blue-collar laborers. And they account for over 40 percent of America's workforce."
The color gold applies to these workers because they are highly skilled. When Kelley's book was published in 1985, these were typically understood as being young, college-educated, and specialized.
See also:
Gold-collar worker (GCW) is a neologism which has been used to describe either young, low-wage workers who invest in conspicuous luxury, or highly skilled knowledge workers, traditionally classified as white collar, but who have recently become essential enough to business operations as to warrant a new classification.
The main challenge faced by gold-collar workers is the short-lived nature of their financial security. More often than not, these people marry and have children, and take on additional financial responsibilities such as mortgages and health insurance.
With partial or no higher education, however, their job prospects could be viewed as narrow and fairly restricted.
Gold Collar often refers to entry level workers (or unskilled workers from middle-class families), in their twenties who want flex time hours, self-control, independence, empowerment, to furnish their own offices, a signing bonus, full tuition reimbursement, flex benefits, to work as a team, casual Friday every day, to work from home, to have fun, and don't want to feel loyal to the company.
Overview:
It has been reported that the term 'gold-collar worker' was first used by Robert Earl Kelley in his 1985 book The Gold-Collar Worker: Harnessing the Brainpower of the New Work Force.
Here he discussed a new generation of workers who use American business' most important resource, brainpower.
A quote from the book summary states, "They are a new breed of workers, and they demand a new kind of management. Intelligent, independent, and innovative, these employees are incredibly valuable. They are scientists and mathematicians, doctors and lawyers, engineers and computer programmers, stock analysts and even community planners. They are as distinct from their less skilled white-collar counterparts—bank tellers, bookkeepers, clerks, and other business functionaries—as they are from blue-collar laborers. And they account for over 40 percent of America's workforce."
The color gold applies to these workers because they are highly skilled. When Kelley's book was published in 1985, these were typically understood as being young, college-educated, and specialized.
See also:
- Book Summary of Gold-Collar Worker
- World Wide Words with the definition of Gold collar worker
- USA Today on the young working class
- "Blue collar, white collar: Why do we use these terms?" at Slate.com
Grey Collar Workers:
Grey-collar refers to the balance of employed people not classified as white- or blue collar. It is used to refer to occupations that incorporate some of the elements of both blue- and white-collar, and generally are in between the two categories in terms of income-earning capability.
Examples of grey-collar industries:
Grey-collar workers often have licenses, associate degrees or diplomas from a trade or technical school in a particular field. They are unlike blue-collar workers in that blue-collar workers can often be trained on the job within several weeks whereas grey-collar workers already have a specific skill set and require more specialized knowledge than their blue-collar counterparts.
The field which most recognizes the diversity between these two groups is that of human resources and the insurance industry. These different groups must be insured differently for liability as the potential for injury is different.
Other Definitions:
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote that another definition for grey collar could be the underemployed white collar worker. Charle Brecher of the Citizens Budget Commission and the Partnership for New York City defined it sub-blue-collar jobs: "maintenance and custodial".
___________________________________________________________________________
Grey-collar refers to the balance of employed people not classified as white- or blue collar. It is used to refer to occupations that incorporate some of the elements of both blue- and white-collar, and generally are in between the two categories in terms of income-earning capability.
Examples of grey-collar industries:
- Police officers, firefighters, nurses, and Emergency medical services personnel
- Skilled tradespeople and technicians
- Typists, stenographers, and paralegals
- Airline pilots and Flight attendants
- Teachers and School Administrators
- Clergy
- Salesperson
- Funeral Director
Grey-collar workers often have licenses, associate degrees or diplomas from a trade or technical school in a particular field. They are unlike blue-collar workers in that blue-collar workers can often be trained on the job within several weeks whereas grey-collar workers already have a specific skill set and require more specialized knowledge than their blue-collar counterparts.
The field which most recognizes the diversity between these two groups is that of human resources and the insurance industry. These different groups must be insured differently for liability as the potential for injury is different.
Other Definitions:
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote that another definition for grey collar could be the underemployed white collar worker. Charle Brecher of the Citizens Budget Commission and the Partnership for New York City defined it sub-blue-collar jobs: "maintenance and custodial".
___________________________________________________________________________
Green Collar Workers:
A green-collar worker is a worker who is employed in the environmental sectors of the economy. Environmental green-collar workers (or green jobs) satisfy the demand for green development.
Generally, they implement environmentally conscious design, policy, and technology to improve conservation and sustainability. Formal environmental regulations as well as informal social expectations are pushing many firms to seek professionals with expertise with environmental, energy efficiency, and clean renewable energy issues. They often seek to make their output more sustainable, and thus more favorable to public opinion, governmental regulation, and the Earth's ecology.
Green collar workers include professionals such as:
Green collar workers also include:
There is a growing movement to incorporate social responsibility within the green industries.
A sustainable green economy simultaneously values the importance of natural resources and inclusive, equitable, and healthy opportunities for all communities.
In the context of the current world economic crisis, many experts now argue that a massive push to develop renewable sources of energy could create millions of new jobs and help the economy recover while simultaneously improving the environment, increasing labour conditions in poor economies, and strengthening energy and food security.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Green Collar Workers:
A green-collar worker is a worker who is employed in the environmental sectors of the economy. Environmental green-collar workers (or green jobs) satisfy the demand for green development.
Generally, they implement environmentally conscious design, policy, and technology to improve conservation and sustainability. Formal environmental regulations as well as informal social expectations are pushing many firms to seek professionals with expertise with environmental, energy efficiency, and clean renewable energy issues. They often seek to make their output more sustainable, and thus more favorable to public opinion, governmental regulation, and the Earth's ecology.
Green collar workers include professionals such as:
- conservation movement workers,
- environmental consultants,
- council environmental services/waste management/recycling managers/officers,
- environmental or biological systems engineers,
- green building architects,
- landscape architects,
- holistic passive solar building designers,
- solar energy and wind energy engineers and installers,
- nuclear engineers,
- green vehicle engineers, "green business" owners,
- green vehicle,
- organic farmers,
- environmental lawyers,
- ecology educators, and ecotechnology workers and sales staff working with these services or products.
Green collar workers also include:
- vocational or trade-level workers:
- electricians who install solar panels,
- plumbers who install solar water heaters, recycling centre/MRF attendants,
- process managers and collectors,
- construction workers who build energy-efficient green buildings and wind power farms,
- construction workers who weatherize buildings to make them more energy efficient,
- or other workers involved in clean, renewable, sustainable future energy development.
There is a growing movement to incorporate social responsibility within the green industries.
A sustainable green economy simultaneously values the importance of natural resources and inclusive, equitable, and healthy opportunities for all communities.
In the context of the current world economic crisis, many experts now argue that a massive push to develop renewable sources of energy could create millions of new jobs and help the economy recover while simultaneously improving the environment, increasing labour conditions in poor economies, and strengthening energy and food security.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Green Collar Workers:
- Notable uses
- Al Gore Repower America
- Center for American Progress
- Worldwatch Institute/UNEP
- U.S. Conference of Mayors
- Scientific, environmental, and health justifications for green collar jobs
- Other uses
- See also:
- Cornell University Global Labour Institute
- Environmentalism
- Sustainable energy
- Green For All
- Green movement
- Industriousness
- Ingenuity
- Stern Review
- Sustainable South Bronx
- Worldwatch Institute
- Market Place: Consumed on NPR
- Green Collar Jobs-- NOW on PBS
- Columbia Journalism Review
- Public Radio episode
- "On the media"'s Word Watch
U.S. Department of Labor, including The Bureau of Labor and Statistics (BLS)
YouTube Understanding BLS Employment Projections
Pictured below: Which Careers are the Fastest Growing?
The United States Department of Labor (DOL) is a cabinet-level department of the U.S. federal government responsible for occupational safety, wage and hour standards, unemployment insurance benefits, reemployment services, and some economic statistics; many U.S. states also have such departments. The department is headed by the U.S. Secretary of Labor.
The purpose of the Department of Labor is to foster, promote, and develop the well-being of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States; improve working conditions; advance opportunities for profitable employment; and assure work-related benefits and rights.
In carrying out this mission, the Department of Labor administers and enforces more than 180 federal laws and thousands of federal regulations. These mandates and the regulations that implement them cover many workplace activities for about 10 million employers and 125 million workers.
The department’s headquarters is housed in the Frances Perkins Building, named in honor of Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the U.S. Department of Labor:
The purpose of the Department of Labor is to foster, promote, and develop the well-being of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States; improve working conditions; advance opportunities for profitable employment; and assure work-related benefits and rights.
In carrying out this mission, the Department of Labor administers and enforces more than 180 federal laws and thousands of federal regulations. These mandates and the regulations that implement them cover many workplace activities for about 10 million employers and 125 million workers.
The department’s headquarters is housed in the Frances Perkins Building, named in honor of Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor from 1933 to 1945.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the U.S. Department of Labor:
- History
- Freedom of Information Act processing performance
- Agencies, boards, offices, programs, library and corporation of the department
- Related legislation
- See also:
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS):
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is a unit of the United States Department of Labor. It is the principal fact-finding agency for the U.S. government in the broad field of labor economics and statistics and serves as a principal agency of the U.S. Federal Statistical System.
The BLS is a governmental statistical agency that collects, processes, analyzes, and disseminates essential statistical data to the American public, the U.S. Congress, other Federal agencies, State and local governments, business, and labor representatives. The BLS also serves as a statistical resource to the United States Department of Labor, and conducts research into how much families need to earn to be able to enjoy a decent standard of living.
The BLS data must satisfy a number of criteria, including relevance to current social and economic issues, timeliness in reflecting today’s rapidly changing economic conditions, accuracy and consistently high statistical quality, impartiality in both subject matter and presentation, and accessibility to all. To avoid the appearance of partiality, the dates of major data releases are scheduled more than a year in advance, in coordination with the Office of Management and Budget.
Statistical Reporting:
Statistics published by the BLS fall into four main categories:
Prices:
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics:
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is a unit of the United States Department of Labor. It is the principal fact-finding agency for the U.S. government in the broad field of labor economics and statistics and serves as a principal agency of the U.S. Federal Statistical System.
The BLS is a governmental statistical agency that collects, processes, analyzes, and disseminates essential statistical data to the American public, the U.S. Congress, other Federal agencies, State and local governments, business, and labor representatives. The BLS also serves as a statistical resource to the United States Department of Labor, and conducts research into how much families need to earn to be able to enjoy a decent standard of living.
The BLS data must satisfy a number of criteria, including relevance to current social and economic issues, timeliness in reflecting today’s rapidly changing economic conditions, accuracy and consistently high statistical quality, impartiality in both subject matter and presentation, and accessibility to all. To avoid the appearance of partiality, the dates of major data releases are scheduled more than a year in advance, in coordination with the Office of Management and Budget.
Statistical Reporting:
Statistics published by the BLS fall into four main categories:
Prices:
- U.S. Consumer Price Index
- Producer Price Index
- U.S. Import and Export Price Indices
- Consumer Expenditure Survey
- Current Population Survey (The "Household Survey")
- Current Employment Statistics (The "Establishment Survey")
- Local Area Unemployment Statistics (LAUS)
- Current Employment Statistics State and Area program
- The Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS)
- The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW)
- The Business Employment Dynamics (BED) program
- Ten year occupational employment projections
- Occupational Employment Statistics (OES)
- Labor productivity, aggregate and by industry
- Multifactor productivity
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics:
- History
- Statistical regions
- See also:
- Alternative employment arrangements
- Bureau of Economic Analysis
- Career Guide to Industries
- Data.gov
- Economic reports
- Index of Leading Indicators
- Job Creation Index
- Monthly Labor Review
- National Income and Product Accounts
- Occupational Outlook Handbook
- U.S. Census Bureau
- USAFacts
- Official website
- Records of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the National Archives (Record Group 257)
- Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Federal Register
- Publications of the BLS available on FRASER
- Bulletins of the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, dating back to 1895
- Local Area Unemployment Reports
Labor Unions in the United States including a List of U.S. Labor Unions
YouTube Video: The Decline of Unions in the United States by MIT Courseware
Pictured below:
TOP: Labor union membership is falling across developed nations. In 1985, 30 percent of workers were members of labor unions and that has now fallen to 17 percent. Reasons for the decline include technological and organizational changes, globalization, policy reform and the decline of the manufacturing sector. 80 million workers are part of labor unions in OECD member states while about 155 million are covered by collective agreements at national, regional, sectoral or occupational level
BOTTOM: As union membership declined income inequality rose, because labor unions have been the main way to participate at work. The US does not yet require employee representatives on boards of directors, or elected work councils.
Click here for a List of Labor Unions in the United States.
Labor unions in the United States are organizations that represent workers in many industries recognized under US labor law. Their activity today centers on collective bargaining over wages, benefits, and working conditions for their membership, and on representing their members in disputes with management over violations of contract provisions. Larger unions also typically engage in lobbying activities and electioneering at the state and federal level.
Most unions in the United States are aligned with one of two larger umbrella organizations: the AFL-CIO created in 1955, and the Change to Win Federation which split from the AFL-CIO in 2005. Both advocate policies and legislation on behalf of workers in the United States and Canada, and take an active role in politics. The AFL-CIO is especially concerned with global trade issues.
In 2016, there were 14.6 million members in the U.S., down from 17.7 million in 1983. The percentage of workers belonging to a union in the United States (or total labor union "density") was 10.7%, compared to 20.1% in 1983.
Union membership in the private sector has fallen under 7% — levels not seen since 1932. From a global perspective, the density in 2013 was 7.7% in France, 18.1% in Germany, 27.1% in Canada, and 88.9% in Iceland, which is currently highest in the world of major industrialized nations. The only country higher is the Vatican City State, which is 100% unionized among its lay employees.
In the 21st century the most prominent unions are among public sector employees such as city employees, government workers, teachers and police. Members of unions are disproportionately older, male, and residents of the Northeast, the Midwest, and California. Union workers average 10-30% higher pay than non-union in the United States after controlling for individual, job, and labor market characteristics.
Although much smaller compared to their peak membership in the 1950s, American unions remain a political factor, both through mobilization of their own memberships and through coalitions with like-minded activist organizations around issues such as immigrant rights, trade policy, health care, and living wage campaigns.
Of special concern are efforts by cities and states to reduce the pension obligations owed to unionized workers who retire in the future. Republicans elected with Tea Party support in 2010, most notably Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, have launched major efforts against public sector unions due in part to state government pension obligations (even though Wisconsin's state pension is 100% funded) along with the allegation that the unions are too powerful.
States with higher levels of union membership tend to have higher median incomes and standards of living. It has been asserted by scholars and the International Monetary Fund that rising income inequality in the United States is directly attributable to the decline of the labor movement and union membership.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Labor Unions in the United States:
Labor unions in the United States are organizations that represent workers in many industries recognized under US labor law. Their activity today centers on collective bargaining over wages, benefits, and working conditions for their membership, and on representing their members in disputes with management over violations of contract provisions. Larger unions also typically engage in lobbying activities and electioneering at the state and federal level.
Most unions in the United States are aligned with one of two larger umbrella organizations: the AFL-CIO created in 1955, and the Change to Win Federation which split from the AFL-CIO in 2005. Both advocate policies and legislation on behalf of workers in the United States and Canada, and take an active role in politics. The AFL-CIO is especially concerned with global trade issues.
In 2016, there were 14.6 million members in the U.S., down from 17.7 million in 1983. The percentage of workers belonging to a union in the United States (or total labor union "density") was 10.7%, compared to 20.1% in 1983.
Union membership in the private sector has fallen under 7% — levels not seen since 1932. From a global perspective, the density in 2013 was 7.7% in France, 18.1% in Germany, 27.1% in Canada, and 88.9% in Iceland, which is currently highest in the world of major industrialized nations. The only country higher is the Vatican City State, which is 100% unionized among its lay employees.
In the 21st century the most prominent unions are among public sector employees such as city employees, government workers, teachers and police. Members of unions are disproportionately older, male, and residents of the Northeast, the Midwest, and California. Union workers average 10-30% higher pay than non-union in the United States after controlling for individual, job, and labor market characteristics.
Although much smaller compared to their peak membership in the 1950s, American unions remain a political factor, both through mobilization of their own memberships and through coalitions with like-minded activist organizations around issues such as immigrant rights, trade policy, health care, and living wage campaigns.
Of special concern are efforts by cities and states to reduce the pension obligations owed to unionized workers who retire in the future. Republicans elected with Tea Party support in 2010, most notably Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin, have launched major efforts against public sector unions due in part to state government pension obligations (even though Wisconsin's state pension is 100% funded) along with the allegation that the unions are too powerful.
States with higher levels of union membership tend to have higher median incomes and standards of living. It has been asserted by scholars and the International Monetary Fund that rising income inequality in the United States is directly attributable to the decline of the labor movement and union membership.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Labor Unions in the United States:
- History
- Labor unions today
- Possible causes of drop in membership
- See also:
- US labor law
- Labor federation competition in the United States
- Union affiliation by U.S. state
- Public-sector trade unions in the United States
- History:
- International:
- General:
- AFL-CIO official Web site
- Change to Win Federation official Web site
- The Challenges of Today's Labor Unions
- The Cost of a Decline in Unions (February 2015), Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times
- The incredible decline of American unions, in one animated map (February 2015), Ana Swanson, The Washington Post
- What Happened to Unions in the Midwest? (Feb. 2015), Melanie Trottman and Eric Morath, The Wall Street Journal
- Unions still matter (April 2015), Sean McElwee, Al Jazeera America.
- Americans Don't Miss Manufacturing – They Miss Unions. FiveThirtyEight, May 13, 2016.
- The Economic Outlook for Millennials Is Bleak. Now They’re Unionizing in Record Numbers. Mother Jones. February 9, 2018.
Minimum Wage in the United States, and The case for raising the minimum wage keeps getting stronger by CNN Business
YouTube Video: Do minimum wage increases actually help the poor? by PBS News Hour
Pictured below: Minimum wage by U.S. state and territory versus the federal rate of $7.25 per hour as of January 1, 2018.
The case for raising the minimum wage keeps getting stronger by by Lydia DePillis @CNNMoney (April 27, 2018)
"It's been too cold to campaign in frozen North Dakota. But as spring has crept across the state, an unusual ballot initiative is starting to emerge: One that would more than double the minimum wage, from $7.25 to $15 an hour by 2021.
"The places we can gather signatures the best are at the parades and the waiting lines at the outhouses," says Scott Nodland, a citizen activist leading the effort. "We expect that now that the snow just melted and temperatures hit the high 50s, we can begin to do something."
It's an unusual platform for the deep red state, which voted 63% for President Trump in 2016. But support for higher minimum wages has transcended partisan politics before. A wave of purple states — including Colorado, Arizona, and Maine — voted in wage hikes last election cycle.
Raising the minimum wage has been hotly debated in cities and states for years. Supporters argue that it's a remedy for widening wage inequality and will boost consumer spending, while opponents counter that it could reduce opportunities for employment, particularly for teenagers and others looking for entry level or low-skilled jobs.
Related: The US needs to do a better job training its workers. Here's how
Now, another batch of proposed wage hikes is headed for ballots in 2018, with initiatives underway in Massachusetts, Missouri, Michigan, Washington, and Washington D.C. And this time, as research on earlier minimum wage hikes piles up, the impact on workers is starting to become more clear.
The outlook? While some jobs could be lost as a consequence of more ambitious jumps in the minimum wage, the vast majority of workers who remain employed will enjoy higher pay and the economy overall isn't expected to suffer as a result.
For example, one study released last month by economists at the University of California, San Diego and the American Enterprise Institute estimated that minimum wage hikes of more than a dollar implemented between 2013 and 2016 — such as those in California, Washington, and New York — reduced employment among low-skilled workers by just under 1.5%.
The impact on jobs in states with smaller wage increases was more variable, and occasionally there was a positive outcome, possibly because more people were drawn back into the labor market by the better pay.
However, research has also generally found that minimum wage hikes put more money in workers' pockets overall.
Another study out last month from two Census Bureau economists found that, based on previous minimum wage increases, a 10% hike would raise income growth for workers in the bottom quarter of wage earners by about 10% — even including any possible reduction in hours.
Considering this new evidence, progressives have shifted from arguing that minimum wage hikes don't lead to job loss to arguing that even if they do, most workers are still better off.
A recent paper from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute points out that people often switch jobs in low-wage industries, so even a 3% loss in jobs could just mean that all workers end up with 3% fewer total hours — but if they were paid 10% more for those hours, everybody comes out ahead.
Related: The gender pay gap isn't just about what you make
Another strand of research from economists at the University of California, Irvine and the London School of Economics finds that higher minimum wages push employers to automate low-wage work — think ordering kiosks in fast-food restaurants — which opponents have used to slam minimum wage measures.
But here's another way of looking at it: America has seen low-productivity growth for the past decade, so investments in labor-saving technology should be welcome.
A slew of reports, including one released this month by the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that displaced workers should then be trained for higher-value, better-paid jobs that robots have yet to learn how to do.
That's not the only way in which higher minimum wage could make the economy more efficient. As the market for low-wage labor has gotten more concentrated, some economists have theorized that large employers haven't needed to bargain as hard for workers, so they've kept pay artificially depressed.
"Employers have the power to set wages," says Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. "And when it's not completely determined by perfect competition, they are going to set wages too low, and they will always complain that they can't find enough workers at the going wage."
Scott Nodland sees that phenomenon at play in North Dakota, which has an ultra low 2.6% unemployment rate and hourly wages that have fallen behind the national average, despite the abundance of highly paid oil and gas work.
Related: For gig economy workers in these states, rights are at risk
"On the North Dakota job service site, there are 14,400 jobs available," Nodland, who has worked in many fields and refers to himself as an "entrepreneur," says. "And last year, there was a net loss of population in North Dakota. Obviously something is out of balance, and I'm suggesting it's wages."
It's not just North Dakota. Activists pushing minimum wage increases all over the country are doing so out of a sense that poor people haven't shared in what otherwise looks like a booming economy. Although wage growth did accelerate for lower income workers in 2015 and 2016, it hasn't been enough to make up decades of lost ground.
A national group called the Fairness Project, funded by a California healthcare union, is taking that message to several states this cycle with minimum wage campaigns as well as ballot initiatives that would expand Medicaid and require employers to offer paid sick leave.
They've calculated, based on data assembled by EPI, that wage increases implemented since the beginning of 2017 have put an extra $4 billion in workers' pockets.
"While unemployment is low, we're seeing pretty stagnant wages," says Fairness Project director Jonathan Scheifer. "And the only places we've seen wage increases is where there's been an increase in the minimum wage."
[End of Article]
___________________________________________________________________________
The minimum wage in the United States is set by US labor law and a range of state and local laws. Employers generally have to pay workers the highest minimum wage prescribed by federal, state, and local law. Since July 24, 2009, the federal government has mandated a nationwide minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
As of January 2018, there were 29 states with a minimum wage higher than the federal minimum. From 2017 to 2018, eight states increased their minimum wage levels through automatic adjustments, while increases in eleven other states occurred through referendum or legislative action.
Using 2018 inflation-adjusted dollars, the federal minimum wage peaked at $11.77 per hour in 1968. If the minimum wage in 1968 had kept up with labor's productivity growth, it would have reached $19.33 in 2017. There is a racial difference in support for a higher minimum wage with most Black and Latino individuals supporting a $15.00 federal minimum wage, and 54% of Whites opposing it.
In 2015, about 3% of White, Asian, and Latino workers earned the federal minimum wage or less. Amongst Black workers, the percentage was about 4%
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Minimum Wage in the United States:
"It's been too cold to campaign in frozen North Dakota. But as spring has crept across the state, an unusual ballot initiative is starting to emerge: One that would more than double the minimum wage, from $7.25 to $15 an hour by 2021.
"The places we can gather signatures the best are at the parades and the waiting lines at the outhouses," says Scott Nodland, a citizen activist leading the effort. "We expect that now that the snow just melted and temperatures hit the high 50s, we can begin to do something."
It's an unusual platform for the deep red state, which voted 63% for President Trump in 2016. But support for higher minimum wages has transcended partisan politics before. A wave of purple states — including Colorado, Arizona, and Maine — voted in wage hikes last election cycle.
Raising the minimum wage has been hotly debated in cities and states for years. Supporters argue that it's a remedy for widening wage inequality and will boost consumer spending, while opponents counter that it could reduce opportunities for employment, particularly for teenagers and others looking for entry level or low-skilled jobs.
Related: The US needs to do a better job training its workers. Here's how
Now, another batch of proposed wage hikes is headed for ballots in 2018, with initiatives underway in Massachusetts, Missouri, Michigan, Washington, and Washington D.C. And this time, as research on earlier minimum wage hikes piles up, the impact on workers is starting to become more clear.
The outlook? While some jobs could be lost as a consequence of more ambitious jumps in the minimum wage, the vast majority of workers who remain employed will enjoy higher pay and the economy overall isn't expected to suffer as a result.
For example, one study released last month by economists at the University of California, San Diego and the American Enterprise Institute estimated that minimum wage hikes of more than a dollar implemented between 2013 and 2016 — such as those in California, Washington, and New York — reduced employment among low-skilled workers by just under 1.5%.
The impact on jobs in states with smaller wage increases was more variable, and occasionally there was a positive outcome, possibly because more people were drawn back into the labor market by the better pay.
However, research has also generally found that minimum wage hikes put more money in workers' pockets overall.
Another study out last month from two Census Bureau economists found that, based on previous minimum wage increases, a 10% hike would raise income growth for workers in the bottom quarter of wage earners by about 10% — even including any possible reduction in hours.
Considering this new evidence, progressives have shifted from arguing that minimum wage hikes don't lead to job loss to arguing that even if they do, most workers are still better off.
A recent paper from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute points out that people often switch jobs in low-wage industries, so even a 3% loss in jobs could just mean that all workers end up with 3% fewer total hours — but if they were paid 10% more for those hours, everybody comes out ahead.
Related: The gender pay gap isn't just about what you make
Another strand of research from economists at the University of California, Irvine and the London School of Economics finds that higher minimum wages push employers to automate low-wage work — think ordering kiosks in fast-food restaurants — which opponents have used to slam minimum wage measures.
But here's another way of looking at it: America has seen low-productivity growth for the past decade, so investments in labor-saving technology should be welcome.
A slew of reports, including one released this month by the Council on Foreign Relations, argues that displaced workers should then be trained for higher-value, better-paid jobs that robots have yet to learn how to do.
That's not the only way in which higher minimum wage could make the economy more efficient. As the market for low-wage labor has gotten more concentrated, some economists have theorized that large employers haven't needed to bargain as hard for workers, so they've kept pay artificially depressed.
"Employers have the power to set wages," says Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. "And when it's not completely determined by perfect competition, they are going to set wages too low, and they will always complain that they can't find enough workers at the going wage."
Scott Nodland sees that phenomenon at play in North Dakota, which has an ultra low 2.6% unemployment rate and hourly wages that have fallen behind the national average, despite the abundance of highly paid oil and gas work.
Related: For gig economy workers in these states, rights are at risk
"On the North Dakota job service site, there are 14,400 jobs available," Nodland, who has worked in many fields and refers to himself as an "entrepreneur," says. "And last year, there was a net loss of population in North Dakota. Obviously something is out of balance, and I'm suggesting it's wages."
It's not just North Dakota. Activists pushing minimum wage increases all over the country are doing so out of a sense that poor people haven't shared in what otherwise looks like a booming economy. Although wage growth did accelerate for lower income workers in 2015 and 2016, it hasn't been enough to make up decades of lost ground.
A national group called the Fairness Project, funded by a California healthcare union, is taking that message to several states this cycle with minimum wage campaigns as well as ballot initiatives that would expand Medicaid and require employers to offer paid sick leave.
They've calculated, based on data assembled by EPI, that wage increases implemented since the beginning of 2017 have put an extra $4 billion in workers' pockets.
"While unemployment is low, we're seeing pretty stagnant wages," says Fairness Project director Jonathan Scheifer. "And the only places we've seen wage increases is where there's been an increase in the minimum wage."
[End of Article]
___________________________________________________________________________
The minimum wage in the United States is set by US labor law and a range of state and local laws. Employers generally have to pay workers the highest minimum wage prescribed by federal, state, and local law. Since July 24, 2009, the federal government has mandated a nationwide minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
As of January 2018, there were 29 states with a minimum wage higher than the federal minimum. From 2017 to 2018, eight states increased their minimum wage levels through automatic adjustments, while increases in eleven other states occurred through referendum or legislative action.
Using 2018 inflation-adjusted dollars, the federal minimum wage peaked at $11.77 per hour in 1968. If the minimum wage in 1968 had kept up with labor's productivity growth, it would have reached $19.33 in 2017. There is a racial difference in support for a higher minimum wage with most Black and Latino individuals supporting a $15.00 federal minimum wage, and 54% of Whites opposing it.
In 2015, about 3% of White, Asian, and Latino workers earned the federal minimum wage or less. Amongst Black workers, the percentage was about 4%
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Minimum Wage in the United States:
- History
- Legislation
- Historical trend
- Economic effects
- Commentary
- Polls
- List by jurisdiction
- Low-paying occupations, 2006 and 2009
- See also:
- Federal Minimum Wage. United States Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division.
- Minimum Wages for Tipped Employees. United States Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division.
- History of Federal Minimum Wage United States Department of Labor Wage and Hour Division.
- U.S. Minimum Wage History. Oregon State University – Wealth and Poverty (Anth 484). Last updated December 26, 2012.
- Maps and charts of minimum wage vs. housing costs – National Low Income Housing Coalition (advocacy group)
- Economics portal
- United States portal
- Average worker's wage
- Fair Labor Standards Act
- History of labor law in the United States
- Income inequality in the United States
- List of minimum wages by country
- Living wage
- Maximum wage
- Minimum Wage Fixing Convention, 1970
- Minimum wage law
- United States labor law
- Wage slavery
- Wage theft
- Working poor
American Job Losses due to: YouTube Video: Job losses due to automation could hit retail industry hardest (by CBS This Morning April 27, 2017)
YouTube Video: Offshoring Jobs Hurts American Workers (by Communications Workers of America)
YouTube Video: Offshoring Jobs Hurts American Workers (by Communications Workers of America)
Report Suggests Nearly Half of U.S. Jobs Are Vulnerable to Computerization
Oxford researchers say that 45 percent of America’s occupations will be automated within the next 20 years.
Rapid advances in technology have long represented a serious potential threat to many jobs ordinarily performed by people.
A recent report (which is not online, but summarized here) from the Oxford Martin School’s Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology attempts to quantify the extent of that threat. It concludes that 45 percent of American jobs are at high risk of being taken by computers within the next two decades.
The authors believe this takeover will happen in two stages. First, computers will start replacing people in especially vulnerable fields like transportation/logistics, production labor, and administrative support.
Jobs in services, sales, and construction may also be lost in this first stage. Then, the rate of replacement will slow down due to bottlenecks in harder-to-automate fields such engineering. This “technological plateau” will be followed by a second wave of computerization, dependent upon the development of good artificial intelligence. This could next put jobs in management, science and engineering, and the arts at risk.
The authors note that the rate of computerization depends on several other factors, including regulation of new technology and access to cheap labor.
These results were calculated with a common statistical modeling method. More than 700 jobs on O*Net, an online career network, were considered, as well as the skills and education required for each. These features were weighted according to how automatable they were, and according to the engineering obstacles currently preventing computerization.
“Our findings thus imply that as technology races ahead, low-skill workers will reallocate to tasks that are non-susceptible to computerization—i.e., tasks that required creative and social intelligence,” the authors write. “For workers to win the race, however, they will have to acquire creative and social skills.”
___________________________________________________________________________
The Offshore Outsourcing of American Jobs: A Greater Threat Than Terrorism.
Is offshore outsourcing good or harmful for America? To convince Americans of outsourcing’s benefits, corporate outsourcers sponsor misleading one-sided “studies.”
Only a small handful of people have looked objectively at the issue. These few and the large number of Americans whose careers have been destroyed by outsourcing have a different view of outsourcing’s impact. But so far there has been no debate, just a shouting down of skeptics as “protectionists.”
Now comes an important new book, Outsourcing America, published by the American Management Association. The authors, two brothers, Ron and Anil Hira, are experts on the subject. One is a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the other is professor at Simon Fraser University.
The authors note that despite the enormity of the stakes for all Americans, a state of denial exists among policymakers and outsourcing’s corporate champions about the adverse effects on the US. The Hira brothers succeed in their task of interjecting harsh reality where delusion has ruled.
In what might be an underestimate, a University of California study concludes that 14 million white-collar jobs are vulnerable to being outsourced offshore. These are not only call-center operators, customer service and back-office jobs, but also information technology, accounting, architecture, advanced engineering design, news reporting, stock analysis, and medical and legal services.
The authors note that these are the jobs of the American Dream, the jobs of upward mobility that generate the bulk of the tax revenues that fund our education, health, infrastructure, and social security systems.
The loss of these jobs “is fool’s gold for companies.” Corporate America’s short-term mentality, stemming from bonuses tied to quarterly results, is causing US companies to lose not only their best employees-their human capital-but also the consumers who buy their products. Employees displaced by foreigners and left unemployed or in lower paid work have a reduced presence in the consumer market. They provide fewer retirement savings for new investment.
Nothink economists assume that new, better jobs are on the way for displaced Americans, but no economists can identify these jobs. The authors point out that “the track record for the re-employment of displaced US workers is abysmal: “The Department of Labor reports that more than one in three workers who are displaced remains unemployed, and many of those who are lucky enough to find jobs take major pay cuts.
Many former manufacturing workers who were displaced a decade ago because of manufacturing that went offshore took training courses and found jobs in the information technology sector. They are now facing the unenviable situation of having their second career disappear overseas.”
The “New Economy” Is The No Jobs Economy
American economists are so inattentive to outsourcing’s perils that they fail to realize that the same incentive that leads to the outsourcing of one tradable good or service holds for all tradable goods and services. In the 21st century the US economy has only been able to create jobs in nontradable domestic services-the hallmark of a third world labor force.
Prior to the advent of offshore outsourcing, US employees were shielded against low wage foreign labor. Americans worked with more capital and better technology, and their higher productivity protected their higher wages.
Outsourcing forces Americans to “compete head-to-head with foreign workers” by “undermining US workers’ primary competitive advantage over foreign workers: their physical presence in the US” and “by providing those overseas workers with the same technologies.”
The result is a lose-lose situation for American employees, American businesses, and the American government. Outsourcing has brought about record unemployment in engineering fields and a major drop in university enrollments in technical and scientific disciplines. Even many of the remaining jobs are being filled by lower paid foreigners brought in on H-1b and L-1 visas. American employees are discharged after being forced to train their foreign replacements.
US corporations justify their offshore operations as essential to gain a foothold in emerging Asian markets. The Hira brothers believe this is self-delusion. “There is no evidence that they will be able to outcompete local Chinese and Indian companies, who are very rapidly assimilating the technology and know-how from the local US plants.
In fact, studies show that Indian IT companies have been consistently outcompeting their US counterparts, even in US markets. Thus, it is time for CEOs to start thinking about whether they are fine with their own jobs being outsourced as well.”
The authors note that the national security implications of outsourcing “have been largely ignored.”
Outsourcing is rapidly eroding America’s superpower status. Beginning in 2002 the US began running trade deficits in advanced technology products with Asia, Mexico and Ireland.
As these countries are not leaders in advanced technology, the deficits obviously stem from US offshore manufacturing. In effect, the US is giving away its technology, which is rapidly being captured, while US firms reduce themselves to a brand name with a sales force.
In an appendix, the authors provide a devastating expose of the three “studies” that have been used to silence doubts about offshore outsourcing-the Global Insight study (March 2004) for the Information Technology Association of America, the Catherine Mann study (December 2003) for the Institute for International Economics, and the McKinsey Global Institute study (August 2003).
The ITAA is a lobbying group for outsourcing. The ITAA spun the results of the study by releasing only the executive summary to reporters who agreed not to seek outside opinion prior to writing their stories.
Mann’s study is “an unreasonably optimistic forecast based on faulty logic and a poor understanding of technology and strategy.”
The McKinsey report “should be viewed as a self-interested lobbying document that presents an unrealistically optimistic estimate of the impact of offshore outsourcing and an undeveloped and politically unviable solution to the problems they identify.”
Outsourcing America is a powerful work. Only fools will continue clinging to the premise that outsourcing is good for America.
Article by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, who was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. His latest book, “How The Economy Was Lost,” has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press.The original source of this article is Creators Syndicate and Global Research
Copyright © Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, Creators Syndicate and Global Research, 2016
Oxford researchers say that 45 percent of America’s occupations will be automated within the next 20 years.
Rapid advances in technology have long represented a serious potential threat to many jobs ordinarily performed by people.
A recent report (which is not online, but summarized here) from the Oxford Martin School’s Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology attempts to quantify the extent of that threat. It concludes that 45 percent of American jobs are at high risk of being taken by computers within the next two decades.
The authors believe this takeover will happen in two stages. First, computers will start replacing people in especially vulnerable fields like transportation/logistics, production labor, and administrative support.
Jobs in services, sales, and construction may also be lost in this first stage. Then, the rate of replacement will slow down due to bottlenecks in harder-to-automate fields such engineering. This “technological plateau” will be followed by a second wave of computerization, dependent upon the development of good artificial intelligence. This could next put jobs in management, science and engineering, and the arts at risk.
The authors note that the rate of computerization depends on several other factors, including regulation of new technology and access to cheap labor.
These results were calculated with a common statistical modeling method. More than 700 jobs on O*Net, an online career network, were considered, as well as the skills and education required for each. These features were weighted according to how automatable they were, and according to the engineering obstacles currently preventing computerization.
“Our findings thus imply that as technology races ahead, low-skill workers will reallocate to tasks that are non-susceptible to computerization—i.e., tasks that required creative and social intelligence,” the authors write. “For workers to win the race, however, they will have to acquire creative and social skills.”
___________________________________________________________________________
The Offshore Outsourcing of American Jobs: A Greater Threat Than Terrorism.
Is offshore outsourcing good or harmful for America? To convince Americans of outsourcing’s benefits, corporate outsourcers sponsor misleading one-sided “studies.”
Only a small handful of people have looked objectively at the issue. These few and the large number of Americans whose careers have been destroyed by outsourcing have a different view of outsourcing’s impact. But so far there has been no debate, just a shouting down of skeptics as “protectionists.”
Now comes an important new book, Outsourcing America, published by the American Management Association. The authors, two brothers, Ron and Anil Hira, are experts on the subject. One is a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and the other is professor at Simon Fraser University.
The authors note that despite the enormity of the stakes for all Americans, a state of denial exists among policymakers and outsourcing’s corporate champions about the adverse effects on the US. The Hira brothers succeed in their task of interjecting harsh reality where delusion has ruled.
In what might be an underestimate, a University of California study concludes that 14 million white-collar jobs are vulnerable to being outsourced offshore. These are not only call-center operators, customer service and back-office jobs, but also information technology, accounting, architecture, advanced engineering design, news reporting, stock analysis, and medical and legal services.
The authors note that these are the jobs of the American Dream, the jobs of upward mobility that generate the bulk of the tax revenues that fund our education, health, infrastructure, and social security systems.
The loss of these jobs “is fool’s gold for companies.” Corporate America’s short-term mentality, stemming from bonuses tied to quarterly results, is causing US companies to lose not only their best employees-their human capital-but also the consumers who buy their products. Employees displaced by foreigners and left unemployed or in lower paid work have a reduced presence in the consumer market. They provide fewer retirement savings for new investment.
Nothink economists assume that new, better jobs are on the way for displaced Americans, but no economists can identify these jobs. The authors point out that “the track record for the re-employment of displaced US workers is abysmal: “The Department of Labor reports that more than one in three workers who are displaced remains unemployed, and many of those who are lucky enough to find jobs take major pay cuts.
Many former manufacturing workers who were displaced a decade ago because of manufacturing that went offshore took training courses and found jobs in the information technology sector. They are now facing the unenviable situation of having their second career disappear overseas.”
The “New Economy” Is The No Jobs Economy
American economists are so inattentive to outsourcing’s perils that they fail to realize that the same incentive that leads to the outsourcing of one tradable good or service holds for all tradable goods and services. In the 21st century the US economy has only been able to create jobs in nontradable domestic services-the hallmark of a third world labor force.
Prior to the advent of offshore outsourcing, US employees were shielded against low wage foreign labor. Americans worked with more capital and better technology, and their higher productivity protected their higher wages.
Outsourcing forces Americans to “compete head-to-head with foreign workers” by “undermining US workers’ primary competitive advantage over foreign workers: their physical presence in the US” and “by providing those overseas workers with the same technologies.”
The result is a lose-lose situation for American employees, American businesses, and the American government. Outsourcing has brought about record unemployment in engineering fields and a major drop in university enrollments in technical and scientific disciplines. Even many of the remaining jobs are being filled by lower paid foreigners brought in on H-1b and L-1 visas. American employees are discharged after being forced to train their foreign replacements.
US corporations justify their offshore operations as essential to gain a foothold in emerging Asian markets. The Hira brothers believe this is self-delusion. “There is no evidence that they will be able to outcompete local Chinese and Indian companies, who are very rapidly assimilating the technology and know-how from the local US plants.
In fact, studies show that Indian IT companies have been consistently outcompeting their US counterparts, even in US markets. Thus, it is time for CEOs to start thinking about whether they are fine with their own jobs being outsourced as well.”
The authors note that the national security implications of outsourcing “have been largely ignored.”
Outsourcing is rapidly eroding America’s superpower status. Beginning in 2002 the US began running trade deficits in advanced technology products with Asia, Mexico and Ireland.
As these countries are not leaders in advanced technology, the deficits obviously stem from US offshore manufacturing. In effect, the US is giving away its technology, which is rapidly being captured, while US firms reduce themselves to a brand name with a sales force.
In an appendix, the authors provide a devastating expose of the three “studies” that have been used to silence doubts about offshore outsourcing-the Global Insight study (March 2004) for the Information Technology Association of America, the Catherine Mann study (December 2003) for the Institute for International Economics, and the McKinsey Global Institute study (August 2003).
The ITAA is a lobbying group for outsourcing. The ITAA spun the results of the study by releasing only the executive summary to reporters who agreed not to seek outside opinion prior to writing their stories.
Mann’s study is “an unreasonably optimistic forecast based on faulty logic and a poor understanding of technology and strategy.”
The McKinsey report “should be viewed as a self-interested lobbying document that presents an unrealistically optimistic estimate of the impact of offshore outsourcing and an undeveloped and politically unviable solution to the problems they identify.”
Outsourcing America is a powerful work. Only fools will continue clinging to the premise that outsourcing is good for America.
Article by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, who was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. His latest book, “How The Economy Was Lost,” has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press.The original source of this article is Creators Syndicate and Global Research
Copyright © Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, Creators Syndicate and Global Research, 2016
International Standard Classification of Occupations
YouTube Video: Top 10 Iconic American Businesses by WatchMojo
Pictured below: Executives from Apple, Inc.
YouTube Video: Top 10 Iconic American Businesses by WatchMojo
Pictured below: Executives from Apple, Inc.
The International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) is an International Labor Organization (ILO) classification structure for organizing information on labor and jobs. It is part of the international family of economic and social classifications of the United Nations. The current version, known as ISCO-08, was published in 2008 and is the fourth iteration, following ISCO-58, ISCO-68 and ISCO-88.
The ILO describes the purpose of the ISCO classification as: "a tool for organizing jobs into a clearly defined set of groups according to the tasks and duties undertaken in the job. It is intended for use in statistical applications and in a variety of client oriented applications. Client oriented applications include the matching of job seekers with job vacancies, the management of short or long term migration of workers between countries and the development of vocational training programmes and guidance."
The ISCO is the basis for many national occupation classifications as well as applications in specific domains such as reporting of teaching, agricultural and healthcare workforce information.
The ISCO-08 revision is expected to be the standard for labour information worldwide in the coming decade, for instance as applied to incoming data from the 2010 Global Round of National Population Censuses.
The ISCO-08 structure:
The ISCO-08 divides jobs into 10 major groups:
Each major group is further organized into sub-major, minor and unit (not shown) groups. The basic criteria used to define the system are the skill level and specialization required to competently perform the tasks and duties of the occupations.
Major group 1: Managers
Major group 2: Professionals
Major group 3: Technicians and associate professionals:
Major group 4: Clerical support workers:
Major group 5: Service and sales workers:
Major group 6: Skilled agricultural, forestry and fishery workers:
Major group 7: Craft and related trades workers:
Major group 8: Plant and machine operators and assemblers:
Major group 9: Elementary occupations:
Major group 10: Armed forces occupations:
See also:
The ILO describes the purpose of the ISCO classification as: "a tool for organizing jobs into a clearly defined set of groups according to the tasks and duties undertaken in the job. It is intended for use in statistical applications and in a variety of client oriented applications. Client oriented applications include the matching of job seekers with job vacancies, the management of short or long term migration of workers between countries and the development of vocational training programmes and guidance."
The ISCO is the basis for many national occupation classifications as well as applications in specific domains such as reporting of teaching, agricultural and healthcare workforce information.
The ISCO-08 revision is expected to be the standard for labour information worldwide in the coming decade, for instance as applied to incoming data from the 2010 Global Round of National Population Censuses.
The ISCO-08 structure:
The ISCO-08 divides jobs into 10 major groups:
- Managers
- Professional
- Technicians and associate professionals
- Clerical support workers
- Service and sales workers
- Skilled agricultural, forestry and fishery workers
- Craft and related trades workers
- Plant and machine operators, and assemblers
- Elementary occupations
- Armed forces occupations
Each major group is further organized into sub-major, minor and unit (not shown) groups. The basic criteria used to define the system are the skill level and specialization required to competently perform the tasks and duties of the occupations.
Major group 1: Managers
- Chief executives, senior officials and legislators
- Legislators and senior officials
- Managing directors and chief executives
- Administrative and commercial managers
- Business services and administration managers
- Sales, marketing and development managers
- Production and specialized services managers
- Production managers in agriculture, forestry and fisheries
- Manufacturing, mining, construction, and distribution managers
- Information and communications technology service managers
- Professional services managers
- Hospitality, retail and other services managers
- Hotel and restaurant managers
- Retail and wholesale trade managers
- Other services managers
Major group 2: Professionals
- Science and engineering professionals
- Physical and earth science professionals
- Mathematicians, actuaries and statisticians
- Life science professionals
- Engineering professionals (excluding electrotechnology)
- Electrotechnology engineers
- Architects, planners, surveyors and designers
- Health professionals
- Medical doctors
- Nursing and midwifery professionals
- Traditional and complementary medicine professionals
- Paramedical practitioners
- Veterinarians
- Other health professionals
- Medical Assistant professionals
- Teaching professionals
- University and higher education teachers
- Vocational education teachers
- Secondary education teachers
- Primary school and early childhood teachers
- Other teaching professionals
- Business and administration professionals
- Finance professionals
- Administration professionals
- Sales, marketing and public relations professionals
- Information and communications technology professionals
- Software and applications developers and analysts
- Database and network professionals
- Legal, social and cultural professionals
- Legal professionals
- Librarians, archivists and curators
- Social and religious professionals
- Authors, journalists and linguists
- Creative and performing artists
Major group 3: Technicians and associate professionals:
- Science and engineering associate professionals
- Physical and engineering science technicians
- Mining, manufacturing and construction supervisors
- Process control technicians
- Life science technicians and related associate professionals
- Ship and aircraft controllers and technicians
- Health associate professionals
- Medical and pharmaceutical technicians
- Nursing and midwifery associate professionals
- Traditional and complementary medicine associate professionals
- Veterinary technicians and assistants
- Other health associate professionals
- Business and administration associate professionals
- Financial and mathematical associate professionals
- Sales and purchasing agents and brokers
- Business services agents
- Administrative and specialized secretaries
- Regulatory government associate professionals
- Legal, social, cultural and related associate professionals
- Legal, social and religious associate professionals
- Sports and fitness workers
- Artistic, cultural and culinary associate professionals
- Information and communications technicians
- Information and communications technology operations and user support technicians
- Telecommunications and broadcasting technicians
Major group 4: Clerical support workers:
- General and keyboard clerks
- General office clerks
- Secretaries (general)
- Keyboard operators
- Customer services clerks
- Tellers, money collectors and related clerks
- Client information workers
- Numerical and material recording clerks
- Numerical clerks
- Material-recording and transport clerks
- Other clerical support workers
- Other clerical support workers
Major group 5: Service and sales workers:
- Personal service workers
- Travel attendants, conductors and guides
- Cooks
- Waiters and bartenders
- Hairdressers, beauticians and related workers
- Building and housekeeping supervisors
- Other personal services workers
- Sales workers
- Street and market salespersons
- Shop salespersons
- Cashiers and ticket clerks
- Other sales workers
- Personal care workers
- Child care workers and teachers' aides
- Personal care workers in health services
- Protective services workers
- Protective services workers
Major group 6: Skilled agricultural, forestry and fishery workers:
- Market-oriented skilled agricultural workers
- Market gardeners and crop growers
- Animal producers
- Mixed crop and animal producers
- Market-oriented skilled forestry, fishery and hunting workers
- Forestry and related workers
- Fishery workers, hunters and trappers
- Subsistence farmers, fishers, hunters and gatherers
- Subsistence crop farmers
- Subsistence livestock farmers
- Subsistence mixed crop and livestock farmers
- Subsistence fishers, hunters, trappers and gatherers
Major group 7: Craft and related trades workers:
- Building and related trades workers, excluding electricians
- Building frame and related trades workers
- Building finishers and related trades workers
- Painters, building structure cleaners and related trades workers
- Metal, machinery and related trades workers
- Sheet and structural metal workers, moulders and welders, and related workers
- Blacksmiths, toolmakers and related trades workers
- 723 Machinery mechanics and repairers
- Handicraft and printing workers
- Handicraft workers
- Printing trades workers
- Electrical and electronic trades workers
- Electrical equipment installers and repairers
- Electronics and telecommunications installers and repairers
- Food processing, wood working, garment and other craft and related trades workers
- Food processing and related trades workers
- Wood treaters, cabinet-makers and related trades workers
- Garment and related trades workers
- Other craft and related workers
Major group 8: Plant and machine operators and assemblers:
- Stationary plant and machine operators
- Mining and mineral processing plant operators
- Metal processing and finishing plant operators
- Chemical and photographic products plant and machine operators
- Rubber, plastic and paper products machine operators
- Textile, fur and leather products machine operators
- Food and related products machine operators
- Wood processing and papermaking plant operators
- Other stationary plant and machine operators
- Assemblers
- Assemblers
- Drivers and mobile plant operators
- Locomotive engine drivers and related workers
- Car, van and motorcycle drivers
- Heavy truck and bus drivers
- Mobile plant operators
- Ships' deck crews and related workers
Major group 9: Elementary occupations:
- Cleaners and helpers
- Agricultural, forestry and fishery labourers
- Agricultural, forestry and fishery labourers
- Laborers in mining, construction, manufacturing and transport
- Mining and construction laborers
- Manufacturing laborers
- Transport and storage laborers
- Food preparation assistants
- Food preparation assistants
- Street and related sales and service workers
- Street and related service workers
- Street vendors (excluding food)
- Refuse workers and other elementary workers
- Refuse workers
- Other elementary workers
Major group 10: Armed forces occupations:
- Commissioned armed forces officers
- Commissioned armed forces officers
- Non-commissioned armed forces officers
- Non-commissioned armed forces officers
- Armed forces occupations, other ranks
- Armed forces occupations, other ranks
See also:
- ISCO official website of the ILO.
- International Standard Industrial Classification
- International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems
- International Standard Classification of Education
- National Occupational Classification of Canada
- Standard Occupational Classification System of the United States
- job title inflation
On-the-Job Training
- YouTube Video: Employee training and development for improved performance
- YouTube Video: Example of On-the-Job Training
On-the-job training (OJT) is an important topic of Human Resource Management. It helps develop the career of the individual and the prosperous growth of the organization.
On the job training is a form of training provided at the workplace. During the training, employees are familiarized with the working environment they will become part of.
Employees also get a hands-on experience using machinery, equipment, tools, materials, etc. Part of (OJT) is to face the challenges that occur during the performance of the job. An experienced employee or a manager are executing the role of the mentor who through written, or verbal instructions and demonstrations are passing on his/her knowledge and company-specific skills to the new employee.
Executing the training on at the job location, rather than the classroom, creates a stress-free environment for the employees. On-the-job training is the most popular method of training not only in the United States but in most of the developed countries, such as the United Kingdom, China, Russia, etc.
Its effectiveness is based on the use of existing workplace tools, machines, documents and equipment, and the knowledge of specialists who are working in this field. On-the-job training is easy to arrange and manage and it simplifies the process of adapting to the new workplace.
OJT is highly used for practical tasks. It is inexpensive, and it doesn’t require special equipment that is normally used for a specific job. Upon satisfaction of completion of the training, the employer is expected to retain participants as regular employees.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about On The Job Training:
On the job training is a form of training provided at the workplace. During the training, employees are familiarized with the working environment they will become part of.
Employees also get a hands-on experience using machinery, equipment, tools, materials, etc. Part of (OJT) is to face the challenges that occur during the performance of the job. An experienced employee or a manager are executing the role of the mentor who through written, or verbal instructions and demonstrations are passing on his/her knowledge and company-specific skills to the new employee.
Executing the training on at the job location, rather than the classroom, creates a stress-free environment for the employees. On-the-job training is the most popular method of training not only in the United States but in most of the developed countries, such as the United Kingdom, China, Russia, etc.
Its effectiveness is based on the use of existing workplace tools, machines, documents and equipment, and the knowledge of specialists who are working in this field. On-the-job training is easy to arrange and manage and it simplifies the process of adapting to the new workplace.
OJT is highly used for practical tasks. It is inexpensive, and it doesn’t require special equipment that is normally used for a specific job. Upon satisfaction of completion of the training, the employer is expected to retain participants as regular employees.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about On The Job Training:
- History
- Psychology
- On-the-job vs Off-the-job training
- On-The-Job Training Plan
- Advantages and Disadvantages
Offshoring Jobs
YouTube Video: Business of offshoring and outsourcing*
* -- John Gray, assistant professor of operations at Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business, gives a business perspective on offshoring and outsourcing; its effect on the economy; benefits and risks and the trends that indicate offshoring is slowing down due to increased costs in today's economic climate.
Pictured below: President Trump Is Offshoring Jobs at 3x the Rate Under Obama
YouTube Video: Business of offshoring and outsourcing*
* -- John Gray, assistant professor of operations at Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business, gives a business perspective on offshoring and outsourcing; its effect on the economy; benefits and risks and the trends that indicate offshoring is slowing down due to increased costs in today's economic climate.
Pictured below: President Trump Is Offshoring Jobs at 3x the Rate Under Obama
Offshoring is the relocation of a business process from one country to another—typically an operational process, such as manufacturing, or supporting processes, such as accounting.
Typically this refers to a company business, although state governments may also employ offshoring.
More recently, offshoring has been associated primarily with the outsourcing of technical and administrative services supporting domestic and global operations from outside the home country ("offshore outsourcing"), by means of internal (captive) or external (outsourcing) delivery models.
India has emerged as a key offshoring destination over the past 15 years.
The term offshoring is in use in several distinct but closely related ways. It is sometimes used broadly to include substitution of a service from any foreign source for a service formerly produced internally to the firm. In other cases, only imported services from subsidiaries or other closely related suppliers are included. A further complication is that intermediate goods, such as partially completed computers, are not consistently included in the scope of the term.
Offshoring can be seen in the context of either production offshoring or services offshoring. After its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, the People's Republic of China emerged as a prominent destination for production offshoring. Another focus area has been the software industry as part of global software development and developing global information systems.
After technical progress in telecommunications improved the possibilities of trade in services, India became a country leading in this domain, though many parts of the world are now emerging as offshore destinations.
The economic logic is to reduce costs, sometimes called labor arbitrage, to improve corporate profitability. Jobs are added in the destination country providing the goods or services (generally a lower-cost labor country), but are subtracted in the higher-cost labor country.
The increased safety net costs of the unemployed may be absorbed by the government (taxpayers) in the high-cost country or by the company doing the offshoring. Europe experienced less offshoring than the United States due to policies that applied more costs to corporations and cultural barriers.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Offshoring:
Typically this refers to a company business, although state governments may also employ offshoring.
More recently, offshoring has been associated primarily with the outsourcing of technical and administrative services supporting domestic and global operations from outside the home country ("offshore outsourcing"), by means of internal (captive) or external (outsourcing) delivery models.
India has emerged as a key offshoring destination over the past 15 years.
The term offshoring is in use in several distinct but closely related ways. It is sometimes used broadly to include substitution of a service from any foreign source for a service formerly produced internally to the firm. In other cases, only imported services from subsidiaries or other closely related suppliers are included. A further complication is that intermediate goods, such as partially completed computers, are not consistently included in the scope of the term.
Offshoring can be seen in the context of either production offshoring or services offshoring. After its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, the People's Republic of China emerged as a prominent destination for production offshoring. Another focus area has been the software industry as part of global software development and developing global information systems.
After technical progress in telecommunications improved the possibilities of trade in services, India became a country leading in this domain, though many parts of the world are now emerging as offshore destinations.
The economic logic is to reduce costs, sometimes called labor arbitrage, to improve corporate profitability. Jobs are added in the destination country providing the goods or services (generally a lower-cost labor country), but are subtracted in the higher-cost labor country.
The increased safety net costs of the unemployed may be absorbed by the government (taxpayers) in the high-cost country or by the company doing the offshoring. Europe experienced less offshoring than the United States due to policies that applied more costs to corporations and cultural barriers.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Offshoring:
- Frequently used terms
- Transfer of intellectual property
- Debate
- Effects of factor of production mobility
- History
- See also:
- Anti-Globalism
- Call center security
- Decline and Fall of the American Programmer
- Follow-the-sun
- Global sourcing
- Globality
- Globally Integrated Enterprise
- Homeshoring
- Inshoring
- Job migration
- Low-cost country sourcing
- Offshore company
- Offshore outsourcing
- Offshoring Research Network
- Outsourcing
- Personal offshoring
- Programmers Guild
- Restructuring
- Runaway production
- Tax haven
- By sector:
Vocational Training including the Top 25 Two-year Trade Schools according to Forbes Magazine.
- YouTube Video: What is Vocational Training?
- YouTube Video: Top 30 Highest Paying Trade School Jobs and Vocational School Careers
- YouTube Video: Should more kids skip college for workforce training? (PBS NewsHour)
The Top 25 Two-Year Trade Schools: Colleges That Can Solve The Skills Gap by Forbes Magazine (8/16/2018)
This fall, approximately 4 million high school students in the U.S. will enter their senior year. Some are already thinking about what comes next, discussing their college wish lists with friends and counselors, and planning out campus visits with parents. Most will undoubtedly be pushed toward attending four-year schools, where bachelor’s degree will supposedly give each student the best chance at finding a fulfilling, high-paying career.
Four-year schools are good fits for many students, but the notion that they’re the best one for all students is downright wrong. As high-tech machines continue to disrupt how things are made, and as workforces age in many technical fields, there are vital jobs opening up that academics just can’t fill. Highly-skilled and well-trained workers are needed, and the country is home to top-notch technical schools ready to fill that need.
For the second year, Forbes is ranking the nation’s Top Two-Year Trade Schools, a list of technical and career colleges with high-earning alumni, stand-out graduation and retention rates, and respectable debt repayment scores (full methodology here).
The 25 schools on the list cover a myriad of careers that need workers — and in high-paying, high-growth areas, such as aircraft maintenance, funeral services, dental hygiene and drafting.
“We are here for one purpose,” says Shawn Strong, president State Technical College of Missouri, the No. 3 school on this ranking. “I wouldn’t even say to get students jobs, but to start students’ careers. That’s all we do.”
The high-ranking trade schools look a lot different than the members of the Forbes Top Colleges list. While 61% of the bachelor’s list are private schools, 21 of the 25 trade schools are public. The Midwest makes up only a quarter of the four-year list, but 60% of the technical schools are from the region.
Three schools are in the Pittsburgh metro area, including No. 1 Pittsburgh Institute of Aeronautics. PIA, a private aircraft maintenance school with ties to Orville Wright himself, plays ball in an industry where the jobs not only are high-paying, but are in desperate need.
Thirty percent of aircraft maintenance technicians nationwide have reached or are nearing retirement age, and only 2% of the workforce is new.
“You would have to try to not have a job offer,” PIA student Sam Karol says of his job prospects after graduation.
Despite the job opportunities that do exist at career schools— and the benefits of paying for two years of school rather than four — headcount numbers aren’t exactly booming.
According to the National Center of Education Statistics, the number of associate’s degrees awarded nationwide has stalled since the 2011-12 school year, while the number of bachelor’s degrees keeps climbing. Among the 25 schools that made the list total combined enrollment has floundered from almost 48,000 in 2010 to less than 41,000 in 2016, an approximate 15% dip.
It’s an issue that’s attracting bipartisan attention — and solutions are getting bipartisan support. On July 31, President Donald Trump signed into law a revamped extension of the Bush-era Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006, reasserting the federal government’s commitment to technical education. The new law, introduced by Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA) on May 4, bolted through both houses of Congress with widespread support.
“Whether you’re a high school student or a late-career worker, there’s never been a better time to learn a trade, hone a skill, or pursue your dream,” the president said following the law-signing at a ceremony at Tampa Bay Technical High School. “Now more than 11 million students and workers will have greater access to better training and more jobs.”
To make the investment worth it, many trade schools are adjusting their offerings and partnering with employers to strengthen the school-to-job pipeline. In response to the workforce needs in its local Kansas community, No. 9 Salina Area Technical College is expanding its police science offerings and starting a practical nursing program.
PIA works with Delta, Embraer, Piedmont and other aerospace companies to raise awareness for the aircraft maintenance field and increase the job prospects for its students. State Tech partners with employers like Toyota, Caterpillar and International Trucks, and it recently started a utility industry technician program to address Missouri’s workforce needs.
“We don’t keep a program around unless there’s a demand and unless there’s a salary associated with it,” says Strong.
Trade school isn’t the best or most lucrative fit for everybody, but for students who prefer working with their hands, opportunities exist in diverse fields from health sciences to construction and beyond.
The following is the list of the Top Two-Year Trade Schools according to Forbes:
1. Pittsburgh Institute of Aeronautics
Location: West Mifflin, PA
Private, non-profit
Median Mid-Career Salary (Payscale): $70,700
Average Net Price (IPEDS, in-state for public schools): $25,394
In-state population for first-time students (IPEDS): 40%
2. North Central Kansas Technical College
Beloit, KS
Public
Average Net Price: $11,961
In-state population for first-time students: 100%
3. State Technical College of Missouri
Linn, MO
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $58,400
Average Net Price: $7,918
In-state population for first-time students: 97%
4. Lake Area Technical Institute
Watertown, SD
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $56,900
Average Net Price: $11,216
In-state population for first-time students: 81%
5. Lancaster County Career and Technology Center
Willow Street, PA
Public
Average Net Price: $9,865
In-state population for first-time students: 98%
6. Carolinas College of Health Sciences
Charlotte, NC
Public
Average Net Price: $21,895
In-state population for first-time students: 100%
7. Mitchell Technical Institute
Mitchell, SD
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $58,300
Average Net Price: $11,003
In-state population for first-time students: 91%
8. Salina Area Technical College
Salina, KS
Public
Average Net Price: $5,917
In-state population for first-time students: 95%
9. Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology
Lancaster, PA
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $63,000
Average Net Price: $5,341
In-state population for first-time students: 100%
10. Johnson College
Scranton, PA
Private, non-profit
Median Mid-Career Salary: $56,400
Average Net Price: $18,059
In-state population for first-time students: 97%
11. Rosedale Technical College
Pittsburgh, PA
Private, non-profit
Median Mid-Career Salary: $59,500
Average Net Price: $15,227
In-state population for first-time students: 90%
12. Northwest Iowa Community College
Sheldon, IA
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $65,800
Average Net Price: $10,089
In-state population for first-time students: 88%
13. Southwest Wisconsin Technical College
Fennimore, WI
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $57,400
Average Net Price: $8,820
In-state population for first-time students: 94%
14. North Dakota State College of Science
Wahpeton, ND
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $60,500
Average Net Price: $10,248
In-state population for first-time students: 57%
15. Frontier Community College
Fairfield, IL
Public
Average Net Price: $2,327
In-state population for first-time students: 96%
16. Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture
Curtis, NE
Public
Average Net Price: $11,007
In-state population for first-time students: 85%
17. Lakeshore Technical College
Cleveland, WI
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $53,600
Average Net Price: $8,838
In-state population for first-time students: 99%
18. Northwest Louisiana Technical College
Minden, LA
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $53,100
Average Net Price: $10,322
In-state population for first-time students: 100%
19. Bates Technical College
Tacoma, WA
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $71,100
Average Net Price: $3,913
In-state population for first-time students: 100%
20. Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science
Pittsburgh, PA
Private, non-profit
In-state population for first-time students: 52%
21. Moraine Park Technical College
Fond du Lac, WI
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $54,600
Average Net Price: $9,173
In-state population for first-time students: 100%
22. Wisconsin Indianhead Technical College
Shell Lake, WI
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $53,900
Average Net Price: $9,250
In-state population for first-time students: 91%
23. Manhattan Area Technical College
Manhattan, KS
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $62,000
Average Net Price: $11,270
In-state population for first-time students: 96%
24. Asnuntuck Community College
Enfield, CT
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $64,300
Average Net Price: $7,690
In-state population for first-time students: 94%
25. Dakota County Technical College
Rosemount, MN
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $61,600
Average Net Price: $12,133
In-state population for first-time students: 94%
[End of Article]
___________________________________________________________________________
Vocational Training is education that prepares people to work as a technician or in various jobs such as a trade or a craft. Vocational education is sometimes referred to as career education or technical education. A vocational school is a type of educational institution specifically designed to provide vocational education.
Vocational education can take place at the post-secondary, further education, and higher education level; and can interact with the apprenticeship system. At the post-secondary level vocational education is often provided by highly specialized trade Technical schools, community colleges, universities, as well as Polytechnic Institutes (Institutes of technology).
Until recently, almost all vocational education took place in the classroom, or on the job site, with students learning trade skills and trade theory from accredited professors or established professionals. However, online vocational education has grown in popularity, and made it easier than ever for students to learn various trade skills and soft skills from established professionals in the industry.
The World Bank's 2019 World Development Report on the future of work suggests that flexibility between general and vocational education particularly in higher education is imperative to enable workers to compete in changing labor markets where technology plays an increasingly important role.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Vocational Training.
This fall, approximately 4 million high school students in the U.S. will enter their senior year. Some are already thinking about what comes next, discussing their college wish lists with friends and counselors, and planning out campus visits with parents. Most will undoubtedly be pushed toward attending four-year schools, where bachelor’s degree will supposedly give each student the best chance at finding a fulfilling, high-paying career.
Four-year schools are good fits for many students, but the notion that they’re the best one for all students is downright wrong. As high-tech machines continue to disrupt how things are made, and as workforces age in many technical fields, there are vital jobs opening up that academics just can’t fill. Highly-skilled and well-trained workers are needed, and the country is home to top-notch technical schools ready to fill that need.
For the second year, Forbes is ranking the nation’s Top Two-Year Trade Schools, a list of technical and career colleges with high-earning alumni, stand-out graduation and retention rates, and respectable debt repayment scores (full methodology here).
The 25 schools on the list cover a myriad of careers that need workers — and in high-paying, high-growth areas, such as aircraft maintenance, funeral services, dental hygiene and drafting.
“We are here for one purpose,” says Shawn Strong, president State Technical College of Missouri, the No. 3 school on this ranking. “I wouldn’t even say to get students jobs, but to start students’ careers. That’s all we do.”
The high-ranking trade schools look a lot different than the members of the Forbes Top Colleges list. While 61% of the bachelor’s list are private schools, 21 of the 25 trade schools are public. The Midwest makes up only a quarter of the four-year list, but 60% of the technical schools are from the region.
Three schools are in the Pittsburgh metro area, including No. 1 Pittsburgh Institute of Aeronautics. PIA, a private aircraft maintenance school with ties to Orville Wright himself, plays ball in an industry where the jobs not only are high-paying, but are in desperate need.
Thirty percent of aircraft maintenance technicians nationwide have reached or are nearing retirement age, and only 2% of the workforce is new.
“You would have to try to not have a job offer,” PIA student Sam Karol says of his job prospects after graduation.
Despite the job opportunities that do exist at career schools— and the benefits of paying for two years of school rather than four — headcount numbers aren’t exactly booming.
According to the National Center of Education Statistics, the number of associate’s degrees awarded nationwide has stalled since the 2011-12 school year, while the number of bachelor’s degrees keeps climbing. Among the 25 schools that made the list total combined enrollment has floundered from almost 48,000 in 2010 to less than 41,000 in 2016, an approximate 15% dip.
It’s an issue that’s attracting bipartisan attention — and solutions are getting bipartisan support. On July 31, President Donald Trump signed into law a revamped extension of the Bush-era Perkins Career and Technical Education Act of 2006, reasserting the federal government’s commitment to technical education. The new law, introduced by Rep. Glenn Thompson (R-PA) on May 4, bolted through both houses of Congress with widespread support.
“Whether you’re a high school student or a late-career worker, there’s never been a better time to learn a trade, hone a skill, or pursue your dream,” the president said following the law-signing at a ceremony at Tampa Bay Technical High School. “Now more than 11 million students and workers will have greater access to better training and more jobs.”
To make the investment worth it, many trade schools are adjusting their offerings and partnering with employers to strengthen the school-to-job pipeline. In response to the workforce needs in its local Kansas community, No. 9 Salina Area Technical College is expanding its police science offerings and starting a practical nursing program.
PIA works with Delta, Embraer, Piedmont and other aerospace companies to raise awareness for the aircraft maintenance field and increase the job prospects for its students. State Tech partners with employers like Toyota, Caterpillar and International Trucks, and it recently started a utility industry technician program to address Missouri’s workforce needs.
“We don’t keep a program around unless there’s a demand and unless there’s a salary associated with it,” says Strong.
Trade school isn’t the best or most lucrative fit for everybody, but for students who prefer working with their hands, opportunities exist in diverse fields from health sciences to construction and beyond.
The following is the list of the Top Two-Year Trade Schools according to Forbes:
1. Pittsburgh Institute of Aeronautics
Location: West Mifflin, PA
Private, non-profit
Median Mid-Career Salary (Payscale): $70,700
Average Net Price (IPEDS, in-state for public schools): $25,394
In-state population for first-time students (IPEDS): 40%
2. North Central Kansas Technical College
Beloit, KS
Public
Average Net Price: $11,961
In-state population for first-time students: 100%
3. State Technical College of Missouri
Linn, MO
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $58,400
Average Net Price: $7,918
In-state population for first-time students: 97%
4. Lake Area Technical Institute
Watertown, SD
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $56,900
Average Net Price: $11,216
In-state population for first-time students: 81%
5. Lancaster County Career and Technology Center
Willow Street, PA
Public
Average Net Price: $9,865
In-state population for first-time students: 98%
6. Carolinas College of Health Sciences
Charlotte, NC
Public
Average Net Price: $21,895
In-state population for first-time students: 100%
7. Mitchell Technical Institute
Mitchell, SD
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $58,300
Average Net Price: $11,003
In-state population for first-time students: 91%
8. Salina Area Technical College
Salina, KS
Public
Average Net Price: $5,917
In-state population for first-time students: 95%
9. Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology
Lancaster, PA
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $63,000
Average Net Price: $5,341
In-state population for first-time students: 100%
10. Johnson College
Scranton, PA
Private, non-profit
Median Mid-Career Salary: $56,400
Average Net Price: $18,059
In-state population for first-time students: 97%
11. Rosedale Technical College
Pittsburgh, PA
Private, non-profit
Median Mid-Career Salary: $59,500
Average Net Price: $15,227
In-state population for first-time students: 90%
12. Northwest Iowa Community College
Sheldon, IA
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $65,800
Average Net Price: $10,089
In-state population for first-time students: 88%
13. Southwest Wisconsin Technical College
Fennimore, WI
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $57,400
Average Net Price: $8,820
In-state population for first-time students: 94%
14. North Dakota State College of Science
Wahpeton, ND
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $60,500
Average Net Price: $10,248
In-state population for first-time students: 57%
15. Frontier Community College
Fairfield, IL
Public
Average Net Price: $2,327
In-state population for first-time students: 96%
16. Nebraska College of Technical Agriculture
Curtis, NE
Public
Average Net Price: $11,007
In-state population for first-time students: 85%
17. Lakeshore Technical College
Cleveland, WI
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $53,600
Average Net Price: $8,838
In-state population for first-time students: 99%
18. Northwest Louisiana Technical College
Minden, LA
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $53,100
Average Net Price: $10,322
In-state population for first-time students: 100%
19. Bates Technical College
Tacoma, WA
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $71,100
Average Net Price: $3,913
In-state population for first-time students: 100%
20. Pittsburgh Institute of Mortuary Science
Pittsburgh, PA
Private, non-profit
In-state population for first-time students: 52%
21. Moraine Park Technical College
Fond du Lac, WI
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $54,600
Average Net Price: $9,173
In-state population for first-time students: 100%
22. Wisconsin Indianhead Technical College
Shell Lake, WI
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $53,900
Average Net Price: $9,250
In-state population for first-time students: 91%
23. Manhattan Area Technical College
Manhattan, KS
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $62,000
Average Net Price: $11,270
In-state population for first-time students: 96%
24. Asnuntuck Community College
Enfield, CT
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $64,300
Average Net Price: $7,690
In-state population for first-time students: 94%
25. Dakota County Technical College
Rosemount, MN
Public
Median Mid-Career Salary: $61,600
Average Net Price: $12,133
In-state population for first-time students: 94%
[End of Article]
___________________________________________________________________________
Vocational Training is education that prepares people to work as a technician or in various jobs such as a trade or a craft. Vocational education is sometimes referred to as career education or technical education. A vocational school is a type of educational institution specifically designed to provide vocational education.
Vocational education can take place at the post-secondary, further education, and higher education level; and can interact with the apprenticeship system. At the post-secondary level vocational education is often provided by highly specialized trade Technical schools, community colleges, universities, as well as Polytechnic Institutes (Institutes of technology).
Until recently, almost all vocational education took place in the classroom, or on the job site, with students learning trade skills and trade theory from accredited professors or established professionals. However, online vocational education has grown in popularity, and made it easier than ever for students to learn various trade skills and soft skills from established professionals in the industry.
The World Bank's 2019 World Development Report on the future of work suggests that flexibility between general and vocational education particularly in higher education is imperative to enable workers to compete in changing labor markets where technology plays an increasingly important role.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Vocational Training.
- Differentiation from TVET (Technical and Vocational Education and Training)
- Opinions and models
- In the United States
- See also:
- Agricultural education
- Apprenticeship – System of employment
- Capacity building – Process by which individual and organizations obtain, improve, and retain the skills and knowledge needed to do their jobs competently
- Community college
- Constructivism (learning theory)
- Dual education system
- Employability
- Environmental education
- European Centre for the Development of Vocational Training
- Family and consumer science
- Finishing school
- Institute of technology
- Internship
- Life skills
- Polytechnic
- Renewable energy
- Training – Acquisition of knowledge, skills, and competencies as a result of teaching
- Tradesperson
- Retraining
- Vocational school – Higher-level learning institution providing education needed for specific occupations
- Vocational university – An institution of higher education and sometimes research, which provides tertiary and sometimes quaternary education and grants professional academic degrees
- Washington County Closed-Circuit Educational Television Project
- Profiles of national vocational education systems compiled from a variety of national and international sources - UNESCO-UNEVOC International Centre for Technical and Vocational Education and Training
- Babcock, Kendric C. (1920). "Education, Industrial" . Encyclopedia Americana.
- Babcock, Kendric C. (1920). "Education, Technical" . Encyclopedia Americana.
- Vocational education at Curlie
Living the American Dream vs. Today's Shrinking Middle Income Class
Pictured: LEFT: For many immigrants, the Statue of Liberty was their first view of the United States, signifying new opportunities in life. The statue is an iconic symbol of the American Dream; RIGHT: White House: “The American middle class is shrinking” (as reported by David Rohde of Reuters (1/13/2012)
- YouTube Video: Erin Burnett: GM shows Trump's jobs promise is false
- YouTube Video: America's Shrinking Middle Class | A Hidden America (with Diane Sawyer: Good Morning America)
Pictured: LEFT: For many immigrants, the Statue of Liberty was their first view of the United States, signifying new opportunities in life. The statue is an iconic symbol of the American Dream; RIGHT: White House: “The American middle class is shrinking” (as reported by David Rohde of Reuters (1/13/2012)
The American Dream is a national ethos of the United States, the set of ideals (democracy, rights, liberty, opportunity, and equality) in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success, and an upward social mobility for the family and children, achieved through hard work in a society with few barriers.
In the definition of the American Dream by James Truslow Adams in 1931, "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement" regardless of social class or circumstances of birth.
The American Dream is rooted in the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims that "all men are created equal" with the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for further amplification:
American Middle Class:
The American middle class is a social class in the United States. While the concept is typically ambiguous in popular opinion and common language use, contemporary social scientists have put forward several ostensibly congruent theories on the American middle class. Depending on the class model used, the middle class constitutes anywhere from 25% to 66% of households.
Constituting roughly 15% to 20% of households is the upper or professional middle class consisting of highly educated, salaried professionals and managers. Constituting roughly one third of households is the lower middle class consisting mostly of semi-professionals, skilled craftsmen and lower-level management.
Middle-class persons commonly have a comfortable standard of living, significant economic security, considerable work autonomy and rely on their expertise to sustain themselves.
Members of the middle class belong to diverse groups which overlap with each other. Overall, middle-class persons, especially upper-middle-class individuals, are characterized by conceptualizing, creating and consulting.
Thus, college education is one of the main indicators of middle-class status. Largely attributed to the nature of middle-class occupations, middle class values tend to emphasize independence, adherence to intrinsic standards, valuing innovation and respecting non-conformity.
Politically more active than other demographics, college educated middle class professionals are split between the two major parties.
Income varies considerably from near the national median to well in excess of US$100,000. Household income figures, however, do not always reflect class status and standard of living, as they are largely influenced by the number of income earners and fail to recognize household size.
It is therefore possible for a large, dual-earner, lower middle class household to out-earn a small, one-earner, upper middle class household. The middle classes are very influential, as they encompass the majority of voters, writers, teachers, journalists, and editors. Most societal trends in the US originate within the middle classes.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for further amplification:
In the definition of the American Dream by James Truslow Adams in 1931, "life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement" regardless of social class or circumstances of birth.
The American Dream is rooted in the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims that "all men are created equal" with the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for further amplification:
- Political leaders
- Public opinion
- Four dreams of consumerism
- Ethnics
- See also:
- Center for a New American Dream
- Empire of Liberty
- Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?, 2011 documentary film
- Who Stole the American Dream?, 2012 non-fiction book
American Middle Class:
The American middle class is a social class in the United States. While the concept is typically ambiguous in popular opinion and common language use, contemporary social scientists have put forward several ostensibly congruent theories on the American middle class. Depending on the class model used, the middle class constitutes anywhere from 25% to 66% of households.
Constituting roughly 15% to 20% of households is the upper or professional middle class consisting of highly educated, salaried professionals and managers. Constituting roughly one third of households is the lower middle class consisting mostly of semi-professionals, skilled craftsmen and lower-level management.
Middle-class persons commonly have a comfortable standard of living, significant economic security, considerable work autonomy and rely on their expertise to sustain themselves.
Members of the middle class belong to diverse groups which overlap with each other. Overall, middle-class persons, especially upper-middle-class individuals, are characterized by conceptualizing, creating and consulting.
Thus, college education is one of the main indicators of middle-class status. Largely attributed to the nature of middle-class occupations, middle class values tend to emphasize independence, adherence to intrinsic standards, valuing innovation and respecting non-conformity.
Politically more active than other demographics, college educated middle class professionals are split between the two major parties.
Income varies considerably from near the national median to well in excess of US$100,000. Household income figures, however, do not always reflect class status and standard of living, as they are largely influenced by the number of income earners and fail to recognize household size.
It is therefore possible for a large, dual-earner, lower middle class household to out-earn a small, one-earner, upper middle class household. The middle classes are very influential, as they encompass the majority of voters, writers, teachers, journalists, and editors. Most societal trends in the US originate within the middle classes.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for further amplification:
- History
- Sub-divisions
- Income
- Influence
- Typical occupations
- Consumption
- Academic models
- Middle-class squeeze
- See also:
Wage Gap in the United States by Gender
(L) Women's median usual weekly earnings as percentage of men's, for full-time workers, by industry, 2009;
(R) Women's weekly earnings as a percent of men's by age, annual averages, 1979-2005 (Courtesy of Tsange: Own work based on File:US women’s earnings as a percentage of mens 1979-2005.gif, CC BY-SA 4.0)
- YouTube Video: What people miss about the gender wage gap
- YouTube Video: One Woman Discovers The Wage Gap
- YouTube Video: Wage Gap: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
(L) Women's median usual weekly earnings as percentage of men's, for full-time workers, by industry, 2009;
(R) Women's weekly earnings as a percent of men's by age, annual averages, 1979-2005 (Courtesy of Tsange: Own work based on File:US women’s earnings as a percentage of mens 1979-2005.gif, CC BY-SA 4.0)
The gender pay gap in the United States is the ratio of female to male median yearly earnings among full-time, year-round workers.
The average woman's un-adjusted annual salary has been cited as 78% to 82% of that of the average man's. However, after adjusting for choices made by male and female workers in college major, occupation, working hours, and parental leave, multiple studies find that pay rates between males and females varied by 5–6.6% or, females earning 94 cents to every dollar earned by their male counterparts. The remaining 6% of the gap has been speculated to originate from deficiency in salary negotiation skills and gender discrimination.
The extent to which discrimination plays a role in explaining gender wage disparities is somewhat difficult to quantify, due to a number of potentially confounding variables. A 2010 research review by the majority staff of the United States Congress Joint Economic Committee reported that studies have consistently found unexplained pay differences even after controlling for measurable factors that are assumed to influence earnings – suggestive of unknown/unmeasurable contributing factors of which gender discrimination may be one.
Other studies have found direct evidence of discrimination – for example, more jobs went to women when the applicant's sex was unknown during the hiring process.
Click on any of the following for more about the Gender Gap in Earnings in the United States:
The average woman's un-adjusted annual salary has been cited as 78% to 82% of that of the average man's. However, after adjusting for choices made by male and female workers in college major, occupation, working hours, and parental leave, multiple studies find that pay rates between males and females varied by 5–6.6% or, females earning 94 cents to every dollar earned by their male counterparts. The remaining 6% of the gap has been speculated to originate from deficiency in salary negotiation skills and gender discrimination.
The extent to which discrimination plays a role in explaining gender wage disparities is somewhat difficult to quantify, due to a number of potentially confounding variables. A 2010 research review by the majority staff of the United States Congress Joint Economic Committee reported that studies have consistently found unexplained pay differences even after controlling for measurable factors that are assumed to influence earnings – suggestive of unknown/unmeasurable contributing factors of which gender discrimination may be one.
Other studies have found direct evidence of discrimination – for example, more jobs went to women when the applicant's sex was unknown during the hiring process.
Click on any of the following for more about the Gender Gap in Earnings in the United States:
- Statistics
- Explaining the gender pay gap
- Sources
- Impact
- Current policy solutions
- Popular culture reactions
- See also:
Wage Gap in the United States by Race
- YouTube Video: Toxic Inequality: How America’s Racial Wealth Gap Threatens Our Future (Aspen Institute)
- YouTube Video: The Racial Wealth Gap in America by the Urban Institute
- YouTube Video: America Unequal: Taking on Economic Inequality and Race by Stanford University
In the United States, despite the efforts of equality proponents, income inequality persists among races. Asian Americans have the highest average income, followed by White Americans, Latino Americans, African Americans, and Native Americans.
A variety of explanations for these differences have been proposed—such as differing access to education, two parent home family structure (70% of black children are born out of wedlock), high school dropout rates and experience of discrimination—and the topic is highly controversial.
When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, it became illegal for employers to discriminate based on race; however, income disparities have not flattened out. After the passage of the act, the wage gap for minority groups narrowed, both in absolute difference with white wages and as a percentage of white wages, until the mid-1970s; at this time, progress for many racial minorities slowed, stopped, or reversed.
As of 2009, the median weekly wage for African American and Hispanic workers was about 65 percent and 61 percent that of White workers, respectively. Asian workers' median wage was about 101 percent that of white workers. Overall, minority women's wages in comparison to those of white women are better than minority men's wages when compared to those of white men.
Knowing the inequalities in the wages of various races is useful for understanding the overall racial inequality in the United States because of the integral role that wages play. Wages from the labor market are the primary source of income for most families in America, and income is a socio-demographic status indicator that is important in understanding the building of wealth.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Wage Gap in the United States by Race:
A variety of explanations for these differences have been proposed—such as differing access to education, two parent home family structure (70% of black children are born out of wedlock), high school dropout rates and experience of discrimination—and the topic is highly controversial.
When the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, it became illegal for employers to discriminate based on race; however, income disparities have not flattened out. After the passage of the act, the wage gap for minority groups narrowed, both in absolute difference with white wages and as a percentage of white wages, until the mid-1970s; at this time, progress for many racial minorities slowed, stopped, or reversed.
As of 2009, the median weekly wage for African American and Hispanic workers was about 65 percent and 61 percent that of White workers, respectively. Asian workers' median wage was about 101 percent that of white workers. Overall, minority women's wages in comparison to those of white women are better than minority men's wages when compared to those of white men.
Knowing the inequalities in the wages of various races is useful for understanding the overall racial inequality in the United States because of the integral role that wages play. Wages from the labor market are the primary source of income for most families in America, and income is a socio-demographic status indicator that is important in understanding the building of wealth.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Wage Gap in the United States by Race:
- Causes
- Specific races
- Private vs. public sector employment
- Policy discussion
- Limitations and criticisms of the racial wage gap
- See also:
Unemployment Rate in the United States by State and Territory
- YouTube Video: Future of Skills: Jobs in 2030
- YouTube Video: What will future jobs look like? | Andrew McAfee TED
The list of U.S. states and territories by unemployment rate compares the seasonally adjusted unemployment rates by state and territory, sortable by name, rate, and change.
Data is provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in its Geographic Profile of Employment and Unemployment publication. While the non-seasonally adjusted data reflects the actual unemployment rate, the seasonally adjusted data removes time from the equation.
Unemployment rate by jurisdiction:
April 20, 2018 for March 2018 for all U.S. states and the District of Columbia. Data for Puerto Rico is from August 2018, data for the Virgin Islands is from July 2018, data for Guam is from March 2018, data for American Samoa is from 2012, and data for the Northern Mariana Islands is from April 2010. Because data for American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands is more than 5 years old, they are not ranked in the table below.
Click here for Unemployment Rates based a List of States and Territories sorted by unemployment rate
Click here for a Comparison of Unemployment Benefits by State
Data is provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in its Geographic Profile of Employment and Unemployment publication. While the non-seasonally adjusted data reflects the actual unemployment rate, the seasonally adjusted data removes time from the equation.
Unemployment rate by jurisdiction:
April 20, 2018 for March 2018 for all U.S. states and the District of Columbia. Data for Puerto Rico is from August 2018, data for the Virgin Islands is from July 2018, data for Guam is from March 2018, data for American Samoa is from 2012, and data for the Northern Mariana Islands is from April 2010. Because data for American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands is more than 5 years old, they are not ranked in the table below.
Click here for Unemployment Rates based a List of States and Territories sorted by unemployment rate
Click here for a Comparison of Unemployment Benefits by State
Automation could kill 73 million U.S. jobs by 2030 (USA Today, 11/28/17)
- YouTube Video: Will You Lose Your Job to Automation?
- YouTube Video: Automation and the new world of work
A new report from Paysa suggests automation jobs will put 10,000 people to work, and big companies will spend $650 million on annual salaries to make it happen. Sean Dowling (@seandowlingtv) has more.
Automation could destroy as many as 73 million U.S. jobs by 2030, but economic growth, rising productivity and other forces could more than offset the losses, according to a new report by McKinsey Global Institute.
“The dire predictions that robots are going to take our jobs are overstated,” says Susan Lund, the group’s director of research and co-author of the study. “There will be enough jobs for everyone in most sectors.”
Yet maintaining full employment will require a huge overhaul of the economy and labor market that rivals or exceeds the nation’s massive shifts from agriculture- and manufacturing-dominated societies over the past 165 years, the report says.
“I think it’s going to be a difficult transition,” Lund says.
More:
Machines and artificial intelligence are already spreading rapidly with the advent of with self-driving cars, software that can respond to customer service inquiries and robots that can man assembly lines, flip hamburgers and check store inventory.
In a study early this year, McKinsey found that about half of all work activities globally have the technological potential to be automated, but the new report provides a more realistic assessment based on economic, social and technical factors. It concludes that from zero to a third of work activities could be displaced by 2030.
In the U.S., 39 million to 73 million jobs could be destroyed, but about 20 million of those displaced workers can be shifted fairly easily into similar occupations, though they may take on slightly different tasks, the report says. That means 16 million to 54 million workers — or as much as a third of the U.S. workforce — will need to be retrained for entirely new occupations.
Globally, up to 800 million workers could be displaced and as many as 375 million may need to learn new skills for new occupational categories. Advanced economies such as the U.S. that have higher wages are more vulnerable to the adoption of labor-saving technology.
The employment growth needed to replace the jobs eradicated will come in part from automation itself — the new workers needed to operate the machines, as well as the increased productivity and economic growth that automation will generate through bigger company profits and higher wages.
Also, however, jobs will be created from rising incomes and consumption, an aging population that will demand more health care professionals and investment in infrastructure and renewable energy, the study says.
Jobs most susceptible to automation are physical ones in predictable environments. Those include workers who operate machinery, prepare fast food, collect and process data, originate mortgages and do paralegal and accounting work.
Jobs safest from the effects of automation involve managing people, high-level expertise and unpredictable environments. They include engineers, scientists, health care providers, educators and IT professionals, as well as gardeners, plumbers and elder care providers.
As a result, high-wage workers are expected to be less affected by the sweeping changes because they have skills that machines can’t replace. Low-wage jobs also could grow rapidly, partly because they cost employers less and so are often not worth supplanting with technology, while many are in health care, such as home health aides. That means middle-wage jobs will continue to decline, widening the divide between wealthy and low-income households, the report says.
The biggest challenge, Lund says, will be retraining millions of workers mid-career. Governments and businesses already have fallen short in the retraining of workers who lost jobs in the recession of 2007 to 2009.
“The big question isn’t, 'Will there be jobs?' ” Lund says. “The big question is, 'Will people who lost jobs be able to get new ones?' ”
According to the report, “there are few precedents in which societies have successfully retrained such large numbers of people.”
Governments will also need to provide income support and other assistance to help workers transition to new occupations and increase investments in infrastructure and energy to boost economic growth, the study says.
The authors acknowledge that the adoption of automation could be far slower than they anticipate, perhaps forcing fewer than 10 million workers globally to switch occupations.
Even under the more rapid spread of the technologies, the authors conclude that the six major countries they studied in detail, including the U.S., should be at or near full employment by 2030. But if many displaced workers don’t have new jobs within a year, unemployment could rise and dampen wage growth” in the short and medium term.
Marlin Steel in Baltimore was able to stay in business by automating its processes to stay competitive when many other manufacturing jobs went overseas.
[End of Article]
___________________________________________________________________________
Automation is the technology by which a process or procedure is performed with minimum human assistance. Automation or automatic control is the use of various control systems for operating equipment such as machinery, processes in factories, boilers and heat treating ovens, switching on telephone networks, steering and stabilization of ships, aircraft and other applications and vehicles with minimal or reduced human intervention. Some processes have been completely automated.
Automation covers applications ranging from a household thermostat controlling a boiler, to a large industrial control system with tens of thousands of input measurements and output control signals. In control complexity it can range from simple on-off control to multi-variable high level algorithms.
In the simplest type of an automatic control loop, a controller compares a measured value of a process with a desired set value, and processes the resulting error signal to change some input to the process, in such a way that the process stays at its set point despite disturbances.
This closed-loop control is an application of negative feedback to a system. The mathematical basis of control theory was begun in the 18th century, and advanced rapidly in the 20th.
Automation has been achieved by various means including mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic, electrical, electronic devices and computers, usually in combination. Complicated systems, such as modern factories, airplanes and ships typically use all these combined techniques.
The benefit of automation include labor savings, savings in electricity costs, savings in material costs, and improvements to quality, accuracy and precision.
The World Bank's World Development Report 2019 shows evidence that the new industries and jobs in the technological sector outweigh the economic effects of workers being displaced by automation.
The term automation, inspired by the earlier word automatic (coming from automaton), was not widely used before 1947, when Ford established an automation department. It was during this time that industry was rapidly adopting feedback controllers, which were introduced in the 1930s.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Automation.
Automation could destroy as many as 73 million U.S. jobs by 2030, but economic growth, rising productivity and other forces could more than offset the losses, according to a new report by McKinsey Global Institute.
“The dire predictions that robots are going to take our jobs are overstated,” says Susan Lund, the group’s director of research and co-author of the study. “There will be enough jobs for everyone in most sectors.”
Yet maintaining full employment will require a huge overhaul of the economy and labor market that rivals or exceeds the nation’s massive shifts from agriculture- and manufacturing-dominated societies over the past 165 years, the report says.
“I think it’s going to be a difficult transition,” Lund says.
More:
- Special report: Automation puts jobs in peril
- Robots stealing human jobs isn't the problem. This is.
- Could robots replace pastors? This one just gives blessings
Machines and artificial intelligence are already spreading rapidly with the advent of with self-driving cars, software that can respond to customer service inquiries and robots that can man assembly lines, flip hamburgers and check store inventory.
In a study early this year, McKinsey found that about half of all work activities globally have the technological potential to be automated, but the new report provides a more realistic assessment based on economic, social and technical factors. It concludes that from zero to a third of work activities could be displaced by 2030.
In the U.S., 39 million to 73 million jobs could be destroyed, but about 20 million of those displaced workers can be shifted fairly easily into similar occupations, though they may take on slightly different tasks, the report says. That means 16 million to 54 million workers — or as much as a third of the U.S. workforce — will need to be retrained for entirely new occupations.
Globally, up to 800 million workers could be displaced and as many as 375 million may need to learn new skills for new occupational categories. Advanced economies such as the U.S. that have higher wages are more vulnerable to the adoption of labor-saving technology.
The employment growth needed to replace the jobs eradicated will come in part from automation itself — the new workers needed to operate the machines, as well as the increased productivity and economic growth that automation will generate through bigger company profits and higher wages.
Also, however, jobs will be created from rising incomes and consumption, an aging population that will demand more health care professionals and investment in infrastructure and renewable energy, the study says.
Jobs most susceptible to automation are physical ones in predictable environments. Those include workers who operate machinery, prepare fast food, collect and process data, originate mortgages and do paralegal and accounting work.
Jobs safest from the effects of automation involve managing people, high-level expertise and unpredictable environments. They include engineers, scientists, health care providers, educators and IT professionals, as well as gardeners, plumbers and elder care providers.
As a result, high-wage workers are expected to be less affected by the sweeping changes because they have skills that machines can’t replace. Low-wage jobs also could grow rapidly, partly because they cost employers less and so are often not worth supplanting with technology, while many are in health care, such as home health aides. That means middle-wage jobs will continue to decline, widening the divide between wealthy and low-income households, the report says.
The biggest challenge, Lund says, will be retraining millions of workers mid-career. Governments and businesses already have fallen short in the retraining of workers who lost jobs in the recession of 2007 to 2009.
“The big question isn’t, 'Will there be jobs?' ” Lund says. “The big question is, 'Will people who lost jobs be able to get new ones?' ”
According to the report, “there are few precedents in which societies have successfully retrained such large numbers of people.”
Governments will also need to provide income support and other assistance to help workers transition to new occupations and increase investments in infrastructure and energy to boost economic growth, the study says.
The authors acknowledge that the adoption of automation could be far slower than they anticipate, perhaps forcing fewer than 10 million workers globally to switch occupations.
Even under the more rapid spread of the technologies, the authors conclude that the six major countries they studied in detail, including the U.S., should be at or near full employment by 2030. But if many displaced workers don’t have new jobs within a year, unemployment could rise and dampen wage growth” in the short and medium term.
Marlin Steel in Baltimore was able to stay in business by automating its processes to stay competitive when many other manufacturing jobs went overseas.
[End of Article]
___________________________________________________________________________
Automation is the technology by which a process or procedure is performed with minimum human assistance. Automation or automatic control is the use of various control systems for operating equipment such as machinery, processes in factories, boilers and heat treating ovens, switching on telephone networks, steering and stabilization of ships, aircraft and other applications and vehicles with minimal or reduced human intervention. Some processes have been completely automated.
Automation covers applications ranging from a household thermostat controlling a boiler, to a large industrial control system with tens of thousands of input measurements and output control signals. In control complexity it can range from simple on-off control to multi-variable high level algorithms.
In the simplest type of an automatic control loop, a controller compares a measured value of a process with a desired set value, and processes the resulting error signal to change some input to the process, in such a way that the process stays at its set point despite disturbances.
This closed-loop control is an application of negative feedback to a system. The mathematical basis of control theory was begun in the 18th century, and advanced rapidly in the 20th.
Automation has been achieved by various means including mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic, electrical, electronic devices and computers, usually in combination. Complicated systems, such as modern factories, airplanes and ships typically use all these combined techniques.
The benefit of automation include labor savings, savings in electricity costs, savings in material costs, and improvements to quality, accuracy and precision.
The World Bank's World Development Report 2019 shows evidence that the new industries and jobs in the technological sector outweigh the economic effects of workers being displaced by automation.
The term automation, inspired by the earlier word automatic (coming from automaton), was not widely used before 1947, when Ford established an automation department. It was during this time that industry was rapidly adopting feedback controllers, which were introduced in the 1930s.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Automation.
- Open-loop and closed-loop (feedback) control
- Control actions
- History
- Advantages and disadvantages
- Societal impact
- Lights out manufacturing
- Health and environment
- Convertibility and turnaround time
- Automation tools
- Cognitive automation
- Recent and emerging applications
- Relationship to unemployment
- See also:
- Automated storage and retrieval system
- Automation technician
- Cognitive computing
- Cybernetics
- Dirty, dangerous and demeaning
- Futures studies
- Machine to machine
- Mobile manipulator
- Multi-agent system
- Process control
- Productivity improving technologies
- Robotic process automation
- Control engineering
- Feedforward control
- Data-driven control system
- Technological unemployment
When (and where) Work Disappears: Overseas manufacturing competition hits U.S. regions hard, leaving workers unemployed for years and local economies struggling (MIT Review); including Outsourcing and Online Outsourcing
TOP: Offshoring Work Is Taking a Toll on the U.S. Economy
BOTTOM: Americans see both good and bad in trends that are changing the workplace
- YouTube Video: TED Speaker Martin Ford: Which Jobs Are Most Vulnerable to Automation?
- YouTube Video: Why is outsourcing a big deal? BBC News
- YouTube Video: "60 Minutes" examines H-1B visas outsourcing American jobs
TOP: Offshoring Work Is Taking a Toll on the U.S. Economy
BOTTOM: Americans see both good and bad in trends that are changing the workplace
The loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs is a topic that can provoke heated arguments about globalization. But what do the cold, hard numbers reveal? How has the rise in foreign manufacturing competition actually affected the U.S. economy and its workers?
A new study co-authored by MIT economist David Autor shows that the rapid rise in low-wage manufacturing industries overseas has indeed had a significant impact on the United States. The disappearance of U.S. manufacturing jobs frequently leaves former manufacturing workers unemployed for years, if not permanently, while creating a drag on local economies and raising the amount of taxpayer-borne social insurance necessary to keep workers and their families afloat.
Geographically, the research shows, foreign competition has hurt many U.S. metropolitan areas — not necessarily the ones built around heavy manufacturing in the industrial Midwest, but many areas in the South, the West and the Northeast, which once had abundant manual-labor manufacturing jobs, often involving the production of clothing, footwear, luggage, furniture and other household consumer items. Many of these jobs were held by workers without college degrees, who have since found it hard to gain new employment.
“The effects are very concentrated and very visible locally,” says Autor, professor and associate head of MIT’s Department of Economics. “People drop out of the labor force, and the data strongly suggest that it takes some people a long time to get back on their feet, if they do at all.” Moreover, Autor notes, when a large manufacturer closes its doors, “it does not simply affect an industry, but affects a whole locality.”
In the study, published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Autor, along with economists David Dorn and Gordon Hanson, examined the effect of overseas manufacturing competition on 722 locales across the United States over the last two decades. This is also a research focus of MIT’s ongoing study group about manufacturing, Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE); Autor is one of 20 faculty members on the PIE commission.
The findings highlight the complex effects of globalization on the United States. “Trade tends to create diffuse beneficiaries and a concentration of losers,” Autor says. “All of us get slightly cheaper goods, and we’re each a couple hundred dollars a year richer for that.” But those losing jobs, he notes, are “a lot worse off.” For this reason, Autor adds, policymakers need new responses to the loss of manufacturing jobs: “I’m not anti-trade, but it is important to realize that there are reasons why people worry about this issue.”
Double trouble: businesses, consumers both spend less when industry leaves
In the paper, Autor, Dorn (of the Center for Monetary and Fiscal Studies in Madrid, Spain) and Hanson (of the University of California at San Diego) specifically study the effects of rising manufacturing competition from China, looking at the years 1990 to 2007. At the start of that period, low-income countries accounted for only about 3 percent of U.S. manufacturing imports; by 2007, that figure had increased to about 12 percent, with China representing 91 percent of the increase.
The types of manufacturing for export that grew most rapidly in China during that time included the production of textiles, clothes, shoes, leather goods, rubber products — and one notable high-tech area, computer assembly. Most of these production activities involve soft materials and hands-on finishing work. “These are labor-intensive, low-value-added [forms of] production,” Autor says. “Certainly the Chinese are moving up the value chain, but basically China has been most active in low-end goods.”
In conducting the study, the researchers found more pronounced economic problems in cities most vulnerable to the rise of low-wage Chinese manufacturing; these include San Jose, Calif.; Providence, R.I.; Manchester, N.H.; and a raft of urban areas below the Mason-Dixon line — the leading example being Raleigh, N.C. “The areas that are most exposed to China trade are not the Rust Belt industries,” Autor says. “They are places like the South, where manufacturing was rising, not falling, through the 1980s.”
All told, as American imports from China grew more than tenfold between 1991 and 2007, roughly a million U.S. workers lost jobs due to increased low-wage competition from China — about a quarter of all U.S. job losses in manufacturing during the time period.
And as the study shows, when businesses shut down, it hurts the local economy because of two related but distinct “spillover effects,” as economists say: The shuttered businesses no longer need goods and services from local non-manufacturing firms, and their former workers have less money to spend locally as well.
A city at the 75th percentile of exposure to Chinese manufacturing, compared to one at the 25th percentile, will have roughly a 5 percent decrease in the number of manufacturing jobs and an increase of about $65 per capita in the amount of social insurance needed, such as unemployment insurance, health care insurance and disability payments.
“People like to think that workers flow freely across sectors, but in reality, they don’t,” Autor says. At a conservative estimate, that $65 per capita wipes out one-third of the per-capita gains realized by trade with China, in the form of cheaper goods. “Those numbers are really startling,” Autor adds.
The study draws on United Nations data on international trade by goods category among developing and developed countries, combined with U.S. economic data from the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Social Security Administration. The study received funding from the National Science Foundation, Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and the Community of Madrid.
The paper has already generated discussion among economists focused on this issue. The large effect found in the paper of overseas competition on U.S. unemployment is “quite plausible, from my experience of surveying and talking to manufacturers,” says Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University. “That was an important figure, it’s been very well-estimated, they’ve done as good a job as you can.” Bloom also thinks the paper’s analysis of the rise in social insurance payments is “ingenious,” and of value to policymakers.
New policies for a new era?
In Autor’s view, the findings mean the United States needs to improve its policy response to the problem of disappearing jobs. “We do not have a good set of policies at present for helping workers adjust to trade or, for that matter, to any kind of technological change,” he says.
For one thing, Autor says, “We could have much better adjustment assistance — programs that are less fragmented, and less stingy.” The federal government’s Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program provides temporary benefits to Americans who have lost jobs as a result of foreign trade. But as Autor, Dorn and Hanson estimate in the paper, in areas affected by new Chinese manufacturing, the increase in disability payments is a whopping 30 times as great as the increase in TAA benefits.
Therefore, Autor thinks, well-designed job-training programs would help the government’s assistance efforts become “directed toward helping people reintegrate into the labor market and acquire skills, rather than helping them exit the labor market.”
Still, it will likely take more research to get a better idea of what the post-employment experience is like for most people. To this end, Autor, Dorn and Hanson are conducting a new study that follows laid-off manufacturing workers over time, nationally, to get a fine-grained sense of their needs and potential to be re-employed.
“Trade may raise GDP,” Autor says, “but it does make some people worse off. Almost all of us share in the gains. We could readily assist the minority of citizens who bear a disproportionate share of the costs and still be better off in the aggregate.”
[End of Article]
___________________________________________________________________________
Outsourcing is an agreement in which one company hires another company to be responsible for a planned or existing activity that is or could be done internally.
It often involves the contracting of a business process (e.g., payroll processing, claims processing), operational, and/or non-core functions, such as manufacturing, facility management, call center support).
The term "outsourcing" came from "outside resourcing" and dates back to at least 1981. Outsourcing sometimes involves transferring employees and assets from one firm to another.
Outsourcing is also the practice of handing over control of public services to private enterprises.
Outsourcing includes both foreign and domestic contracting, and sometimes includes offshoring (relocating a business function to a distant country) or nearshoring (transferring a business process to a nearby country).
Offshoring and outsourcing are not mutually inclusive: there can be one without the other. They can be intertwined (Offshore outsourcing), and can be individually or jointly, partially or completely reversed, involving terms such as reshoring, inshoring, and insourcing.
Click here for more about Outsourcing.
___________________________________________________________________________
Online outsourcing is the internet-based version of outsourcing (see above). This process is when one department, or indeed a whole area of work, transfers tasks and projects to a third party company.
Examples of such tasks could be programming and web design, multi-media production, logo design or search engine optimization not forgetting services like translations, research and editorial work. In this case, online platforms can serve to simplify the process of attaining and assigning projects.
With offshoring, a variant of outsourcing, respective tasks can be situated in another country.
This could be both business tasks or indeed business processes.
With nearshoring, offshoring also has its own variant. While the former relocates tasks to a country usually very far afield on another continent, the latter is, as the name suggests, relocation closer to home.
Homeshoring, as a variant of outsourcing, describes the location of third party services which are not undertaken by companies but by individuals working from home. This form of working is also known as Home-Office or often telecommuting.
Through outsourcing a company can relieve itself of secondary tasks and concentrate on core issues, thus improving its efficiency. Or as Peter Drucker expressed it, "Do what you can do best and Outsource the rest.
See also:
A new study co-authored by MIT economist David Autor shows that the rapid rise in low-wage manufacturing industries overseas has indeed had a significant impact on the United States. The disappearance of U.S. manufacturing jobs frequently leaves former manufacturing workers unemployed for years, if not permanently, while creating a drag on local economies and raising the amount of taxpayer-borne social insurance necessary to keep workers and their families afloat.
Geographically, the research shows, foreign competition has hurt many U.S. metropolitan areas — not necessarily the ones built around heavy manufacturing in the industrial Midwest, but many areas in the South, the West and the Northeast, which once had abundant manual-labor manufacturing jobs, often involving the production of clothing, footwear, luggage, furniture and other household consumer items. Many of these jobs were held by workers without college degrees, who have since found it hard to gain new employment.
“The effects are very concentrated and very visible locally,” says Autor, professor and associate head of MIT’s Department of Economics. “People drop out of the labor force, and the data strongly suggest that it takes some people a long time to get back on their feet, if they do at all.” Moreover, Autor notes, when a large manufacturer closes its doors, “it does not simply affect an industry, but affects a whole locality.”
In the study, published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Autor, along with economists David Dorn and Gordon Hanson, examined the effect of overseas manufacturing competition on 722 locales across the United States over the last two decades. This is also a research focus of MIT’s ongoing study group about manufacturing, Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE); Autor is one of 20 faculty members on the PIE commission.
The findings highlight the complex effects of globalization on the United States. “Trade tends to create diffuse beneficiaries and a concentration of losers,” Autor says. “All of us get slightly cheaper goods, and we’re each a couple hundred dollars a year richer for that.” But those losing jobs, he notes, are “a lot worse off.” For this reason, Autor adds, policymakers need new responses to the loss of manufacturing jobs: “I’m not anti-trade, but it is important to realize that there are reasons why people worry about this issue.”
Double trouble: businesses, consumers both spend less when industry leaves
In the paper, Autor, Dorn (of the Center for Monetary and Fiscal Studies in Madrid, Spain) and Hanson (of the University of California at San Diego) specifically study the effects of rising manufacturing competition from China, looking at the years 1990 to 2007. At the start of that period, low-income countries accounted for only about 3 percent of U.S. manufacturing imports; by 2007, that figure had increased to about 12 percent, with China representing 91 percent of the increase.
The types of manufacturing for export that grew most rapidly in China during that time included the production of textiles, clothes, shoes, leather goods, rubber products — and one notable high-tech area, computer assembly. Most of these production activities involve soft materials and hands-on finishing work. “These are labor-intensive, low-value-added [forms of] production,” Autor says. “Certainly the Chinese are moving up the value chain, but basically China has been most active in low-end goods.”
In conducting the study, the researchers found more pronounced economic problems in cities most vulnerable to the rise of low-wage Chinese manufacturing; these include San Jose, Calif.; Providence, R.I.; Manchester, N.H.; and a raft of urban areas below the Mason-Dixon line — the leading example being Raleigh, N.C. “The areas that are most exposed to China trade are not the Rust Belt industries,” Autor says. “They are places like the South, where manufacturing was rising, not falling, through the 1980s.”
All told, as American imports from China grew more than tenfold between 1991 and 2007, roughly a million U.S. workers lost jobs due to increased low-wage competition from China — about a quarter of all U.S. job losses in manufacturing during the time period.
And as the study shows, when businesses shut down, it hurts the local economy because of two related but distinct “spillover effects,” as economists say: The shuttered businesses no longer need goods and services from local non-manufacturing firms, and their former workers have less money to spend locally as well.
A city at the 75th percentile of exposure to Chinese manufacturing, compared to one at the 25th percentile, will have roughly a 5 percent decrease in the number of manufacturing jobs and an increase of about $65 per capita in the amount of social insurance needed, such as unemployment insurance, health care insurance and disability payments.
“People like to think that workers flow freely across sectors, but in reality, they don’t,” Autor says. At a conservative estimate, that $65 per capita wipes out one-third of the per-capita gains realized by trade with China, in the form of cheaper goods. “Those numbers are really startling,” Autor adds.
The study draws on United Nations data on international trade by goods category among developing and developed countries, combined with U.S. economic data from the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Social Security Administration. The study received funding from the National Science Foundation, Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and the Community of Madrid.
The paper has already generated discussion among economists focused on this issue. The large effect found in the paper of overseas competition on U.S. unemployment is “quite plausible, from my experience of surveying and talking to manufacturers,” says Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University. “That was an important figure, it’s been very well-estimated, they’ve done as good a job as you can.” Bloom also thinks the paper’s analysis of the rise in social insurance payments is “ingenious,” and of value to policymakers.
New policies for a new era?
In Autor’s view, the findings mean the United States needs to improve its policy response to the problem of disappearing jobs. “We do not have a good set of policies at present for helping workers adjust to trade or, for that matter, to any kind of technological change,” he says.
For one thing, Autor says, “We could have much better adjustment assistance — programs that are less fragmented, and less stingy.” The federal government’s Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program provides temporary benefits to Americans who have lost jobs as a result of foreign trade. But as Autor, Dorn and Hanson estimate in the paper, in areas affected by new Chinese manufacturing, the increase in disability payments is a whopping 30 times as great as the increase in TAA benefits.
Therefore, Autor thinks, well-designed job-training programs would help the government’s assistance efforts become “directed toward helping people reintegrate into the labor market and acquire skills, rather than helping them exit the labor market.”
Still, it will likely take more research to get a better idea of what the post-employment experience is like for most people. To this end, Autor, Dorn and Hanson are conducting a new study that follows laid-off manufacturing workers over time, nationally, to get a fine-grained sense of their needs and potential to be re-employed.
“Trade may raise GDP,” Autor says, “but it does make some people worse off. Almost all of us share in the gains. We could readily assist the minority of citizens who bear a disproportionate share of the costs and still be better off in the aggregate.”
[End of Article]
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Outsourcing is an agreement in which one company hires another company to be responsible for a planned or existing activity that is or could be done internally.
It often involves the contracting of a business process (e.g., payroll processing, claims processing), operational, and/or non-core functions, such as manufacturing, facility management, call center support).
The term "outsourcing" came from "outside resourcing" and dates back to at least 1981. Outsourcing sometimes involves transferring employees and assets from one firm to another.
Outsourcing is also the practice of handing over control of public services to private enterprises.
Outsourcing includes both foreign and domestic contracting, and sometimes includes offshoring (relocating a business function to a distant country) or nearshoring (transferring a business process to a nearby country).
Offshoring and outsourcing are not mutually inclusive: there can be one without the other. They can be intertwined (Offshore outsourcing), and can be individually or jointly, partially or completely reversed, involving terms such as reshoring, inshoring, and insourcing.
Click here for more about Outsourcing.
___________________________________________________________________________
Online outsourcing is the internet-based version of outsourcing (see above). This process is when one department, or indeed a whole area of work, transfers tasks and projects to a third party company.
Examples of such tasks could be programming and web design, multi-media production, logo design or search engine optimization not forgetting services like translations, research and editorial work. In this case, online platforms can serve to simplify the process of attaining and assigning projects.
With offshoring, a variant of outsourcing, respective tasks can be situated in another country.
This could be both business tasks or indeed business processes.
With nearshoring, offshoring also has its own variant. While the former relocates tasks to a country usually very far afield on another continent, the latter is, as the name suggests, relocation closer to home.
Homeshoring, as a variant of outsourcing, describes the location of third party services which are not undertaken by companies but by individuals working from home. This form of working is also known as Home-Office or often telecommuting.
Through outsourcing a company can relieve itself of secondary tasks and concentrate on core issues, thus improving its efficiency. Or as Peter Drucker expressed it, "Do what you can do best and Outsource the rest.
See also:
Professions, including a List of Professions Pictured below: (L) Medical care by doctor; (R) Attorney Michael Cohen and his (former) client Donald Trump
A profession is an occupation founded upon specialized educational training, the purpose of which is to supply disinterested objective counsel and service to others, for a direct and definite compensation, wholly apart from expectation of other business gain/
The term is a truncation of the term "liberal profession", which is, in turn, an Anglicization of the French term "profession libérale".
Originally borrowed by English users in the 19th century, it has been re-borrowed by international users from the late 20th, though the (upper-middle) class overtones of the term do not seem to survive retranslation: "liberal professions" are, according to the European Union's Directive on Recognition of Professional Qualifications (2005/36/EC) "those practiced on the basis of relevant professional qualifications in a personal, responsible and professionally independent capacity by those providing intellectual and conceptual services in the interest of the client and the public".
It has been said that a profession is not a trade and not an industry.
Medieval and early modern tradition recognized only three professions: divinity, medicine, and law – the so-called "learned professions".
Major milestones which may mark an occupation being identified as a profession include:
Applying these milestones to the historical sequence of development in the United States shows surveying achieving professional status first (note that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln all worked as land surveyors before entering politics), followed by medicine, actuarial science, law, dentistry, civil engineering, logistics, architecture and accounting.
With the rise of technology and occupational specialization in the 19th century, other bodies began to claim professional status: mechanical engineering, pharmacy, veterinary medicine, psychology, nursing, teaching, librarianship, optometry and social work, each of which could claim, using these milestones, to have become professions by 1900.
Just as some professions rise in status and power through various stages, others may decline. Disciplines formalized more recently, such as architecture, now have equally long periods of study associated with them.
Although professions may enjoy relatively high status and public prestige, not all professionals earn high salaries, and even within specific professions there exist significant inequalities of compensation; in law, for example, a corporate/insurance defense lawyer working on a billable-hour basis may earn several times what a prosecutor or public defender earns.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about "Professions"
The term is a truncation of the term "liberal profession", which is, in turn, an Anglicization of the French term "profession libérale".
Originally borrowed by English users in the 19th century, it has been re-borrowed by international users from the late 20th, though the (upper-middle) class overtones of the term do not seem to survive retranslation: "liberal professions" are, according to the European Union's Directive on Recognition of Professional Qualifications (2005/36/EC) "those practiced on the basis of relevant professional qualifications in a personal, responsible and professionally independent capacity by those providing intellectual and conceptual services in the interest of the client and the public".
It has been said that a profession is not a trade and not an industry.
Medieval and early modern tradition recognized only three professions: divinity, medicine, and law – the so-called "learned professions".
Major milestones which may mark an occupation being identified as a profession include:
- an occupation becomes a full-time occupation
- the establishment of a training school
- the establishment of a university school
- the establishment of a local association
- the establishment of a national association of professional ethics
- the establishment of state licensing laws
Applying these milestones to the historical sequence of development in the United States shows surveying achieving professional status first (note that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln all worked as land surveyors before entering politics), followed by medicine, actuarial science, law, dentistry, civil engineering, logistics, architecture and accounting.
With the rise of technology and occupational specialization in the 19th century, other bodies began to claim professional status: mechanical engineering, pharmacy, veterinary medicine, psychology, nursing, teaching, librarianship, optometry and social work, each of which could claim, using these milestones, to have become professions by 1900.
Just as some professions rise in status and power through various stages, others may decline. Disciplines formalized more recently, such as architecture, now have equally long periods of study associated with them.
Although professions may enjoy relatively high status and public prestige, not all professionals earn high salaries, and even within specific professions there exist significant inequalities of compensation; in law, for example, a corporate/insurance defense lawyer working on a billable-hour basis may earn several times what a prosecutor or public defender earns.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about "Professions"
List of largest United States-based employers globally
- YouTube Video: Walmart Associates Explain Walmart Culture
- YouTube Video: Working for Amazon
- YouTube Video: Boeing 777 team: Precision Craftsmanship
Click here a list of United States-based companies having the most employees globally. Note that for some companies listed the United States does not comprise the majority of total employees.
Click here for Employment by major industry sector.
See also:
Click here for Employment by major industry sector.
See also:
- List of largest employers
- List of the largest software companies
- List of largest Internet companies
- List of the largest information technology companies
History of Labor in the United States
- YouTube Video of AFL-CIO on Strike Against General Motors
- YouTube Video: Robert Reich: Why Unions Matter to You
- YouTube Video: What Happened To The American Labor Union? | TIME
The labor history of the United States describes the history of organized labor, US labor law, and more general history of working people, in the United States. Beginning in the 1930s, unions became important components of the Democratic Party. Some historians question why a Labor Party did not emerge in the United States, in contrast to Western Europe.
The nature and power of organized labor is the outcome of historical tensions among counter-acting forces involving workplace rights, wages, working hours, political expression, labor laws, and other working conditions. Organized unions and their umbrella labor federations such as the AFL–CIO and citywide federations have competed, evolved, merged, and split against a backdrop of changing values and priorities, and periodic federal government intervention.
As commentator E. J. Dionne has noted, the union movement has traditionally espoused a set of values—solidarity being the most important, the sense that each should look out for the interests of all. From this followed commitments to mutual assistance, to a rough-and-ready sense of equality, to a disdain for elitism, and to a belief that democracy and individual rights did not stop at the plant gate or the office reception room.
Dionne notes that these values are "increasingly foreign to American culture". In most industrial nations the labor movement sponsored its own political parties, with the U.S. as a conspicuous exception. Both major American parties vied for union votes, with the Democrats usually much more successful. Labor unions became a central element of the New Deal Coalition that dominated national politics from the 1930s into the mid-1960s during the Fifth Party System. Liberal Republicans who supported unions in the Northeast lost power after 1964.
The history of organized labor has been a specialty of scholars since the 1890s, and has produced a large amount of scholarly literature focused on the structure of organized unions.
In the 1960s, as social history gained popularity, a new emphasis emerged on the history of workers, including unorganized workers, and with special regard to gender and race. This is called "the new labor history". Much scholarship has attempted to bring the social history perspectives into the study of organized labor.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the History of Labor in the United States:
The nature and power of organized labor is the outcome of historical tensions among counter-acting forces involving workplace rights, wages, working hours, political expression, labor laws, and other working conditions. Organized unions and their umbrella labor federations such as the AFL–CIO and citywide federations have competed, evolved, merged, and split against a backdrop of changing values and priorities, and periodic federal government intervention.
As commentator E. J. Dionne has noted, the union movement has traditionally espoused a set of values—solidarity being the most important, the sense that each should look out for the interests of all. From this followed commitments to mutual assistance, to a rough-and-ready sense of equality, to a disdain for elitism, and to a belief that democracy and individual rights did not stop at the plant gate or the office reception room.
Dionne notes that these values are "increasingly foreign to American culture". In most industrial nations the labor movement sponsored its own political parties, with the U.S. as a conspicuous exception. Both major American parties vied for union votes, with the Democrats usually much more successful. Labor unions became a central element of the New Deal Coalition that dominated national politics from the 1930s into the mid-1960s during the Fifth Party System. Liberal Republicans who supported unions in the Northeast lost power after 1964.
The history of organized labor has been a specialty of scholars since the 1890s, and has produced a large amount of scholarly literature focused on the structure of organized unions.
In the 1960s, as social history gained popularity, a new emphasis emerged on the history of workers, including unorganized workers, and with special regard to gender and race. This is called "the new labor history". Much scholarship has attempted to bring the social history perspectives into the study of organized labor.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the History of Labor in the United States:
- Organized labor prior to 1900
- Organized labor 1900–1920
- Weakness of organized labor 1920–1929
- Organized labor 1929–1955
- The Great Depression and organized labor
- The Norris–La Guardia Anti-Injunction Act of 1932
- FDR and the National Industrial Recovery Act
- The American Federation of Labor: craft unionism vs. industrial unionism
- John L. Lewis and the CIO
- Upsurge in World War II
- Walter Reuther and UAW
- PAC and politics of 1940s
- Taft-Hartley Act
- Anti-communism
- Union decline 1955–2016
- Recent history
- Public-sector unions
- See also:
- United States labor law
- American Federation of Labor (AFL)
- Gilded Age
- History of labor law in the United States
- Immigration policies of American labor unions
- International comparisons of labor unions
- Labor federation competition in the United States
- Labor unions in the United States
- List of strikes (many in the United States)
- List of worker deaths in United States labor disputes
- Minimum wage in the United States
- New Deal coalition
- History of unfree labor in the United States
- Labor History Links
- United Farm Workers official site
- Blair Community Center and Museum to help preserve and understand the largest labor uprising in US history—the Battle of Blair Mountain.
Standard of Living in the United States for Blue Collar vs. White Collar Workers
- YouTube Video about the Standard of Living: 1919 vs. 2019
- YouTube Video: Where the Jobs Are: The New Blue Collar
- YouTube Video: Automation entering white-collar work
Standard of Living in the United States:
The standard of living in the United States is high by the standards that most economists use, and for many decades throughout the 20th century, the United States was recognized as having the highest standard of living in the world.
Per capita income is high but also less evenly distributed than in most other developed countries; as a result, the United States fares particularly well in measures of average material well being that do not place weight on equality aspects.
Measures of Standard of Living Globally:
In the United Nations Human Development Index, which measures health, education, and per capita income levels, the United States is relatively high, currently ranking 8th.
However, the Human Development Index is not considered a measure of living standards, but a measure of potential living standards were there no inequality: rather, the inequality-adjusted Human Development Index is considered the actual level of human development, taking inequality into account. On the inequality-adjusted HDI, the United States ranked 27th in 2014, tied with Poland.
In 2013, the Economist Intelligence Unit's Where-to-be-born Index, which takes into account material well-being as measured by GDP per capita, life expectancy, political stability, the quality of family life based on divorce rates, community life, crime and terrorism rates, gender equality, the quality of governance, climate, and unemployment rates, ranked the United States at 16th place, tied with Germany.
The OECD Better Life Index, which measures quality of life according to 11 factors, ranks the United States as 7th among 34 OECD countries.
The home ownership rate is relatively high compared to other post-industrial nations. In 2005, 69% of Americans resided in their own homes, roughly the same percentage as in the United Kingdom, Belgium, Israel and Canada.
In 2007, Americans enjoyed more cars and radios per capita than any other nation and more televisions and personal computers per capita than any other nation with more than 200 million people.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Standard of Living in the United States:
Blue-Collar Workers:
A blue-collar worker is a working class person who performs manual labor. Blue-collar work may involve skilled or unskilled positions in:
Blue-collar work often involves something being physically built or maintained.In contrast, the white-collar worker (see next topic) typically performs work in an office environment and may involve sitting at a computer or desk.
A third type of work is a service worker (pink collar) whose labor is related to customer interaction, entertainment, sales or other service-oriented work. Many occupations blend blue, white, or pink-collar work and are often paid hourly wage-labor, although some professionals may be paid by the project or salaried. There is a wide range of payscales for such work depending upon field of specialty and experience.
Origin of Term:
The term blue collar was first used in reference to trades jobs in 1924, in an Alden, Iowa newspaper. The phrase stems from the image of manual workers wearing blue denim or chambray shirts as part of their uniforms.
Industrial and manual workers often wear durable canvas or cotton clothing that may be soiled during the course of their work. Navy and light blue colors conceal potential dirt or grease on the worker's clothing, helping him or her to appear cleaner. For the same reason, blue is a popular color for boilersuits which protect workers' clothing. Some blue collar workers have uniforms with the name of the business and/or the individual's name embroidered or printed on it.
Historically, the popularity of the color blue among manual labourers contrasts with the popularity of white dress shirts worn by people in office environments. The blue collar/white collar color scheme has socio-economic class connotations. However, this distinction has become blurred with the increasing importance of skilled labor, and the relative increase in low-paying white-collar jobs.
Education requirements:
Since many blue-collar jobs consist of mainly manual labor, educational requirements for workers are typically lower than those of white-collar workers. Often, only a high school diploma is required, and many of the skills required for blue-collar jobs will be learned by the employee while working.
In higher level jobs, vocational training or apprenticeships may be required, and for workers such as electricians and plumbers, state-certification is also necessary.
Blue collar shift to developing nations:
See also: Deindustrialization
With the information revolution, Western nations have moved towards a service and white collar economy.
Many manufacturing jobs have been offshored to developing nations which pay their workers lower wages. This offshoring has pushed formerly agrarian nations to industrialized economies and concurrently decreased the number of blue-collar jobs in developed countries.
In the United States, blue collar and service occupations generally refer to jobs in precision production, craft, and repair occupations; machine operators and inspectors; transportation and moving occupations; handlers, equipment cleaners, helpers, and laborers.
In the United States, an area known as the Rust Belt comprising the Northeast and Midwest, including Western New York and Western Pennsylvania, has seen its once large manufacturing base shrink significantly.
With the de-industrialization of these areas starting in the mid-1960s cities like the following have experienced a steady decline of the blue-collar workforce and subsequent population decreases:
Due to this economic osmosis, the rust belt has experienced high unemployment, poverty, and urban blight.
Automation and future:
Due to many blue-collar jobs involving manual labor and relatively unskilled workers, automation poses a threat of unemployment for blue-collar workers.
One study from the MIT Technology Review estimates that 83% of jobs that make less than $20 per hour are threatened by automation. Some examples of technology that threaten workers are self-driving cars and automated cleaning devices, which could place blue-collar workers such as truck drivers or janitors out of work.
Others have suggested that technological advancement will not lead to blue-collar job unemployment, but rather shifts in the types of work performed.
Proponents of this idea view coding as a replacement for blue-collar jobs, and suggest that more coders will be needed in a technologically advancing world, and posit that, ostensibly, new white-collar IT jobs could be filled by displaced blue-collar workers. Others see future of blue-collar work as humans and computers working together to improve efficiency.
Such jobs would consist of data-tagging and labeling.
Electoral politics:
Blue-collar workers have played a large role in electoral politics. In the 2016 United States Presidential election, many attributed Donald Trump's victories in the states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan to blue-collar workers, who overwhelmingly favored Trump over opponent Hillary Clinton.
Among white-working class citizens, Trump won 64% of the votes, compared to only 32% for Clinton. This was the largest margin of victory among this group of voters for any presidential candidate since 1980.
Many attributed Trump's success among this bloc of voters to his opposition of international trade deals and environmental regulations, two of the largest perceived threats to blue-collar employment. Opponents of this view believe Trump's success with this bloc had more to do with an anti-illegal immigrant and nationalist platform that supports deportation of illegals and discourages investment in higher education.
Adjective:
"Blue-collar" can be used as an adjective to describe the environment of the blue-collar worker or a setting reflective of that environment, such as a "blue-collar" neighborhood, restaurant, or bar.
See also:
White-collar worker
A white-collar worker is a person who performs professional, managerial, or administrative work. White-collar work may be performed in an office or other administrative setting.
White-collar workers includes works related to the following:
Other types of work are those of a grey-collar worker, who has more specialized knowledge than those of a blue-collar worker, whose job requires manual labor and a pink-collar worker, whose labor is related to customer interaction, entertainment, sales, or other service-oriented work. Many occupations blend blue, white and pink (service) industry categorizations.
The term "White Collar Worker" refers to the white dress shirts of male office workers common through most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Western countries, as opposed to the blue overalls worn by many manual laborers.
The term "white collar" is credited to Upton Sinclair, an American writer, in relation to contemporary clerical, administrative, and management workers during the 1930s, though references to white-collar work appear as early as 1935. White collar employees are considered as highly educated as compared to blue collar.
Demographics:
Formerly a minority in the agrarian and early industrial societies, white-collar workers have become a majority in industrialized countries due to modernization and outsourcing of manufacturing jobs.
The blue-collar and white-collar descriptors as it pertains to work dress may no longer be an accurate descriptor as office attire has broadened beyond a white shirt and tie. Employees in office environments may wear a variety of colors, may dress in business casuals or wear casual clothes altogether.
In addition, the work tasks have blurred. "White-collar" employees may perform "blue-collar" tasks (or vice versa). An example would be a restaurant manager who may wear more formal clothing yet still assist with cooking food or taking customers' orders or a construction worker who also performs desk work.
Health Effects:
Less physical activity among white-collar workers has been thought to be a key factor in increased life-style related health conditions such as fatigue, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, and heart disease.
Workplace interventions such as alternative activity workstations, sit-stand desks, promotion of stair use are among measures being implemented to counter the harms of sedentary workplace environments.
A Cochrane systematic review published in 2018 concluded that "At present there is low-quality evidence that the use of sit-stand desks reduce workplace sitting." Also, evidence was lacking on the long term health benefits of such interventions.
See also:
The standard of living in the United States is high by the standards that most economists use, and for many decades throughout the 20th century, the United States was recognized as having the highest standard of living in the world.
Per capita income is high but also less evenly distributed than in most other developed countries; as a result, the United States fares particularly well in measures of average material well being that do not place weight on equality aspects.
Measures of Standard of Living Globally:
In the United Nations Human Development Index, which measures health, education, and per capita income levels, the United States is relatively high, currently ranking 8th.
However, the Human Development Index is not considered a measure of living standards, but a measure of potential living standards were there no inequality: rather, the inequality-adjusted Human Development Index is considered the actual level of human development, taking inequality into account. On the inequality-adjusted HDI, the United States ranked 27th in 2014, tied with Poland.
In 2013, the Economist Intelligence Unit's Where-to-be-born Index, which takes into account material well-being as measured by GDP per capita, life expectancy, political stability, the quality of family life based on divorce rates, community life, crime and terrorism rates, gender equality, the quality of governance, climate, and unemployment rates, ranked the United States at 16th place, tied with Germany.
The OECD Better Life Index, which measures quality of life according to 11 factors, ranks the United States as 7th among 34 OECD countries.
The home ownership rate is relatively high compared to other post-industrial nations. In 2005, 69% of Americans resided in their own homes, roughly the same percentage as in the United Kingdom, Belgium, Israel and Canada.
In 2007, Americans enjoyed more cars and radios per capita than any other nation and more televisions and personal computers per capita than any other nation with more than 200 million people.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Standard of Living in the United States:
- Changing over the past
- International rankings
- Social class
- See also:
Blue-Collar Workers:
A blue-collar worker is a working class person who performs manual labor. Blue-collar work may involve skilled or unskilled positions in:
- manufacturing,
- mining,
- sanitation,
- custodial work,
- textile manufacturing,
- power plant operations,
- farming,
- commercial fishing,
- landscaping,
- pest control,
- food processing,
- oil field work,
- waste disposal,
- recycling,
- electrical,
- plumbing,
- construction,
- mechanic,
- maintenance,
- warehousing,
- shipping,
- technical installation,
- and many other types of physical work.
Blue-collar work often involves something being physically built or maintained.In contrast, the white-collar worker (see next topic) typically performs work in an office environment and may involve sitting at a computer or desk.
A third type of work is a service worker (pink collar) whose labor is related to customer interaction, entertainment, sales or other service-oriented work. Many occupations blend blue, white, or pink-collar work and are often paid hourly wage-labor, although some professionals may be paid by the project or salaried. There is a wide range of payscales for such work depending upon field of specialty and experience.
Origin of Term:
The term blue collar was first used in reference to trades jobs in 1924, in an Alden, Iowa newspaper. The phrase stems from the image of manual workers wearing blue denim or chambray shirts as part of their uniforms.
Industrial and manual workers often wear durable canvas or cotton clothing that may be soiled during the course of their work. Navy and light blue colors conceal potential dirt or grease on the worker's clothing, helping him or her to appear cleaner. For the same reason, blue is a popular color for boilersuits which protect workers' clothing. Some blue collar workers have uniforms with the name of the business and/or the individual's name embroidered or printed on it.
Historically, the popularity of the color blue among manual labourers contrasts with the popularity of white dress shirts worn by people in office environments. The blue collar/white collar color scheme has socio-economic class connotations. However, this distinction has become blurred with the increasing importance of skilled labor, and the relative increase in low-paying white-collar jobs.
Education requirements:
Since many blue-collar jobs consist of mainly manual labor, educational requirements for workers are typically lower than those of white-collar workers. Often, only a high school diploma is required, and many of the skills required for blue-collar jobs will be learned by the employee while working.
In higher level jobs, vocational training or apprenticeships may be required, and for workers such as electricians and plumbers, state-certification is also necessary.
Blue collar shift to developing nations:
See also: Deindustrialization
With the information revolution, Western nations have moved towards a service and white collar economy.
Many manufacturing jobs have been offshored to developing nations which pay their workers lower wages. This offshoring has pushed formerly agrarian nations to industrialized economies and concurrently decreased the number of blue-collar jobs in developed countries.
In the United States, blue collar and service occupations generally refer to jobs in precision production, craft, and repair occupations; machine operators and inspectors; transportation and moving occupations; handlers, equipment cleaners, helpers, and laborers.
In the United States, an area known as the Rust Belt comprising the Northeast and Midwest, including Western New York and Western Pennsylvania, has seen its once large manufacturing base shrink significantly.
With the de-industrialization of these areas starting in the mid-1960s cities like the following have experienced a steady decline of the blue-collar workforce and subsequent population decreases:
- Cleveland, Ohio;
- Detroit, Michigan;
- Buffalo, New York;
- Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania;
- Erie, Pennsylvania;
- Youngstown, Ohio;
- Toledo, Ohio,
- Rochester, New York,
- and St. Louis, Missouri,
Due to this economic osmosis, the rust belt has experienced high unemployment, poverty, and urban blight.
Automation and future:
Due to many blue-collar jobs involving manual labor and relatively unskilled workers, automation poses a threat of unemployment for blue-collar workers.
One study from the MIT Technology Review estimates that 83% of jobs that make less than $20 per hour are threatened by automation. Some examples of technology that threaten workers are self-driving cars and automated cleaning devices, which could place blue-collar workers such as truck drivers or janitors out of work.
Others have suggested that technological advancement will not lead to blue-collar job unemployment, but rather shifts in the types of work performed.
Proponents of this idea view coding as a replacement for blue-collar jobs, and suggest that more coders will be needed in a technologically advancing world, and posit that, ostensibly, new white-collar IT jobs could be filled by displaced blue-collar workers. Others see future of blue-collar work as humans and computers working together to improve efficiency.
Such jobs would consist of data-tagging and labeling.
Electoral politics:
Blue-collar workers have played a large role in electoral politics. In the 2016 United States Presidential election, many attributed Donald Trump's victories in the states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan to blue-collar workers, who overwhelmingly favored Trump over opponent Hillary Clinton.
Among white-working class citizens, Trump won 64% of the votes, compared to only 32% for Clinton. This was the largest margin of victory among this group of voters for any presidential candidate since 1980.
Many attributed Trump's success among this bloc of voters to his opposition of international trade deals and environmental regulations, two of the largest perceived threats to blue-collar employment. Opponents of this view believe Trump's success with this bloc had more to do with an anti-illegal immigrant and nationalist platform that supports deportation of illegals and discourages investment in higher education.
Adjective:
"Blue-collar" can be used as an adjective to describe the environment of the blue-collar worker or a setting reflective of that environment, such as a "blue-collar" neighborhood, restaurant, or bar.
See also:
- Blue-collar bullying
- Blue-collar crime
- Contingent work
- Designation of workers by collar color
- Japanese blue collar workers
- Moonlight clan
- McJob
- Working-class culture
White-collar worker
A white-collar worker is a person who performs professional, managerial, or administrative work. White-collar work may be performed in an office or other administrative setting.
White-collar workers includes works related to the following:
- academia,
- business management,
- customer support,
- market research,
- finance,
- human resources,
- engineering,
- operations research,
- marketing,
- information technology,
- networking,
- attorneys,
- medical professionals,
- architects,
- research and development
- and contracting.
Other types of work are those of a grey-collar worker, who has more specialized knowledge than those of a blue-collar worker, whose job requires manual labor and a pink-collar worker, whose labor is related to customer interaction, entertainment, sales, or other service-oriented work. Many occupations blend blue, white and pink (service) industry categorizations.
The term "White Collar Worker" refers to the white dress shirts of male office workers common through most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Western countries, as opposed to the blue overalls worn by many manual laborers.
The term "white collar" is credited to Upton Sinclair, an American writer, in relation to contemporary clerical, administrative, and management workers during the 1930s, though references to white-collar work appear as early as 1935. White collar employees are considered as highly educated as compared to blue collar.
Demographics:
Formerly a minority in the agrarian and early industrial societies, white-collar workers have become a majority in industrialized countries due to modernization and outsourcing of manufacturing jobs.
The blue-collar and white-collar descriptors as it pertains to work dress may no longer be an accurate descriptor as office attire has broadened beyond a white shirt and tie. Employees in office environments may wear a variety of colors, may dress in business casuals or wear casual clothes altogether.
In addition, the work tasks have blurred. "White-collar" employees may perform "blue-collar" tasks (or vice versa). An example would be a restaurant manager who may wear more formal clothing yet still assist with cooking food or taking customers' orders or a construction worker who also performs desk work.
Health Effects:
Less physical activity among white-collar workers has been thought to be a key factor in increased life-style related health conditions such as fatigue, obesity, diabetes, hypertension, cancer, and heart disease.
Workplace interventions such as alternative activity workstations, sit-stand desks, promotion of stair use are among measures being implemented to counter the harms of sedentary workplace environments.
A Cochrane systematic review published in 2018 concluded that "At present there is low-quality evidence that the use of sit-stand desks reduce workplace sitting." Also, evidence was lacking on the long term health benefits of such interventions.
See also:
Are Right to Work Laws Bad for Workers?
- YouTube Video: New book details brutal working conditions at Amazon warehouses
- YouTube Video: What is 'Right-to-Work'?
- YouTube Video: Class War in Michigan
Right-to-Work Laws Have Devastated Unions — and Democrats
OpEd By James Feigenbaum, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Vanessa Williamson March 8, 2018 (New York Times)
Next week’s special congressional election in southwestern Pennsylvania will test whether, deep in Trump country, union support can help elect a Democrat running on a middle-class economic agenda.
A victory would remind Democrats of the electoral power of organized labor. Even though it has relied on unions’ electoral muscle for nearly a century, the party has often failed to shore up labor’s diminishing strength. Our research demonstrates what an enormous electoral mistake that has been.
Political analysts have long argued that dwindling union power would be bad for Democrats. The conservative strategist Grover Norquist, for instance, has speculated that the decline of labor in recent years could mean that Republicans (and President Trump) may continue to win big despite Mr. Trump’s unpopularity. But there were not reliable estimates of the size of that effect on elections.
We have quantified the electoral effects of one kind of anti-union law, commonly called “right to work” legislation. Those bills allow workers to opt out of paying fees to a union at their workplace — even if those workers benefit from union bargaining and protections. The results are ugly for Democrats and for the working class.
We looked at how right-to-work laws shaped elections from 1980 through 2016. We compared pairs of counties, one in a state that passed a right-to-work law and the other just across the border in a state that didn’t.
Even if right-to-work and non-right-to-work states are quite different, bordering counties in many states tend to have similar economic, demographic and political trends.
Our approach, which isolates the changes that show up only when right-to-work laws are passed, holds up even when we account for other state-level legislation passed at the same time as right-to-work bills, including voter ID laws and other common pieces of conservative legislation.
When right-to-work laws are in place, Democrats up and down the ballot do worse. In presidential elections, we estimate that these laws cost Democratic candidates two to five percentage points in right-to-work counties.
Voter turnout also dropped by approximately two points. That is not trivial, especially considering that Hillary Clinton lost Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016 — two relatively recent right-to-work states — by less than one percentage point each. We find similar effects at other levels of government. Democrats, for instance, are less likely to win state legislative seats after the passage of right-to-work laws.
With a weaker labor movement, it’s not just Democratic electoral prospects that suffer. The working class loses, too. We find that the number of state legislators who had previously worked in blue-collar jobs drops sharply after right-to-work goes into effect.
These politicians tend to strongly support economic policies preferred by working-class Americans, like a higher minimum wage and a stronger safety net. Right-to-work laws thus undercut political representation for working-class people, a group that is disproportionately nonwhite, and reduce the legislative voice for progressive economic policies.
Why do unions matter so much to Democrats’ electoral chances and to working people’s political voice? Most people know that unions are big campaign spenders and help turn out voters during elections.
But in between elections, unions also help develop political interest and skills among workers who might not otherwise devote much time to thinking about politics. And, on a deeper level, unions shape how working-class Americans perceive their political and economic interests.
For all of these reasons, unions have been vital to Democratic electoral success and in ensuring that Democrats, once in office, take the concerns of working people seriously.
In Pennsylvania, unions and Democrats are attempting to recreate the old winning formula. The A.F.L.-C.I.O.-endorsed Democrat in the 18th District, Conor Lamb, is running on union rights, infrastructure investment and the protection of Social Security, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act. His Republican opponent, Rick Saccone, supports anti-union policies like right-to-work laws. The election next week affords unions an opportunity to show their strength.
But whatever happens in this one race, revitalizing the labor movement ought to be at the center of the Democratic agenda. Democrats would do well to ban right-to-work laws, as Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Brad Sherman have recently proposed.
Democrats might consider making it easier for workers to organize and bargain collectively with their employers. Our work suggests that, for Democrats, the old labor anthem had it right: “The union makes us strong.”
[End of NY Times OpEd Piece]
___________________________________________________________________________
Right-to-work Law (Wikipedia)
In the context of U.S. labor politics, "right-to-work laws" refers to state laws that prohibit union security agreements between companies and labor unions. Under these laws, employees in unionized workplaces are banned from negotiating contracts which require all members who benefit from the union contract to contribute to the costs of union representation.
According to the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, right-to-work laws prohibit union security agreements, or agreements between employers and labor unions, that govern the extent to which an established union can require employees' membership, payment of union dues, or fees as a condition of employment, either before or after hiring.
Right-to-work laws do not aim to provide general guarantee of employment to people seeking work, but rather are a government ban on contractual agreements between employers and union employees requiring workers to pay for the costs of union representation.
Right-to-work laws (either by statutes or by constitutional provision) exist in 27 U.S. states, in the Southern, Midwestern, and interior Western states. Such laws are allowed under the 1947 federal Taft–Hartley Act.
A further distinction is often made within the law between people employed by state and municipal governments and those employed by the private sector, with states that are otherwise union shop (i.e., workers must pay for union representation in order to obtain or retain a job) having right to work laws in effect for government employees; provided, however, that the law also permits an "agency shop" where employees pay their share for representation (less than union dues), while not joining the union as members.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Right to Work Laws:
OpEd By James Feigenbaum, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Vanessa Williamson March 8, 2018 (New York Times)
Next week’s special congressional election in southwestern Pennsylvania will test whether, deep in Trump country, union support can help elect a Democrat running on a middle-class economic agenda.
A victory would remind Democrats of the electoral power of organized labor. Even though it has relied on unions’ electoral muscle for nearly a century, the party has often failed to shore up labor’s diminishing strength. Our research demonstrates what an enormous electoral mistake that has been.
Political analysts have long argued that dwindling union power would be bad for Democrats. The conservative strategist Grover Norquist, for instance, has speculated that the decline of labor in recent years could mean that Republicans (and President Trump) may continue to win big despite Mr. Trump’s unpopularity. But there were not reliable estimates of the size of that effect on elections.
We have quantified the electoral effects of one kind of anti-union law, commonly called “right to work” legislation. Those bills allow workers to opt out of paying fees to a union at their workplace — even if those workers benefit from union bargaining and protections. The results are ugly for Democrats and for the working class.
We looked at how right-to-work laws shaped elections from 1980 through 2016. We compared pairs of counties, one in a state that passed a right-to-work law and the other just across the border in a state that didn’t.
Even if right-to-work and non-right-to-work states are quite different, bordering counties in many states tend to have similar economic, demographic and political trends.
Our approach, which isolates the changes that show up only when right-to-work laws are passed, holds up even when we account for other state-level legislation passed at the same time as right-to-work bills, including voter ID laws and other common pieces of conservative legislation.
When right-to-work laws are in place, Democrats up and down the ballot do worse. In presidential elections, we estimate that these laws cost Democratic candidates two to five percentage points in right-to-work counties.
Voter turnout also dropped by approximately two points. That is not trivial, especially considering that Hillary Clinton lost Michigan and Wisconsin in 2016 — two relatively recent right-to-work states — by less than one percentage point each. We find similar effects at other levels of government. Democrats, for instance, are less likely to win state legislative seats after the passage of right-to-work laws.
With a weaker labor movement, it’s not just Democratic electoral prospects that suffer. The working class loses, too. We find that the number of state legislators who had previously worked in blue-collar jobs drops sharply after right-to-work goes into effect.
These politicians tend to strongly support economic policies preferred by working-class Americans, like a higher minimum wage and a stronger safety net. Right-to-work laws thus undercut political representation for working-class people, a group that is disproportionately nonwhite, and reduce the legislative voice for progressive economic policies.
Why do unions matter so much to Democrats’ electoral chances and to working people’s political voice? Most people know that unions are big campaign spenders and help turn out voters during elections.
But in between elections, unions also help develop political interest and skills among workers who might not otherwise devote much time to thinking about politics. And, on a deeper level, unions shape how working-class Americans perceive their political and economic interests.
For all of these reasons, unions have been vital to Democratic electoral success and in ensuring that Democrats, once in office, take the concerns of working people seriously.
In Pennsylvania, unions and Democrats are attempting to recreate the old winning formula. The A.F.L.-C.I.O.-endorsed Democrat in the 18th District, Conor Lamb, is running on union rights, infrastructure investment and the protection of Social Security, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act. His Republican opponent, Rick Saccone, supports anti-union policies like right-to-work laws. The election next week affords unions an opportunity to show their strength.
But whatever happens in this one race, revitalizing the labor movement ought to be at the center of the Democratic agenda. Democrats would do well to ban right-to-work laws, as Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Brad Sherman have recently proposed.
Democrats might consider making it easier for workers to organize and bargain collectively with their employers. Our work suggests that, for Democrats, the old labor anthem had it right: “The union makes us strong.”
[End of NY Times OpEd Piece]
___________________________________________________________________________
Right-to-work Law (Wikipedia)
In the context of U.S. labor politics, "right-to-work laws" refers to state laws that prohibit union security agreements between companies and labor unions. Under these laws, employees in unionized workplaces are banned from negotiating contracts which require all members who benefit from the union contract to contribute to the costs of union representation.
According to the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, right-to-work laws prohibit union security agreements, or agreements between employers and labor unions, that govern the extent to which an established union can require employees' membership, payment of union dues, or fees as a condition of employment, either before or after hiring.
Right-to-work laws do not aim to provide general guarantee of employment to people seeking work, but rather are a government ban on contractual agreements between employers and union employees requiring workers to pay for the costs of union representation.
Right-to-work laws (either by statutes or by constitutional provision) exist in 27 U.S. states, in the Southern, Midwestern, and interior Western states. Such laws are allowed under the 1947 federal Taft–Hartley Act.
A further distinction is often made within the law between people employed by state and municipal governments and those employed by the private sector, with states that are otherwise union shop (i.e., workers must pay for union representation in order to obtain or retain a job) having right to work laws in effect for government employees; provided, however, that the law also permits an "agency shop" where employees pay their share for representation (less than union dues), while not joining the union as members.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Right to Work Laws:
- History
- Arguments for and against
- Studies of economic effect
- Polling
- U.S. states with right-to-work laws
- See also:
Women in the workforce, including Labor Feminism, Women in Labor Unions, and Coalition of Labor Union Women
- YouTube Video: Women in the Workplace 2017: Understanding the problem (McKinsey & Company)
- YouTube Video: How Having More Women in the Workplace Benefits Everyone I Fortune
- YouTube Video: 5 stunning stats about women in the workplace (CNN)
Women in the workforce earning wages or salary are part of a modern phenomenon, one that developed at the same time as the growth of paid employment for men, but women have been challenged by inequality in the workforce.
Until modern times, legal and cultural practices, combined with the inertia of longstanding religious and educational conventions, restricted women's entry and participation in the workforce. Economic dependency upon men, and consequently the poor socio-economic status of women, have had the same impact, particularly as occupations have become professionalized over the 19th and 20th centuries.
Women's lack of access to higher education had effectively excluded them from the practice of well-paid and high status occupations. Entry of women into the higher professions like law and medicine was delayed in most countries due to women being denied entry to universities and qualification for degrees; for example, Cambridge University only fully validated degrees for women late in 1947, and even then only after much opposition and acrimonious debate.
Women were largely limited to low-paid and poor status occupations for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, or earned less pay than men for doing the same work. However, through the 20th century, the labor market shifted. Office work that does not require heavy labor expanded, and women increasingly acquired the higher education that led to better-compensated, longer-term careers rather than lower-skilled, shorter-term jobs.
The increasing rates of women contributing in the work force has led to a more equal disbursement of hours worked across the regions of the world. However, in western European countries the nature of women's employment participation remains markedly different from that of men.
Although access to paying occupations (the "workforce") has been and remains unequal in many occupations and places around the world, scholars sometimes distinguish between "work" and "paying work", including in their analysis a broader spectrum of labor such as uncompensated household work, childcare, eldercare, and family subsistence farming.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Women in the Workforce:
Labor feminism is a term used for a movement in the United States that emerged after women gained the right to vote in the 1920s. Labor feminists advocated for protectionist legislation and special benefits for women. They helped pass state laws regulating working conditions for women, expanded women's participation in unions, and organized to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment.
1920s to 1970s:
After gaining the right to vote, the National Woman's Party proposed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The ERA was bitterly opposed by the social feminists who saw it as undermining many of the gains they had made in the treatment of women workers. The charge was led by labor feminists, who were the successors to Progressive Era social feminists.
Labor feminists did not want to end all distinctions based on sex, only those that hurt women. For example, they felt that state laws that put in place wage floors and hour ceilings benefited women. Thus, they continued to advocate for protectionist legislation and special benefits for women.
In addition to state wage laws, they sought to expand maternity leave, health coverage during childbirth, and disability and unemployment coverage for mothers. Their view was that women had different needs than men and should not be penalized for performing the function of motherhood.
By the 1940s, labor feminists began to broaden their advocacy efforts at the national level. Led by prominent labor figures such as Esther Peterson, an AFL–CIO lobbyist, and Myra Wolfgang, a trade union leader, labor feminists came together at the Women's Bureau at the U.S. Department of Labor to advance their social reform agenda. This included equal pay for comparable work, shorter workdays for women and men, and social welfare support for childbearing and childrearing.
In 1945, they introduced the Equal Pay Act in Congress, which sought to abolish wage disparity based on sex. Their version of the bill, which was different than what passed in 1963, advocated for equal pay for comparable work in addition to same work because employers often undervalued the contributions of women in roles that women tended to occupy. Labor feminists re-introduced the bill every year until 1963 when the Equal Pay Act was passed.
During this time, labor feminists also expanded women's participation in unions. They viewed union organization as an effective way to pressure employers to close the gender wage gap. In 1947, they helped orchestrate the largest walkout of women in U.S. history when 230,000 telephone operators nationwide went on strike against AT&T, cutting off telephone service at the White House.
The merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955 created a unified labor movement with greater political and economic power. The AFL–CIO adopted the CIO position on equal pay, and by the late 1950s, federal equal pay legislation became a priority of the merged organization.
In 1960, President Kennedy appointed Peterson the Director of the Women's Bureau, and she became the highest-ranking woman in President Kennedy's administration. In her new position, Peterson helped draft a report for the President's Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW). The PCSW had been established by President Kennedy in 1961 to examine the gains of women and role of government in addressing the changing needs of women and their families. Their report American Women published in 1963 expressed a desire for the elimination of gender difference, but not where it would remove protections for working-class women.
Legal debate over the ERA:
Labor feminists supported the Hayden Rider to the ERA, which said that the ERA could not impair any existing benefits conferred to women. Many labor feminists, including Peterson, believed that legislation could promote equality and special benefits for women and did not see these as incompatible. These feminists located women's rights within a framework of women's service as workers and homemakers, rather than the framework of liberal individualism used by equal rights feminists.
Legal scholars challenged the idea of a legally viable model of promoting equal rights that did not erode those protections already in place for women. First, they argued that this would be problematic from an application standpoint. Legislation that afforded privileges to women that were not available to men would be valid, but disabilities imposed on women because of their sex would be invalidated.
Deciding when a statute conferred a benefit rather than a disability would be difficult. Second, they argued it was problematic from a sociological standpoint. Legal constructions of difference reinforced cultural stereotypes and limited the definition of the role of women. While there were valid biological differences between men and women, it was thought that these definitions invoked generalities and ignored the capabilities of the individual.
Decline in labor feminism:
The labor movement remained a powerful presence throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. The passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963 without the desired comparable pay language represented a significant defeat for labor feminists and shifted the terms of the debate with equal rights feminists. ERA supporters had opposed the language out of a desire for true equality.
Labor feminists remained united in their opposition that the ERA would erase protectionist legislation, but split in their approach as it became apparent that they would not be able to achieve expansions of equality without sacrificing some protections. The passage of Title VII in 1963 further undermined their position. Protectionist legislation violated Title VII's prohibitions against discrimination based on sex.
The rapidly changing economic and cultural landscape of the 1960s contributed to the successes of equal rights feminists over labor feminists. One of the biggest opponents of comparable pay language had been American businesses. In the aftermath of World War II, American businesses flourished, and the power of the American business lobby grew. US business leaders opposed government support for people not in the labor force and government intervention in the labor force.
As the federal government retreated from the private sector, it left the task of caring for workers to employers. In the backdrop of the Cold War, American politicians and the public interpreted this economic success as validation of American ideals of individualism and free enterprise, which provided further justification for the emerging corporate welfare state and opposition toward socialist measures.
By the 1970s, there was a decline in labor feminism. Some labor feminists hoped that the movement could regroup around an agenda of equal rights and equal opportunity. A group of labor women helped secure support for the ERA from the United Auto Workers, the American Federation of Teachers, the Newspaper Guild, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
The Women's Bureau switched its position on the ERA in 1970. In 1971, Peterson also changed her mind, reasoning that history was moving in this direction. However, some labor feminists, including Wolfgang, remained staunchly opposed and testified against the ERA in Congress. The passage of the ERA in 1972 enabled equal rights feminism to solidify its place as the dominant women's movement in the US.
___________________________________________________________________________
Women in Labor Unions:
Women in labor unions have participated in labor organizing and activity throughout United States history. These workers have organized to address issues within the workplace, such as promoting gender equality, better working conditions, and higher wages.
Women have participated in unions including the Collar Laundry Union, the WTUL, the IWW, the ILGWU, and the UAW.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Women in Labor Unions:
Coalition of Labor Union Women
The Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of trade union women affiliated with the AFL-CIO. The CLUW is a bridging organization that seeks to create connections between the feminist movement and the labor movement in the United States.
The organization works towards overcoming past constraints and conflicts in pursuance of relationship improvement between those movements and thus enabling broad coalitions. The CLUW is the only national organization solely for women union members and is one of six constituency groups within the AFL-CIO. It is based in the headquarters of the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C.
CLUW pursues by four goals:
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW):
Until modern times, legal and cultural practices, combined with the inertia of longstanding religious and educational conventions, restricted women's entry and participation in the workforce. Economic dependency upon men, and consequently the poor socio-economic status of women, have had the same impact, particularly as occupations have become professionalized over the 19th and 20th centuries.
Women's lack of access to higher education had effectively excluded them from the practice of well-paid and high status occupations. Entry of women into the higher professions like law and medicine was delayed in most countries due to women being denied entry to universities and qualification for degrees; for example, Cambridge University only fully validated degrees for women late in 1947, and even then only after much opposition and acrimonious debate.
Women were largely limited to low-paid and poor status occupations for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, or earned less pay than men for doing the same work. However, through the 20th century, the labor market shifted. Office work that does not require heavy labor expanded, and women increasingly acquired the higher education that led to better-compensated, longer-term careers rather than lower-skilled, shorter-term jobs.
The increasing rates of women contributing in the work force has led to a more equal disbursement of hours worked across the regions of the world. However, in western European countries the nature of women's employment participation remains markedly different from that of men.
Although access to paying occupations (the "workforce") has been and remains unequal in many occupations and places around the world, scholars sometimes distinguish between "work" and "paying work", including in their analysis a broader spectrum of labor such as uncompensated household work, childcare, eldercare, and family subsistence farming.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Women in the Workforce:
- Areas of study
- Women and Economic Development
- Paid employment globally
- Organizations formed by women for rights
- Women in workforce leadership
- Barriers to equal participation
- Gender inequality by social class
- Impact issues of female participation in the workforce
- History
- Occupational safety and health
- See also:
- Feminisation of the workplace
- Rosie the Riveter
- Women's history
- Women's empowerment
- Women's rights
- Women's studies
- Gender studies
- Workplace discrimination, Occupational sexism, and Glass ceiling
- Labor history
- Educational Inequality
- Timeline of women's rights (other than voting)
- Motherhood penalty
- Supervising Women Workers (short social guidance film)
- Western dress codes
- Women's participation in different occupations: Below is a list of encyclopedia articles that detail women's historical involvement in various occupations:
- Sciences – See generally Women in science and List of female scientists
- Women in computing (see also Women in the Information Age research project)
- Women in engineering
- Women in geology
- List of female mathematicians
- Medical professions – See generally Women in medicine
- Legal professions – See generally Women in the United States judiciary
- Although women comprise approximately half of the students enrolled in American law schools, they represent only 17% of partners at major law firms and less than a quarter of tenured law professors. Similarly, in the United States, there has been only one female attorney general, three female secretaries of state, two women Supreme Court justices, and one acting solicitor general.
- Arts, writing, media, sports and entertainment
- Women artists (visual arts)
- Women Surrealists
- Performing arts
- Vulcana Women's Circus (organization for women in the circus)
- Writing
- Film
- List of female film and television directors
- Women's cinema (discusses women screenwriters & directors)
- Music
- Sports
- Humanities
- Crime: Women in piracy
- Government: Women in politics
- Military
- Women in the military
- Women in the military by country, in Europe, and in the Americas
- History of women in the military; Timeline of women in ancient warfare; Timeline of Women in Medieval warfare
- List of women warriors in folklore, literature, and popular culture
- Category:Female military personnel
- Women's Land Army
- Category:Female wartime spies
- from the collections of the Imperial War Museum
- "The New Majority? the Past, Present and Future of Women in the Workplace", Symposium at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, September 9, 2011.
- Women's Employment, United States and Great Britain in the Early 20th Century in the Claremont Colleges Digital Library
- A collection of historical documents chronicling the role of women in the nation’s economy and labor force, with statistical reports and other documents coming from sources such as the Census Bureau, the Supreme Court, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the Women's Bureau.
- Women in Business and Commerce in Asia, Asian Development Bank
- American Association of University Women
- Sciences – See generally Women in science and List of female scientists
Labor feminism is a term used for a movement in the United States that emerged after women gained the right to vote in the 1920s. Labor feminists advocated for protectionist legislation and special benefits for women. They helped pass state laws regulating working conditions for women, expanded women's participation in unions, and organized to oppose the Equal Rights Amendment.
1920s to 1970s:
After gaining the right to vote, the National Woman's Party proposed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The ERA was bitterly opposed by the social feminists who saw it as undermining many of the gains they had made in the treatment of women workers. The charge was led by labor feminists, who were the successors to Progressive Era social feminists.
Labor feminists did not want to end all distinctions based on sex, only those that hurt women. For example, they felt that state laws that put in place wage floors and hour ceilings benefited women. Thus, they continued to advocate for protectionist legislation and special benefits for women.
In addition to state wage laws, they sought to expand maternity leave, health coverage during childbirth, and disability and unemployment coverage for mothers. Their view was that women had different needs than men and should not be penalized for performing the function of motherhood.
By the 1940s, labor feminists began to broaden their advocacy efforts at the national level. Led by prominent labor figures such as Esther Peterson, an AFL–CIO lobbyist, and Myra Wolfgang, a trade union leader, labor feminists came together at the Women's Bureau at the U.S. Department of Labor to advance their social reform agenda. This included equal pay for comparable work, shorter workdays for women and men, and social welfare support for childbearing and childrearing.
In 1945, they introduced the Equal Pay Act in Congress, which sought to abolish wage disparity based on sex. Their version of the bill, which was different than what passed in 1963, advocated for equal pay for comparable work in addition to same work because employers often undervalued the contributions of women in roles that women tended to occupy. Labor feminists re-introduced the bill every year until 1963 when the Equal Pay Act was passed.
During this time, labor feminists also expanded women's participation in unions. They viewed union organization as an effective way to pressure employers to close the gender wage gap. In 1947, they helped orchestrate the largest walkout of women in U.S. history when 230,000 telephone operators nationwide went on strike against AT&T, cutting off telephone service at the White House.
The merger of the AFL and CIO in 1955 created a unified labor movement with greater political and economic power. The AFL–CIO adopted the CIO position on equal pay, and by the late 1950s, federal equal pay legislation became a priority of the merged organization.
In 1960, President Kennedy appointed Peterson the Director of the Women's Bureau, and she became the highest-ranking woman in President Kennedy's administration. In her new position, Peterson helped draft a report for the President's Commission on the Status of Women (PCSW). The PCSW had been established by President Kennedy in 1961 to examine the gains of women and role of government in addressing the changing needs of women and their families. Their report American Women published in 1963 expressed a desire for the elimination of gender difference, but not where it would remove protections for working-class women.
Legal debate over the ERA:
Labor feminists supported the Hayden Rider to the ERA, which said that the ERA could not impair any existing benefits conferred to women. Many labor feminists, including Peterson, believed that legislation could promote equality and special benefits for women and did not see these as incompatible. These feminists located women's rights within a framework of women's service as workers and homemakers, rather than the framework of liberal individualism used by equal rights feminists.
Legal scholars challenged the idea of a legally viable model of promoting equal rights that did not erode those protections already in place for women. First, they argued that this would be problematic from an application standpoint. Legislation that afforded privileges to women that were not available to men would be valid, but disabilities imposed on women because of their sex would be invalidated.
Deciding when a statute conferred a benefit rather than a disability would be difficult. Second, they argued it was problematic from a sociological standpoint. Legal constructions of difference reinforced cultural stereotypes and limited the definition of the role of women. While there were valid biological differences between men and women, it was thought that these definitions invoked generalities and ignored the capabilities of the individual.
Decline in labor feminism:
The labor movement remained a powerful presence throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. The passage of the Equal Pay Act in 1963 without the desired comparable pay language represented a significant defeat for labor feminists and shifted the terms of the debate with equal rights feminists. ERA supporters had opposed the language out of a desire for true equality.
Labor feminists remained united in their opposition that the ERA would erase protectionist legislation, but split in their approach as it became apparent that they would not be able to achieve expansions of equality without sacrificing some protections. The passage of Title VII in 1963 further undermined their position. Protectionist legislation violated Title VII's prohibitions against discrimination based on sex.
The rapidly changing economic and cultural landscape of the 1960s contributed to the successes of equal rights feminists over labor feminists. One of the biggest opponents of comparable pay language had been American businesses. In the aftermath of World War II, American businesses flourished, and the power of the American business lobby grew. US business leaders opposed government support for people not in the labor force and government intervention in the labor force.
As the federal government retreated from the private sector, it left the task of caring for workers to employers. In the backdrop of the Cold War, American politicians and the public interpreted this economic success as validation of American ideals of individualism and free enterprise, which provided further justification for the emerging corporate welfare state and opposition toward socialist measures.
By the 1970s, there was a decline in labor feminism. Some labor feminists hoped that the movement could regroup around an agenda of equal rights and equal opportunity. A group of labor women helped secure support for the ERA from the United Auto Workers, the American Federation of Teachers, the Newspaper Guild, and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.
The Women's Bureau switched its position on the ERA in 1970. In 1971, Peterson also changed her mind, reasoning that history was moving in this direction. However, some labor feminists, including Wolfgang, remained staunchly opposed and testified against the ERA in Congress. The passage of the ERA in 1972 enabled equal rights feminism to solidify its place as the dominant women's movement in the US.
___________________________________________________________________________
Women in Labor Unions:
Women in labor unions have participated in labor organizing and activity throughout United States history. These workers have organized to address issues within the workplace, such as promoting gender equality, better working conditions, and higher wages.
Women have participated in unions including the Collar Laundry Union, the WTUL, the IWW, the ILGWU, and the UAW.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about Women in Labor Unions:
- Early union activity
- The Women's Trade Union League:
- Industrial Workers of the World
- Garment work in 1909-1913
- The United Auto Workers
Coalition of Labor Union Women
The Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of trade union women affiliated with the AFL-CIO. The CLUW is a bridging organization that seeks to create connections between the feminist movement and the labor movement in the United States.
The organization works towards overcoming past constraints and conflicts in pursuance of relationship improvement between those movements and thus enabling broad coalitions. The CLUW is the only national organization solely for women union members and is one of six constituency groups within the AFL-CIO. It is based in the headquarters of the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C.
CLUW pursues by four goals:
- to bring women into union leadership,
- to organize unorganized women workers,
- to bring women's issues onto the labor agenda,
- and to involve women into political action.
Click on any of the following blue hyperlinks for more about the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW):
- History
- Structure and governance
- Relationship with AFL-CIO
- Bridging Organization
- Impact
- Diversity
- Programs
- See also: