Labor Market Archives - Public Seminar

Economy

The Hidden Costs of Unnecessary Work

By reevaluating the role of work, we can remake our economy and our lives

April 18, 2021 • by Jared Spears

_____ As America looks cautiously toward economic “reopening” post-pandemic, most official prescriptions tend to share a fundamental premise: rebounding to pre-pandemic G.D.P. growth and pursuing the promise of new employment opportunities in the private sector. President Biden’s "Build Back Better" climate and economic recovery plan has been geared toward putting Americans back to ...

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A Cleaner, Greener World Requires More Than Regulations

New regulations and better technologies that promote climate change impacts workers too

November 19, 2018 • by Michael Flaherty

Countries around the globe are grappling with the challenges of designing, introducing, and enforcing policies to minimize the extent of climate change and to prepare for those damages that are inevitable. Most people, I think, would agree a cleaner, greener world is ideal, but concerns emerge about the costs inflicted ...

A Cleaner, Greener World Requires More Than Regulations

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Stranded in Stagnant Regions, Older Workers Left with Low Wages

May 2018 Unemployment Report for Workers Over 55

June 2, 2018 • by Teresa Ghilarducci

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported a 2.8% unemployment rate for workers age 55 and older in May, a decrease of 0.2 percentage points from April. The economy is expanding, unemployment is low, and wages are growing. But wage growth for workers over 55 is slower than wage growth for younger ...

Stranded in Stagnant Regions, Older Workers Left with Low Wages

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The Scab

One who gives more value for the same price than another.

May 8, 2018 • by Jack London

"Such is the tangle of conflicting interests in a tooth-and-nail society that people cannot avoid being scabs, are often made so against their desires, and unconsciously" [Although the author of this paper has been chiefly known to the readers of the Atlantic as a writer of stories of the Klondike, he has given ...

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Trump’s Bottling of Old Wine

Can we finally lose our bipartisan taste for workfare?

April 23, 2018 • by John Krinsky

It is tempting to see President Trump’s executive order directing his agencies to find ways to require work as a condition for receiving means-tested benefits as another example of his outsized callousness. By casting all means-tested aid programs as “welfare,” Trump’s executive order supersizes “workfare” by linking benefits to work. There are ...

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Observing the Social Content of Economic Competition

A report of new findings

April 9, 2018 • by Paulo L. dos Santos

“All that frenetic switching between left and right means something. It’s not random noise. It’s as if you’re flipping a coin. Of course you expect as many heads as tails, but instead you get twice as many heads as tails. So you conclude that the coin is loaded, in our ...

Observing the Social Content of Economic Competition

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Film review: Champ of the Camp

The first ever feature-length documentary filmed in the UAE’s controversial labor camps

January 1, 2018 • by Elena Gagovska

Mahmoud Kaabour’s film Champ of the Camp (2014) opens with the song by a South Asian man set against the backdrop of a modernistic building covered in glass windows. The song is called “Long Separation” and the setting is the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Such juxtaposition runs throughout the movie: the poor ...

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Offshoring

Reassessing the Rhetoric of Ineluctability

December 19, 2017 • by Sabine Pitteloud

Such rhetoric explains the increased use of offshoring since the 1990s — and the changes in employment that it has engendered — by referencing the changing economic environment. One decisive change that is almost always mentioned when this is discussed is the increased integration of markets around the world: markets ...

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Older Workers’ Gender Gap in Paid vs Unpaid Work Hurts Women’s Retirement Savings

October 2017 Unemployment Report for Workers Over 55

November 5, 2017 • by Teresa Ghilarducci

Both men and women ages 55-64 spend the same amount of time working each week -- 47.9 hours a week for men and 48 hours a week for women -- including both paid work in the labor market and unpaid household work. But of this total, men spend more time in ...

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Speculation and Counter-speculation

From value to price, from labor to debt, from revolution to disruption

October 12, 2017 • by Joshua Simon

Finance is speculation on debt. In the past decades, finance has replaced production, while debt has replaced waged labor as the main generator of profit in the contemporary economy. Under the reign of production, labor-time aimed to semiotize value. In other words, each terrain of human activity was assigned a ...

Multi Media

Amazon & Whole Foods, Summer Jobs, and Gerrymandering

Past Present: Episode 89

June 30, 2017 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this week's episode, Natalia, Niki, and Neil debate Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods, the disappearing teen summer job, and the politics of gerrymandering.

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Amazon & Whole Foods, Summer Jobs, and Gerrymandering

Uncategorized

The Discontinuous Borders of the European Union

Migrants, refugees, and the labor market

September 15, 2015 • by Felice Mometti and Cinzia Arruzza

The powerful image of thousands of migrants marching together on the motorway between Budapest and Vienna, in the first week of September, is one of those images capable of symbolizing a turning point. It made visible the utter failure of the European policies on immigration and political asylum, while symbolizing ...