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Article Artículo

Thomas Friedman Says That Our Economy Is Being Killed By Employers Who Can't Do Arithmetic

The evidence presented in Thomas Friedman's column today would lead readers to believe that the economy's biggest problem is that companies are being run by executives who are so ignorant of economics that they don't know that the way to attract more workers is to raise wages. The column begins with the story of Traci Tapini, who with her sister is co-president of Wyoming Machine. For some reason Friedman assures us Tapini "is not your usual C.E.O."

According to Friedman, back in 2009, when the economy was collapsing and unemployment was soaring Tapini had to struggle to find 10 welders that she needed to meet an order from the military. She could not find workers with the right skills, which now includes not only the ability to make a good weld, but also a knowledge of metallurgy. Eventually she found a welder who had passed the American Welding Society Certified Welding Inspector exam and was able to train the other welders.

Friedman tells readers:

"Welding 'is a $20-an-hour job with health care, paid vacations and full benefits,' said Tapani, but 'you have to have science and math. I can’t think of any job in my sheet metal fabrication company where math is not important. If you work in a manufacturing facility, you use math every day; you need to compute angles and understand what happens to a piece of metal when it’s bent to a certain angle.'

Who knew? Welding is now a STEM job — that is, a job that requires knowledge of science, technology, engineering and math."

The obvious problem in this story is that Tapini apparently doesn't understand that you have to pay more money to get highly skilled workers. If the minimum wage had risen in step with inflation and productivity since the late sixties, it would be almost $20 an hour today. Back in the late sixties, a typical minimum wage worker would have a high school degree or less. Now, according to Friedman, we have CEOs who think that they can get highly skilled workers at the some productivity adjusted wage as someone who would have had limited literacy and numeracy skills 45 years ago. If we applied the same standard to doctors, they would be averaging around $100,000 a year today (instead of around $250,000). If employers really do have such poor understanding of how markets work then it will certainly be a serious impediment to economic growth in the years ahead.

Dean Baker / November 18, 2012

Article Artículo

Workers

No Cupcake: Workers Turn Down Bad Deal from Hostess

There have been a number of news stories about the closing of Hostess’ factories and plans to liquidate the company in the wake of the refusal of one of its unions to accept reductions in pay and benefits and other concessions. It appears as though this will leave Hostess’ 18,000 workers without a job by the end of the year.

While this is certainly a bad story for the workers, it is not clear that they had a better route available to them. It is important to understand a bit about the history of Hostess in assessing whether the workers and their union made the right call.

Hostess has been relying on pretty much the same mix of products for decades. While other companies have sought to adjust to changing consumer tastes, Hostess still gets the vast majority of its revenue from a relatively small number of products that it has been selling in largely the same form since the sixties. This failure to innovate was the main reason that the company first went into bankruptcy in 2004.

Hostess remained in bankruptcy for five years until it was brought out of bankruptcy in February of 2009 by Ripplewood Holdings, a private equity company. Remarkably, it exited bankruptcy with nearly $670 million in debt, almost 50 percent more than the $450 million it owed when it went into bankruptcy.

Usually companies use bankruptcy to shed debt. With Hostess the opposite was true. This meant that Ripplewood was taking a heavily leveraged gamble. If the company survived, it would get a very high return on its investment. However there was a strong likelihood that the company would not be able to make it given its extraordinary debt burden and the weakness of the economy.

CEPR / November 16, 2012

Article Artículo

Honduras

Latin America and the Caribbean

World

Murders of Teenagers and Opposition Party Members Underscore Impunity in Honduras and the Failure of U.S. “Vetting”

In previous blog posts we’ve commented on the rampant political violence in Honduras since the country’s 2009 military coup, as well as the alleged involvement of Honduran security forces in extrajudicial killings and other human rights violations. Sadly, recent reports from Honduras suggest that the situation continues to deteriorate. Today we’ll provide an update on some of the troubling recent events in Honduras - the recent killing of an unarmed boy allegedly carried out by U.S.- vetted military troops; the targeted killings of opposition politicians – as well as efforts by non-governmental groups to hold Honduran authorities accountable for the ongoing attacks and the country’s pervasive climate of impunity.

U.S.-vetted soldiers allegedly murder unarmed boy

Breaking news this week reveals that soldiers vetted by the U.S. chased after, shot and killed a 15-year-old boy, Ebed Yanes, who supposedly ran through a check point on a motorcycle in Tegucigalpa on the night of May 26. The Associated Press’ Alberto Arce and Martha Mendoza reported that, according to a soldier involved in the incident who came forward:

The boy, he said, did not stop at the checkpoint, but raced through it. They followed him in the Ford pickup, chasing him through the dark alleys for at least five minutes. The boy turned into an alley too narrow for the truck, so the driver stopped. The lieutenant sitting in the front passenger seat ordered the unit to open fire as he jumped out of the truck and started shooting. Two other soldiers got out and fired from 30 meters away, with soldier Eleazar Abimael Rodriguez dropping to his knee in the firing position, said the soldier, who is now a protected witness. The motorcyclist was shot.

AP notes that the soldier alleged to have fired first, Josue Sierra, was trained last year at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), formerly known as the School of the Americas (SOA), at Fort Benning, Georgia, and has been charged with attempting to cover up a crime and violating official duties. Lt. Col. Reynel Funes, who allegedly oversaw a cover-up of the murder (in part by having the soldiers switch out their weapons) also attended the SOA in 1984, and went to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, in 2006, AP reports.

The revelations behind Yanes’ murder – only brought to light through the brave investigative work of his father - further demonstrates the rampant impunity and corruption within the Honduran military and police, even by officers “vetted” by the U.S. Despite recent misleading comments by U.S. Ambassador to Honduras Lisa Kubiske in the Honduran press, the U.S. Congress is already withholding funds to the Honduran police over the national police chief’s past ties to death squads, and counternarcotics operations and radar support to the Honduran police and military has been suspended following Honduras’ shooting down of airplanes, and the May 11 shootings of several local villagers in a counter-drugs operation in the Moskitia region. A State Department official cited in AP’s report yesterday says that “the withholding may reach $50 million, including $8.3 million in counter-narcotics aid, and $38 million under the Central America Regional Security Initiative.”

CEPR / November 16, 2012

Article Artículo

The Washington Post Is Trying to Scare You, Again

I'm not kidding, that's the headline of a blog post:

"this graph should scare you."

The Post reports on a new study from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) which shows that GDP growth in this recovery has been considerably weaker than the average of prior recoveries. It's not entirely clear why the graph from CBO is supposed to be scary. After all, don't most people already know the economy stinks?

And the reason is pretty simple, we don't have any source of demand to replace the $1 trillion or so of annual construction and consumption demand that was generated by the housing bubble. So CBO's graph doesn't seem to be giving us any new information.

Perhaps we are supposed to be scared by CBO's assessment that two-thirds of the reason for slower growth is slower potential GDP growth, with only one-third is due to slower demand growth. This could be seen as somewhat scar. After all, if the economy really has much less growth potential that would be bad news, but on closer inspection there is not much "there" there.

Half of CBO's estimated slowing of potential GDP growth is due to slower labor force growth. This is the story of the retirement of the baby boom cohorts. As a baby boomer who one day expects to retire, this never struck me as especially scary and it certainly is not news. Everyone other than former Senator Alan Simpson (who seems to have first discovered the baby boom cohort when he sat on President Obama's deficit commission) knew that we would have a big wave of baby boomer retirements about 50 years ago.

We have two stories here. One is slower population growth. This pays us all sorts of dividends in reduced crowding and less pollution which are mostly not picked up in GDP measures. While some folks around this town (Washington) go nuts over slower population growth or, even worse, declining populations, I consider this outcome as 100 percent positive. (It is not good if people who want children feel that they are unable to afford them.)

The other story is a rising ratio of dependents (retired and young) to workers. This is somewhat of a drag on living standards, but hardly a disaster. The graph below shows the projected negative impact on after-tax wages of the increase in the ratio of retirees to workers compared with the positive impact of various rates of productivity growth.

living-standards-2012-2035

Source: Social Security Trustees Report and author's calculations.

Are you scared yet?

Dean Baker / November 15, 2012

Article Artículo

Latin America and the Caribbean

Mexico

World

Mexican Senate Passes Labor Reform Bill, Weakening Worker Rights

The Mexican senate approved controversial new labor reforms yesterday, the AP reports. The bill, which has faced mounting public protests, would allow greater flexibility on the part of owners to hire and fire workers, among other changes.  While supporters claim it will generate thousands of jobs, critics contend that it will erode what little benefits workers do have. Alejandra Barrales, a senator from the Democratic Revolution Party, told Reuters, “What we're doing here is annulling worker's rights.”

Aspects of the bill that unions had advocated for; the right to a secret ballot and increasing transparency of union finances, were stripped in the lower house and not included in the Senate version. Those reforms were seen as key to diminishing the power of the PRI-backed, non-democratic unions and supporting the development of smaller more independent groups.  The PRD did manage to get Senate approval for two articles (388 and 390) that allow workers to choose which union they want based on majority vote and require unions to submit proposed contracts to union members.  Ultimately, these were left out of the labor reform bill and sent back to the lower house for discussion and approval.

These reforms would have been especially important in the Mexican context because often collective bargaining agreements are signed by ‘unions’ that are company-backed.  Without independence, these frequently fail to represent the interests of workers, many of whom are unaware that their labor group is essentially an extension of the company they work for. 

Senator Manuel Bartlett told reporters Tuesday night that, “This law is an attack against social justice, and the only ones who will benefit are going to be the business owners.” For example, the law legalizes trial periods and initial training contracts, which allow employers options for offering more tenuous employment and paying lower wages with fewer benefits.  With respect to outsourcing, a practice already used but now formally sanctioned, the law allows employers even more ways to combine low wages with little or no health, housing, severance and profit-sharing benefits, according to the AP.

Jake Johnston and Stephan Lefebvre / November 15, 2012

Article Artículo

It's So Cute When People Who Couldn't See an $8 Trillion Housing Bubble Tell Us How Markets Will React to the Ending of the Bush Tax Cuts

The Washington Post has been as aggressive as any Republican in Congress in hyping the dangers of letting the Bush tax cuts expire. It has run numerous front page pieces telling readers of the dire consequences of letting January 1 pass without a deal (e.g. here and here). Today Wonkblog warned of us the real bad news of going off the fiscal cliff!!!!!!!

Just in case you didn't understand the Post's official line on this, the headline of the piece is "the economy (probably) can't survive a short dive into austerity crisis." It starts with some clearly mistaken economics. It calculates the hit to the economy of higher tax with-holdings for the month of January.

"In a narrow sense, a short voyage off the cliff shouldn’t crush the economy too badly. The CBO estimates that the full brunt of the policies add up to about $56 billion a month, which is a lot of money — about 4 percent of GDP — but should, in theory at least, do only modest damage to the economy if it lasted only a few weeks. One month of austerity along those lines would subtract only about a third of a percentage point from growth for the full year, before accounting for multiplier effects.

For comparison, the U.S. economy grew at a 1.8 percent rate over the last year; if a single month of fiscal cliff-style austerity had been in place, that number would have been more like 1.4 percent."

The problem with this arithmetic is that consumption is unlikely to respond in any measurable way to a one-month tax hike. There is a big debate among economists as to how much consumption responds to temporary tax cuts, like the Make Work Pay tax cut that was part of the initial stimulus package. Many economists, especially those who seem to be most worried about the "fiscal cliff" right now, argue that consumption responds little or not at all to tax cuts that are scheduled to be in effect for a year or two. One doesn't have to agree with this strong position to accept the view that a one month increase in taxes will have a minimal impact on people's consumption patterns.

This is especially likely if the tax increase is likely to be reversed the next month, which would almost certainly be the case, as the column acknowledges in the next sentence. So, this arithmetic exercise gets us essential zero hit from jumping over the fiscal cliff.

Dean Baker / November 14, 2012

Article Artículo

Cholera as a Human Rights Issue
A new human rights report reaffirms the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti’s (MINUSTAH) responsibility for causing the cholera epidemic that has now killed over 7,600 and infected over 600,000. The Paris-based International Federation of Human

CEPR / November 13, 2012