July 13, 2015
Would a doctor work for Uber? Probably not, but if it turned out there were no jobs for doctors and the only way she could support her family was to work for Uber, then a doctor may work for Uber. That is an important point left out of an interesting article on growing economic insecurity for workers.
A big part of this story is the decision by the Federal Reserve Board to raise interest rates to deliberately limit the number of jobs in the economy. This disproportionately hits less educated workers, who are the first ones to be fired when the economy slows. If jobs were plentiful then employers would be forced to offer higher wages and more job security in order to attract the workers they need. The Fed’s policy to keep the labor market weak in the last three and a half decades has been a major factor in the deterioration of job quality.
It is also bizarre that the article cited a study by Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney to support the case that, controlling for education, men have been seeing declines in wages for forty years. The Economic Policy Institute had been documenting this decline in the State of Working America for decades.
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