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Article Artículo

Workers

Union Membership, 2012
On January 23, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will release its estimates of “Union Membership” for 2012. Using the same data from the Current Population Survey (CPS), we have compiled advance estimates for union membership and coverage for 2012 and find a

John Schmitt and Janelle Jones / January 17, 2013

Article Artículo

UN’s Muñoz Misses the Point
In the face of headlines such as “3 years after Haiti's quake, lives still in upheaval” and “Haiti: the graveyard of hope,” Heraldo Muñoz,  U.N. assistant secretary-general and director of the Regional Bureau for Latin America & the Caribbean at UNDP, had

CEPR / January 17, 2013

Article Artículo

Economic Growth

Workers

Occupation Employment Trends and Wage Inequality: What the Long View Tells Us

This post is the third in a short series that assesses the role of technological change and job polarization in wage inequality trends.

The discussion of job polarization—the expansion of high and low-wage occupations while middle-wage occupations decline—and its role in driving wage inequality would benefit from a longer examination of occupational change and technology’s impact.

“Occupational upgrading” has been going on for 60 years or more. By occupational upgrading, we mean the erosion of employment in blue-collar and, more recently, pink-collar (administrative/clerical) occupations and the corresponding employment expansion of high wage, professional and managerial white-collar occupations. The share of employment in low-wage, service occupations (food preparation, janitorial/cleaning services, personal care and services) has actually been relatively stable for many decades and remained a small—roughly 15 percent—share of total employment.

The bottom line for the discussion of the role that technologically-driven occupation trends have played in generating wage inequality is that occupational upgrading has been occurring for decades, through periods of both rising and falling wage inequality and through both rising and falling median real wage growth. In our view, this makes occupational employment shifts a poor candidate for explaining the rise in wage inequality since 1979. 

In our forthcoming paper, John Schmitt, Heidi Shierholz and I document these employment trends using data over the 1959 to 2007 period drawn from a Daron Acemoglu and David Autor (2011) paper and supplemented by our analysis of Current Population Survey data from 1979 onwards. These data are based on occupation shares of total employment but the trends are the same if one examines shares of total hours worked.

CEPR and Lawrence Mishel / January 15, 2013

Article Artículo

Three Years Later Round-up: Clinton Edition
Haiti marked the third anniversary of the 2010 earthquake on Saturday. The LA Times’ Tracy Wilkinson reported: In simple ceremonies Saturday in and around the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, President Michel Martelly laid a wreath at a mass grave and,

CEPR / January 15, 2013