December 17, 2010
Reuters decided to abandon evidence-based reporting in a news story that told readers that the United States is suffering from “structural” unemployment. The use of the term “structural” is important because it implies that the main reason that people are unemployed is that there is a mismatch between skills and the available jobs. The alternative explanation, is that we just need more demand in the economy to drastically increase employment levels.
There are certain pieces of evidence that economists would look to as evidence of structural unemployment. For example, there should be high rates of job openings, which would suggest that there are sectors of the economy or regions of the country in which employers are having difficulty finding workers. In fact, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show the job opening rate at 2.5 percent. This is above the 1.9 percent low hit last year, but only slightly higher than the 2.3 percent low from the last recession. It is well below the 3.4 percent pre-recession rate.
If the economy’s main problem is structural unemployment then there also should be sectors where wages are rising rapidly as firms are forced to compete for an inadequate supply of skilled workers. There is no major sector of the economy where wages are rising substantially more than the rate of inflation.
If the main problem is structural unemployment then we should also expect to see sectors where workers are putting in large numbers of hours. The reason is that employers cannot find enough workers so they pay over-time wages and other premiums to get the available workers to put in more time. Again, there is no major sector of the economy where average weekly hours has even risen to its pre-recession level.
In short, this article presents no evidence whatsoever that the U.S. economy is suffering from structural unemployment. The focus of the article is the decline in the manufacturing industry, and especially the auto industry, in the Midwest. However, there are always declining sectors of the economy. The question is whether these sectors are large enough and the workers in these sectors sufficiently ill-prepared for other lines of work to lead to structural unemployment in an otherwise growing economy. This lengthy piece provides no evidence to suggest that this is the case.
Remarkably, in a piece that includes many references to international competition, there is no discussion whatsoever of the value of the dollar. In a system of floating exchange rates, like what we currently have, a large trade deficit is supposed to adjust through a decline in the value of a country’s currency. Such adjustment has not happened in the case of the United States due to a deliberate policy of both the United States (in the Clinton administration) and some of our trading partners in keeping the value of the dollar up.
The piece also includes the bizarre assertion that manufacturing workers in the United States are uniquely unable to compete internationally. In fact, our more highly educated workers, like doctors, lawyers, and accountants are even less competitive with their counterparts in the developing world. However, professionals have the political power to sustain and even increase the barriers to foreign competition. By contrast, U.S. trade policy has been quite explicitly focused on subjecting U.S. manufacturing workers to such competition.
The article also seriously misrepresents the experience of Germany, its model of a successful wealthy country. While it did have substantial reforms of its labor market, it did not have a long period of double-digit unemployment as this piece implies. Germany also did not have sharp declines in wages. Compensation for manufacturing workers continued to rise over the last decade and is currently almost 50 percent higher than in the United States.
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