I don’t see why; the government would create very blunt rules, while rules by negotiation would be more fitted to the workplace in question.
Stops them … organising …
Obviously the US is under the rule of the C’tan.
There’s also the issue of montoring compliance with labour laws. Local unions are much better placed to notice if businesses are cutting corners in defiance of the law and make sure that it gets official attention.
I don’t recall this being a big issue in in the Scandinavian countries, but I’m not an expert. Some union implementations are better than others, but again all I’m saying is that it’s not the clearly bad thing you’re talking like. Everything is tradeoffs. I’d note when the US had heavy unionization we didn’t remotely have the temporary employment silliness.
Structural problems are not the precipitating factor of the current unemployment bonanza, but in good times they are indeed a significant contributor to unemployment. We should deal with them to eliminate that issue, not because we expect it to provide a magic solution to current woes. It will make the job hunt easier for a subset of the population with useful skills in a useless location, and that’s never a bad thing.
In the 1990s during the boom the unemployment rate went to 4% and the population/employment ratio shot up, with virtually nothing extra in the way of job training or employment matching assistance. It doesn’t hurt, but it’s not remotely enough to put a dent in the problem.
This is Japan as well, fwiw.
If you have to apportion unemployment – and you do – then it seems to me that this is the best way to do it. I’ve been unemployed for significant periods at 27 and I’ve been unemployed for significant periods at 47 (with wife and kid). And believe me, the former was a thousand orders of magnitude easier. Job security meant squat to me in my twenties. But once one has a family, it is probably the most important thing in the world for 99.9% of the population. A labor system that subjects the young to significant possibilities of unemployment but which provide stable employment to those over 35 seems to me to be a feature rather than a bug, given the inevitability of some level of unemployment per se in the system.
Someone losing a year of employment at an early age takes a significant hit to their future earnings. Every additional year lost locks them lower down the totem pole. It’s also a lot harder to apply for a job when the only thing on your resume under professional experience is a blank space.
Someone with twenty years of experience and plenty of time spent developing savings, contacts and a fat resume is not in anything like the same boat.
Then there’s the actual issue. Young people cannot break into the system permanent side of the system because ironclad contracts are not being offered anymore. They’re unaffordable. So every time the business cycle swaps into the off position, they’re out of work. Why? Because those temp workers with big gaps in their resume are the easiest to fire, the least experienced and therefore the obvious firing targets. And because all that is true, nobody bothers to offer them training.
It is a vicious cycle, and it leans hardest on the most vulnerable folks.
Someone losing a year of employment at an early age takes a significant hit to their future earnings. Every additional year lost locks them lower down the totem pole.
How is that worse than someone later in life? I don’t see where you are coming from with this. Early on you aren’t going to make as much, it’s probably a job you won’t keep long and your benefits probably suck.
Raises on one’s salary history work similarly to compound interest. It’s not a perfect analogy, but it gets the idea across.
Think of it this way: The economy tanks. A 21 year old college graduate doesn’t get a job, and a 41 year old with a family is fired. Each is unemployed for a year. The college grad heads home to live with the parents, and loses out on $30k. The 41 year old loses out on $60k, and the loss of income precipitates a family crisis. Faced with this choice, you would want the 21 year old to spend the year unemployed. This is the conventional view of things, which mdowdle referenced, and which seems to be conscious government policy in a lot of countries.
However, studies suggests that the impacts of unemployment on the young are felt for decades, and cause a significant drop in life-long earning. The now-22 year old job seeker is seen as less competitive than a “fresh” graduate, so has to take a lower paying job, or a job with less advancement opportunities. Flash forward 20 years and the cumulative effects add up to a very large amount.
Thus, it may be that penalizing the young causes far more economic damage than penalizing the old. It depends on whether the average unemployed 40-year old “bounces back” faster than an unemployed 21 year old.
A quick Google search found this article on the subject:
Yeah there are oodles of studies on this. It’s way worse for young people to be out of the labor force. On the face of it it’s counter intuitive because :mortgage: but it turns out resumes can really bite you on the ass.
Goddamn but I am so glad I found a job
fuck all y’all old-ass motherfuckers
Is it the fact they are young and this happens to them or the fact that they joined the workforce in a downtime and therefore the income never catches up to those who start in the workforce during a good economy?
Which is the more important factor…the health of the economy at the time of the unemployment or the age at the time of the unemployment?
Does that make sense?..:)
Age of the worker matters more according to most studies, but if the economic climate is benign it’s less likely to really crush them.
Took me a long while to find work as a young person, and despite having better “stats” than most of my peers I’m in a worse job than those who didn’t get stuck in that loop, pay wise.
Catching up because eff yes bonuses, but if I had started a year earlier at this place I’d be making twice as much right now, easily. Why? I’d have the contacts to sell stuff already in place, I’d have benefits and I’d have all my certs done and the big ass raises that comes from having them.
Life.
Anyway it’s not easy for anyone to lose their job. It’s just that young people don’t really have much on their resume. It wasn’t easy to spin “FM for Canvassing Organization” as a professional gig, and taking out “Liquor Store Clerk” really hurt me on the years employed metric. All I really had were a couple of internships and some phony jobs for parents of friends in high school – as in, I worked someplace else and they gave me a nice professional sounding title for the rezzie when I fixed their computers.
I’d think it would be both. Because the young-person-in-a-bust can’t find work for an extended period of time (and therefore develop skills, work experience, etc) they aren’t the first pick for the jobs that are offered to those in boom times due to…exactly what we’re seeing now; lack of experience, lack of fine-honed skills you develop on the job, etc. Skills also atrophy or have the apperance of atrophying on a resume in such a layoff.
The young-person-in-a-boom has the time to get out of that first range of lower end employement and into a more advanced in the organization position. They avoid the first round of layoffs due to work skills, specific knowledge (if working in a knowledge industry) or training that the young-person-in-a-bust hasn’t had the chance to develop. If they are laid off, they have a resume of recent employement that would be more attractive to another company.
That’s just off the cuff from me; I’m sure that there are studies that are a lot more specific than my thoughts.
But none of this really refutes my point. The studies presented show that unemployment is hard on the young: in particular, it results in lower lifetime earnings and more difficulty entering the labour market. My point is not that employment is easy for the young, it is that it is arguably not as hard for the young as it is on the middle aged. This is a comparative issue, and none of the data mentioned above is comparative.
Reduction in lifetime earnings seems a minor point to me in this debate. The real issue is how is this reduction experienced? I have and will always have seriously reduced lifetime earning due to early unemployment, an initial career choice to study music, and then to become an academic rather than a professional. Doesn’t matter at all. For all that forgone lifetime income (and I’m talking here about much, much more than $100,000), I’m perfectly secure with what I have now. I would argue there are very important quality of life implications of unemployment at 20 vs. unemployment at 40 that are not at all captured in data on reduction in aggregate lifetime earnings.
As I understand it, re-entry into the workforce after a period of unemployment is also very difficult for a laid-off 40 year-old, and will generally result in a persistent reduction in income even after the new job is found, because the new job will invariably not pay as well as the old one. Also, lost one’s tenure, it becomes more difficult to get promoted, etc. I would also hypotheses that these are much more difficult to overcome – of move beyond – than the employability issues arising from unemployment at 20 – assuming an environment in which there is general job security for those who have entered the workforce. I believe that even at 30, you can enter the workforce at entry level and still have access to opportunities for career promotion. If you enter a new job at 40, that becomes much less likely.
And of course, none of the studies mentioned above looks at the effect of unemployment on others. How does a 40-year-old parent’s unemployment effect a child’s earning potential? How does it effect the public fisc vis-a-vis that of a 20 year old?
Volume.
This right here to me is the key paragraph. Everyone who buys stuff off the internet also has to pay for shipping. Or, if they aren’t paying for it, somebody else is and the cost needs to be accounted for somewhere. And considering how people buy cheap stuff online, shipping costs can double the cost of a purchase. Plus, being online means its easy to compare shipping costs. The workers aren’t paid poorly because management isn’t squeezing them. They are paid poorly because if the company doesn’t cut costs they will go out of business.
This is the sort of thing that is driving down the cost of goods, but is usually done overseas where a mind numbingly boring factory job is still preferable to the mind numbing boring farming job with less certainty in wage. Ultimately, the only solution is what happened in America in the post War years: a labor market that favors workers. Then a union could actually negotiate better wages.
PS) Ohio is not a “right to work” state, and unions (like most of the rust belt) are traditionally strong. However, the unions here and elsewhere have weakened considerably since the 80’s at least.
They can write it off!