...but not a fair day’s wage.
America's labor market really boomed in 2014. In fact there were 3 million more people in work than a year earlier. According to a recent study reported in The Economist, the ratio of job seekers to actual job openings fell "from a peak of seven to one in 2009 to two to one in November 2014." Why is this? Or, What caused this?
In a fascinating piece of research from the non-partisan National Bureau of Economic Research, the failure of congress to....
In short, it can be said that the job market is hot because of a cold-hearted Republican reform.
In the new study Marcus Hagedorn and his colleagues, look at over 1,000 counties that border each other but belong to different states. When counties are so close together, they assume, their economies will be pretty similar. Transport, climate and skills will not differ much (that's an important conclusion). But the benefits could have been very different. In December 2013, for instance, people in Fairfax County, Virginia made do with 40 weeks of benefits; people in those in nearby Montgomery County, Maryland could get 63. Since the reform limited benefits to 26 weeks in almost all states, it hit Montgomery County harder.
Here's the conclusion: Employment growth in 2014 was higher in counties that saw bigger declines in the duration of benefits. Overall, the study authors estimate that the 1.8 million extra jobs (about 2/3 of the total) suggests that the Republicans were right--up to a point.
Interpretive problem: Only a minority of the new jobs were filled by people moving off unemployment benefit. Some 1 million were taken by people who were previously not in the labor force. That may be because without benefits to rely on, workers were prepared to toil for less. Employers created more jobs to take advantage of lower wages. With vacancy notices popping up everywhere, more people who had given up looking for work decided to try again.
Very few people, including congressmen, predicted these results. The Economist (that bastion of economic and capitalistic writers) stated clearly that there is still plenty of evidence that making unemployment benefits too stingy is a bad idea, especially when an economy hits the skids. If people feel forced to take the first job that comes their way, they are unlikely to pick the one in which they are most productive. But when the labor market is improving, cutting them may give it an extra spurt.
A caveat
Though unemployment has been pushed down, real wages have not budged since 2007. Indeed, the whole century has been tough on wages so far. These days nearly all the benefits go to people at the top of the income ladder. In contrast, wages grew in the 1950s for a number of reasons. Norms of fairness and internal equity were important. These norms emphasized the "living" or "family" wage. Unions and labor movements emphasized that everyone should be paid enough to live on. Most significantly, business leaders embraced those norms.
As James Surowieki has written: The fact that the benefits of economic growth in the postwar era were widely shared had a lot to do with the assumption that companies were responsible not only to their shareholders but also to their workers. That's why someone like Peter Drucker, the dean of management theorists, could argue that no company's C.E.O. should be paid more than twenty times what its average employee earned. These ideas have obviously been relegated to the dustbin by today’s corporations.
Furthermore, poor employee wages aren't because of company income. Corporate America has done just fine for the past five years. So have execs and shareholders. But company norms today emphasize paying workers as little as possible and absolutely no more than that. Hopefully the current preoccupation with inequality and the shrinking middle class can finally reach Corporate America. It needs to do that.
For the center Left and Right
If my background and commitments were only political, I'd find these stingy benefits more than a little frustrating. Like some of my Democratic friends and crazies, I'd want to reject the science out of hand.
Fortunately, I've also got a fairly thorough theological background to help make sense out of the current perspective. Like that so-called "RINO (Republican in name only)," David Brooks, I inevitably turn to Reinhold Niebuhr, that brilliant public and theologically informed intellectual of the twentieth century. Niebuhr was not only a superb theologian, he was also a political writer, fascinated by human nature and human society. Indeed, issues of justice and inequality were central to his thinking seventy years ago.
Niebuhr’s interest in human nature and history grew out of his experience in the pastorate. As a pastor in Detroit in the 'thirties, he and Henry Ford had numerous public and highly conflicted interactions. Niebuhr solidly rejected the liberal faith of historical progress as well as the rampant confidence in human reason. At that time, both commitments were widely held by politicians, scientists, educators and the general public. But the crises of WWI and the first recession challenged those beliefs. Later, as a faculty member and biblical theologian at Union Theological Seminary as well as a public intellectual, his writings regularly appeared not only in Detroit newspapers but around the nation. He and his colleague, Harry Emerson Fosdick, were widely read and respected.
Niebuhr's work is "political," not "individualistic." It differs significantly from today's popular Christianity, including Evangelicalism as well as extreme conservative politicos. But he also understood that human nature and society are unintelligible without the biblical realities. So Niebuhr asked how society works and why and how men and women behave as they do, and what sort of hopes there are for justice.
He seems to say that sin appears in its worst forms in Christianity and especially in the profoundest points of Protestant piety. But it's his understanding of organizations--business, religious and governmental--that is most useful here. Relationships between groups (employees, employers, companies, unions), he concluded, are predominately political. To him, power, self-interest and organizational hubris characterize all group relationships.
Thus, he concluded that groups will never respond to reason or persuasion. For Niebuhr, the real cause of social inertia, of today's inequality, lower wages and today's business practices is "predatory self-interest." He believes that the only way to deal with injustice is by conflict and challenges to power. In Niebuhr’s thinking, powerful individual morality is the path to overcoming social immorality.
James Surowiecki's article on inequality describes how the CEO of Aetna takes on corporate injustice in his home turf, dealing constructively with the problems of financial inequality. It’s a superb example of an individual, a CEO, challenging business norms. That was the major approach to organizational hubris that Niebuhr expected and hoped for.
To paraphrase Niebuhr, it’s going to have to be a culture’s powerful individuals taking on society to bring about needed changes—like wage inequality. Indeed, the notion of powerful individuals underlay Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s challenge to Nazism during WWII. We are going to need more of those “challengers” to deal with the problems of inequality our nation faces today. And some of these leaders, like Bonhoeffer, may have to face at least “political” death.