Posts tagged low-skilled workers
Who Loves Minimum Wage Laws? Kiosk Makers
July 3, 2024 // Average voters who might think they are helping downtrodden, exploited workers might mean well, but they should realize that they are actually enriching higher-skill workers (who don’t need the help as much), software developers, and people who own shares in ordering kiosk companies.
22 States Raised the Minimum Wage: What Does This Mean for Low-Skilled Workers?
January 12, 2024 // If an employer must pay someone $16 hourly, the new minimum wage in New York and California, whom will they pay? Would it be a higher-skilled college graduate or a less-skilled worker with only a high school diploma? You can deduce which hire is the safer option. When the cost of obtaining more education or skills is higher than the cost of relying on government unemployment benefits, dependence becomes the more appealing choice over labor-force participation.
Opinion: California’s minimum wage woes are a cautionary tale for the nation
January 10, 2024 // California politicians seem to have a penchant for doing whatever they can to reduce housing affordability and otherwise increase the cost of living in the state — high taxes, burdensome labor and environmental mandates, waste for boondoggles like the high-speed rail project and countless other laws and regulations. Then they attempt to be saviors by passing still more laws to benefit one group or another and alleviate the situation they have largely created.
Another Weirdness of the COVID Labor Market
September 2, 2022 // The early retirements problem came into view as pandemic unemployment “cleared” and the labor market returned to status quo ante. The 65-plus group accounts for between 50 percent and 100 percent of the decline in the population-to-employment ratio, amounting to .7 percent of the entire workforce, perhaps a million or so workers, and about half that number were among those who chose to hang up their cleats ahead of time. These early retirements are interacting with the overall market in some unique ways. In a normal recession, businesses tend to cut labor costs through automation. As the old jobs are eliminated, workers are “reallocated,” meaning they move into new occupations. The NBER study finds that the COVID-19 recession saw almost no reallocation except in low-skill leisure and hospitality occupations. In the meantime, the number of workers in professional occupations grew as a share of the labor market. This relative expansion of professional jobs was also accompanied by “downskilling” (i.e., the relaxation of educational and experience requirements reflected in help-wanted ads) as firms responded to the tight labor market by making it easier for less credentialed workers to qualify for openings further up the value chain.