mbs
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Max,
Thanks for passing on the comment on the "Willy Loman" piece in The Economist. I have a couple of reactions.
First, I was surprised that the Economist was interested in writing a piece --in the middle of "the best economy of the last 30 years"-- on continuing worker insecurity and job instability. The writer of the Loman piece must not read his own magazine much, given that he missed an article from February 21, 1998 (the most receont one on the topic that I remember seeing), written entirely to debunk the idea that job insecurity was on the rise. In addition, the view of the mainstream economists who work on this issue (Henry Farber of Princeton and David Neumark of Michigan State University, are the most prominent) is that job stability and job security are about the same now as they were 20 years ago.
Second, the information attributed to me in the article was not in quotes. While the statement isn't inaccurate, it is not the way that I would have made the point in my own words. One of several points I made to the reporter was that Farber and Neumark base their argument for relative job stability on the aggregate data, but they don't look separately at men and women, which tell a different story. A gender disaggregation reveals two things: (1) that, over the last 20 years, most measures of job security and stability have deteriorated markedly for men; and (2) that, over the same period, these same measures for women have improved, but from low levels to levels that are still far below those of men. To give one example, the share of men in the same job for 10 years or longer fell from 49.8% in 1979 to 40.0% in 1996; at the same time the share of women in the same job for ten years or longer "improved" from 29.1% to 30.3%.
Third, to the reporter's credit, he tracked down two indicators that show rising insecurity in the last few years (lay-off data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, up in 1999 versus 1998; an unnamed poll of 500,000 workers showing job anxiety three times higher in 1998 than in the 1980-81 recession -- I am a big skeptic of the new economy, but I find this second piece of evidence very hard to believe, actually). But, every other major data source on the issue of which I am aware shows improvements in the last two years. My own view is that these improvements are the standard improvements we see at or near the peak of a business cycle. Perhaps recent performance is even a little better than usual thanks to sustained, relatively low, aggregate unemployment. But, what we'd really like to use to measure job stability and job security is a measure that controls for the state of the business cycle and allows us to get at the underlying, structural, instability. If we had such a measure, it would probably show that structural instability is up. We have some imperfect measures that suggest this is the case. For example, during 1981-83, when the unemployment rate averaged 9.1%, 12.3% of all workers experienced a layoff or downsizing (remember, people can be unemployed for other reasons); in 1993-95 (the most recent year for which such data are available), when the average unemployment rate was a much lower 6.2%, 11.4% of all workers experienced at least one layoff or downsizing. I think that it was at about this point in my conversation with the reporter that I mentioned that, even in the middle of the current much-celebrated recovery, some instability and insecurity measures for men are still looking pretty sickly. As such, even the recent aggregate improvements in job stability and security depend pretty heavily on the long-term improvement in women's position relative to men. This last statement, I think, led to the nonquote in The Economist.
I can't speak to why the Economist reporter chose to present the information exactly as he did, but I hope that the above clarifies, for better or for worse, my own view on the issue.
John
-----Original Message----- From: Max Sawicky [SMTP:sawicky at epinet.org] Sent: Friday, June 18, 1999 1:57 PM To: jschmitt at epinet.org Subject: FW: "Why Willy Loman lives"
>From Doug Henwood's mailing list.
Care to respond lest your position
be mangled unrecognizably? I will
forward it back to the list.
max
-----Original Message----- From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com] On Behalf Of Doug Henwood Sent: Friday, June 18, 1999 11:06 AM To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Re: "Why Willy Loman lives"
Carl Remick quoted The Economist:
>> John Schmitt at the Economic Policy Institute points out that if you
exclude women (whose careers have become slightly more secure), many of the
standard
insecurity measures are still worsening. >>
** Not to nitpick or anything, but why should you exclude women? This is a very odd way of saying that women have been doing better in the labor market and men have been doing worse, which, in job security/tenure measures averages out to a rather flattish picture. I guess men are still the norm in this writer's eyes. Did Schmitt put it this way, or is it The Economist's spin?
Doug **