Word: labor
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Thwarted ambition is not the only problem. One of the dirty little secrets of Spain's boom years was the number of people Spanish firms employed on casual contracts. In an effort to make its labor market more flexible, the country has the highest rate of temporary jobs in the European Union: one in three. The great majority of those "trash contracts," as they're called by locals, go to the young, making them the easiest (read: least expensive) workers to fire. None of this is new. Young people have complained of being mileuristas since Europe adopted the common currency...
...waiting. Last year, a police shooting of a 15-year-old boy in Athens triggered weeks of riots by Greek youth. Some commentators attributed the eruption to anarchist groups, but, as elsewhere in Europe, structural flaws are just as much to blame. "In Greece, all flexibility in the labor market comes from young workers and the evolution of their wages is completely flat, while it continues to rise for people in their 40s or 50s," explains Philippe Askenazy, researcher at the Paris School of Economics. "The Greek problem stemmed from the fact that prospects for young people are more negative...
...youth unemployment across the E.U. is significantly higher (17% for those 25 and under) than in the general population (7.6%), some countries are more vulnerable than others. German companies tend to hire workers at an early age; French and Spanish firms prefer temporary contracts to get around sometimes draconian labor laws. "The social crisis is more pronounced [in France and Spain] because their citizens believe policy should create more employment. But in a downturn, it leads to a rapid increase in just the opposite," says Askenazy...
Getting Students Ready to Work The 1,200 community colleges in the U.S. are especially suited to helping students adapt to a changing labor market. While four-year universities have the financial resources to lure top professors and students, they are by nature slow-moving. Community colleges, on the other hand, are smaller and able to tack quickly in changing winds. They often partner with local businesses and can gin up continuing-education courses midsemester in response to industry needs, getting students in and out and ready to work - fast...
...people building the F-22s need the jobs they generate. In the past week, three labor groups whose members help assemble the planes - the AFL-CIO, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers and the United Steelworkers - have urged lawmakers to keep them in production. With F-22 plants and suppliers spread across 44 states, there's a lot of support on Capitol Hill for keeping it in production. Senator Saxby Chambliss, the Georgia Republican who has thousands of constituents working on the planes at the Lockheed-Martin plant in Marietta, wants to keep those voters employed. He solicited...