Word: laborative
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MANN: I disagree with you. Labor economists know a lot about how to promote skills evolution in the face of change. We know a lot about re-employment. So there is a sense of understanding among the policy community. There is not that sense of urgency or desire to spend any money in the political community...
SLAUGHTER: Much of the discussion is breathlessly waiting for next month's unemployment report and seeing how many manufacturing jobs there are in Ohio and Florida. That is nowhere near sufficient to grapple with the sort of issues we've talked about. The median person in the U.S. labor force today has a high school diploma and about one year of post-high school education. That person is going to have a job, but how productive and how highly compensated is that job going to be? Maybe we could have tax cuts for less skilled Americans...
SLAUGHTER: One could start with the issue of How many H1-B visas are we going to issue? You want to ameliorate the pressures in the labor market, but you should also try to soften the impact, at least initially, of more workers arriving in the system who will compete with workers...
HIRA: I think Professor Slaughter doesn't understand fully how the H1-B is being utilized. Many of the Indian IT firms--their whole business model is about bringing in inexpensive foreign labor so they can underbid their U.S. rivals. This discussion is an important one, but it's all about how a U.S. firm will benefit from globalization. There's no guarantee these firms will actually hire U.S. workers to serve those markets. There's a fundamental shift in the bargaining power between workers and firms...
MANN: There are two sets of issues with respect to labor- market adjustment. One has to do with people who have lost their job in an area where there's no replacement. That has to be addressed through wage insurance, through unemployment insurance, through the portability of health care and pensions. So if you lose your job, you don't lose everything else with it. But there is a different problem: firms do not have an incentive to, say, take people who are programmers and train them to be systems-integration network engineers. We ought to have some kind...