Word: laborators
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...Labor Conundrum The speed of America's now historic employment contraction reflects how puzzling this economic slide has been. Recall that the crisis has included assurances from the chairman of the Federal Reserve that it was over when in fact it was just getting started and a confession from a former Fed chairman that much of what he thought was true for decades now appears to be wrong. Nowhere is this bafflement clearer than in the area of employment. (See 10 things to buy during the recession...
...When compiling the "worst case" for stress-testing American banks last winter, policymakers figured the most chilling scenario for unemployment in 2009 was 8.9% - a figure we breezed past in May. From December 2007 to August 2009, the economy jettisoned nearly 7 million jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's a 5% decrease in the total number of jobs, a drop that hasn't occurred since the end of World War II. The number of long-term unemployed, people who have been out of work for more than 27 weeks, was the highest since the BLS began...
...America now faces the direst employment landscape since the Depression. It's troubling not simply for its sheer scale but also because the labor market, shaped by globalization and technology and financial meltdown, may be fundamentally different from anything we've seen before. And if the result is that we're stuck with persistent 9%-to-11% unemployment for a while - a range whose mathematical congruence with that other 9/11 is impossible to miss - we may be looking at a problem that will define the first term of Barack Obama's presidency the way the original 9/11 defined George...
...flameout of 1930s magnitude - Larry Summers made his reputation as an employment theorist. Summers is the nephew of two Nobel economists and was regarded as the smartest undergrad anyone knew, but as he surveyed his research options 30 years ago, he settled on the then relatively unsexy specialty of labor. The subject tickled his sense of skepticism. "The view that was taking hold at that time, a view that unemployment wasn't a terribly serious problem, was importantly wrong," Summers says. "I thought if you could have areas where there was long-term substantial unemployment, then that raised some questions...
Cash for Clunker Careers What to do? If your goal is to create jobs, you have two choices - and one painful fact - to confront. The painful fact is that the 1930s option, to have the government directly employ millions of people in labor fronts, is not an option today. "There's no way to create real jobs using this approach," says Harvard professor Roberto Mangabeira Unger. In the 1930s, you could throw 10,000 people with shovels at dam or road projects. Today the work of 10,000 shovels is done by a few machines...