Mark WeisbrotThe New York Times, 20 avril, 2017

Avril 2017, Mark Weisbrot, Lara Merling, Alexander Main et David Rosnick

Mark WeisbrotThe New York Times, April 20, 2017

Last month the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) announced that the (now defunct) American Health Care Act (AHCA) would have reduced off-budget spending by $5.9 billion in 2026. Off-budget spending, otherwise known as Social Security, isn’t mentioned in the bill once, so how could the AHCA affect its spending? The answer is that the bill, in CBO’s assessment, would have discouraged older workers from retiring or moving to part-time work and starting to collect Social Security benefits.

Under the Affordable Care Act, workers have the flexibility to obtain health insurance from the exchanges instead of relying on employer-provided plans. Without it, we can infer that CBO’s projected savings came as the result of 500,000^[1] older workers delaying their retirement, and therefore not collecting Social Security benefits in 2026.

April 2017, Mark Weisbrot, Lara Merling, Alexander Main, and David Rosnick

Dean Baker
Truthout, April 17, 2017

Paul Krugman used his column this morning to ask why we don't pay as much attention to the loss of jobs in retail as we do to jobs lost in mining and manufacturing. His answer is that in large part the latter jobs tend to be more white and male than the latter. While this is true, although African Americans have historically been over-represented in manufacturing, there is another simpler explanation: retail jobs tend to not be very good jobs.

The basic story is that jobs in mining and manufacturing tend to offer higher pay and are far more likely to come with health care and pension benefits than retail jobs. A worker who loses a job in these sectors is unlikely to find a comparable job elsewhere. In retail, the odds are that a person who loses a job will be able to find one with similar pay and benefits.

A quick look at average weekly wages can make this point. In mining the average weekly wage is $1,450, in manufacturing it is $1,070, by comparison in retail it is just $555. It is worth mentioning that much of this difference is in hours worked, not the hourly pay. There is nothing wrong with working shorter workweeks (in fact, I think it is a very good idea), but for those who need a 40 hour plus workweek to make ends meet, a 30-hour a week job will not fit the bill.

This difference in job quality is apparent in the difference in separation rates by industry. (This is the percentage of workers who lose or leave their job every month.) It was 2.4 percent for the most recent month in manufacturing. By comparison, it was 4.7 percent in retail, almost twice as high. (It was 5.2 percent in mining and logging. My guess is that this is driven by logging, but I will leave that one for folks who know the industry better.)

April 14, 2017 (Prices Byte)

The business media routinely feature stories about employers' difficulty in getting qualified workers. These pieces often leave economists scratching their heads, since the usual way to get better workers is to offer higher pay. And, the workers are almost invariably out there, most likely working for a competitor.

This means that if there were really shortages of workers with specific skills then we should see pay for workers with these skills rising rapidly. Since there is no major segment of the labor market where we see rapidly rising real wages, it is difficult to take the story of a skills shortage seriously.

This naturally brings us to ask questions about United Airlines and CEO pay because it is always interesting to ask what justifies the high pay at the top. Ostensibly, CEOs have compensation packages that run into the tens of millions a year because that is what you have to pay to attract and keep these extraordinarily talented individuals.

United's CEO, Oscar Munoz, is targeted to receive pay of $14 million this year, with a potential $500,000 bonus depending on customer satisfaction surveys. So we should assume that United has to pay this sort of money (roughly the pay of 1000 minimum wage workers) in order to attract a person with Mr. Munoz's skills.

While it would take more work than I am going to do just now to evaluate Mr. Munoz's overall performance for the company's shareholders (I'm ignoring the issue of the sort of corporate citizen United might be to its workers, customers, and the environment), his performance surrounding the forcible removal of Dr. David Dao from a United plane earlier this week hardly seems worth $14 million a year.

After 13 years and more than $7 billion spent, the United Nations Security Council voted today to extend the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) mandate for a final six months. By October 2017 the last of the 2,000 plus foreign troops are scheduled to depart Haiti – already down from a high of nearly 9,000 in 2010. But far from representing a complete withdrawal of the controversial mission, the Security Council also approved a successor mission – MINUJUSTH – composed of some 1,000 UN police officers that will stay on with a focus on strengthening the Haitian national police and the country’s justice system.

In an op-ed published in the Miami Herald yesterday, Lauren Carasik, a law professor and human rights expert, outlines the inherent contradictions with this new UN mission, and its focus on increasing access to justice in Haiti:

Nowhere is the United Nations’ lack of accountability more glaring than in Haiti. The U.N. Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) is responsible for causing a cholera epidemic that has killed thousands and for crimes, including sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA), that have largely gone unpunished.

…

Against the backdrop of its transgressions in Haiti, the U.N. is voting this week on withdrawing MINUSTAH, a move long demanded by many who deeply resent the harm inflicted by those sent to protect them. The U.N.’s new secretary-general, António Guterres, favors winding down the force in six months and replacing it with a leaner successor mission that will focus on rule of law and police development. Yet Guterres failed to reflect on how the U.N. can purport to strengthen Haiti’s institutions when its own conduct fails to satisfy bedrock principles of democracy, or whether the $346 million annual budget would be better spent repairing the organization’s tarnished cholera legacy instead.

But in its resolution approving the gradual withdrawal of MINUSTAH, cholera is barely mentioned. The resolution simply welcomes the UN’s “New Approach to Cholera in Haiti,” which is currently just 2% funded. As Carasik writes, “despite the anemic reception to his fundraising efforts, the Secretary-General is tabling a move to assess mandatory contributions in the face of stiff resistance from certain member states.” And reports indicate that certain member states also pushed to weaken the cholera-related language in the UNSC resolution. From a report in What's In Blue:

[T]here were some differences over how much to focus on the humanitarian situation, human rights and peacebuilding and on the Secretary-General’s new approach regarding cholera. It seems that France and the US pushed for a shorter and more streamlined text, and had reservations about including proposed language on cholera, while Brazil and other Latin American countries felt it was important to reflect some of the observations on human rights and humanitarian challenges and the importance of peacebuilding contained in the Secretary-General’s report.