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Workers

Reducing Unemployment with Work-Sharing

With today's news that jobless claims are up, Dean Baker points out that "employers are already hiring more than 4 million workers a month. The problem is that roughly 4 million workers a month are also leaving their jobs, half voluntarily and half involuntarily."

So while it's important to reduce jobless claims, the unemployment rate would also be lowered by working on the other side of the jobs equation -- by preventing some of the 2 million layoffs that happening every month.

This is where the idea of work-sharing comes in.  As the NY Times noted in a recent article on Germany's quick rebound from the recession,"A vast expansion of a program paying to keep workers employed, rather than dealing with them once they lost their jobs, was the most direct step taken in the heat of the crisis,"

CEPR and Nicole Woo / August 20, 2010