Interesting perspective.... I don't agree with most of it, but an interesting perspective. The only reason the workers are "gaining leverage" is because the government is paying them to sit as home doing nothing. As soon as this ends... their "leverage" is over. Workers are gaining leverage over employers right before our eyes https://www.wral.com/workers-are-gaining-leverage-over-employers-right-before-our-eyes/19712420/ The relationship between U.S. businesses and their employees is undergoing a profound shift: For the first time in a generation, workers are gaining the upper hand. The change is broader than pandemic-related signing bonuses at fast-food places. Up and down the wage scale, companies are becoming more willing to pay a little more, to train workers, to take chances on people without traditional qualifications and to show greater flexibility in where and how people work. The erosion of employer power began during the low-unemployment years leading up to the pandemic and, given demographic trends, could persist for years. A record number of positions were open in March, according to federal data that goes back to 2000, and workers were voluntarily leaving their jobs at a rate that matches its historical high. Burning Glass Technologies, a firm that analyzes millions of job listings a day, found that the share of postings that say “no experience necessary” is up two-thirds over 2019 levels, while the share of those promising a starting bonus has doubled. People are demanding more money to take a new job. The “reservation wage,” as economists call the minimum compensation workers would require, was 19% higher for those without a college degree in March than in November 2019, a jump of nearly $10,000 a year, according to a survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Employers are feeling it: A survey of human resources executives from large companies conducted in April by The Conference Board, a research group, found that 49% of organizations with a mostly blue-collar workforce found it hard to retain workers, up from 30% before the pandemic. “Companies are going to have to work harder to attract and retain talent,” said Karen Fichuk, who as CEO of the giant staffing company Randstad North America closely tracks supply and demand for labor. “We think it’s a bit of a historic moment for the American labor force.” This recalibration between worker and employer partly reflects a strange moment in the economy. It is reopening, but many would-be workers are not ready to return to the job. Yet in key respects, the shift builds on changes already underway in the tight labor market preceding the pandemic, when the unemployment rate was 4% or lower for two straight years. That follows decades in which union power declined, unemployment was frequently high and employers made an art out of shifting work toward contract and gig arrangements that favored their interests over those of their employees. It would take years of change to undo those cumulative effects. But the demographic picture is not becoming any more favorable for employers eager to fill positions. Population growth for Americans between ages 20 and 64 turned negative last year for the first time in the nation’s history. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the potential labor force will grow a mere 0.3% to 0.4% annually for the remainder of the 2020s; the size of the workforce rose an average of 0.8% a year from 2000 to 2020. An important question for the overall economy is whether employers will be able to create conditions attractive enough to coax back in some of the millions of working-age adults not currently part of the labor force. Depending on your view of the causes, the end of expanded pandemic-era jobless benefits might have an effect too. Some businesses may need to raise prices or retool how they operate; others may be forced to close entirely. Higher wages are part of the story. The jobs report issued on Friday showed that average hourly earnings for nonmanagerial workers were 1.3% higher in May than two months earlier. Other than in a brief period of statistical distortions early in the pandemic, that is the strongest two-month gain since 1983. But wages alone aren’t enough, and firms seem to be finding it in their own best interest to seek out workers across all strata of society, to the benefit of people who have missed out on opportunity in the last few decades. “I’ve been doing this a long time and have never felt more excited and more optimistic about the level of creative investment on this issue,” said Bertina Ceccarelli, CEO of NPower, a nonprofit aimed at helping military veterans and disadvantaged young adults start tech industry careers. “It’s an explosive moment right now.” In effect, an entire generation of managers that came of age in an era of abundant workers is being forced to learn how to operate amid labor scarcity. That means different things for different companies and workers — and often involves strategies more elaborate than simply paying a signing bonus or a higher hourly wage. At the high end of the labor market, that can mean workers are more emboldened to leave a job if employers are insufficiently flexible on issues like working from home. It also means companies are thinking more expansively about who is qualified for a job in the first place. That is evident, for example, in the way Alex Lorick, a former South Florida nightclub bouncer, was able to become a mainframe technician at IBM. Lorick often worked a shift called “devil’s nine to five” — 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. — made all the more brutal when it was interspersed with day shifts. The hours were tough, but the pay was better than in his previous jobs, one at a retirement home and another serving food at a dog track. Yet it was a far cry from the type of work he had dreamed about in high school, when he liked computers and imagined making video games for a living. As a young adult, he took online classes in web development and programming languages, but encountered a Catch-22 many job seekers know well: Nobody wanted to hire a tech worker without experience, which meant he couldn’t get enough experience to be hired. College wasn’t for him. Hence the devil’s nine to five. Until late last year, that is. After months on unemployment during the pandemic, he heard from IBM, where he had once applied and been rejected for a tech job. IBM invited him to apply to an apprenticeship program that would pay him to be trained as a mainframe technician. Now 24, he completed his training this month and is beginning hands-on work in what he hopes is the start of a long career. “This is a way more stable paycheck, and more consistent hours,” Lorick said. “But the most important thing is that I feel like I’m on a path that makes sense and where I have the opportunity to grow.” Before Adquena Faine began an IBM apprenticeship to become a cloud storage engineer, she was driving for ride-hailing services to support herself and her daughter, dealing with the erratic income and sore back that came with it. “I really hate driving now,” she said. “I could feel the car vibrating even when I wasn’t in the car.” She had attended but not completed college, and served in the Air Force, but the information technology industry was new to her. “They were confident they could teach me what I needed to know,” she said. “It was intense, but I didn’t want to let myself down or my baby girl down.” The hiring of Faine and Lorick was part of a deliberate effort by IBM to rethink how it hires and what counts as a qualification for a given job. The apprenticeship program began in 2017, and thousands of people have moved through that and similar programs. Executives concluded that the qualifications for many jobs were unnecessarily demanding. Postings might require applicants to have a bachelor’s degree, for example, in jobs that a six-month training course would adequately prepare a person for. “By creating your own dumb barriers, you’re actually making your job in the search for talent harder,” said Obed Louissaint, IBM’s senior vice president for transformation and culture. In working with managers across the company on training initiatives like the one under which Lorick was hired, “it’s about making managers more accountable for mentoring, developing and building talent versus buying talent.” “I think something fundamental is changing, and it’s been happening for a while, but now it’s accelerating,” Louissaint said. Efforts like the one at IBM are, to some degree, a rediscovery of the value of investing in workers. “I do think companies need to relearn some things,” said Byron Auguste, CEO of Opportunity at Work, an organization devoted to encouraging job opportunities for people from all backgrounds. “A lot of companies, after the recessions in 2001 and 2008, dismantled their onboarding and training infrastructure and said that’s a cost we can’t afford. “But it turns out, you actually do need to develop your own workers and can’t just depend on hiring.” Any job involves much more than a paycheck. Some good jobs don’t pay much, and some bad jobs pay a lot. Ultimately, every position is a bundle of things: a salary, yes, but also a benefits package; a work environment that may or may not be pleasant; opportunities to advance (or not); flexible hours (or not). Statistics agencies collect pretty good data on the aspects of jobs that are quantifiable, especially salary and benefits, and not such great data on other dimensions of what makes a job good or bad. But it is clear, as the labor market tightens, that people routinely favor those less quantifiable advantages. That has become vividly apparent in the restaurant industry, which is facing extreme labor shortages. “Traditionally in restaurants, it was: ‘Hey, this is the job. If you want these hours, great; if not, we’ll find somebody else,’” said Christopher Floyd, owner of the hospitality industry recruitment firm Capital Restaurant Resources in Washington. “Now employers have to say, ‘You have the qualities we’re looking for; maybe we can work out a more flexible schedule that works for you.’ Employers are becoming much more cognizant that yes, it’s about money, but also about quality of life.” Whether it’s a bigger paycheck, more manageable hours, or a training opportunity offered to a person with few formal credentials, the benefits of a tight labor market and shifting leverage can take many forms. What they have in common — no matter how long this shift toward workers lasts, or how powerful a force it turns out to be — is that it puts the employee in the position that matters most: the driver’s seat. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
'Lockdown' states like California did better economically than 'looser' states like Florida, new COVID data shows https://www.aol.com/news/lockdown-states-california-did-better-153025114.html Like seemingly everything else in America, the COVID-19 pandemic has sparked its fair share of bitter, polarizing debates: over masks, over distancing, over vaccines. Lockdowns are no exception. One assumption many Americans seem to make is that the more a government limits gatherings, mandates masks, restricts business activity and advises residents to stay at home, the more economic damage it will do. Among the loudest of these voices is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican who raised his national profile by allowing bars and restaurants to operate at full indoor capacity during America’s horrific holiday surge, then effectively banned mask mandates once Florida started to recover — all in the name of supporting business. “She’s a lockdown lobbyist,” DeSantis recently said in reference to Democrat Nikki Fried, one of his 2022 gubernatorial opponents. Speaking at a New Smyrna Beach restaurant, DeSantis said Fried “would have had this business shuttered for the whole year. They would be out of business if Fried were governor.” Yet for much of the past year, some experts have quietly advanced a counterargument: that economic activity is mainly affected by the rising and falling severity of the pandemic itself — not the relative strictness of the measures implemented to mitigate it. In fact, these experts argued, nonpharmaceutical interventions, or NPIs — a set of 20 government responses such as business closures, mask mandates and stay-at-home advisories that Oxford University rates according to stringency — can have an economic upside. The more the virus seems to be under control, the more eager people will be to participate in the economy. Last week, this argument got a boost with the publication of a new report by economists at the University of California, Los Angeles. According to the latest quarterly UCLA Anderson Forecast, not only did big states with more stringent COVID measures end 2020 with fewer infections per capita, they also tended to post better economic growth numbers last year than states with fewer restrictions. In other words, California’s economy actually fared better than Florida’s. Yahoo News: Is it now fair to say that so-called lockdown states performed better economically than so-called looser states during the 2020 pandemic? Jerry Nickelsburg: That is correct. We generally view economic performance through the lens of gross domestic product. On average, GDP declined in 2020, and it declined everywhere. But those declines were smaller in states with more stringent nonpharmaceutical interventions than states with less stringent NPIs. That’s the opposite of the conventional wisdom. In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is telling voters, in effect, “I saved the economy by opening bars and banning masks.” What made you suspect that the prevailing narrative — this idea that there’s a trade-off between public health and the health of the economy — might be wrong? It was something that we started to see in Scandinavia. It's something we saw in the 1918-19 influenza pandemic as well. It seemed to be more than just a fluke. When you say “something,” what do you mean? The evidence suggested that policies that are good for people’s health during a pandemic — like NPIs — are not necessarily bad for the economy. There might even be a positive correlation. But early on, we did not have any 2020 pandemic data to answer that question. So it was open for debate. But now we have that data. Now we do. Yahoo News spoke with economist Jerry Nickelsburg, the director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast, to find out more. Walk us through what it says. The states that were considered for this analysis are basically the states that produce most of the U.S. GDP — states with a population of 5 million or greater. We found two things. First, California had more stringent interventions and a lower infection rate than either Texas or Florida, two states to which it’s often compared. Yet California also performed better with respect to GDP than either Texas or Florida. Second, the same pattern showed up across all big states: On average, the ones with more stringent interventions had both better health outcomes and better economic outcomes. How do we know this has anything to do with COVID restrictions? Couldn’t it just be a coincidence — that some state economies were better suited to weather this particular storm, regardless of how stringent their interventions were? To be sure, states have different economic compositions. But that’s one reason we didn’t include small states like North Dakota. Even though it had very poor health outcomes, North Dakota can do very well in terms of GDP when oil prices go up, because of the dominance of petroleum production in the value of goods and services produced there. In contrast, large states typically have more diverse economies. And when you line them up according to their interventionist policies, you find that states that intervened more heavily tended to have fewer COVID cases per capita and smaller declines in GDP. There were two outliers: New York and Michigan. Both had stringent NPIs but lost a lot of ground in terms of GDP. Why? Michigan was all about supply chain interruption in the automobile industry. This had nothing to do with interventions. Factories were forced to close for part of the year. What about New York? In the report you write, “Perhaps the economic performance [there] has more to do with remote work than the pandemic per se.” We don’t know the answer. It may be that because of “work from home,” many New York employees were working from New Jersey or Connecticut or even Florida, and spending their money there. Someone like Gov. DeSantis would disagree with your conclusions, and one argument he would make is that if restrictions are so great, then why is California’s unemployment rate 8.3 percent while Florida’s is 4.3 percent? Is that a fair comparison? It’s true that if unemployment is your metric, California has a very high rate relative to Florida. But people who dropped out of the labor force because of COVID — either because they contracted it or because of concern for themselves or their families — are not counted in the unemployment rate. Likewise, there’s evidence that states that opened up earlier may have reduced their employees’ hours because fewer people were coming through the doors; the reduction in hours per employee was 4.2 percent in Texas versus 1.1 percent in California. So unemployment is actually quite complicated, and you can’t really rely on it. [The UCLA report also suggests that “the answer lies in the structure of the California economy.” In California, “sectors with a high degree of human contact” — that is, “leisure and hospitality, education, retail trade, and health care and social services” — contributed only “0.3 percentage points to annual GDP growth over the decade preceding the pandemic.” But last year, “they accounted for 75 percent of the state’s job losses.” Meanwhile, the sectors driving growth in California — “information, professional and business services, manufacturing and financial services” — weren’t hit nearly as hard. That helps to explain the discrepancy between the state’s unemployment rate and its overall economic performance. UCLA expects “many of those lost jobs to return.”] What about 2021? California has kept many of its restrictions in place for the first half of the year. Florida has not. Yet due to vaccination, cases have been going down in both states for months now. Does that change anything? The data we have for 2020 is pretty conclusive. The data for the 1918-19 pandemic is pretty conclusive. The data for Scandinavia is pretty conclusive. So far, the data says that with NPIs, there's no trade-off between better health outcomes and better economic outcomes. I don’t expect that to change.
1 week from reopening, California seeing one of country's lowest COVID-19 rates https://abc7.com/health/california-seeing-one-of-countrys-lowest-covid-19-rates/10764549/ One week away from the state reopening, California is boasting one of the lowest COVID-19 rates in the country. The Golden State is tied with Nebraska for the third lowest among all states. According to the CDC, California's seven-day case rate per 100,000 people is 11. Vermont comes in first with a 6.9 per 100,000 rate, while South Dakota is second at 9.2 California is planning to lift restrictions on capacity at businesses and limits on other activities on June 15.
States That Took COVID Seriously Did Better Economically Than States That Didn’t https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/covid-outcomes-states/ While Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and other GOP shooting stars have spread their names cross country by boasting about supposedly saving businesses through largely ignoring a pandemic that’s killed 600,000 Americans, a pair of new studies indicate that states which mandated masks, limited gatherings, and ordered store closures have done better economically than the ones that freewheeled it. According to Yahoo News, an Oxford University report that rates government non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) by stringency, along with UCLA’s latest quarterly Anderson Forecast, reveal that “lockdown” states ended 2020 with better economic numbers than states that chose a “looser” response to the crisis. The studies found that the more people perceived the virus as being under control, the more readily they participated in the economy. “On average, [gross domestic product] declined in 2020, and it declined everywhere,” Anderson Forecast director Jerry Nickelsburg tells Yahoo. “But those declines were smaller in states with more stringent non-pharmaceutical interventions than states with less stringent NPIs.” Nickelsburg said that evidence supporting the idea that policies which are good for people’s health are also good for the economy dates back to the 1918 influenza pandemic, but that early in 2020 researchers lacked sufficient data to counter arguments from people like DeSantis that letting businesses do whatever struck their fancy was best. But after analyzing states that produce the most GDP—those with populations of 5 million or more—the evidence is in. “California had more stringent interventions and a lower infection rate than either Texas or Florida, two states to which it’s often compared,” Nickelsburg said. “Yet California also performed better with respect to GDP than either Texas or Florida. Second, the same pattern showed up across all big states: On average, the ones with more stringent interventions had both better health outcomes and better economic outcomes.” Two states bucked this trend, however, with New York and Michigan enforcing strict NPIs yet still ending up with poor showings financially. “Michigan was all about supply chain interruption in the automobile industry,” Nickelsburg told Yahoo. “This had nothing to do with interventions. Factories were forced to close for part of the year.” New York’s situation, he admits, is harder to explain. “We don’t know the answer,” Nickelsburg said. “It may be that because of ‘work from home,’ many New York employees were working from New Jersey or Connecticut or even Florida, and spending their money there.” As for why California’s unemployment rate is 8.3 percent while Florida’s is 4.3, Nickelsburg explained that people who dropped out of the job market due to COVID-19 aren’t counted in unemployment numbers, adding that “there’s evidence that states that opened up earlier may have reduced their employees’ hours because fewer people were coming through the doors; the reduction in hours per employee was 4.2 percent in Texas versus 1.1 percent in California. So unemployment is actually quite complicated, and you can’t really rely on it.”
Covid Cases Down? Ace Don't Care, He diggin on the Virtue Signaling Power Trip He gets to pull with his good ol Louisville Slugger, LOL. Skyler is Lucky that he is in LLLiberal Seattle. They are SSSoo thoughtful kind and trustworthy. Wait, the new liberal doesn't seem like the Old School Liberal Aw who gives a shite, Want a Mask Pal? https://www.news.com.au/finance/bus...y/news-story/8390b46274f1cbf3c2ac3f5d9ae17f0e Seattle Band Macklemore Plays Seattle Favorite Thrift Store! 1.5 Billion Views. He Rocks A Mask, fo sho!
Can I just say that I hope we keep the outside dining and closed off streets in downtown areas. If anything good came from this whole mess it’s opening downtowns to pedestrians creates a great atmosphere.
Why Did Tougher COVID Restrictions Help State Economies? An Economist Unravels the False Choice Between Business and Public Health https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/...ited-states-economy-restrictions/ideas/essay/ In April 2020, with the pandemic in full swing, the Economist published: “A Grim Calculus: COVID-19 presents stark choices between life, death and the economy.” Soon Americans were blaming the lockdowns for recession and, in the words of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, “the destruction of millions of lives across America… without any corresponding benefit in COVID mortality.” Before the end of the year, some states, notably Texas, were ending COVID restrictions with the goal of improving their economic activity. Now that 2020 is mercifully in the past, we have data (from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis) to evaluate the “grim calculus” in each state. And looking at that data—especially for large states, which have more diversified economies—the results may surprise. It’s hard to find any real trade-off between COVID lockdowns and decreased economic activity. If anything, we find the opposite. First, let’s step back and look at larger state data. Of those states that performed better economically than the U.S. as a whole in 2020, the state of Washington, with greater than average COVID restrictions, took first place. Then came three less COVID-stringent states—Arizona, Colorado and Georgia—followed by three more stringent states—North Carolina, Maryland, and Virginia. Then, in eighth place, came California, one of the most stringent states. After California, only three other states outperformed the country economically—Texas, Indiana, and Florida, all less stringent. Across these 11 states it is hard to find a trade-off; states with more COVID restrictions did well economically and those with fewer restrictions also did well. And if we look beyond those 11 states to all states, we find a striking pattern: States with more stringent interventions had on average better economic outcomes and better health outcomes. Is this just a statistical anomaly? The answer seems to be no. One reason to be confident of the result is to look at other countries. Consider, for example, Sweden, well-known for having few stringent COVID measures. In 2020, Sweden had worse health outcomes than the similar Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway, and Finland. At the same time, its economic outcomes during the pandemic were no better than any of its healthier neighbors. The finding also fits with history. A 2008 Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis survey of the 1918 influenza pandemic found that St. Louis, which took the flu more seriously and opened up later, had better economic and health outcomes than Philadelphia, a city that opened up sooner. States with more stringent interventions had on average better economic outcomes and better health outcomes. Is this just a statistical anomaly? The answer seems to be no. Similarly, 2020 research into the 1918 pandemic found that cities with more stringent interventions had better employment gains and better health outcomes. What explains this seemingly strange but persistent result? The power of government signaling. When a state indicates through policy and pronouncements that it takes the pandemic seriously enough to impose measures (sometimes extreme) to control the spread of the disease and protect public health, it is sending a message to its citizens. Part of that message is about businesses. The state is saying that there are protocols in place to make open businesses as safe as possible, and were that not possible, the businesses would be closed. But when a state indicates through policy, as Sweden did, that individuals should make a choice as to what they do during a pandemic and that the government will not choose for them, it sends a different signal. It is saying, “Citizens, you are on your own, choose wisely.” So, while an open business will be busier than a closed one, the open businesses are likely to do better in a place with more stringent restrictions. Does this show up in data? Yes, in some ways. Using OpenTable’s data for the pandemic, a decline in the number of diners was more dramatic for restaurants and bars in California than Texas. However, for those individual businesses were open, hours worked by employees fell by only 1.5 percent in California versus an 8.9 percent decline in Texas. But this is simply cherry picking two states. The decline in the number of diners in Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Ohio was comparable to that in Florida, Georgia, and Missouri even though the former were closer to California in restrictions and the latter closer to the Swedish approach. The retail sector data paint a similar picture. For the same large states mentioned above, there is no significant correlation between changes in retail sales and the stringency of COVID interventions. A similar analysis of retail purchases by type of store also shows no correlation between interventions and the volume of sales. And, for the smallest 10 states, the same result holds true. People headed to online platforms to purchase goods at about the same rate regardless of the stringency of interventions. The bottom line is that people respond to the information they have and the signals they receive from their government. Clearly, business closures increase unemployment in affected sectors. But there is no evidence to suggest that closures and other public health interventions have led to worse economic outcomes. So, the trade-off, such as it is, must be between sectors directly impacted by interventions and, in states and countries with fewer interventions, voluntary lower demand and more work absenteeism due to higher overall infection rates. Knowing all this, you might still believe that the freedom to choose is valuable enough to pay the societal and health costs of that freedom. But empirically it is not a trade-off between health and economic outcomes. It is a trade-off between the freedom to choose and public health.