The low-wage labor market in the U.S. presents a number of
challenges for workers. For many, minimum wage jobs don’t provide
higher than a poverty level income. Another challenge is that
many low-wage jobs come with uncertainty in scheduling and hours,
which makes it difficult to get the training and education it
takes to get better jobs. Learn more here about the low-wage
labor market.
Ken Jacobs moderates this policy discussion and Q&A on
raising labor standards at the local level. Jacobs is the
Chair of the UC Berkeley Labor Center, where he has been a
Labor Specialist since 2002.
In this Keynote presentation, Paul Osterman discusses the
low-wage labor market and policies that affect low-wage workers.
Osterman is the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) Professor
of Human Resources and Management at the M.I.T. Sloan School of
Management as well as a member of the Department of Urban
Planning at M.I.T.
How can we explain the low rate of employment in the U.S.? This
paper documents a decline in demand for job skills since
2000 even as the supply of highly educated workers continues to
grow.
Official measures of poverty may not capture the difficulties
afflicting low-wage workers, since households can still
experience material hardship while not considered poor by
official measures. From a survey of front-line service workers,
we find that material hardship is associated with higher levels
of self-reported depression and overall poorer mental health.
This suggests that the mental health of low-wage workers may
benefit from laws that not only increase earnings but also
facilitate income stability. Low-wage workers may also benefit
from programs that directly address material hardship.
In this podcast, Harry Holzer and Center Director Ann Stevens
discuss how colleges have taken on the role of building the U.S.
labor force. In March, 2015, Holzer visited the center as a
Visiting Scholar to present the seminar “Building Labor Market
Skills among Disadvantaged Americans.”
With unauthorized youth at the forefront of immigration reform
discourse and policy proposals, understanding the diversity of
their profiles and experiences is necessary to create holistic
immigration policies.
In this April, 2014 seminar, Visiting Scholar David Autor
presents his new work about the difference in achievement and
other outcomes between boys and girls.
Some policy analysts, policymakers and scholars argue that
low-wage workers should “work their way out of poverty” by
acquiring the human capital that would enable them to leave
poverty-level jobs.
In the recent recession, unemployment nearly doubled to 9.5
percent by mid-2009. This figure is powerful in and of
itself, but does not tell the whole story.
For an extended period now, U.S. farms have enjoyed an abundance
of workers from Mexico who work for stable or decreasing real
wages. However, since 2008 the overall number of these farm
workers, both these working in the U.S. and those who remain in
Mexico, has shrunk substantially.
Those who come to the United States looking for work compete with
some groups of native-born workers but complement others. Since
wages and the local poverty rate play a part in how many arrive,
it is a challenge to quantify the effect they in turn have on
both, and whether they push native workers below the poverty
line.
