Monday, November 18, 2013

Lit review #5

Mishel, Lawrence, Ruy A. Teixeira, and Washington, DC. Economic Policy Inst. "The Myth Of The Coming Labor Shortage: Jobs, Skills, And Incomes Of America's Workforce 2000." (1991): ERIC. Web. 18 Nov. 2013.
This article was written as a rebuttal to the Workforce 2000 report by Johnston and Kicker in 1987 which gave speculation into the future of the american labor market in regards to labor shortages.  This article uses Bureau of Labor Statistics to analyse and predict labor market trends.  Though this article is out of date and many of their predictions are wrong, this article helps me with my research in a few ways.  It provides an interesting view on the labor market and offers many interesting solutions to them. "This is because the focus on and overstatement of the increasing number of professional and technical jobs has led to an overemphasis on college education. In fact, even an optimistic view of the labor market suggests that, at most, 30 percent of the future labor force will need a college degree, up from about 25 percent in the mid-1980s. Moreover, employment projections suggest that there will be a surplus of college graduates" (Mishel 7).  This idea of college coupled with skilled labor is, as of now, an inefficient idea but it does interact nicely with the idea of making the process one system like in Europe.  His productions of necessary levels of education are also highly correct and highlight an issue rarely discussed anymore. "Moreover, there is no evidence that skill upgrading within particular occupations will be large, though it seems likely that more jobs will require threshold levels of literacy and numeracy. The implication of these findings is that there is little empirical support for one aspect of the "coming skills mismatch" hypothesis: an explosive growth in skill requirements" (Mishel 13).  His definitions of different levels of labor are also very helpful in discussing the broad topic.  "First, job characteristics are partially driven by changes in the occupational composition of employment, such as a shift from manual to technical/professional jobs. Since jobs within a particular occupation will differ depending on their industry attachment, a second important dimension is the industrial aim position of employment. The last dimension is changes in the skill content or pay level of work in a particular occupational/industrial category. This dimension reflects, for instance, the degree to which the skill level of supermarket cashiers, blue-collar manufacturing workers, or stock brokers grows over time. As it turns out, change in the skill content of particular jobs is probably the most important (certainly the hardest to measure) dimension of the job structure" (Mishel 13).  In other words the occupational composition division is highly skilled producers, the industrial division is that of skilled construction workers such as steel workers and welders, and the last division occupational jobs or those requiring the least skill and education that still require unionized work.  He also defines a key term to this article, Labor shortage or skills mismatch.  What this means that the job requirements have exceed that of the available workforce and can be to the fault of the employer or to the decline of workforce.  
this article was written by Lawrence Mishel, the Research Director of the Economic Policy Institute, and Ruy A. Teixeira, a sociologist at the Economic Research Service, and I.S. Department of Agriculture.  Both men are relatively unbiased and well versed in workforce issues and debates.  This is a picture of the two men.

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