How many people are suffering from
labor market problems This is one of the most critical yet contentious social
policy questions. In many ways, our social statistics exaggerate the degree of
hardship. Unemployment does not have the same dire (可怕的) consequences today as
it did in the 1930s when most of the unemployed were primary breadwinners, when
income and earnings were usually much closer to the margin of subsistence, and
when there were no countervailing social programs for those failing in the labor
market. Increasing affluence, the rise of families with more than one wage
earner, the growing predominance of secondary earners among the unemployed, and
improved social welfare protection have unquestionably mitigated (减轻) the
consequences of joblessness. Earnings and income data also overstate the
dimensions of hardship. Among the millions with hourly earnings at or below the
minimum wage level, the overwhelming majority is from multiple earners,
relatively affluent families. Most of those counted by the poverty statistics
are elderly or handicapped or have family responsibilities which keep them out
of the labor force, so the poverty statistics are by no means an accurate
indicator of labor market pathologies.
Yet there are also many
ways our social statistics underestimate the degree of labor-market-related
hardship. The unemployment counts exclude millions of fully employed workers
whose wages are so low that their families remain in poverty. Low wages and
repeated or prolonged unemployment frequently interact to undermine the capacity
for self-support. Since the number experiencing joblessness at some time during
the year is several times the number unemployed in any month, those who suffer
as a result of forced idleness can equal or exceed average annual unemployment,
even though only a minority of the jobless in any month really suffers. For
every person counted in the monthly unemployment tallies, there is another
part-time working because of the inability to find fulltime work, or else
outside the labor force but wanting a job. Finally, income transfers in our
country have always focused on the elderly, disabled, and dependent, neglecting
the needs of the working poor, so that the dramatic expansion of cash and in
kind transfers does not necessarily mean that those failings in the labor market
are adequately protected.
As a result of such contradictory
evidence, it is uncertain whether those suffering seriously as a result of labor
market problems number in the hundreds of thousands or the tens of millions, and
hence, whether high levels of joblessness can be tolerated or must be countered
by job creation and economic stimulus. There is only one area of agreement in
this debate—that the existing poverty, employment, and earnings statistics are
inadequate for one of their primary applications, measuring the consequences of
labor market problems. |
