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| Re: God damn it! More bad news :((( (38106) | |||
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Re: God damn it! More bad news :((( |
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Posted by Peter Rosa on Mon Jun 13 14:10:45 2005, in response to Re: God damn it! More bad news :(((, posted by Charles G on Mon Jun 13 13:23:49 2005. New York's official unemployment rate is not that high. One can argue (and I believe you have) that there are many other people not included in that figure who are also unemployed. These include people on disability, people who lack basic education/intelligence and people who simply choose not to work because they can do better "living off the system". New businesses coming to the city would not do anything to reduce that type of unemployment.Some of these "labor force nonparticipants" are beyond all hope. I have no doubt, however, that many of them are on the margins and can be reintroduced to the working world if the job market is sufficiently strong. Let's say, for instance, that economic growth gets to a point at which the starting salary for retail or fast-food work in the city is at $10 per hour. Thousands of disabled people will experience sudden miracle recoveries. Off-the-books work such as street peddling or even panhandling will lose its advantage over legitimate work. Employers will lose much of their bargaining power and will find themselves with no choice but to train uneducated and unskilled people wherever possible. In making these predictions, I'm guided by what happened in Connecticut during the economic boom of the late 1980's. Labor shortages were so actue that entry-level wages sometimes reached double the federal minimum wage. Desparate for enough help, employers tried to convince retirees to come back to work, recruited mentally retarded and other disabled people when possible, offered child care in attempts to recruit housewives, and so on. True, New York is a far larger labor market, and almost certainly has a higher percentage of "labor force nonparticipants," but that shouldn't make it impossible for a Connecticut-style situation to occur given sufficient economic growth. My LIRR/NYCT blog |
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