And can I say I hate this article? I hate this article. Take this:
In 2008, in the midst of the recession, the average hourly pay of production and nonsupervisory workers tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics — those who toil at a cash register or on a shop floor — was 10 percent below its 1973 peak after accounting for inflation. Since then, wages have regained virtually all of that ground.
So we've only almost recovered from the recession on this metric and we've almost broken even with how good workers were doing in 1973? That sounds like a pretty shit recovery to me.
More than seven years after the recession ended and the job market began to bounce back, only 60 percent of Americans over the age of 16 are working, about 2.5 percentage points fewer than just before the economy took a dive.
Here's another metric where we haven't even made it back to '08 levels!
And the answer requires removing a roadblock standing in the way of this potential golden age: Even if demand for workers is rising, it may not be for the kind of workers on offer, those sitting on the sidelines of the labor force. “The jobs in demand are more skilled than the workers we have,” Professor Krueger told me.
Because the article won't describe a solution to this "roadblock" can we all take a guess at what it's going to be. I'll give you two choices:
(A) Encouraging firms to hire under-developed american workers and train them in-house to do these jobs.
(B) Loosen immigration restrictions so we can hire cheap overseas labor.
On the supply side, Professor Kearney and Professor Abraham suggest that being cautious about raising the minimum wage, which could price some workers out of jobs, and reforming disability insurance to encourage recipients to seek jobs.
Oh for fucks sake. So simultaneously we are about to enter a labor shortage but we can't raise the minimum wage? A labor shortage is the best time to raise the minimum wage! And of course rather than encouraging any one of our numerous solutions we definitely need to cut disability. This is the grossest bit of neoliberal propaganda I've seen in a while.