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Most US jobs created since 2005 are not conventional full-time work

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Re: Most US jobs created since 2005 are not conventional full-time work

#21
post #7

Another powerful demographic force in the USA is the number of men who are ex-convicts: ""Few of us today are aware of the staggering size of this group. In a forthcoming study, Sarah Shannon, a sociologist at the University of Georgia, and five colleagues estimate that America’s criminal class (people with a felony conviction or prison time in their background) roughly quadrupled between 1980 and 2010 — from 5 milli…

> This implies that at least one in eight adult men in the at-large population has been sentenced for a felony. That's an astounding statistic. I don't live in America, and I obviously don't run into a perfectly uniform sampling of society, but I'd guess way less than 1 in 8 people I meet have done something that deserves being thrown in prison.

Not that many people have done something that deserves being thrown in prison in the US, either. We're just far too happy to throw people in for things that don't deserve it, like non-violent drug offenses.

Re: Most US jobs created since 2005 are not conventional full-time work

#22
post #2

> “We find that 94% of net job growth in the past decade was in the alternative work category,” said Krueger. “And over 60% was due to the [the rise] of independent contractors, freelancers and contract company workers.” So, not exactly temp workers, but contract workers who require less overhead and are easy to fire.

Pretty much. I fit into this category and my anecdotal experience tells me that hiring managers favor contractors for that reason as well as the fact that the money to pay them sometimes is listed as a different line-item on the budget. I think the combination of the two helps as well - when looking at a large contractor line-item, knowing that it can be scaled back with less headache than a Full Time Employee (FTE)…

[deleted]

Re: Most US jobs created since 2005 are not conventional full-time work

#23
post #6

This is in large part because the sectors that saw the largest move towards alternative work arrangements—like education and medicine—have a high proportion of women. Anyone know more about this? What jobs in those areas are becoming contract based?

My little sister is a physical therapist assistant (usually the person actually administering physical therapy), and a lot of her jobs have been contract based.

Ah, I didn't realize those jobs were starting to turn!

Re: Most US jobs created since 2005 are not conventional full-time work

#24
post #2

> “We find that 94% of net job growth in the past decade was in the alternative work category,” said Krueger. “And over 60% was due to the [the rise] of independent contractors, freelancers and contract company workers.” So, not exactly temp workers, but contract workers who require less overhead and are easy to fire.

Pretty much. I fit into this category and my anecdotal experience tells me that hiring managers favor contractors for that reason as well as the fact that the money to pay them sometimes is listed as a different line-item on the budget. I think the combination of the two helps as well - when looking at a large contractor line-item, knowing that it can be scaled back with less headache than a Full Time Employee (FTE)…

Its not well paid IT contractors its all the minimum wage disguised employment "gig" jobs that is where the growth is.

Re: Most US jobs created since 2005 are not conventional full-time work

#25

In the time since the end of the article's data was sourced, until now, the U6 rate has fallen from 11% to 8.3% - which is back to where it was in the Summer of 1998. When it gets into the 7.x% levels, the employment market will be the second hottest in roughly 50 years next to the year 2000. The time frame sourced, includes an U6 rate that reached nearly 18% and a U3 rate that hit 10%. It's not surprising that conve…

depends how they fiddle th figure I though 3 or 4 % was the full employment rate

Re: Most US jobs created since 2005 are not conventional full-time work

#26
post #9
post #2

> “We find that 94% of net job growth in the past decade was in the alternative work category,” said Krueger. “And over 60% was due to the [the rise] of independent contractors, freelancers and contract company workers.” So, not exactly temp workers, but contract workers who require less overhead and are easy to fire.

People talk like this is a bad thing, but I don't get it. If working for your employer became a negative ROI, you'd quit your job. If employing somebody becomes a negative ROI, I don't see why it shouldn't be equally easy to stop employing them. As long as the relationship is mutually beneficial, neither party will terminate it.

Workers are usually more efficient when they concentrate on one job full time. But that leaves them exposed to any disruption of that one job.

Also, many employers expect contractors to be always available, or available full time for long stretches, but that makes it impossible to diversify their income.

So it can become very one-sided. A possible answer would be to make it normal for employees to have contracts with several employers at once, but that can create conflicts of interest in a lot of professions, and would make things like IP very messy.

Re: Most US jobs created since 2005 are not conventional full-time work

#27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much. I fit into this category and my anecdotal experience tells me that hiring managers favor contractors for that reason as well as the fact that the money to pay them sometimes is listed as a different line-item on the budget. I think the combination of the two helps as well - when looking at a large contractor line-item, knowing that it can be scaled back with less headache than a Full Time Employee (FTE)…

Its not well paid IT contractors its all the minimum wage disguised employment "gig" jobs that is where the growth is.

Yeah, and these gigs aren't the best thing around for sure. But I wonder where people would be without them, you know? Would it be huge unemployment? Or would conventional employees be the result?

Re: Most US jobs created since 2005 are not conventional full-time work

#28
post #14
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People talk like this is a bad thing, but I don't get it. If working for your employer became a negative ROI, you'd quit your job. If employing somebody becomes a negative ROI, I don't see why it shouldn't be equally easy to stop employing them. As long as the relationship is mutually beneficial, neither party will terminate it.

Most employers can adapt to the loss of a single worker much more easily than a worker can adapt to losing their job. And much of our social safety net currently operates via employers - things like pensions, maternity leave, healthcare, and even unemployment are tightly coupled to the single-long-term-employer model. Maybe they shouldn't be, but fixing that will take time and in the meantime people will slip through…

We're stuffing people into cracks and making new cracks to stuff them in.

Re: Most US jobs created since 2005 are not conventional full-time work

#29
post #20
post #2

> “We find that 94% of net job growth in the past decade was in the alternative work category,” said Krueger. “And over 60% was due to the [the rise] of independent contractors, freelancers and contract company workers.” So, not exactly temp workers, but contract workers who require less overhead and are easy to fire.

Has the increasing cost of health insurance motivated employers to start using more contract workers?

Employers have been operating without any sense of social responsibility since long before health care became a part of the national conversation.

You could entirely remove any obligation of providing health insurance from all employers, and they'd still replace payrolled employees with contract workers if it saved them a buck.

Re: Most US jobs created since 2005 are not conventional full-time work

#30

In the time since the end of the article's data was sourced, until now, the U6 rate has fallen from 11% to 8.3% - which is back to where it was in the Summer of 1998. When it gets into the 7.x% levels, the employment market will be the second hottest in roughly 50 years next to the year 2000. The time frame sourced, includes an U6 rate that reached nearly 18% and a U3 rate that hit 10%. It's not surprising that conve…

depends how they fiddle th figure I though 3 or 4 % was the full employment rate

I'm no expert but I think the 3/4% is relative to the U3 statistic and and not the U6 statistic mentioned above.

    http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate.jsp
    http://portalseven.com/employment/unemployment_rate_u6.jsp
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