Four telling facts about jobs and wages for young Americans, as explained in this policy brief, suggest a labor market recovery is coming, although it will be gradual and uneven by educational attainment. Young Americans with a postsecondary degree are more likely to be employed, but the nature of their employment suggests they are taking…

According to an analysis by the AFL-CIO, unemployment is still a problem 4 years after the end of the last recession. Since that time, although employment is up, many jobs lack adequate pay and benefits and many jobs are insecure. In addition, 7.7 million people are still jobless, compared to fewer than 3 million in the 1960s. In addition, the…

Levitan (Chairman of the National Commission on Employment and Unemployment Statistics) and Belous question the usefulness and accuracy of current methods of compiling unemployment statistics. Better measurements of labor market performance are crucial because of the ways such data are used to allocate funds and to form policies for combatting…

This collection of short articles addresses several issues. The first article briefly discusses the growing lack of confidence in schools, with a glance at the role of the mass media. The second article, an interview on the same topic, looks at the state's loss of credibility regarding education and other areas in the United States and other…

An Ontario (Canada) study used longitudinal data on high school seniors of 1973 to investigate educational and work decisions, looking at such factors as the influence of student characteristics on skill-to-job mismatch, predictors of mismatch for college versus university graduates, and effects of student exposure to alternative education on…

Of the currently unemployed workforce, a portion (100,000 to 2.1 million) can be termed dislocated workers. Even as the economy recovers from the current recession, these involuntarily unemployed workers will face serious problems finding new jobs because of structural changes in the economy. Current unemployment and training programs often do not…

The relationship between the concepts "full employment" and "sustainable livelihoods" was examined in the context of international efforts to promote economic development and eradicate poverty worldwide. After a comparison of the very different economic problems facing developing nations and the nations of Eastern Europe and…

Stagnant or declining wages for less-educated workers make policies to upgrade the job market options for low wage workers an urgent priority. One in three low wage workers lives in a low income family. The link between low basic skills and low wages is strong. No single standard of minimum skill requirements applies to all middle income jobs, and…

Federal block grants and consolidated programs related to poverty reduction may compel states to streamline administrative structures and approaches that have deterred collaboration in the past. This report considers the block grant environment in making key policy recommendations for reducing poverty in rural areas, formulated during a Pathways…

Most of the nonmetropolitan poor live in a household with at least one worker. In 1987, 70% of nonmetro poor family heads who were not ill, disabled, or retired worked for at least part of the year, and 24% worked full time, year-round. The employed proportion of the poor was significantly larger in nonmetro than metro areas. Despite a lengthy…

The paper, one of a series of monographs, is intended for educators and employers who are actively concerned with improving the interaction between the institutions of education and work. The purpose of the paper is to make educators more aware of the realities of the labor market. The first part of the paper introduces the concept of…

The report consists of three parts: "The Design of a Federal Employment Program to Counter Recession"; "The Design of a Federal Employment Program in a Strategy to Raise Low Earnings"; and "The Design of a Guaranteed Job Opportunity as a Part of Welfare Reform". In Part 1, an Anti-Recession Program (ARP) is proposed. ARP is an automatically…

Underemployment is the focus of this transcript of a radio series published as an electronic weekly magazine concerned with issues in education. The first of a 2-part series, this program incorporates studio interviews with: James O'Toole of the Center for the Study of the Future; a ceramics college graduate working as a shipping clerk; various…

Unemployment compensation in the United States is provided through a federal-state system of unemployment insurance (UI). UI provides temporary partial wage replacement to active job seekers who are involuntarily out of work. For older workers, UI is an important source of income security and a potential influence on work incentives. For example,…

The moral and ethical values enunciated by America's leading religious organizations lay much of the groundwork for its major democratic institutions and establish the benchmarks by which U.S. employment conditions and policies should be measured. The public's perception of the economy's relative well-being is based on oversimplified statistical…