The good news is that recent high school and college graduates looking for work aren't as screwed as they were a few years ago.
The bad news is that they're still kinda screwed.
... the unemployment rate is 7.2 percent for young college graduates and 19.5 percent for young high school graduates. Although these rates have come down from the peaks after the Great Recession, they are still elevated above their 2007 levels (5.5 percent for college grads and 15.9 percent for high school grads), which were already high compared to the more favorable rates seen in 1995-2000. The Class of 2015 joins a sizable backlog of unemployed college graduates from the last six graduating classes (the classes of 2009–2014) in a difficult job market. [...]
The underemployment rate is 14.9 percent for young college graduates and 37.0 percent for young high school graduates. These numbers are elevated compared to their 2007 levels (9.6 percent for college grads and 26.8 percent for high school grads), which is a sign that many young graduates either want a job but have simply given up looking for work, or have a job that does not provide the hours they need. Underemployment remains particularly high compared to its pre-recession levels. The ratio of the underemployment to unemployment is near the highest it’s ever been for young high school graduates and college graduates, (1.9 and 2.1, respectively).
Congratulations! You've got your diploma, the future is yours, and all those other commencement platitudes. Now go climb over your peers and un- or under-employed graduates of the past five years in the chase for the shrinking number of good jobs out there.
Continue reading below the fold for more of the week's labor and education news.
- How can you get an ethical manicure? Support worker organizing.
- And there's a new wage theft lawsuit against a chain of nail salons workers say paid them $60 for 10-hour days.
- Wage theft through misclassification of workers as independent contractors rather than employees is an epidemic in Massachusetts, according to new research. According to the research—and no great surprise—undocumented immigrants are particularly vulnerable to exploitation.
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- The fight for a $15 minimum wage changes another major company. Facebook has announced that:
... contractors and vendors in U.S. will have to adhere to new standards, including a $15 minimum wage, at least 15 days paid leave for vacation, sick days and holidays, and a $4,000 new child benefit for parents who don’t get paid parental leave.
Effective May 1, the new benefits will cover contract employees who work as cooks, janitors, security guards and other support staff at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. The company plans to extend the benefits to third-party vendors with more than 25 employees at its other 16 campuses in the U.S. over the next year.
- Ugly, ugly union-busting in Bangladesh.
- Public assistance programs may look like they don't have much effect in the short term, but turn out to do a lot of good in the long term:
Consider Moving to Opportunity, an experiment in the 1990s that gave families housing assistance, in some cases contingent on their moving to less poor neighborhoods. Initial evidence from the randomized trial was disappointing, finding little or no improvements in test scores for children or earnings for adults. A new paper by the Harvard economists Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren and Lawrence F. Katz, however, followed the children for another decade. It found that traditional rental vouchers had increased their earnings as adults by 15 percent, and experimental vouchers, which required people to move to less poor neighborhoods, by 31 percent. The additional tax revenue from these higher earnings was enough to repay the program’s cost.
- Two things jump out at me in this piece about a law firm offering 22 weeks of paid family leave. The first is familiar: it's a WOW! story in the American context, but wouldn't seem generous in the international context. The second is that the 22 weeks of paid leave applies to attorneys. Other staff only get 14 weeks—still generous, but hi there, class difference!
- Ned Resnikoff is in the middle of a seven-part series on the tech boom and the working class. Part four is Unions make strides among Silicon Valley workforce.
- New York nurses are protesting staffing shortages. You want to know who besides nurses needs to be worried about staffing shortages? Patients. Anyone who has a loved one who's a patient. Anyone who may become a patient.
- When will we stop exploiting home-care workers?
Education