The Devastating Transformation Of Work In The US

Two of the best-known labor economists in the US,  Lawrence F. Katz and Alan B. Krueger, recently published a study of the rise of so-called alternative work arrangements.

Here is what they found:

The percentage of workers engaged in alternative work arrangements – defined as temporary help agency workers, on-call workers, contract workers, and independent contractors or freelancers – rose from 10.1 percent [of all employed workers] in February 2005 to 15.8 percent in late 2015.

That is a huge jump, especially since the percentage of workers with alternative work arrangements barely budged over the period February 1995 to February 2005; it was only 9.3 in 1995.

But their most startling finding is the following:

A striking implication of these estimates is that all of the net employment growth in the U.S. economy from 2005 to 2015 appears to have occurred in alternative work arrangements. Total employment according to the CPS increased by 9.1 million (6.5 percent) over the decade, from 140.4 million in February 2005 to 149.4 in November 2015. The increase in the share of workers in alternative work arrangements from 10.1 percent in 2005 to 15.8 percent in 2015 implies that the number of workers employed in alternative arrangement increased by 9.4 million (66.5 percent), from 14.2 million in February 2005 to 23.6 million in November 2015. Thus, these figures imply that employment in traditional jobs (standard employment arrangements) slightly declined by 0.4 million (0.3 percent) from 126.2 million in February 2005 to 125.8 million in November 2015.

Take a moment to let that sink in—and think about what that tells us about the operation of the US economy and the future for working people.  Employment in so-called traditional jobs is actually shrinking. The only types of jobs that have been growing in net terms are ones in which workers have little or no security and minimal social benefits.

Figure 2 from their study shows the percentage of workers in different industries that have alternative employment arrangements.  The share has grown substantially over the last ten years in almost all of them.  In Construction, Professional and Business Services, and Other Services (excluding Public Services) approximately one quarter of all workers are employed using alternative work arrangements.

The study

Because the Bureau of Labor Statistics has not updated its Contingent Work Survey (CWS), the authors contracted with the RAND institute to do their own study.  Thus, Rand expanded its own American Life Panel (ALP) surveys in October and November 2015 to include questions similar to those asked in the CWS.   They surveys only collected information about the surveyed individual’s main job.  And, to maintain compatibility with the CWS surveys, day laborers were not included in the results.  Finally, the authors only included information from individuals who had worked in the survey reference week.

People were said to be employed under alternative work arrangements if they were “independent contractors,” “on-call workers,” “temporary help agency workers,” or “workers provided by contract firms.  The authors defined these terms as follows:

“Independent Contractors” are individuals who report they obtain customers on their own to provide a product or service as an independent contractor, independent consultant, or freelance worker. “On-Call Workers” report having certain days or hours in which they are not at work but are on standby until called to work. “Temporary Help Agency Workers” are paid by a temporary help agency. “Workers Provided by Contract Firms” are individuals who worked for a company that contracted out their services during the reference week.

The results in more detail

All four categories of nonstandard work recorded increases:

Independent contractors continue to be the largest group (8.9 percent in 2015), but the share of workers in the three other categories more than doubled from 3.2 percent in 2005 to 7.3 percent in 2015. The fastest growing category of nonstandard work involves contracted workers. The percentage of workers who report that they worked for a company that contracted out their services in the preceding week rose from 0.6 percent in 2005 to 3.1 percent in 2015.

Table 4 shows the percentage of workers in different categories that are employed for their main job in one of the four nonstandard work arrangements.  The relevant comparisons over time are with the two CPS studies and the Alternative Weighted results from the Rand study.

Here are some of the main findings:

There is a clear age gradient that has grown stronger, with older workers more likely to have nonstandard employment than younger workers.  In 2015, 6.4 percent of those aged 16 to 24 were employed in an alternative work arrangement, while 14.3 percent of those aged 25-54 and 23.9 percent of those aged 55-74 had nonstandard work arrangements.

The percentage of women with nonstandard work arrangements grew dramatically from 2005 to 2015, from 8.3 percent to 17 percent.  Women are now more likely to be employed under these conditions than men.

Workers in all educational levels experienced a jump in nonstandard work, with the increase greatest for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher.  “Occupational groups experiencing particularly large increases in the nonstandard work from 2005 to 2015 include computer and mathematical, community and social services, education, health care, legal, protective services, personal care, and transportation jobs.”

The authors also tested to determine “whether alternative work is growing in higher or lower wage sectors of the labor market.”  They found that “workers with attributes and jobs that are associated with higher wages are more likely to have their services contracted out than are those with attributes and jobs that are associated with lower wages. Indeed, the lowest predicted quintile-wage group did not experience a rise in contract work.”

The take-away

The take-away is pretty clear.  Corporate profits and income inequality have grown in large part because US firms have successfully taken advantage of the weak state of unions and labor organizing more generally, to transform work relations.  Increasingly workers, regardless of their educational level, find themselves forced to take jobs with few if any benefits and no long-term or ongoing relationship with their employer.  Only a rejuvenated labor movement, one able to build strong democratic unions and press for radically new economic policies will be able to reverse existing trends.

Capitalism and Inequality

Defenders of capitalism in the United States often choose not to use that term when naming our system, preferring instead the phrase “market system.”  Market system sounds so much better, evoking notions of fair and mutually beneficial trades, equality, and so on.  The use of that term draws attention away from the actual workings of our system.

In brief, capitalism is a system structured by the private ownership of productive assets and driven by the actions of those who seek to maximize the private profits of the owners.  Such an understanding immediately raises questions about how some people and not others come to own productive wealth and the broader social consequences of their pursuit of profit.

Those are important questions because it is increasingly apparent that while capitalism continues to produce substantial benefits for the largest asset owners, those benefits have increasingly been secured through the promotion of policies – globalization, financialization, privatization of state services, tax cuts, attacks on social programs and unions–that have both lowered overall growth and left large numbers of people barely holding the line, if not actually worse off.

The following two figures come from a Washington Post article by Jared Bernstein, in which he summarizes the work of Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. The first figure shows the significant decline in US pre-tax income growth.  In the first period (1946-1980), pre-tax income grew by 95 percent.  In the second (1980-2014), it grew by only 61 percent.

This figure also shows that this slower pre-tax income growth has not been a problem for those at the top of the income distribution.  Those at the top more than compensated for the decline by capturing a far greater share of income growth than in the past.  In fact, those in the bottom 50 percent of the population gained almost nothing over the period 1980 to 2014.

The next figure helps us see that the growth in inequality has been far more damaging to the well-being of the bottom half than the slowdown in overall income growth.  As Bernstein explains:

The bottom [blue] line in the next figure shows actual pretax income for adults in the bottom half of the income scale. The top [red] line asks how these folks would have done if their income had grown at the average rate from the earlier, faster-growth period. The middle [green] line asks how they would have done if they experienced the slower, average growth of the post-1980 period.

The difference between the top two lines is the price these bottom-half adults paid because of slower growth. The larger gap between the middle and bottom line shows the price they paid from doing much worse than average, i.e., inequality (aging demographics are also in play, but the researchers show that they do not explain the extent of the slowdown in income growth). That explains about two-thirds of the difference in endpoints. Slower growth hurt these families’ income gains, but inequality hurt them more.

A New York Times analysis of pre-tax income distribution over the period 1974 to 2014 reinforces this conclusion about the importance of inequality.  As we can see in the figure below, the top 1 percent and bottom 50 percent have basically changed places in terms of their relative shares of national income.

The steady ratcheting down in majority well-being is perhaps best captured by studies designed to estimate the probability of children making more money than their parents, an outcome that was the expectation for many decades and that underpinned the notion of “the American dream.”

Such research is quite challenging, as David Leonhardt explains in a New York Times article, “because it requires tracking individual families over time rather than (as most economic statistics do) taking one-time snapshots of the country.”  However, thanks to newly accessible tax records that go back decades, economists have been able to estimate this probability and how it has changed over time.

Leonhardt summarizes the work of one of the most important recent studies, that done by economists associated with the Equality of Opportunity Project.   In summary terms, those economists found that a child born into the average American household in 1940 had a 92 percent chance of making more than their parents.  This falls to 79 percent for a child born in 1950, 62 percent for a child born in 1960, 61 percent for a child born in 1970, and only 50 percent for a child born in 1980.

The figure below provides a more detailed look at the declining fortunes of most Americans.   The horizontal access shows the income percentile a child is born into and the vertical access shows the probability of that child earning more than their parents.   The drop-off for children born in 1960 and 1970 compared to the earlier decade is significant and is likely the result of the beginning effects of the changes in capitalist economic dynamics that started gathering force in the late 1970s, for example globalization, privatization, tax cuts, union busting, etc.  The further drop-off for children born in 1980 speaks to the strengthening and consolidation of those dynamics.

The income trends highlighted in the figures above are clear and significant, and they point to the conclusion that unless we radically transform our capitalist system, which will require building a movement capable of challenging and overcoming the power of those who own and direct our economic processes, working people in the United States face the likelihood of an ever-worsening future.

Confronting Capitalist Globalization

Trade agreements were a major issue in the US presidential election.  Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump both made opposition to the Transpacific Partnership a central part of their respective campaigns, and the popularity of this position eventually forced Hillary Clinton to also oppose it.  A number of mainstream economists even began to acknowledge that many working people actually had reason to be critical of globalization dynamics.  These economists still held that globalization brought positive benefits to the country.  The problem, in their opinion, was that the gains had not been equally distributed, with many workers, especially in manufacturing, suffering wage and employment losses.  Of course, few offered meaningful suggestions for correcting the problem.

Now that Trump has been elected, economists again appear to be downplaying the negative consequences of globalization, arguing that it is technology, rather than globalization, that best explains the growth in inequality and worker insecurity.  No doubt this stems from their concern that popular dissatisfaction with current economic conditions might grow from opposition to trade agreements into an actual challenge to contemporary globalization dynamics, which means capitalism itself.

Contemporary globalization dynamics are an expression of capitalism’s logic.  Faced with profit pressures, leading firms in core countries began to internationalize their operations in the mid-1980s by shifting production to the third world.  This internationalization process was shaped by the creation of cross border production networks or value chains.  Firms would divide the production of their goods into multiple segments and then locate the individual segments in different third world countries.

Sometimes, these leading firms built and operated their own overseas production facilities, directly controlling the entire production process.  More often, especially in electronics and telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, textiles and clothing, and automobiles, leading firms relied on “independent” partner firms to organize production under terms which still allowed them to direct operations and capture the majority of profits from sale of the final goods.

In broad brush, Japanese transnational corporations centered their product chains in China and several East Asian countries.  US transnational corporations centered theirs in China, Mexico and several Caribbean countries.  German transnational corporations centered theirs in China and several Central and Eastern European countries.   China’s role in the global economy grew explosively because it was a favorite location for production and final assembly for transnational corporations from all three core countries.

One consequence of this development was that both the US trade deficit, especially with China, and the Chinese trade surplus, especially with the US, grew large.  The chart below highlights this development, showing changes in size of the US and Chinese current account balances relative to their respective GDP.

The following chart looks just at the US trade balance and shows its dramatic decline beginning in the late 1990s.

US manufacturers were not alone in benefiting from the shift in production to lower cost third world countries.  US retailers also gained as the lower costs allowed them to boost sales and profits.  And the US financial industry also gained.  The large deficits meant large dollar flows abroad which were returned for investment in financial instruments such as stocks and bonds.  Moreover, as conditions worsened for growing numbers of working people in the US (more on that below), many were forced to borrow to maintain their life style which further expanded financial activity and profits.  In addition, globalization has enabled many transnational corporations to shift profits to those countries with the lowest tax requirements, thereby further boosting their profitability and that of the financial sector.

Not surprisingly, the expansion of international production by US and other transnational corporations took its toll on US manufacturing workers.  As Dean Baker explains:

As can be seen (in the chart below), manufacturing employment stayed close to 17.5 million from the early 1970s to 2000. We had plenty of productivity growth over these three decades, but little net change in manufacturing employment, in spite of cyclical ups and downs. It was declining as a share of total employment, which almost doubled over this period. Then, as the trade deficit explodes, we see manufacturing employment plummet. Note that most of the drop is before the Great Recession in 2008.

In other words, while it is true that manufacturing employment as a share of total US employment had been falling for some time, the dramatic decline in the number of workers employed in manufacturing dates to the period of rapid expansion of third world-centered international production networks.

Jared Bernstein and Dean Baker summarize the results of two studies that examine some of the costs paid by US workers for this global restructuring:

Trade deficits, even in times of strong growth, have negative, concentrated impacts on the quantity and quality of jobs in parts of the country where manufacturing employment diminishes. . . . There is, for example, a lot of research confirming that deindustrialization in the Rust Belt is partly a result of the fact that America meets its domestic demand for manufactured goods by importing more than it exports. One oft-cited academic study found that imbalanced trade with China led to the loss of more than 2 million U.S. jobs between 1991 and 2011, about half of which were in manufacturing (which worked out to 17 percent of manufacturing jobs overall during that time).  Further, the economist Josh Bivens found that in 2011 the cost of imbalanced trade with low-wage countries cost workers without college degrees 5.5 percent of their annual earnings (about $1,800). Far from a small, isolated group, these workers represent two-thirds of the American workforce.

Unfortunately, many US workers have viewed globalization from a nation-state perspective, believing that third world workers, especially those in China and Mexico, are stealing their jobs.  In reality, few workers employed in these product chains have enjoyed meaningful gains.  For example, the number of manufacturing workers in China has also been falling.  And growing numbers of them are forced to work long hours, in unsafe conditions, for extremely low wages.  Firms operating in China as subcontractors for foreign multinational corporations are squeezed by these corporations to lower costs.  They in turn employ a variety of tricks to lower worker wages and intensify the work process.  And they do this with the approval of local government officials who want to maintain the production in their jurisdiction.

One common trick is to use employment agencies to provide them with students under so-called internship programs.  As students, they are not considered workers under Chinese labor law and thus are not covered by such things as minimum wage laws, overtime benefit laws, and pensions.  A recent study by China Labor Watch provides one example:

University students who worked summer jobs at one of China’s leading small-appliance factories were forced to live in cramped, ill-equipped dorm rooms, made to sweat through 12-hour days in a hot factory and then were stiffed on pay, according to a report by China Labor Watch and confirmed via interviews with students and the agents who hired them.

The 8,000-employee Cuori factory in Ningbo, south of Shanghai on China’s east coast, manufactures kitchen appliances, irons, heaters and vacuum cleaners under its own name and for such multinational firms as Cuisinart, Hamilton Beach and George Foreman. Stores in the U.S. carrying items made there include Walmart and Home Depot.

More often, the students are from technical schools and forced to accept jobs as part of their curriculum.  This is just one way that firms operating within international production networks seek to push down wages to maximize their own profits and satisfy the demands of transnational corporations for low cost production.

Seen from this perspective the problem facing US workers, and those in Japan and Germany who face similar competitive pressures and downward movement in their living and working conditions, is not job theft by workers in the third world, but the working of contemporary capitalism.   And this is the perspective needed to judge the likely policies of newly elected US president Donald Trump.

We already have two indicators that the Trump administration will do little to threaten contemporary globalization dynamics.  During the campaign, Trump made big news when he told Carrier, an air-conditioning and furnace manufacturer, that the company would “pay a damn tax” if it carried out its plan to lay off some 1400 workers and close one of its factories in Indianapolis and move its production to Mexico.  Later he said that if Carrier moved its Indianapolis production to Mexico he would, if President, levy a steep 35 percent tariff on any of its products coming back to the US from off-shore factories.

Well, on December 1, 2016, Trump announced the terms of the deal he worked out with Carrier.  Carrier would “keep” 800 workers in its Indianapolis factory.  But approximately 600 workers would still be laid off as the factory’s fan coil assembly line would still be moved to Mexico.  And in exchange, the state of Indiana would provide Carrier with a $7 million subsidy including tax breaks and training grants.  This is no attack on capitalist globalization.  And when the president of the union at the factory voiced his disapproval of the agreement, Trump tweeted out that the union needed to “Spend more time working-less time talking. Reduce dues.”

As for Trump’s claim that we will look carefully at NAFTA to see if it should be rewritten, the US Chamber of Commerce has already gone on record in defense of NAFTA but welcoming its revision to incorporate issues like e-commerce that were not included at the time of its approval. In line with the Chamber’s confidence, a former Chamber lobbyist who has publicly defended NAFTA and outsourcing more generally has just been appointed to Trump’s transition team dealing with trade policy.

In short, if we are going to build a strong economy that works for the great majority of US workers we need to build a movement that is critical not just of the Transpacific Partnership but the entire process of capitalist globalization.  Moreover, that movement needs to be built in ways that strengthen relations of solidarity with workers in and from other countries.  And, it is critical to start the needed educational process now, before the new administration has a chance to trumpet new misleading initiatives and confuse people about the real threat to our well-being.