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The "quiet catastrophe" is particularly dismaying because it is so quiet, without social turmoil or even debate. It is this: After 88 consecutive months of the economic expansion that began in June 2009, a smaller percentage of American males in the prime working years (ages 25 to 54) are working than were working near the end of the Great Depression in 1940, when the unemployment rate was above 14 percent. If the labor-force participation rate were as high today as it was as recently as 2000, nearly 10 million more Americans would have jobs.
The work rate for adult men has plunged 13 percentage points in a half-century. This "work deficit" of "Great Depression-scale underutilization" of male potential workers is the subject of Nicholas Eberstadt's new monograph "Men Without Work: America's Invisible Crisis," which explores the economic and moral causes and consequences of this:
Is it an aberration, or a harbinger of things to come?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09 2016, @07:06PM
What do you do when you have less work to do? take turns.
The (Socialist) Mondragon worker-owned cooperative has encountered this (in a micro sense, serving as an example for the macro model).
With the construction of new housing in a slump, orders to their appliance manufacturing division slowed down.
They moved some folks from the appliance division to other divisions and reduced everyone's hours a bit.
Everyone tightened his belt a bit and all the worker-owners have weathered the slump.
Compare this to the way a Capitalist operation would have handled that: laying off a bunch of folks.
Add to that the increased productivity of USAian workers for decades and decades while wages have essentially remained flat. [washingtonpost.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 13 2016, @09:35PM
Not actually true.
Some industries had massive layoffs. Others did not. Do you know what the difference was?
No, it was not the magnitude of charitable urges of blood-sucking vampiric bosses.
It was how easily replaced the workers were. Construction? Bad news, guys, almost anyone can step in and push a wheelbarrow full of concrete up a ramp. Master machinists? Say there, friend, could we drop your hours for a while until the bad times are over?
In some mixed systems such as in Germany, layoffs were extremely rare. They just cut hours and waited out the storm.
Nothing unique about Mondragon here.