Employment Trends Quotes

The unemployment rate today for people with our-year college degrees is 4.1%, which is almost none. That's people switching jobs basically. That tells you that education is the only way up and the only way out. If that is the fact, then we've got to get more of it for more people.

When union membership goes down, so do wages.

Wage work is disappearing. I didn't make the jobs disappear, but they have disappeared. And people are forced to be looking for other alternatives.

Generally, we have translated greater output in the few hours of work per week over the last century. And that's a good trend of the future. But we do have to have a system that, as output of goods and services keeps increasing per capita, that it takes care of the people who are willing to work and really are not getting by very well with a family on a 40-hour week.

During my three years as chief economist of the World Bank, labor market issues were looked at through the lens of neoclassical economics. A standard message was to increase labor market flexibility. The not-so-subtle subtext was to lower wages and lay off unneeded workers.

Workers in the United States are making less than they were almost 20 years ago, and yet they are working harder.But so am I working harder, that I can tell you.

Technology is always creating jobs. It's always destroying jobs. But right now the pace is accelerating. It's faster we think than ever before in history. So as a consequence, we are not creating jobs at the same pace that we need to.

I'm fascinated by the skills gap.

The vast majority of Americans are employed in service sector industries, and many of those sectors are highly internationalized. The most high-value added sectors, notably the tech sector, is massively globalized. And, for them, it would be a disaster if America's trade policy was to go down a spiraling route towards protectionism.

What you've seen from the 1980s, particularly in this country, is far fewer people doing Saturday jobs and doing jobs after school.

Careers don't seem to be built up in the same way as they were in the 80s.

Technology is just one of the factors affecting the world of work. Economics, demographics, sociological trends, and government policies are four other core influences reshaping labour markets and determining how we will work for years ahead.

Bush said the unemployment situation is turning around. Last week alone, 5,000 people started working for John Kerry.

Jobs will come back when the economy recovers, but they will never be the same.

[M]ore Americans work for federal, state or local government than work in any form of manufacturing. We crossed that Rubicon about 10 years ago.

Every month, we get the reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that say even more people have given up looking for work.

If you do a job where someone tells you exactly what to do, they will find someone cheaper than you to do it. And yet our schools are churning out kids who are stuck looking for jobs where the boss tells them exactly what to do.

In the Great Depression, employment was not low because investment was low. Employment and investment were low because labor market institutions and industrial policies changed in a way that lowered normal employment.

While the developed world has shifted from agriculture to manufacturing and then to services, the number of jobs has always climbed.

If we want to contrast what we have done in the past few years on delivery with what the right hon. and learned Gentleman delivered, let us remember the interest rates at 10 per cent. to 15 per cent., the 1.5 million fewer people in work, the boom and the bust and the borrowing at 8 per cent.

Treating unemployment as a national problem is almost always a mistake. Employment trends vary dramatically by race, geography, gender and level of education. But none of that is reflected in the all-encompassing unemployment rate, and hence policies informed only by that number are bound to fall short.

Historically, it has required a combination of favorable employment trends and active government intervention to lower the percentage of people in poverty and raise living standards for the working middle class.

This has been a trend for a long time; the days of lifetime employment are long since over.

In a globalized economy, jobs no longer need a passport, but workers do.

That's not a convincing argument. Public sector jobs are cyclical. Teachers get fired when money is tight, then rehired when things get better. Manufacturing jobs, on the other hand, aren't coming back. They're relics of a past age.