Most research on poverty focuses on the damage caused by persistent unemployment. But what actually happens when jobs are plentiful and workers are hard to come by? Moving the Needle examines how very low unemployment boosts wages at the bottom, improves job quality, lengthens job ladders, and pulls the unemployed into a booming job market. Drawing on over seventy years of quantitative data as well as interviews with employers, jobseekers, and longtime residents of poor neighborhoods, this lecture investigates the most durable positive consequences of tight labor markets and focus on the mechanisms that produce positive outcomes: matching processes that include the dispossessed, job ladders that grow within the low wage sector, and increasing human capital that can be parlayed into internal and external upward mobility. Dr. Newman will also consider the downside of overheated economies, which can fuel surging rents and ignite outmigration. She will conclude with a discussion of policies and practices that can sustain the benefits of tight labor markets when unemployment begins to rise.
Date
27.7.2023
, 1:30 – 3:00 pm
Speaker
Katherine S. Newman
University of California
Katherine Newman is Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs of the University of California and the Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Her research ranges from technical education and apprenticeship, to the sociological study of the working poor in America’s urban centers, middle class economic insecurity under the brunt of recession, and school violence on a mass scale. She has written on the consequences of globalization for youth in Western Europe, Japan, South Africa and the US, on the impact of regressive taxation on the poor, and on the history of American political opinion on the role of government intervention. She recently published her new book „Moving the Needle. What Tight Labor Markets do for the Poor, https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520379107/moving-the-needle.
More information can be found at: https://www.ucop.edu/academic-affairs/immediate-office-staff/Bios/katherine-s-newman.html