For an increasing proportion of workers—whether in standard employment or fissured, non- standard work—compensation, access to benefits, ability to exercise voice at work, and treatment at the workplace have worsened over recent decades. The restructuring of businesses (fissuring) has shifted activities from large firms to other entities, contributing to the decline in the quality of work, particularly for less-skilled and low-wage workers. This restructuring has shifted internal wage and salary decisions away from single employers to multiple players in multiple markets.
The most direct way for college students to build specific skills is through their choice of curriculum and field of study. However, we lack consistent information about what employers demand across major fields and how that has changed over time, how aware students and institutional leaders are of shifts in skill demand, and the extent to which students and colleges respond and adapt to such changes.
Employers frequently pass the costs of variable customer demand onto their hourly workers, especially low-wage workers, by changing or canceling their shifts with little notice. Research has shown that schedule unpredictability is associated with adverse worker and family outcomes. Several cities and states, including San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and Oregon, now require service industry employers over a certain size to post schedules with a specified minimum lead time and to compensate workers for cancelled shifts.
New institutions and technologies have made it simpler for self-employed individuals to perform work for firms and peers that previously would have been done through traditional employment relationships. Though these new work arrangements may provide employment opportunities for those on the margins of the workforce or increased flexibility for those who desire it, they raise concerns that traditional employment could be replaced by independent contractors.
In October 2018, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published a notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM) in the Federal Register that would discourage low-income immigrant families’ and individuals’ from accessing public safety net benefits to which they are entitled.
No poverty measure produced by U.S. government agencies or by other independent researchers incorporates health care/insurance needs and benefits. The Official Poverty Measure excludes all in-kind benefits.
Authorized by Congress in 1996 as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, 287(g) agreements authorize local enforcement agencies (LEAs) to carry out federal immigration enforcement functions. There are two main models. Under the Jail Enforcement Officer model, enforcement occurs at the jail, after individuals have been arrested by the LEA for non-immigration criminal offenses.
Whether immigration increases crime remains a much-debated question. Sociologists and criminologists have suggested that immigration has not increased crime since 1960, when larger waves of immigrants began to enter the U.S. Economists have recently entered this debate and are seeking to produce causal estimates of this relationship. Economic historian Rowena Gray will examine the extent to which immigration increased crime in an earlier era of heavy immigration.
Noncompete Agreements (NCAs) contractually limit a worker’s ability to accept a new job with a competitor of his or her current employer. By restricting workers’ mobility across employers, current employers may be more willing to invest in training or to impart trade secrets without fear that their workers will transfer the benefits of those assets to competitors.
Much of the research on non-standard forms of employment has analyzed individual data from household surveys or tax forms. Key questions have included measurement of the size of non-standard versus standard employment relationships and the quality of non-standard work, for instance whether temporary employment can function as a “stepping stone” to permanent jobs.