Quote: “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 … 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.”
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…
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