Economic Justice

It’s generally seen as good news when the state’s unemployment rate goes down.

Michigan’s unemployment rate fell again in July to 3.7 percent and has been at its lowest point since 2000, according to the state department that tracks it.

That means companies are hiring more people. Right?

Not exactly.

An underlying problem is that people are giving up looking for work, harkening back to the deepest depths of the Great Recession.

In Michigan, people out of the workforce are disproportionately teenagers between the ages of 16 and 19, and adults who don’t have a bachelor’s degree, according to American Community Survey estimates.

Labor-force participation — the share of adults 16 and older who are working or looking for work — peaked at just over 67 percent in 1996-2000 and has fallen since then. Some analysts observe that the number of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI)beneficiaries grew steeply after 2000, and assume the two trends are related. But evidence for that connection is weak. Here’s why:

• Most of the growth in SSDI stemmed from demographic causes. We estimate that 70 percent of SSDI’s enrollment growth since 2000 reflects four big demographic factors: population growth, aging of the baby boom, growth in women’s labor force participation, and the rise in Social Security’s full retirement age from 65 to 66. The Great Recession, although sometimes blamed for rising SSDI enrollment, actually hurt the SSDI trust fund more by reducing the program’s tax revenue than by swelling its benefit payments.
• Rising SSDI receipt and falling labor-force participation aren’t affecting the same age groups. SSDI receipt has grown modestly among older people, especially older women (see graph) — but so has their labor-force participation, as older workers postpone retirement. The drop in labor-market activity is concentrated at younger ages, particularly men, where SSDI receipt has not risen.
• There’s no reason to think that SSDI beneficiaries would otherwise be in the work force. SSDI allows and encourages work, but few beneficiaries take advantage. That’s no surprise: SSDI recipients are mostly 50 or older, have suffered a severe medical impairment after a lifetime of work, experience high death rates, and typically have limited education. Even rejected applicants struggle in the labor market, and so do former SSDI recipients whose benefits have stopped.

Seattle’s Department of Labor Standards (OLS) is taking public comment on a proposed rule change that would extend local minimum wage protections to disabled workers.

The proposed rule change was first recommended by the Seattle Commission for People with Disabilities in June, after a four month review of sub-minimum wage practices in consultation with Councilmember Lisa Herbold’s office and county and state officials. In a letter to the Mayor and City Council, the Commission reported that there are two active exemptions, one at the Ballard First Lutheran Church and another at the Town & Country Market in Ballard. Each pays one worker $11.01 per hour instead of $13, according to the letter.

People who are deafblind can be a valuable addition to your workplace. With just a few accommodations, based on an employee’s degree of vision and hearing, you can set your new hire – and your company – up for success. “Everybody’s human and wants to participate in work,” said Perkins School for the Blind spokesperson Jaimi Lard, who is deafblind. “Whether it’s a difference in skin color or a difference in disabilities, everybody wants to be part of the community.” Lard and interpreter Christine Dwyer offer some tips.

1. Take advantage of outside resources: A person who is deafblind can request a job coach, orientation and mobility instructor or even technology – at no cost to your company – from an agency like the Massachusetts Commission for the Blind. “That way, an employee can get acclimated to work in a new environment,” said Dwyer, from setting up their workstation to learning their way around the office.
2. Obtain the right technology: Your employee may use a screen magnifier or a refreshable braille display to do their work. Once you work together to figure out what he or she needs, you can set up this assistive technology to create an effective workspace.
3. Communication is key: Whether it’s email, instant messaging or sign language, your employee will have a preferred way to convey his or her thoughts. Establish that up front so you can have clear lines of communication moving forward. Some employees who are deafblind may carry a phone or tablet to type on as they move around the office, for example. You may even have team members who learn to sign with a coworker who’s deafblind. “When my coworkers learn some sign language and communicate directly with me, it energizes me,” said Lard. “I feel more included.”
4. Make all notifications accessible: Don’t just leave a box of goodies in the kitchen or post a sign on the bathroom door – use email or another accessible mode of communication to send a description of the pastries or the plumbing issue so everyone in the office knows what’s going on. “I don’t feel equal and I feel frustrated by barriers that are there by not having the information,” said Lard. “How would you feel if you went in and started using the bathroom and then you find out it’s broken?”
5. Bring in an interpreter for presentations and gatherings: Whether it’s a retirement party or a company-wide announcement, make sure your employee has full access to the people presenting and the information presented. “There’s a social aspect – everyone wants to feel included,” said Dwyer. In addition to an interpreter, employers can also consider using Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART), which provides real-time captioning on a screen as well as a full transcription at the end of the event.

Most of these households are families with children, senior citizens, or include a person with disabilities. Serious housing problems have grown across every demographic, racial, and ethnic group and affect renters living in urban, suburban, and rural areas in all parts of the country. And housing costs continued to grow faster than incomes for extremely low-income renters between 2013 and 2015.

This is why we need systems thinking. The incentives tell Social Security to delay, delay, delay by denial of eligibility because the core driver of the disability benefits system is reducing costs.....

https://goo.gl/MhhX4s

The lifetime of the Social Security disability trust fund was recently declared slightly healthier than expected, partly because people are enduring longer wait times for approval.

“What we see that’s been of particular concern is that the trust is benefiting from this massive hearing backlog,” said Mary Dale Walters, senior vice president of Allsup, a company that helps disability claimants obtain benefits.

“They’re not processing the claims as they used to, so it means a lesser impact on the trust fund,” she said.

One central and positive reason for the added lifespan of the fund was a drop in disability claims, a positive sign of economic growth. But despite fewer claimants, the backlog had continued to grow to a level of 1.1 million people, and wait times have soared.

The wait time for claimants to get a hearing determining their eligibility has risen from an average of 360 days in 2011 to roughly 583 days today, and is expected to continue rising to 605 days by September, according to Allsup's data.

The number of cases decided at the hearing level has dropped 29 percent between 2012 and 2016.

While the Trump administration has recommended designating $90 million of the Social Security Administration’s funding toward reducing the backlog, Walters is skeptical.

“They don’t have the staff, they don’t have a way to really handle that capacity of the baby boomer bubble that came through,” she said.

The Social Security Administration said it was working vigorously to address the backlog, which it attributes to the aging of the baby boomer generation.

Human jobs in the future will be the ones that require emotional labour: currently undervalued and underpaid but invaluable.

Early last year, the World Economic Forum issued a paper warning that technological change is on the verge of upending the global economy. To fill the sophisticated jobs of tomorrow, the authors argued, the ‘reskilling and upskilling of today’s workers will be critical’. Around the same time, the then president Barack Obama announced a ‘computer science for all’ programme for elementary and high schools in the United States. ‘[W]e have to make sure all our kids are equipped for the jobs of the future, which means not just being able to work with computers but developing the analytical and coding skills to power our innovation economy,’ he said.

But the truth is, only a tiny percentage of people in the post-industrial world will ever end up working in software engineering, biotechnology or advanced manufacturing. Just as the behemoth machines of the industrial revolution made physical strength less necessary for humans, the information revolution frees us to complement, rather than compete with, the technical competence of computers. Many of the most important jobs of the future will require soft skills, not advanced algebra.

Back in 1983, the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild coined the term ‘emotional labour’ to describe the processes involved in managing the emotional demands of work. She explored the techniques that flight attendants used to maintain the friendly demeanours their airline demanded in the face of abusive customers: taking deep breaths, silently reminding themselves to stay cool, or building empathy for the nasty passenger. ‘I try to remember that if he’s drinking too much, he’s probably really scared of flying,’ one attendant explained. ‘I think to myself: “He’s like a little child.”’

Today, the rapid shrinking of the industrial sector means that most of us have jobs requiring emotional skills, whether working directly with customers or collaborating with our corporate ‘team’ on a project. In 2015, the education economist David Deming at Harvard University found that almost all jobs growth in the United States between 1980 and 2012 was in work requiring relatively high degrees of social skills, while Rosemary Haefner, chief human resources officer at the jobs site CareerBuilder, told Bloomberg BNA in January that corporate hiring this year would prize these skills to a greater degree than in previous economic recoveries. ‘Soft skills,’ she said, ‘can make the difference between a standout employee and one who just gets by.’

DTE Energy is partnering with Detroiters Working for Environmental Justice to give qualifying customers new energy efficiency refrigerators to replace their old, inefficient models. A new refrigerator could be just a form away if you:

1. Are a DTE Energy electric customer
2. Own a refrigerator that was manufactured before 2000*
3. Meet income eligibility requirements (see table)