Forging a Migration Policy for Capital: Labor Shortages and Guest Workers

The expanding use of guest work is the wave of the future global neoliberal capitalism, but is a recurring theme in capitalism. The trade in global labor was pervasive during the Victorian age, second only to trade in finance. As the United States lost manufacturing to the global South, service and professional workers and their unions found it reassuring that that their jobs could not sent abroad. In the last decade, importing service workers from the global South is a dominant trend. As the United States is closing doors to traditional forms of immigration, it promotes migrant labor as a means to fill job shortages created by capital to lower wages. Guest work destabilizes the working class through turning “good jobs” into “bad jobs.” If comprehensive immigration reform includes guest work, borders will close and free migrant labor will become indentured labor. The World Bank and WTO view these programs as the new development model for the global South. Promoting export of skilled and unskilled labor benefits a bare few while driving most workers and peasants into abject poverty while heightening exploitation of labor worldwide.     

Social Security as Poverty's Guardian

Although social security programs were originally introduced as measures to reduce the poverty of needy groups, factors such as coverage, vestedness, administrative regulations and the so-called "wage stop" effectively prevent millions of people throughout the world from living decently when their only source of income is from social security. In the overwhelming majority of social security programs worldwide, including old-age pensions, illness and maternity programs, workers compensation, and family or children's allowances, coverage is open only to workers and usually excludes housewives, transient workers, agricultural laborers, new immigrants and part-time workers. Similarly, vestedness requirements effectively prevent many people from receiving benefits. Administrative regulations, including waiting times and proof of status, add to the difficulties many people have in getting social security benefits. Most importantly, the stipulation in almost every program that no one should be able to get from welfare programs that which he or she could get from wages or salaries keeps the level of payments far below the poverty line. This paper will document and demonstrate the influence of social security programs throughout the world in contributing to the maintenance of poverty and will propose some radical solutions for overcoming the problem.     

The employment and redistributive effects of reducing or eliminating minimum wage tip credits

Recent policy debate on minimum wages has focused not only on raising the minimum wage, but on eliminating the tip credit for restaurant workers. We use data on past variation in tip credits—or minimum wages for restaurant workers—to provide evidence on the potential impacts of eliminating (or reducing) the tip credit. Our evidence points to higher tipped minimum wages (smaller tip credits) reducing jobs among tipped restaurant workers, without positive earnings effects on those who remain employed sufficiently large to raise total earnings in this sector. And most of our evidence provides no indication that higher tipped minimum wages would be well targeted to poor or low-income families or reduce the likelihood of being poor or very low income.     

Joblessness and poverty in America's central cities: Causes and policy prescriptions

Abstract

Two paradigms pervade the policy debate on the causes of urban joblessness and poverty: (1) a structural, nonvoluntaristic perspective emphasizing the roles of urban economic change, residential segregation, and spatial and skills mismatches, and (2) a rational‐choice, voluntaristic perspective contending that the generosity and ready availability of welfare programs have removed the incentive for poor persons to accept low‐paying jobs. This article brings together propositions of each paradigm into a comprehensive theoretical model. The study measured and tested key causal operators of the model for a sample of 67 large U.S. cities, with special attention to race and gender.

Results show that structural and welfare disincentive perspectives are not in conflict but rather operate side by side to reinforce joblessness and poverty. Race and gender, especially the role of urban space for women's work, are important. The article raises pertinent policy issues derived from the two perspectives and from the analysis.     

城市化进程中的反贫困:制度创新与法律保障

面对日益严峻的城市贫困问题,国家初步建立了涵括基本养老保险制度、城市居民最低生活保障制度等在内的城市反贫困制度法律体系。但是这一制度法律体系还不够系统完善,还存在城市反贫困主体单一、社会参与有限的问题,尚未建立系统完备、保障全面的社会保障制度和全国统一的城市反贫困法律体系。城市化进程中的主体贫困、制度贫困和法律贫困是致使产生城市贫困问题的重要原因。这就需要建立政府主导、社会共同参与的城市反贫困工作管理机制,解决反贫困制度建设滞后和立法不规范的问题,科学规划、统筹规范反贫困工作,形成以宪法为基本依据、以《反贫困法》为核心、以《社会保障法》等相关社会保障法律法规为支撑的反贫困法律体系,强化城市反贫困权利救济和责任追究制度,不断提升城市反贫困制度化、法治化进程。     

如何突破中国农村反贫困政策的瓶颈

改革开放以来,我国农村的反贫困政策取得了举世瞩目的成就。但是,目前我国农村反贫困政策实际上陷入了某种瓶颈之中。要突破中国农村反贫困政策的瓶颈,就必须在全社会确立起让全体社会成员共享社会发展成果的基本理念。在此条件下,针对中国农村社会政策存在的问题分别采取以下几项实际的对策:缩小城乡反贫困政策之间的差距;启动农村的职业培训;将公益性(救济式)扶贫与生产性(开发性)扶贫有效地结合在一起;对失地农民需要采取力度更大的扶持政策;重视极端贫困地区的搬迁式扶贫。     

Moving Up,Moving Out,or Going Nowhere? A Study of the Employment Patterns of Young Women and the Implications for Welfare Mothers

Conventional wisdom holds that women on welfare will be better off in the long run if they take a job, even if it means initially having less money to spend on their and their children's needs. Underlying this thinking is the belief that women who take low‐paying jobs will eventually move up to higher paying jobs either with their current employer or by changing employers. This paper examines the employment transitions of young women focusing on the likelihood that women who turn to the welfare system for support will make the transition from low‐paying to high‐paying jobs. The data are drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Based on the experiences of women who never received welfare, an estimated one‐quarter of young women who received welfare could be firmly established in jobs paying more than $9.50 an hour by ages 26 and 27. An additional 40 percent would work steadily but in low‐paying jobs, and more than one‐third would work only sporadically. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Toward more valid evaluations of training programs serving the disadvantaged

The author challenges the widespread assumption that the wage effects of federal training programs are reliable and unbiased estimates of productivity effects and social benefits. Evidence is presented that the reputations of government training programs are unreliable and that employers stigmatize those eligible for Targeted Jobs Tax Credit and Comprehensive Employment and Training Act on-the-job training contracts. Graduates of classroom training programs which are known to be funded by the Job Training Partnership Act are likely to be similarly stigmatized. TJTC eligibles are seriously underpaid by employers and job training partnership act graduates may experience a similar fate. Consequently, the true effect of JTPA on the productivity of disadvantaged workers may be considerably larger than its effect on wages. The author describes alternative methods of obtaining estimates of productivity effects of training programs.     

关于高职应用电子技术专业建设的思考

高职应用电子技术专业是一个传统的电子信息类专业，多年来，我们坚持改革和加强实践教学，努力做到学校与社会职业岗位能力需求相结合、师生与实践劳动者相结合。通过立项研究，实验室、实习实训基地建设等实践，在培养方案、课程设置和建设、课程教学模式、实践和实训过程河内容等领域作了一些研究和探索，取得了一些建设性的成果。     

THE NEXT DECADE: THE ECONOMIC, POLITICAL, AND SOCIAL CONTEXT OF EMPLOYMENT AND TRAINING POLICIES

The conservative challenge of the Reagan administration has not produced a full-scale reversal of the liberal policies and social programs developed by earlier administrations and seems unlikely to do so now. Nevertheless, the continuities in American social and political history, the changed economic and fiscal circumstances of the current era, and growing public appreciation of the limits of federal action and of institutional capabilities are likely to effect a reduction in the level of federal spending for social programs in the foreseeable future and force the states to assume larger fiscal and programmatic roles. Implications for future employment and training policies include continued decentralization, a shift in focus away from training new entrants to retraining mid-career workers, and greater emphasis on meeting cost-effectiveness tests as program goals seek to promote economic efficiency rather than social objectives.     

Social Security's special minimum benefit

Social Security's special minimum primary insurance amount (PIA) provision was enacted in 1972 to increase the adequacy of benefits for regular long-term, low-earning covered workers and their dependents or survivors. At the time, Social Security also had a regular minimum benefit provision for persons with low lifetime average earnings and their families. Concerns were rising that the low lifetime average earnings of many regular minimum beneficiaries resulted from sporadic attachment to the covered workforce rather than from low wages. The special minimum benefit was seen as a way to reward regular, low-earning workers without providing the windfalls that would have resulted from raising the regular minimum benefit to a much higher level. The regular minimum benefit was subsequently eliminated for workers reaching age 62, becoming disabled, or dying after 1981. Under current law, the special minimum benefit will phase out over time, although it is not clear from the legislative history that this was Congress's explicit intent. The phaseout results from two factors: (1) special minimum benefits are paid only if they are higher than benefits payable under the regular PIA formula, and (2) the value of the regular PIA formula, which is indexed to wages before benefit eligibility, has increased faster than that of the special minimum PIA, which is indexed to inflation. Under the Social Security Trustees' 2000 intermediate assumptions, the special minimum benefit will cease to be payable to retired workers attaining eligibility in 2013 and later. Their benefits will always be larger under the regular benefit formula. As policymakers consider Social Security solvency initiatives--particularly proposals that would reduce benefits or introduce investment risk--interest may increase in restoring some type of special minimum benefit as a targeted protection for long-term low earners. Two of the three reform proposals offered by the President's Commission to Strengthen Social Security would modify and strengthen the current-law special minimum benefit. Interest in the special minimum benefit may also increase because of labor force participation and marital trends that suggest that enhancing workers' benefits may be a more effective means of reducing older women's poverty rates than enhancing spousal or widow's benefits. By understanding the Social Security program's experience with the special minimum benefit, policymakers will be able to better anticipate the effectiveness of other initiatives to enhance benefits for long-term low earners. This article presents the most recent and comprehensive information available about the special minimum benefit in order to help policymakers make informed decisions about the provision's future. Highlights of the current special minimum benefit include the following: Very few persons receive the special minimum benefit. As of December 2001, about 134,000 workers and their dependents and survivors were entitled to a benefit based on the special minimum. Of those, only about 79,000 received a higher total benefit because of the special minimum; the other 55,000 were dually entitled. (In effect, when persons are eligible for more than one type of benefit--that is, they are dually eligible--the highest benefit payable determines total benefits. If the special minimum benefit is not the highest benefit payable, it does not increase total benefits paid.) As of February 2000, retired workers who were special minimum beneficiaries with unreduced benefits and were not dually entitled were receiving, on average, a monthly benefit of $510 per month. That amount is approximately $2,000 less than the annual poverty threshold for an aged individual. Special minimum benefits provide small increases in total benefits. For special minimum beneficiaries who were not dually entitled as of December 2001, the average special minimum monthly PIA was just $39 higher than the regular PIA. Most special minimum beneficiaries are female retired workers. About 90 percent of special minimum beneficiaries are retired workers, and 77 percent of those retired workers are women. The special minimum benefit has never provided poverty-level benefits. Maximum payable special minimum benefits (unreduced for early retirement) equal 85 percent of the poverty level for aged persons, down from 96 percent at the provision's inception. Major public policy considerations raised by this analysis include the following: Social Security benefits alone do not protect all long-term low earners from poverty. Low earners with 30 years of earnings equal to the annual full-time minimum wage who retired in selected years from 1982 to 2000 received benefits that were 3.9 percent to 20.1 percent below the poverty threshold, depending on the year they retired. For 40-year earners, the range was 3.9 percent to 15.3 percent below poverty. Furthermore, in 1993, 29.2 percent of retired-worker beneficiaries who were poor had 30 or more years of coverage. The size of the universe of persistently low earners with significant attachment to the covered workforce is unknown. Available research that examines two 28-month periods suggests that only 4 percent to 6 percent of full-time, full-period earners had below-minimum wages for more than 12 consecutive months. Targeting enhanced benefits only toward long-term, regular workers who are low earners is difficult under the current Social Security program. All else being equal, if total wage-indexed lifetime covered earnings are the same for both a full-career low earner and for a high earner who has worked only occasionally, then their Social Security benefits will be identical. Social Security has no information on number of hours worked, hourly wages, or other information that could distinguish between two such persons.     

The minimum wage and the poor: The end of a relationship

The belief that minimum-wage legislation helps the working poor is one reason for its continued popular support. The authors track the household incomes of low-wage workers and find that a radical transformation has occurred in the half century since the passage of the original minimum-wage law. Today most low-wage workers live in households well above the poverty line. Hence, those living in poverty will get only about 11 percent of the gains from the higher minimum-wage increase proposed in the Kennedy-Hawkins Bill. Low-wage workers in families with incomes three or more times the poverty line will get nearly 40 percent. Thus it is not clear that increases in the minimum wage make good policy even if no jobs are lost as a result.     

HELPING PEOPLE WITH LABOR MARKET PROBLEMS: AN OVERVIEW OF KEY POLICIES

Those in need of employment and training programs face a variety of difficulties. Accordingly, the federal response to labor market problems has encompassed a wide range of initiatives. These include preparing people for work (through skills training, the Job Corps, work experience programs); improving the functioning of the labor market (through matching workers with jobs, establishing a minimum wage, and the Targeted Jobs Tax Credit program); and preventing discrimination. Unresolved issues in these areas are examined. They include who should be targeted for federal assistance, which levels of government can best operate programs, how public versus private efforts should be balanced, how limited resources should be distributed, and how the welfare versus work question should be resolved.     

Welfare,work experience,and economic self‐sufficiency

The potential of former AFDC recipients to earn a living wage is central to the success of welfare‐to‐work programs. Previous studies have found that welfare recipihyphen;ents see little increase in their wages over time. Low wage growth could arise from either low returns to work experience or low levels of experience. This distinction is important for designing effective welfare policy. In the following paper, we estimate how wages grew with work experience between 1978 and 1992 for a national sample of women from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. We compare women who never received welfare with both short‐ and long‐term recipients in order to see to what extent the rates of wage growth with work experience differ. We find that they differ very little. We use numerous specification checks to test the robustness of our results and find consistent evidence that the wages of AFDC recipients grew at a rate similar to those of nonrecipients once work experience is taken into account. © 2001 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Black pioneers—do their moves to the suburbs increase economic opportunity for mothers and children?

Abstract

This paper examines whether housing vouchers help poor people improve their education and employment. The Gautreaux program uses housing certificates and counseling to help poor people move to white suburbs and to black urban areas. The people who move to suburbs face different opportunities and challenges than those moving within the city, so it is not certain which group will have better employment and education. We find that compared with city movers, the adult suburban movers have greatly improved employment, even after controls, but they have no different pay or hours worked. Among children, suburban movers are more likely than city movers to be (1) in school, (2) in college‐track programs, (3) in four‐year colleges, (4) in jobs, (5) in better‐paying jobs, and (6) in jobs with benefits. Just by moving people and without providing additional services, this program has uncovered capabilities of these low‐income people that were not evident in the city. Policy implications of this program are considered herein.     

Social policy implications of the minimum wage law

Poverty and unemployment are two critical issues facing the United States today. Linked to both of these is the federal minimum wage law. Established under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, the purpose of the law was—and still is—to eliminate, as rapidly as possible, labor conditions thought to be harmful to the “health, efficiency, and general well-being of workers ... without substantially curtailing employment or earning power.”¹ In other words, to eliminate low wages without eliminating jobs. This is a laudable goal, with which no one is likely to disagree. The question remains as to how effective the law has been in achieving this goal. Has it eliminated poverty? Or has it, to the contrary, had effects detrimental to those the law was designed to help? It is the contention here that the minimum wage law has played a significant role in causing unemployment among the most disadvantaged groups, including blacks, teenagers, unskilled workers, and people living in economically depressed regions. It is therefore proposed that further increases in the minimum wage be blocked and that the rate and coverage be held at the present level.     

You Can't Fix What You Don't Measure: How ALICE Can Help Rebuild the Middle Class

Seventy percent of Americans identify as middle class, but one in three middle‐income households do not earn enough to support their family at the most basic level, and four in five do not earn enough to afford a sustainable budget. This incongruity explains the increasing frustration of many workers. Yet official government measures do not capture this reality, and as a result, policy makers continue to create economic policies that perpetuate the structural mismatch between wages and costs. This Viewpoint essay addresses these shortcomings. After reviewing alternatives to the federal poverty level, it argues that the most realistic and accurate floor to the middle class is the ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) Household Survival Budget. The essay then turns to policies that help realign wages and cost of living and presents initiatives that are being implemented in states across the country. Four policy areas would enable more workers to support their families and fulfill the promise of being middle class in America: meaningful work with stable and sufficient wages, upskilling and digital retooling, fiscal cushion for periods of financial instability, and affordable credit.     

Government Reform,Political Ideology,and Administrative Burden: The Case of Performance Management in the Bush Administration

This article examines how ideological differences between political officials and agencies may have affected the implementation of an ostensibly nonpartisan, government‐wide administrative initiative: the George W. Bush administration's Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) review of federal programs. The analysis reveals that managers in agencies associated with liberal programs and employees (“liberal agencies”) agreed to a greater extent than those in agencies associated with conservative programs and employees (“conservative agencies”) that PART required significant agency time and effort and that it imposed a burden on management resources. Further analysis reveals that differences in reported agency effort can be explained partly by objective differences in the demands that PART placed on agencies—liberal agencies were required to evaluate more programs and implement more improvement plans relative to their organizational capacity—and partly by the ideological beliefs of employees—on average, liberal managers reported more agency effort, even after accounting for objective measures of administrative burden.     

“十四五”时期我国社会救助制度改革的目标与任务

“十四五”时期我国完成现阶段脱贫攻坚任务后将开启以解决相对贫困问题为目标的新的贫困治理阶段,社会救助制度在此期间应该发挥更加积极的作用。本文在总结“十三五”时期我国社会救助发展成绩和短板的基础上,提出了“十四五”时期社会救助改革与发展的基本目标和主要任务。本文认为,“十四五”时期社会救助应该转向以治理相对贫困为目标,继续提高社会救助的公平性,着眼于更高的社会效益和运行效率。为此,“十四五”时期应该提升社会救助的贫困识别标准,扩大社会救助的行动体系,优化社会救助制度体系,加强服务救助体系建设,并加强和优化社会救助的管理体系。     

Poverty Reduction in A Transforming China: A Critical Review

This review essay surveys the literature that explains China’s poverty reduction progress since the late 1970s. It examines three dominant explanations: geographic conditions, economic growth, and anti-poverty policies, whose impacts on poverty have evolved with China’s socioeconomic transformation. The review finds that the government has come to play an increasingly significant part in mitigating geographic adversity and making growth more inclusive for the poor over the last two decades. However, our understanding of the political institutions and processes underpinning poverty reduction remains incomplete because most studies concentrate on national and provincial authorities but overlook the county government. As counties have gained considerable resources and authority in poverty reduction, an investigation of their capacity and efficacy is fundamental to explain their various poverty alleviation outcomes. This essay thus proposes a framework for future research that investigates county governments’ bureaucratic arrangements and their relations to society to explain their performance in poverty reduction. This essay concludes with lessons and limitations of China’s government-led poverty alleviation campaign.