Even in weak employment markets, the United States has typically had a trump card to play. The nation's workers are legendary for their willingness to travel across the country for new opportunities.

The result has been a speedier recovery of job growth than in Europe and possibly a higher productivity rate, since skilled workers are better matched to openings.

With the August employment report on Friday expected to show little improvement in the job market, America has never needed this flexibility more. Yet, at the risk of adding to the gloom, this advantage appears to be fading fast. The good news is that the United States still boasts one of the most dynamic labor markets of any rich nation. OECD rankings of its 30 wealthy member nations put the U.S. far
ahead of other large countries. (It comes second only to Denmark, which has unmatched programs to help the unemployed back to work.)

On average, around a quarter of American workers change jobs each year, compared with 15 percent in Italy and 13 percent in Greece, says Stefano Scarpetta, head of employment research at the OECD.

Yet there has been a striking decline in U.S. mobility in recent years. Since 2000, the movement of Americans across state lines has halved to just 1.6 percent of the population this year -- the lowest rate since records began in 1948. Even movement between counties is at historic lows.

(Click chart to enlarge in new window)

Americans may be becoming less adventurous because they are getting older. During the recession of the early 1980s the median age in the labor force was 35, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Now it is 41.

In middle age, people are less willing to leave their home and yank their children out of a school district for anything less than a dream job. OECD figures show that workers above 45 are half as likely as those under 34 to change companies.

Another factor is at work -- the housing meltdown. Tighter lending standards and negative equity make it much harder to relocate. The willingness of people to move for a new job halves when a family is suffering from negative equity, according to research by Joseph Gyourko and Fernando Ferreira at the University of Pennsylvania.

Those who owe more on their mortgage than the property is worth face a tough choice if they are offered a job elsewhere. Either they can sell and hand over the balance of the debt to the lender -- often tens of thousands of dollars -- or walk away and suffer years of higher borrowing costs.

This is a problem that is certain to grow. Negative equity currently afflicts around 26 percent of borrowers, or 14 million properties, according to Deutsche Bank. By the time the slump is over, Deutsche expects that close to half of households will suffer from negative equity. More than a quarter of borrowers could end up owing more than 125 percent of the value of their home.

Economists believe there may be other factors chipping away at the flexibility of the workforce. Rising healthcare costs have increased the risks associated with going without insurance -- something than many dynamic startups can't afford.

When a recovery gathers pace, the frustration of being tied down to depressed areas will become ever more acute. The United States may not have the onerous labor market laws seen in much of continental Europe. But the housing market collapse combined with an aging population may end up having a similar effect.

If American companies find it harder to draw on the nation's full pool of talent or if workers can't move where they will be most productive, the prospects for a full-blooded recovery will dim.

–- Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. The views expressed are her own. –-

It’s July, teen unemployment has risen to 24 percent, and you—or your teenage children—still don’t have a summer job. This is a peculiarly American problem.

In Nepal, according to Hudson Institute research assistant and Nepalese citizen Astha Strestha, “teens just hang around all summer and spend their parents’ money.”

In France, summer vacations are shorter, only 6 weeks, and teens try to stay with relatives outside the city.

In America, summer vacation lasts the better part of three months, and teens work either to earn spending money, contribute to college tuition payments, or simply because they think that they should have a job.

These days summer jobs are less plentiful due to the economy and to increases in the minimum wage.

It’s easier to be employable at a wage of $5.15, the 2006 minimum, than to find someone to hire you at $7.25, the new federal minimum effective on July 24. But just because no one has hired you, it doesn’t mean that you can’t earn money. You can start your own business. If it grows, you can employ friends and siblings, and perhaps keep it going for the rest of the year.

Computer assistance. You may not know it, but you have a comparative advantage in computers. This can be used by helping older adults, who grew up when computers were larger than cars and programming meant putting a pile of cards in a machine. You could help people set up email or social networking accounts, figure out their iPods, build a Web site, organize digital photos on a computer, or construct spreadsheets for bills and expenses.

Tutoring. You may not get straight As in school, but you probably know more about a subject than kids two or three years younger than you. And some of them might want to review material from last year, or get a head start on their classes for next year. Even more likely, parents might think their kids need help. Your slogan can be “Give Your Kids the Best—the Power of Summer Tutoring.”

Bicycle Repair. It’s remarkable how people throw out bicycles that–with a little cleaning, grease and tube repair—can be almost as good as new. Some people have old bikes in their basements that they would like collected, and some cities are even willing to have discarded bicycles removed from their dump. With the help of a bike repair manual you can mend them and sell them on Craigslist.

Yard Service and Car Maintenance. What people value most is their time, and some don’t want to spend their time mowing their lawn, weeding, or washing their cars. In suburbia there are endless opportunities which can carry over into the school year with leaf clearing and snow shoveling.

Summer Camp. One step up from babysitting is setting up informal week-long summer camps for small groups of neighborhood children. The themes could be sports, arts and crafts, reading and writing—wherever your skills may lie. In order to start a business, you need enthusiasm for a publicity drive through word of mouth; flyers through neighbors’ doors; notices with tear-off telephone numbers at grocery stores, houses of worship, community centers, and libraries; or internet sites, such as your Facebook page and Craigslist.

The object is to let everyone know that you’re available. Since businesses generally spread through word of mouth, you could ask the first few clients to act as references, perhaps even giving them a discount to do so. Valuable references and good will are some of the best assets your young company can have. That means always being courteous and cleanly-dressed.

Pricing can be a challenge. Until you find the right price, you might want to ask your clients to pick the price—“pay me whatever you like to mow this lawn”—so that people don’t think that you’re out to exploit them. In some cases, your clients might pay you more than you would have dared to charge on your own.

Just as large businesses collect information about potential customers, you want to keep a good database of your clients by recording names, addresses, telephone numbers, and email addresses.

Then, if business is a little slow, or if you go on vacation and return to town, you can call your clients and politely ask if they need your services. The advantages of starting your own business are numerous. You work for yourself, not a boss. You set your own hours. You don’t have to put up with cranky co-workers. If you’re not interacting with your clients, you can dress as you choose: no one cares if you build a website in your pajamas.

On the other hand, entrepreneurship is unpredictable and has its ups and downs. You might need several tries to get clients. One teen I know intended to spend his summer tutoring full-time and fixing bicycles on the side, yet ended up fixing bicycles full-time and tutoring on the side, since he had more bike customers than students.

Teens, there’s a job out there for you. You just have to go out and make it.

– Daniela Drake, M.D., attended Wellesley College and received an MBA from Stanford University. She, along with Elizabeth Ford, authored the book “Smart Girls Marry Money.” A former McKinsey consultant, she is now a full-time primary care physician. Drake married (for love) and has reaped the consequences. The views expressed are her own. –

I had to pause when I came across a blog out of South Africa that read, “I think a way forward, or backwards some of you might say, is to encourage our smart, savvy and capable daughters to marry for money.” Since I co-authored a book with a similar premise, this sassy assertion definitely grabbed my attention.

The blog’s author Jackie May, an editor for The Times world pages in South Africa, penned these seemingly heretical comments after learning of alarming research by Dr. Caroline Gatrell at Lancaster University in England. Dr. Gatrell found, “women who explicitly choose career over kids are often vilified at work.”

Huh?

Conventional wisdom says just the opposite: Sacrificing baby-making is often necessary in the calculus of getting ahead at work. Many mid-career women have forsaken motherhood to obtain career goals. Indeed, economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett made news a few years ago when she presented the statistic that 49% of mid-career women who made $100,000 a year or more were childless, compared to only 10% of men.

Yet, despite the sacrifices many women make in order to climb the corporate ladder, women are still woefully under represented in top executive ranks. Eight of the CEO’s on the Fortune 500 were women a couple of years ago. Now, two years later, we’ve got 12. At this rate it will take a little over 100 years for us to represent half of the CEO’s in the Fortune 500, in the year 2128.

Although the number of CEO’s is a lofty benchmark, in general even at the lower reaches, workplace parity is coming at a glacial pace. The reasons are complicated, and it isn’t just sexism. Many have suggested that it has to do with the choices women make to fulfill personal life ambitions.

Even today, many young women don’t foresee that these choices will affect their career success. Hewlett’s more recent national survey found that the typical young woman graduate plans to have a high paying job, take two to three years off to have children and benefit from career flexibility that lets her pop back in to the workplace when the mood strikes.

While Hewlett found the women’s optimism charming, she also noted that this generation follows hot on the high-heels of a generation of women who had similar ideas. By following non-linear career paths, that generation “lost 18…to 37% of their earning power,” and suffered a complete “downsizing of their ambitions.”

But the new graduates aren’t heeding the warning signs of the slightly more senior women’s failures.

These young women are counting on their talents to grant them repeated entrée into a marketplace they were brought up to believe is a meritocracy. The bad old days are behind us, as one co-ed commented to Hewlett, “Back then—when there were dinosaurs—people just did bad stuff to women.”

But is this true, or are people still doing bad stuff to women? If Dr. Caroline Gatrell’s study is right, women who have sacrificed important personal goals are penalized at work. As Gatrell’s study indicates: Childless women are viewed as lacking an “essential humanity” and viewed as unfit to manage others.

Yet at the same time Gatrell assures us that mothers don’t fare much better. Gatrell avers, “Women with children are blamed for combining motherhood with paid work and women with no children are sidelined and discounted because they are not mothers.”

The problem of women in the workplace is so complicated that the answers themselves sound like Orwellian double-speak. Or, have we at long last entered an age when double-speak simply means that both things can be true, that workplace discrimination can take on many forms and that there are no easy answers? But one thing is certain: achieving success in the workplace is like winning a competition. If half the entering team shows up thinking it’s something less than that, then men will still have the home field advantage—and achieving parity may take more than the 100 years estimated by my back-of-the-envelope calculation.

So what will I say if my daughter asks me, “How can I make sure my life is financially secure?”

I would have to pause before I answer. I would have to consider that in all likelihood she won’t live to see true workplace equality. But her life matters now. So I will have my own Orwellian answer for her and offer it with a hefty dose of irony, “Apply yourself at school and at work. And to cover all your bases, marry a man with money.”

– Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.  The views expressed are her own. —

Chairman Henry Waxman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee announced yesterday that his American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 “will create millions of jobs, revive our economy, and secure our energy independence.”

The 648-page bill, co-sponsored by Waxman and fellow Democrat Edward Markey, Chairman of the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee, has been the subject of four days of committee hearings this week.  It would set new limits for greenhouse gas emissions, and prescribe radically new standards for energy production and use.

The most surprising word in the 648-page bill is one that isn’t there, not even once.  That word is “nuclear.” To discuss clean energy and security without mentioning increased development of nuclear energy, now powering 20 percent of America’s electricity with no greenhouse gas emissions, shows that Chairmen Waxman and Markey are not taking the issue seriously. They’re just trying to raise taxes on Americans and enhance the power of Congress and the agencies it oversees.

Over 100 pages in the bill are spent on measures to reduce greenhouse gases.  The bill requires greenhouse gas emissions in 2012 to be no more than 97 percent of 2005 emissions, 58 percent in 2030 and 17 percent in 2050.  This last target, four decades into the future, is incompatible with our present standard of living—and illustrates the arrogance of politicians who think that they can micro-manage the economy far beyond anyone’s capacity to foresee events.

The mechanism for this is a “cap-and-trade” program, proposed by President Obama in his budget, under which allowances—the number and price as yet unspecified—to emit greenhouse gases would be issued by the Environmental Protection Agency.  If a firm’s emissions exceeded its allowance, or cap, it would have to purchase more allowances, either from the government or from other firms.

As allowed emissions decline over time, firms would have to buy more allowances, driving up costs that inevitably would be paid to consumers.  The Obama March Budget forecast that revenues of $646 billion over eight years would be collected from cap-and-trade.

Representative Joe Barton of Texas, ranking Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee, offered his version of candor at yesterday’s hearing.  “Ladies and gentlemen, if you like the idea of reducing your carbon footprint to the size that this legislation proposes, you can test drive these carbon emissions levels by living in Nigeria,” he said.

Cap-and-trade is only one part of the bill that would drive up prices.  Consider energy production.  The bill would require doubling in three years of the share of electric utility output that comes from renewable sources—wind, solar, geothermal, biomass—from three percent now to six percent in 2012.  In a further leap of central-planning arrogance, the bill would raise that standard in stages to 25 percent in 2025.

Sounds good? Maybe, but the technology to do it doesn’t exist. Nor do transmission lines to deliver wind energy from where it is likely to be produced,  in the central states, to the population centers on the coasts, where it would be consumed.

Solar energy might be produced in the southwestern desert and California, yet exporting it to Rhode Island and foggy Washington State is practically impossible.  The bill could address this problem by giving the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission additional authority to site transmission lines, yet it does not do so.

Or, take energy efficiency. If people don’t conserve energy voluntarily, the bill would require them to do so.  Existing federal energy efficiency standards for commercial and residential buildings would rise by 30 percent until 2016 for new buildings, and 50 percent thereafter. EPA would set by next year new emissions standards for cars, trucks, trains, and aircraft. Electricity distributors would be required to achieve energy savings beginning with one percent in 2012 and reaching 15 percent in 2020.

If this bill would create millions of jobs and revive our economy, why not make the standards tougher and create even more jobs?

With the global economy in the depths of the worst recession since the Great Depression, according to the International Monetary Fund, now is not the time to raise the cost of energy and consumer goods.  Chairmen Waxman and Markey should reconsider.

– Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.  The opinions expressed are her own. —

The economic outlook is bleak. Unemployment is rising.  Credit markets are dysfunctional.  Students are worried about job prospects, for good reason.

If you’re a young person choosing a career path, forget banking, forget autos, and forget Wall Street.  A new study coming out from the Hudson Institute in January, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, shows that enrolling in a community college and earning a two-year degree or certificate in a health-related profession—the only field that showed significant job gains in November, and the one with the most jobs openings—can open a pathway to higher earnings.

These findings demonstrate that the role of community colleges in American higher education has been expanding for good reason: they are cost effective.

The study, by economists Louis Jacobson and Christine Mokher of CNA in Alexandria, Virginia, examines 145,000 students in Florida from 1996 to 2007, using individual data on education and earnings.

The study shows that getting a two-year associate degree in a health-care field — such as nursing, medical imaging, and physical therapy — gave students an unusually good starting salary, and a good return on investment.  Students with health-related concentrations earned the highest salaries when they left school, with median incomes of $46,000.

This was about $10,000 more than students who prepared for professional fields such as law and banking; $12,000 more than those who prepared for vocational or technical degrees in fields like agriculture and construction; and $15,000 more than those who studied in the category now abbreviated as STEM, which includes science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.  Students with concentrations in humanities had the lowest starting salaries, with a median of $27,000.

For students who pursued a 4-year BA degree, the additional two years of health-care study made little difference in salary.  However, students who majored in STEM over four years pulled down initial salaries of $46,000, matching health-care earners.  Those who got a BA in a professional field, or in a technical vocation, earned $40,000 and $39,000 respectively, still less than those who took a two-year degree in a health-related field.

The data shows that while it is not necessary for students with concentrations in health-care to attend college for four years to boost earnings, students who go into more academic fields win high-starting pay with a four-year degree.

This is especially relevant in Florida, which has fared badly in this recession.  Its loss of 58,600 payroll jobs between October and November, a decline of seven tenths of one percent, was the largest in absolute numbers and the fifth largest in percentage terms in the nation.  Over the past year, Florida has lost 207,000 jobs and its unemployment rate has shot up from 4.4 percent to 7.3 percent.

In all, the almost 1,200 community colleges in America now enroll 11.5 million students, according to the American Association of Community Colleges, or 46 percent of all undergraduates and 41 percent of first-time freshmen.

Average in-state tuition and fees are $2,400 a year, a bargain compared with tuition at four-year schools, public or private.

Do the math.  Two years’ tuition at your local community college comes to $4,800 (on average).  A major in a health-care field might lead to a job paying around $46,000. Times might be bad, but opportunities abound if one looks in the right direction.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth can be reached at dfr@hudson.org. For her previous columns, click here.

November's job losses were the steepest since December 1974, when 602,000 jobs were shed. Analysts polled by Reuters had predicted a reduction of 340,000 jobs.

"This is a clear employment blowout. Firms are reacting as dramatically as they can to make sure they have cost structures they can survive the recession we are in," said Joel Naroff, president of Naroff Economic Advisors.

One reader commenting on the site feels the job losses have not hit bottom. "I predict 30% unemployment by March of 2009. The retailers are gonna tank right after Christmas. Look for some really good deals!" wrote Smacktle.

Not all responses were as dire.

"Well these are pretty bad numbers. This will be a real test to see how much bad news is priced into the markets. Futures are down quite a bit, but I actually expected them to be down a lot more given these terrible recessionary numbers," says Jeff Kleintop, chief market strategist for LPL Financial in Boston.

"It might be hard in future months to get numbers that are any worse. It might be good that we raced to some of the worst numbers we've had because perhaps it can't get incrementally worse."

Some of our readers found the data less shocking.

"This is not a big surprise, really. One has only to observe how many fewer cars are on the road shortly after rush hour, how many empty seats are on the planes into or out of major hubs, how many fewer people are in front of you in any line for services from movie theaters to tire stores, how much more quickly you are seated in a restaurant," writes Jaime Simmons.

What you think about today's unemployment numbers?

(Pictured above: A member of the Laborers Union Local 89 waits outside his local union hall after placing his name on the job list in San Marcos, California November 7, 2008. REUTERS/Mike Blake)

As Congress debates legislation to help struggling automakers, many Americans say they are uneasy with the plan, arguing that while it may save jobs, it would reward companies for pursuing bad business practices. Some even question whether automakers will be viable, even with support.

“They need to restructure. If they get bailed out they are not going to do it,” said Eric Smith, a paint contractor interviewed in Chamblee, Georgia, on the outskirts of Atlanta.

U.S. automakers say federal aid is vital to their survival, and there could be devastating ramifications for the broader economy if the sector is not stabilized.

“This is an issue of the whole auto industry, if that becomes under severe pressure, the impact on the whole U.S. economy will be devastating,” GM Chief Executive Rick Wagoner said in an appearance on a NBC-affiliated television station in Detroit.

Retired Gen. Wesley Clark says that a rescue of U.S. automakers is important both economically and for national security. In a New York Times opinion piece, Clark wrote that the U.S. auto industry has played an important role in successive military campaigns, from World War II to today, and its ability to continue to develop new technologies is imperative for national security.

Some are calling for executive shake-ups if it would ensure congressional backing for a bailout. “If it was the difference between getting this kind of support or not, obviously the management should consider resigning,” Carl Levin, a staunch industry ally, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

As Democrats finalize a rescue plan, the question remains: should U.S. automakers be bailed out?

(Pictured above: G. Richard Wagoner (R), chairman and CEO of General Motors, testifies next to Robert Nardelli (2nd R), chairman and CEO of Chrysler, Alan Mulally (2nd L), President and CEO of Ford Motor Company, and Ron Gettelfinger (L), President of the United Auto Workers union, before the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs in a hearing on “Examining the State of the Domestic Automobile Industry,” on Capitol Hill in Washington, November 18, 2008.  REUTERS/Molly Riley)

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