Employment and Wages in Community and Social Service Occupations

People who work in community and social service occupations are concerned with improving society and the lives of individuals. These workers perform a diverse array of duties that may include counseling individuals with substance abuse and behavioral problems, providing social assistance to improve the social and psychological functioning of families, and offering spiritual and moral guidance to members of a faith. This issue of BEYOND THE NUMBERS will give a broad overview of employment and wages in community and social service occupations

Number fields unramified away from 2

We consider finite extensions of the rationals which are unramified except for at 2 and infinity. We show there are no such extensions of degrees 9 through 15

An Overview of Employment and Wages in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) Groups

STEM is an acronym often used to refer to occupations, as well as fields of study, in science, technology, engineering, and math. The definition of STEM can vary, depending on the group using it. To develop some standards, the Standard Occupation Classification Policy Committee, made up of representatives of several government agencies, developed options for defining STEM occupations, using the 2010 Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system. The SOC Policy Committee developed two major domains that contain two subdomains each. The first major domain contains the core STEM occupations, and the second domain includes occupations that are dependent upon STEM knowledge. The domains, subdomains, and the five types of STEM occupations are all groupings based on the type of occupations and the duties associated with each particular type of occupation that should prove useful for workforce planning and development, human resource departments, and jobseekers. This Beyond the Numbers article describes the employment and wages for these STEM groups, using Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics

Surveillance technologies as instruments of discipline in the elite sports coaching context: a cautionary post-structural commentary

The use of surveillance technologies as tools to encourage performance enhancement has become an accepted component of elite coaching. Those from the communities of sports physiology, psychology and biomechanics who promote the application of surveillance technologies have reported multiple benefits for the athlete. Conversely, several socio-cultural studies have suggested that surveillance technologies can lead to an oppressive mechanism of control over the athlete, significantly altering the role and responsibilities of the contemporary coach. In this critical commentary we use a post-structural position and adopt Foucault’s disciplinary analysis to contribute to the ongoing debate surrounding the use of surveillance technology in sport. Specifically, we achieve this by labelling surveillance technologies in sport as what Foucault (1977) might call, instruments of discipline, and by explaining the impact they have upon the working coach and the skilled athlete. We present some suggestions surrounding how to most appropriately utilise surveillance technologies in a sports coaching context and conclude by warning against a binary consideration of the use of technology as either good or bad

Union Advantage for Black Workers

In this report, we review the most recent data available to examine the impact of unionization on the wages and benefits paid to black workers. These data show that even after controlling for factors such as age and education level, unionization has a significant positive impact on black workers' wages and benefits. The union advantage is particularly strong for black workers with lower levels of formal education

Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?

The U.S. workforce is substantially older and better-educated than it was at the end of the 1970s. The typical worker in 2010 was seven years older than in 1979. In 2010, over one-third of US workers had a four-year college degree or more, up from just one-fifth in 1979. Given that older and better-educated workers generally receive higher pay and better benefits, we would have expected the share of "good jobs" in the economy to have increased in line with improvements in the quality of workforce. Instead, the share of "good jobs" in the U.S. economy has actually fallen. The estimates in this paper, which control for increases in age and education of the population, suggest that relative to 1979 the economy has lost about one-third (28 to 38 percent) of its capacity to generate good jobs. The data show only minor differences between 2007, before the Great Recession began, and 2010, the low point for the labor market. The deterioration in the economy's ability to generate good jobs reflects long-run changes in the U.S. economy, not short-run factors related to the recession or recent economic policy

A College Degree is No Guarantee

The Great Recession has been hard on recent college graduates, but it has been even harder for black recent college graduates. This report examines the labor-market outcomes of black recent college graduates using the general approach developed by Federal Reserve Bank of New York researchers Jaison Abel, Richard Deitz, and Yaqin Su (2014), who recently studied the outcomes of all recent college graduates

Down and Out: Measuring Long-term Hardship in the Labor Market

The official concept of "long-term unemployment," while useful, is incomplete and, in some cases, even potentially misleading. As tracked by government statistics, the long-term unemployed are only a relatively small part of the population facing extended, sometimes permanent, spells without work

Making Jobs Good

A series of earlier CEPR reports documented a substantial decline over the last three decades in the share of "good jobs" in the U.S. economy. This fall-off in job quality took place despite a large increase in the educational attainment and age of the workforce, as well as the productivity of the average U.S. worker.This report evaluates the likely impact of several policies that seek to address job quality, including universal health insurance, a universal retirement system (over and above Social Security), a large increase in college attainment, a large increase in unionization, and gender pay equity

Bad Jobs on the Rise

The decline in the economy's ability to create good jobs is related to deterioration in the bargaining power of workers, especially those at the middle and the bottom of the pay scale. The restructuring of the U.S. labor market -- including the decline in the inflation-adjusted value of the minimum wage, the fall in unionization, privatization, deregulation, pro-corporate trade agreements, a dysfunctional immigration system, and macroeconomic policy that has with few exceptions kept unemployment well above the full employment level -- has substantially reduced the bargaining power of U.S. workers, effectively pulling the bottom out of the labor market and increasing the share of bad jobs in the economy