Doug:
The unemployment rate has been below 5% for some time, and
but any given value of the unemployment rate has a much great impact of disciplining labor than it used to. That's because the "social safety net" ain't what it used to be. Many if not most workers are more exposed to competition from the non-employed than they used to be (as "secondary labor market" conditions of high turnover have become more general). (The NAIRU has fallen! The NAIRU has fallen! or at least that's my hypothesis.)
employers frequently complain about shortages of skilled labor. Construction had, until the housing bubble started leaking air, been very tight; in hot markets, builders were cruised rival construction sites, offering cash bonuses to defectors.
that's only one sector. Interestingly, if the Fed decides to up interest rates to deal with the labor shortage there, which sector gets hit hardest? construction, which serves an extremely interest-sensitive type of spending. That includes the employers, not just the workers. at the same time, health care and education (major sources of the persistence of inflation) are pretty immune to recession's effects.
Manufacturing is a mess, but there are a lot of other service sectors outside MBA-land.
service sectors are more likely to have secondary-sector labor relations than mfg.
I realize it violates PEN-L orthodoxy to suggest that it's not 1928 or 1932 all over again, so I apologize for any hurt I've caused.
Doug, please stop being so sour. First, there is no "PEN-L orthodoxy." There are a variety of different views, while there is some turnover of personnel. Second, while your plaint about lefty crisis-mongering is largely valid, its repetition got you into the region diminishing (if not negative) returns awhile back. Especially when adorned with sardonic and world-weary tones. Doug, you've corrected my excesses in crisis-mongering in the past, but nowadays you seem a bit too fast with the trigger. -- Jim Devine / "The truth is more important than the facts." -- Frank Lloyd Wright
