PBS Newshour, July 2013

PBS Newshour

July 2013

PBS Newshour (full article)

Should We Fear 'the End of Work'?

Lars Vilhuber is a Cornell labor economist who's previously worked with the Census Bureau. He echoed the call for more accurate information about who's being hurt and how:

    "There are a lot of things that we don't know, and that at least with current data, we cannot know. We'd like to be able to say which are the jobs that are turning over a lot, which are the jobs that are being permanently lost, and where are people going to and from these different occupations, while at the same time capturing the huge local variations (across the country) ... We've got some of that, but only a small snapshot of the real whole picture."

And yes, confirmed Steven Berkenfeld, a managing director in the investment division of Barclays Capital, the reluctance to hire any new employees at all has now become very widespread, for understandable reasons:

    "When I speak to small companies, emerging companies, the general sense I get is that they will do anything possible not to hire a full-time, permanent employee. There are a lot of real disincentives to hiring people when you can outsource it, and so hiring someone is a big commitment. It comes with a lot of responsibilities and costs for the person doing the hiring throughout the whole tenure of that new employee, and it's something that employers would rather avoid if at all possible."