#labour mobility

New Job Opportunities for Kenyans to Work in USA Kenyan job seekers have received a major boost following the signing of a new labour mobility agreement. This is between the Government of Kenya and the Government of the State of Nebraska in the United States. It opens structured and legal pathways for Kenyans to work, study, and train in America. The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed…

Hon. Ian Ling-Stuckey, CMG. MPMinister for Treasury25 June 2024 P O Parliament HouseWaigani. NCDm: +675 71111777 “The world is changing. In 2022, the World Bank estimated that overseas workers sent $US794 billion back to their home communities and families. This is equivalent to K3 trillion. A trillion is a thousand billions, or a million millions,  or K3,000,000,000,000.00.Nearly 30 times the…

The following piece was written by Dr Claire Higgins, Senior Research Fellow at the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, and Marina Brizar, Director of the UK Office of Talent Beyond Boundaries. It was originally published on the Kaldor Centre’s website on 4 August 2020. 

“In a paper released last week, David Autor, a pioneering labor economist at MIT, said the geography of jobs has changed. Cities, once the hope of people seeking a middle-class life, are now a symbol of the disappearance of well-paid, middle-skill work.”

“The culprits — automation and the shift of jobs abroad. And people know that it's the same story everywhere, so they are "acting rationally," Autor tells Axios, and staying home.”

“The internet is a key unspoken actor in this dynamic of motionlessness. According to the Minneapolis Fed report, people know much more what they are getting into, and are seeing little romance in experiencing it for themselves.?”

Economists [on] why Americans no longer move:

Joan Williams, UC Hastings: "A more important factor is the Two Body problem, as it's called in academia. Families now need two better jobs, not just one. And they have to be so much better that the family will all be better off even after paying for services they get a home for free, notably child and elder care."

Anthony Carnevale, Georgetown University: "From 1946 through the 1970s, you could be pretty fancy free. If you were able-bodied and had a good attitude, there was something for you out there. Even without a high school education, you could get a job. Then the boom was over, and everything changed. In the 1970s, automation across industries began, and starting in the early 1980s, a double-dip recession. Computing skills began to be required, and better education. We are just a mature post-industrial society. The Tom Joads are in trouble."

Mark Zandi, chief economist, Moody's Analytics: "Because people don’t need to move to the job, they can do the job where they already live. The creation and use of information can be done almost anywhere. This even applies to those with lesser skills, who are increasingly part of the information economy."

Daniel Shoag, Case-Western University: "The big action is on where people move, not so much a general decline in overall mobility. I know that's a controversial point, but my read of the data is more in line with this. In terms of where people move, I think it's mostly about out of control housing markets more than the internet."

Axios, March 5, 2019: “For struggling Americans, nowhere to go,” by Steve LeVine

Work of the Past, Work of the Future

“This deskilling reflects the joint effects of automation and international trade, which have eliminated the bulk of non-college production, administrative support, and clerical jobs, yielding a disproportionate polarization of urban labor markets.  The unwinding of the urban non-college occupational skill  gradient  has,  I  argue,  abetted  a  secular  fall  in  real  non-college  wages  by:   (1)shunting non-college workers out of specialized middle-skill occupations into low-wage occupations that require only generic skills; (2) diminishing the set of non-college workers that hold middle-skill jobs in high-wage cities; and (3) attenuating, to a startling degree, the steep urban wage premium for non-college workers that prevailed in earlier decades.  Changes in the nature of work—many of which are technological in origin—have been more disruptive and less beneficial for non-college than college workers.”

The insurance is in fact, as President Juncker clearly presents, a contribution to national unemployment benefit costs made by the EU Budget’s redistribution mechanism to mitigate asymmetric shocks and by the reform reform compensation mechanism (presented in the tabled regulation as an “incentive” to reform).

I’m in favour of the latter, having suggested it months before it was proposed by the…