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C.S.Lewis

by 제인 Aug 28. 2023

노동시장에 관한 ft 사설 필사

https://www.ft.com/content/9e0437d3-61c6-4aac-9edd-ac6c1bf66fdf


본 기사를 고른 특별한 이유는 없고, 최근에 labour market data를 조사했어서 조금 관심이 있기에 고르게 되었다. 또한 거시경제에 있어서 노동 데이터는 꽤나 중요하니까, 한 번 필사해보면 좋지 않을까라는 생각도 들었다.


(사실 여러 사설을 재고 따질 체력이 별로 남아있지 않았다^^;)


아래부터는 #파이낸셜타임즈 의 사설 전문



Women are driving the US labour market

A post-pandemic boon in female employment shows the 'she-cession'has been reversed



Of all of the pandemic-era labour trends that now behind us, the "she-cession" is perhaps the most significant. Far from fleeing the workforce in the US, women are today driving it.



When Covid-19 first struck, female labour was hit hard, not because women were disproportionately represented in locked-down sectors such as leisure, hospitality and education, but also because they took more responsibility for home schooling and pandemic childcare. Many thought this would be a long-term trend.



But now the economy is back on track, women workers have been on a tear. Female employment growth has not only surpassed that of men post-pandemic, but the labour force participation rate among 25 to 54-year-old women in the US just hit its third record high month - 77.8 percent of women in that age bracket are now in work.



In some ways, this is a return to normal. Between 2015 and 2020, prime-age female labour force participation incresed by 3.5 percentage points, three times the growth rate of men. Economicsts credit this jump to the tighter labour market following the Great Recession of 2007-09, which pushed up wages and drew more women into work. The same effect is in play now, but inflation is adding to the impetus자극체, 추진력.



Women's return to the labour market dovetail딱 들어맞다s with another recent prediction that hasn't stuck. While many economists thought that the pandemic would lead to lots of boomers sliding into early retirement, just the opposite is happening. The millions of people in their fifties and sixties who left jobs are now coming back into work, led by women.



Inflation is clearly one reason for this, but a lack of adequate retirement savings - even with asset prices still relatively hight - is another. Only 34.6 percent of working age Americans have a company-sponsored 401k pension scheme, which is the primary way of saving for retirement in the US. (Nearly another third have some other type of retirement account.)



The median retirement savings for the bottom half of the socio-economic spectrum is a shocking zero. Women are in the worst shape. They are 80 percent more likely to be impoverished in their old age than men. Women are in the worst shape. They are 80 percent more likely to be impoverished in their old age than men, according to the 2016 report Shortchanged in Retirement by Jennifer Brown and others, thanks in part to shorter working lives.



They said, they also have new advantages. More flexible post-pandemic work arrangements are a boon요긴한것 for many women, particularly working mothers. What's more, the Biden Whilte House has made getting more women and people of coulour into the labour market a strategic priority, linking infrastructure spending and corporate subsidies for things such as clean energy and semiconductors to efforts to create a more diverse workforce.



This has already led to some big shifts of women into traditionally male areas, including construction and transport. In the first half of this year, the Department of Buildings in New York issued three times as many building site workers' safety cards to women as they did in the whole of 2019.



Elsewhere, labour rights leaders recently won a big lawsuit requiring one of the nation's largest bus makers, New Flyer, to hire more women and minorities in places such as California and Alabama, as part of transition to battery power funded by Biden infrastructure bill. Building trade unions say many more women are sighning up for training programmes, as employers in tight labour markets make efforts to accommodate work and childcare schedules.



While women are moving into traditionally male work, the trend is not going the other way. There's a body of social science showing that while women will take manufacturing jobs for higher wages, men - particularly white men - are less likely to move into, say, nursing, even if they would earn more there than in manul labour.



Given that both manufacturing and healthcare are booming, it will be interesting to see how these gender-based trends play out, particularly when you add artificial intelligence into the picture. A recent study fron the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School found women were more vulnerable to AI-based job disruption than men, in part because percentage wise, more of them are sill in white-collar office jobs than in manual services and production. The researchers found 80 percent of female workers highly exposed to AI disruption, against 58 percent of men.



While that may be true in the near tern, I would argue that as cutting-edge technology moves deeper into areas such as manufacturing and logistics, you will see displacement(displace 대신/대체하다, (살던 곳에서) 쫓아내다/ displacement (제자리에서 쫓겨난) 이동))in traditionally male fields as well. In the future, it's likely that those with higher emotional intelligence and the ability to be flexible about tasks and retrain themselves quickly to deal with whatever comes will be most in demand, whatever their gender. That reminds me of a conversion I once had with a financial services chief executive, who told me she loved hiring working mothers because their effort to be home in time for dinner made them so productive and efficient. Tha's a gender-based labour trend I can get behind.











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