Friday Links, April 2
US employment is recovering, but we're still a long way off pre-pandemic levels for most occupations.
Good U.S. employment numbers today, as @DanielAlpert described in a great Twitter thread today:
Good JobsDay (and Good Friday). We at @jobqualityindex expect that the restoration of private sector low-wage/low-hours jobs, wiped out by the pandemic, will continue in the March data. Stand by...five minutes from now>>>
— Dan Alpert (@DanielAlpert) April 2, 2021
That said, absolute employment levels in occupations outside of managerial/support functions and professional (~60% of employed people normally) are still lower than they were in 2010.
(I'm keeping a monthly tracker with US employment trends by occupational group, which you can find here: https://www.michelezanini.com/manager-administrator-employment-tracker/)
Younger generations and socialism. A new Fortune Magazine/Survey Monkey poll suggests younger generations have greater sympathy for socialism than older cohorts. It's not hard to see why, given the crappy labor market they've had to contend with over the last ~15 yrs, along with other symptoms of social/econ malaise.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/fortune-poll-march-2021/
More evidence that efforts to optimizing your time can hurt your creative capacity. The article is about individual choices, but the same is true of entire organizations, of course:
Loizos Heracleous and David Robson
And speaking of time optimization... how about another example of digital Taylorism? Call center staff to be monitored via webcam for home-working ‘infractions’
Peter Walker
Excellent Aspen Institute report on the link between employee ownership and job quality, employee ownership, and business performance. It's so full of excellent data and insights that I might write a whole piece about it soon. But seriously, how much more evidence do we need, people?
Jenny Weissbourd