World Academy of Art & Science

G20 Labor Ministers Finalise Jobs Plan Ahead Of Toronto Meeting

Youth Unemployment Surges World-Wide

All New Jobs are Created by New Firms in USA

A Manifesto for the Employment Market to Guarantee Britain's Future

Minister for Employment Participation Mark Arbib today joined G20 Labour and Employment Ministers in finalising their recommendations to G20 leaders ahead of their meeting in Toronto.

Senator Arbib said the G20 leaders had tasked labour and employment ministers with looking at the challenges the global financial crisis has presented for working families around the world.

Senator Arbib joined other G20 labour ministers today in presenting their recommendations to US President Barack Obama.

“The International Labour Organisation report estimates that the policies adopted by G20 governments during the global economic crisis saved or created an estimated 21 million jobs in 2009 and 2010,” Senator Arbib said.

“Australia will continue to work through the G20 to help build a lasting global recovery, while maintaining the flexibility to do what is right for our economy and for Australian families.”

The conference in Washington, hosted by US Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, was convened for the first time to help coordinate labour market policy. It involved ministers responsible for labour markets in the 20 largest economies in the world.

The ministers reviewed the massive programs launched in the past year to respond to the crisis and discussed additional measures to ensure a sustained recovery that produces enough jobs for workers.

“The conference also discussed a 21st century job skills training strategy, which is important for Australia as we move into a period of growth,” Senator Arbib said.

Ministers also discussed strategies for confronting the problem common to all countries – the spike in youth unemployment.

“I was pleased to join other G20 Labour and Employment Ministers in presenting our recommendations to President Obama,” Senator Arbib said.

“Each Minister will now also present the recommendations to our governments.”

The recommendations include:

I. Accelerate job creation to ensure a sustained recovery and future growth.

As some countries begin to experience economic recovery, continued attention must be paid to job creation and job preservation, including vigorous implementation of existing policies and consideration of additional employment measures.

In countries with extensive underemployment, informal sectors and/or high rates of poverty, target efforts to generate employment for poor households and vulnerable groups, utilising lessons learned from recent policy innovations.

II. Strengthen social protection systems and promote inclusive active labour market policies.

Where needed, strengthen social protection systems and active labour market policies because significant numbers of people, including the most disadvantaged, will remain unemployed even after recovery takes hold, and others will need help to adjust to structural changes in our economies.

In addition, all countries should establish adequate social protection systems so that households have sufficient security to take advantage of economic opportunities.

III. Place employment and poverty alleviation at the centre of national and global economic strategies.

G20 leaders should prioritise employment and poverty alleviation as they lay the foundation for strong, sustained and balanced growth that is beneficial to all.

IV. Improve the quality of jobs for our people.

Renew attention to labour market policies and institutions to improve the quality of jobs and respect for fundamental rights at work, as well as the importance of social dialogue.

V. Prepare our workforces for future challenges and opportunities.

Education, lifelong learning, job training and skills development strategies should be prioritised and linked to growth strategies.

Better anticipate and match skills to jobs that can help the workforce benefit from post-crisis restructuring and new opportunities.

During his visit to the United States Senator Arbib also formalised an historic partnership between Australia and the International Labour Organisation to support jobs for people in the Asia-Pacific.

The Australia-ILO Partnership Agreement 2010-2015 will support economic and employment growth, increasing labour standards and improving living conditions by supporting quality jobs.

The agreement is the first time the Australian Government has funded an overarching package of labour programs through the ILO. It provides $15 million funding in the first two years.

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April 14, 2010

The Wall Street Journal

The ranks of the young unemployed have swelled.

The March employment report showed that American workers aged 16-24 had an unemployment rate of 18.8%, nearly double the 9.7% unemployment rate for the population at large. Even though these young workers represent only about an eighth of the work force, they account for a quarter of America’s unemployed.

But rising youth unemployment is not just an American problem, points out a report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Across the 30 OECD countries, there are nearly 15 million unemployed workers aged 15-24 — four million more than at the end of 2007. In France and Italy, one in four young workers are unemployed; in Spain, 40% are jobless.

The currently high levels of youth unemployment could have negative long-term consequences, the report’s authors say.

“For disadvantaged youth lacking basic education, failure to find a first job or keep it for long can have negative long-term consequences on their career prospects that some experts refer to as ‘scarring’.,” they write. “Beyond the negative effects on future wages and employability, long spells of unemployment while young often create permanent scars through the harmful effects on a number of other outcomes, including happiness, job satisfaction and health, many years later.”

One solution, they say, would be to expand apprenticeship programs, which allow young workers to acquire skills and work experience. It seems to be working in Germany, where the ratio of youth unemployment to adult unemployment is 1.5 to 1, compared to 2.8 to 1 across the OECD area.

Source: http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2010/04/14/youth-unemployment-surges-world-wide/tab/print/

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

April 3, 2010

The NewYork Times

Here’s my fun fact for the day, provided courtesy of Robert Litan, who directs research at the Kauffman Foundation, which specializes in promoting innovation in America: “Between 1980 and 2005, virtually all net new jobs created in the U.S. were created by firms that were 5 years old or less,” said Litan. “That is about 40 million jobs. That means the established firms created no new net jobs during that period.”

Message: If we want to bring down unemployment in a sustainable way, neither rescuing General Motors nor funding more road construction will do it. We need to create a big bushel of new companies — fast. We’ve got to get more Americans working again for their own dignity — and to generate the rising incomes and wealth we need to pay for existing entitlements, as well as all the new investments we’ll need to make. It was just reported that Social Security this year will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes — a red line we were not expected to cross until at least 2016.

But you cannot say this often enough: Good-paying jobs don’t come from bailouts. They come from start-ups. And where do start-ups come from? They come from smart, creative, inspired risk-takers. How do we get more of those? There are only two ways: grow more by improving our schools or import more by recruiting talented immigrants. Surely, we need to do both, and we need to start by breaking the deadlock in Congress over immigration, so we can develop a much more strategic approach to attracting more of the world’s creative risk-takers. “Roughly 25 percent of successful high-tech start-ups over the last decade were founded or co-founded by immigrants,” said Litan. Think Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, or Vinod Khosla, the India-born co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

That is no surprise. After all, Craig Mundie, the chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft, asks: What made America this incredible engine of prosperity? It was immigration, plus free markets. Because we were so open to immigration — and immigrants are by definition high-aspiring risk-takers, ready to leave their native lands in search of greater opportunities — “we as a country accumulated a disproportionate share of the world’s high-I.Q. risk-takers.”

In addition, because of our vibrant and meritocratic university system, the best foreign students who wanted the best education also came here, and many of them also stayed. In its heyday, our unique system also attracted a disproportionate share of high-I.Q. risk-takers to high government service. So when you put all this together, with our free markets and democracy, it made it easy here for creative, high-I.Q. risk-takers to raise capital for their ideas and commercialize them. In short, America had a very powerful, self-reinforcing engine for growing innovative new companies.

“When you get this happy coincidence of high-I.Q. risk-takers in government and a society that is biased toward high-I.Q. risk-takers, you get these above-average returns as a country,” argued Mundie. “What is common to Singapore, Israel and America? They were all built by high-I.Q. risk-takers and all thrived — but only in the U.S. did it happen at a large scale and with global diversity, so you had this really rich cross-section.”

What is worrisome about America today is the combination of cutbacks in higher education, restrictions on immigration and a toxic public space that dissuades talented people from going into government. Together, all of these trends are slowly eating away at our differentiated edge in attracting and enabling the world’s biggest mass of smart, creative risk-takers.

It isn’t drastic, but it is a decline — at a time when technology is allowing other countries to leverage and empower more of their own high-I.Q. risk-takers. If we don’t reverse this trend, over time, “we could lose our most important competitive edge — the only edge from which sustainable advantage accrues” — having the world’s biggest and most diverse pool of high-I.Q. risk-takers, said Mundie. “If we don’t have that competitive edge, our standard of living will eventually revert to the global mean.”

Right now we have thousands of foreign students in America and one million engineers, scientists and other highly skilled workers here on H-1B temporary visas, which require them to return home when the visas expire. That’s nuts. “We ought to have a ‘job-creators visa’ for people already here,” said Litan. “And once you’ve hired, say, 5 or 10 American nonfamily members, you should get a green card.”

We need health care, financial reform and education reform. But we also need to be thinking just as seriously and urgently about what are the ingredients that foster entrepreneurship — how new businesses are catalyzed, inspired and enabled and how we enlist more people to do that — so no one ever says about America what that officer says to Tom Cruise in “Top Gun”: “Son, your ego’s writing checks your body can’t cash.”

Source: NY Times

How can it be that 8m adults in this country are not working, when many employers are suffering severe shortages of staff with the appropriate skills?

By Alistair Cox

28 Mar 2010

Telegraph.co.in

The number comes from the Office for National Statistics, which earlier this month showed that employment has reached a 13-year low with more than 8m adults deemed "economically inactive". That's more than one in five of the total population and the highest since records began 40 years ago.

The message from this data is unequivocal. Britain needs to change its attitudes and support for employment to secure a more economically stable and prosperous future.

Ahead of the election, debate is raging over how we can once again make our nation a world-class place to do business and develop an economy that promotes a healthy employment market. As the UK's largest specialist recruiting agency, Hays has an unrivalled view of what is happening in the world of jobs and skills. From our vantage point, we have detected a sense of unease and frustration about the current state of the employment market.

Many businesses would like to recruit more staff, either temporary or permanent, but often feel there are too many risks involved, too many barriers to make it worthwhile. Others are suffering chronic skill shortages in key roles. Some are even scaling back their ambitions because of the difficulties involved in employing people today.

In recent years, employers have been expected to shoulder a significant burden in the form of increased taxes and legislation. In addition, they are often expected to recruit school and university leavers with inadequate skills.

No government can impose employment on an economy. Artificial job-creation schemes have proved expensive and counterproductive. The only way of creating long-term, sustainable employment is to create the right economic, legislative and social framework to nurture new businesses and encourage existing ones to grow.

Based upon data we see every day at the sharp end of the job market, we have produced a "Manifesto for Employment" to tackle the issues preventing greater employment in Britain. We have identified key areas that need to be addressed by the next government.

On taxation and employment legislation, we are seeking a commitment to freeze and then reduce employers' National Insurance Contributions (NICs); a limit on the impact of the EU's Agency Workers' Directive; and a moratorium on new employment legislation.

In education and training, we urge the next government to provide a first-class education system, which equips all school leavers with basic skills and a commercial understanding; to realign further education with the strategic focus of the economy and give the business community an advisory role in university course and curriculum provision; and to increase government funding for apprenticeships, raising their status with employers.

In terms of matching skills to opportunities, we recommend the introduction of greater commercial and change management experience into the public sector. Doing so will transform the sector as it faces budget cuts and transitions many people into private industry.

Similarly, Jobcentre Plus needs to be reconfigured to suit real jobseeker needs during a period of change. Where it is clear that we cannot find the necessary skills at home, immigration quotas must be linked to skills shortages.

We do not believe any of these proposals are particularly radical or controversial. Some proposals, such as the commitment on NICs or employment legislation, could be made almost immediately. Such a commitment would have a beneficial impact on the economy, giving employers confidence that they will not be hit with further creeping tax increases or bureaucracy that limits the flexibility of their workforce.

The Agency Workers Directive is another piece of legislation that concerns employers, and its scope and impact are particularly relevant now. As we emerge from recession, many employers will look to increase capacity initially by recruiting temporary staff. But they will only do that if they feel temporary employment offers them speed and flexibility and does not expose them to undue risks if there is another downturn. The Directive increases the risk.

Our vision for Britain is one with the right conditions for business to be able to compete and win on the world stage with a well-trained workforce, and a job-friendly fiscal and regulatory regime. We urge the incoming government to take note and take action.

Source: Telegraph.co.in