U.S. educational and occupational wage differentials were exceptionally high at the dawn of the twentieth century and then decreased in several stages over the next eight decades. But starting in the early 1980s the labor market premium to skill rose sharply and by 2005 the college wage premium was back at its 1915 level. The twentieth century contains two inequality tales: one declining and one rising. We use a supply-demand-institutions framework to understand the factors that produced these changes from 1890 to 2005. We find that strong secular growth in the relative demand for more educated workers combined with fluctuations in the growth of relative skill supplies go far to explain the long-run evolution of U.S. educational wage differentials. An increase in the rate of growth of the relative supply of skills associated with the high school movement starting around 1910 played a key role in narrowing educational wage differentials from 1915 to 1980. The slowdown in the growth of the relative supply of college workers starting around 1980 was a major reason for the surge in the college wage premium from 1980 to 2005. Institutional factors were important at various junctures, especially during the 1940s and the late 1970s.

Jobs for NSW was launched in August 2015 as a private sector-led and New South Wales (NSW) Government-backed initiative. Its goals are twofold: to help make the NSW economy as competitive as possible, and to fulfil the government's primary objective for NSW of creating more jobs across the state. This paper presents Jobs for NSW's view on how NSW will secure its jobs for the future. Four unavoidable challenges to future jobs growth are identified (increasing global trade in the knowledge economy; new challenges in faster changing industries; task automation and unbundling; an ageing population) and a strategy proposed to turn these challenges into opportunities. The strategy provides four long-term priorities for job creation over the next 20 years and an agenda for action through to 2020. The strategies are: (1) growing exports; (2) opening doors for entrepreneurs; (3) drawing on all of the state's people; and (4) skilling up for the knowledge economy.

In today’s tough global market, organisations have to strive harder than ever to compete. Attracting, retaining and developing the right talent is critical to success. For organisations to operate and compete on a global level, there is an increasing expectation for 24/7 availability and responsiveness. The result: a longer hours culture as organisations are driven to squeeze the maximum out of their resources - a challenge for both women and men who need to balance career demands alongside family and lifestyle commitments. Under these pressures, employers often struggle to find practical solutions for reduced hours working that are both sustainable and commercially competitive.

The Future of Work study aims to stimulate thinking and dialogue on how people and organisations can prepare for tomorrow’s world of work. It provides evidence, inspiration and alternative thinking for those with an interest in employment and skills. The results are derived from a robust, evidence-based approach that draws on expert input from key groups including business, trade unions and academia, as well as a detailed and comprehensive review of literature. A central finding is that in future, new attitudes and behaviours will be needed, founded on flexibility, resilience, collaboration, enterprise and creativity. Above all the ability to respond to change will be critical.

We know that automation is affecting the labor market, but forecasts differ on how swift and dramatic the future impact will be. A new report now suggests things may happen more slowly than some have predicted.

We are a nation of enthusiastic adopters. We embrace technological change and its associated benefits. But any rapid change brings associated trade-offs and risks as well as benefits. It is these trade-offs and risks that must be subject to transparent public debate. The pace at which technology is transforming our lives is exponential. Entire industries are being disrupted as new business models emerge. Regulators, businesses and individuals alike must adapt or be left behind. Our legal and regulatory sectors must act to both protect society and foster innovation. They must modify their frameworks to accommodate technological advances. The job market is changing and will continue to change. Some jobs will disappear. Some will be replaced by different roles that emerge from the relevant technology. Research suggests that roles requiring a low skill level are the most likely to be automated, and that the resulting job loss is likely to be most severe in regional centres. Studies suggest that jobs requiring ‘soft skills’, such as creative and social intelligence, are at a relatively low risk of being automated. In this paper, we explore various industries where technological change is set to significantly disrupt the status quo. Driverless cars, solar power and longer lives – all made possible by technological advancement. Our small island nation is home to numerous disruptive technology companies. According to the CEO of one such company, Rocket Lab, New Zealand is the best place in the world to launch a satellite! These businesses are thriving despite low levels of governmental investment in innovation, by the standards of the developed world. As stakeholders in our country’s future, we must be aware of the impact disruptive technologies are having on our lives: good and bad. In the final section of the paper, we present a series of suggestions that aim to challenge policy makers, businesses and individuals to mindfully embrace technological innovation

With the potential of precarious work to limit consumer willingness to spend, delay family formation and create too much uncertainty in the labour force, governments are paying close attention to these issues in Canada and abroad. Further, they are looking at a number of tools to address these issues, including changes to labour legislation and improvements in safety nets. But how widespread are employment risks and insecurities, and is it getting worse over time? In this Commentary, we look at the common meanings of precarious work in academic and policy research finding that various meanings help bring attention to employment arrangements with elevated insecurity. We examine trends in non-standard work in Canada and find that the overall prevalence of non-standard work has stabilized over the last couple of decades after growing sharply in the early 1990s. Non-standard work tends to be more insecure than “traditional” jobs, so its persistence over time and, in particular, increases in the prevalence of temporary employment – with large concentrations in health, education, and food services sectors, among others – prompts a deeper investigation. Many forces contribute to the creation of non-standard work. They include factors such as business desires for flexibility – often associated with globalization and technological change – but also worker preferences, which play a major role. In our view, the complexity behind causes of non-standard job creation, and the lessons from some international attempts to address specific areas of concerns through blunt legislative tools, militates in favour of looking to options that bolster the safety net. We think that although reviews of labour laws and their enforcement may lead to constructive discussions and new ideas to improve enforcement, interventions to shape employment arrangements with legislation pose the greatest risks of stymying job creation. In this Commentary, we present a list of options to reduce the income-related vulnerabilities and uncertainties faced by many non-standard workers. These include reducing gaps in health coverage, improving Employment Insurance (EI) eligibility, boosting access to social programs, and ensuring uptake of programs that improve access to education and skills training programs for workers. All of these options should help policymakers design the social safety net in ways that mitigates common risks in non-standard work, while supporting labour market dynamism.

We propose a novel method that infers the employment effect of a minimum wage increase by comparing the number of excess jobs paying at or slightly above the new minimum wage to the missing jobs paying below it. To implement our approach, we estimate the effect of the minimum wage on the frequency distribution of hourly wages using 138 prominent state-level minimum wage changes between 1979 and 2016. We find that the overall number of low-wage jobs remained essentially unchanged over five years following the increase. At the same time, the direct effect of the minimum wage on average earnings was amplified by modest wage spillovers at the bottom of the wage distribution. Our estimates by detailed demographic groups show that the lack of job loss is not explained by labor-labor substitution at the bottom of the wage distribution. We also find no evidence of disemployment when we consider higher levels of minimum wages. However, we do find some evidence of reduced employment in tradable sectors. In contrast to our bunching-based estimates, we show that some conventional studies can produce misleading inference due to spurious changes in employment higher up in the wage distribution.

We live in an age of paradox. Systems using artificial intelligence match or surpass human level performance in more and more domains, leveraging rapid advances in other technologies and driving soaring stock prices. Yet measured productivity growth has declined by half over the past decade, and real income has stagnated since the late 1990s for a majority of Americans. We describe four potential explanations for this clash of expectations and statistics: false hopes, mismeasurement, redistribution, and implementation lags. While a case can be made for each, we argue that lags have likely been the biggest contributor to the paradox. The most impressive capabilities of AI, particularly those based on machine learning, have not yet diffused widely. More importantly, like other general-purpose technologies, their full effects won’t be realized until waves of complementary innovations are developed and implemented. The required adjustment costs, organizational changes, and new skills can be modeled as a kind of intangible capital. A portion of the value of this intangible capital is already reflected in the market value of firms. However, going forward, national statistics could fail to measure the full benefits of the new technologies and some may even have the wrong sign.