Unemployment, according to the OECD, is people above a specified age not being in paid employment or self-employment but currently available for work during the reference period.
Underemployment is the underuse of a worker because their job does not use their skills, offers them too few hours, or leaves the worker idle. It is contrasted with unemployment, where a person lacks a job at all despite wanting one.
The New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University (ILR) is an industrial relations school and one of Cornell University's four statutory colleges. The School has five academic departments which include: Labor Economics, Human Resource Management, Global Labor and Work, Organizational Behavior, and Statistics & Data Science.
The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit American think tank based in Washington, D.C., that carries out economic research and analyzes the economic impact of policies and proposals. Affiliated with the labor movement, the EPI is usually described as presenting a left-leaning and pro-union viewpoint on public policy issues. Since 2021, EPI has been led by economist Heidi Shierholz, the former chief economist of the Department of Labor.
Aviva Chomsky is an American professor, historian, author, and activist. She is a professor of history and the Coordinator of Latin American, Latino and Caribbean Studies at Salem State University in Massachusetts. She previously taught at Bates College in Maine and was a research associate at Harvard University, where she specialized in Caribbean and Latin American history.
Worker centers are non-profit community-based mediating organizations in the United States that organize and provide support to communities of low-wage workers who are not already members of a collective bargaining organization, or have been legally excluded from coverage by U.S. labor laws. Many worker centers focus on immigrant and low-wage workers in sectors such as restaurant, construction, day labor and agriculture.
The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) is an American think tank that specializes in economic policy. Based in Washington, D.C. CEPR was co-founded by economists Dean Baker and Mark Weisbrot in 1999.
John Schmitt is an American economist, who serves as a senior economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He has written extensively on economic inequality, unemployment, the new economy, the welfare state, and other topics for both academic and popular audiences. He has also worked as a consultant for national and international organizations including the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, the Global Policy Network, the International Labour Organization, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America, and others.
Lawrence Mishel is distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., a pro-labor think-tank that seeks to advance the interests of American workers. He has been at EPI since 1987, first serving as Research Director, then as Vice-president and then as president from 2002 to 2017.
Jared Bernstein is an American government official who is the chair of the United States Council of Economic Advisers. He is a senior fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. From 2009 to 2011, Bernstein was the chief economist and economic adviser to Vice President Joe Biden in the Obama administration. In 2008, Michael D. Shear described Bernstein as a progressive and "a strong advocate for workers".
Labor unions in the United States, since their early beginnings, have held various viewpoints on immigration. There were differences among the labor unions and occasionally opposition to contemporary majority opinions and public policies.
99ers is a colloquial term for unemployed people in the United States, mostly citizens, who have exhausted all of their unemployment benefits, including all unemployment extensions. As a result of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act passed by Congress in February 2009, many unemployed people could receive up to 99 weeks of unemployment insurance benefits, hence the name "99ers". An estimated 7 million people are affected.
Martha Alter Chen is an American academic, scholar and social worker, who is presently a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and senior advisor of the global research-policy-action network WIEGO and a member of the Advisory Board of the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER). Martha is a development practitioner and scholar who has worked with the working poor in India, South Asia, and around the world. Her areas of specialization are employment, poverty alleviation, informal economy, and gender. She lived in Bangladesh working with BRAC, one of the world's largest non-governmental organizations, and in India, as field representative of Oxfam America for India and Bangladesh for 15 years.
Wage theft is the failing to pay wages or provide employee benefits owed to an employee by contract or law. It can be conducted by employers in various ways, among them failing to pay overtime; violating minimum-wage laws; the misclassification of employees as independent contractors; illegal deductions in pay; forcing employees to work "off the clock", not paying annual leave or holiday entitlements, or simply not paying an employee at all.
Wage compression refers to the empirical regularity that wages for low-skilled workers and wages for high-skilled workers tend toward one another. As a result, the prevailing wage for a low-skilled worker exceeds the market-clearing wage, resulting in unemployment for low-skilled workers. Meanwhile, the prevailing wage for high-skilled workers is below the market-clearing wage, creating a short supply of high-skilled workers.
The Emergency Unemployment Compensation Extension Act is a bill that would extend the length of unemployment benefits to cover another three months, until March 31, 2014. The three-month extension would cost $6.4 billion.
Edward Wight Bakke was an American sociology and economics professor at Yale University who achieved prominence in the field of industrial relations. He was a Sterling Professor, Yale's highest level of academic rank, and served as director of the Yale Labor and Management Center from its founding in 1945 until its dissolution in the late 1950s. The author, co-author, or co-editor of thirteen books, Bakke made major contributions to the study of unemployment and organizational theory.
Gordon Lafer is a political economist writer who has served as Senior Labor Policy Advisor for the U.S. House of Representatives' Committee on Education and Labor and has a history of Labor Union activism. He has written widely on labor and employment policy issues and is the author of the books The Job Training Charade and The One Percent Solution.
Martin Carnoy is an American labour economist and Vida Jacks Professor of Education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Education as well as of the International Academy of Education. Professor Carnoy has graduated nearly 100 PhD students, a record at Stanford University.
Working Women United (WWU) is a women's rights organisation based in the United States which was formed in Ithaca, New York in 1975, to combat sexual harassment of women in the workplace.
