Category: Labor Economics

As College Enrollments Drop, Apprenticeships Flourish

(p. A5) Today, colleges and universities enroll about 15 million undergraduate students, while companies employ about 800,000 apprentices. In the past decade, college enrollment has declined by about 15%, while the number of apprentices has increased by more than 50%, according to federal data and Robert Lerman, a labor economist at the Urban Institute and co-founder of Apprenticeships for America.

Apprenticeship programs are increasing in both number and variety. About 40% are now outside of construction trades, where most have traditionally been, Dr. Lerman said. Programs are expanding into white-collar industries such as banking, cybersecurity and consulting at companies including McDonald’s Corp., Accenture PLC and JPMorgan Chase & Co.

. . .

. . ., some employers say a mismatch has developed between the skills employers are seeking and the lessons students are learning in college and university courses. To address the mismatch, companies are dropping requirements for degrees for some jobs, and states are rebuilding the vocational-education pathways that were de-emphasized two generations ago when the nation adopted a college-preparatory path for nearly all students.

. . .

Companies such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Delta Air Lines Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. have responded by dropping college degrees as requirements for some positions and shifting hiring to focus more on skills and experience. Pennsylvania has cut college-degree requirements for some state jobs, and Maryland has set a statewide goal of 45% of high-school students starting a registered apprenticeship by 2031.

For the full story, see:

Douglas Belkin. “More Choose Apprenticeships Instead of Heading to College.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 18, 2023): A5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated March 16, 2023, and has the title “More Students Are Turning Away From College and Toward Apprenticeships.”)

Elon Musk Got Rich the Old-Fashioned Way, He EARNED It

(p. B4) Elon Musk is tired, his back hurts and his mom wants him to get some sleep.

. . .

A self-described nanomanager, Mr. Musk has long waded deeply into the weeds of the companies he runs, including SpaceX and Tesla Inc., green up pointing triangle routinely working late into the night and sleeping little. His tenacity has led to superhuman-like accomplishments, such as landing space rockets and making electric cars sexy.

. . .

Since taking ownership of Twitter Inc. in late October [2022], Mr. Musk’s workload has exploded to more than 120 hours a week from as much as 80 hours before, he told investor Ron Baron in November at a conference.

“I go to sleep, I wake up, I work, go to sleep, wake up, work—do that seven days a week,” Mr. Musk said.

. . .

Even before buying Twitter, Mr. Musk wasn’t a “chill, normal dude,” as he once joked on “Saturday Night Live.” Mr. Musk has said he usually goes to sleep around 3 a.m. and typically gets six hours of shut-eye before waking and immediately checking his phone for any new emergencies.

These days, Mr. Musk has said he is sleeping at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. He has even provided beds for employees.

. . .

Concerns about Mr. Musk’s health had circulated a few years ago, ignited by photos of him that appeared to show a new scar on his neck. In 2020, he confirmed he had two surgeries, the first a failure, to address neck pain.

His pain, Mr. Musk has said, traces to a birthday party thrown years ago by his second wife that was attended by a sumo wrestler.

Mr. Musk took to the ring and—according to him—managed to throw the 350-pound opponent, resulting in an injury to his spine. “It cost me smashing my c5-c6 disc & 8 years of mega back pain!” Mr. Musk said on Twitter last year.

. . .

Entrepreneur Arianna Huffington at one point in 2018 pleaded with Mr. Musk to take better care of himself.

. . .

He responded with a tweet sent at 2:32 a.m.: “Ford & Tesla are the only 2 American car companies to avoid bankruptcy. I just got home from the factory. You think this is an option. It is not.”

For the full story, see:

Tim Higgins. “Musk’s Frantic Schedule Comes at a Personal Cost.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Feb. 6, 2023): B4.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated February 5, 2023, and has the title “When Does Musk Sleep? He Speaks of Limits to Fixing Twitter, Back Pain.”)

Many Universities, Embracing DEI, No Longer Hire and Reward Based on Competence and Merit

(p. A13) Diversity is no longer a term to describe the breadth of our differences but a demand to flatter and grant privileges to purportedly oppressed identity groups. Equity assigns desirable positions based on race, sex and sexual orientation rather than character, competence and merit. Inclusion now means creating a social environment where identity groups are celebrated while those who disagree are maligned.

“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” [DEI]—the compound form of these modern concepts—is especially toxic. It divides us by social identity groups, ranks those groups on privilege and power, and excludes those who fail to honor the new orthodoxy. Rather than being equally endowed with innate dignity and fundamental rights as human beings—best judged by our character and not skin color—we are supposed to discriminate and confer status based on race, sex and cultural affinity.

. . .

When coming from the college’s administration, DEI practices essentially gatekeep entry to college faculty, staff and students. Requiring DEI statements as part of the faculty employment process dissuades those who think otherwise from even applying. It stifles discourse by keeping dissenting viewpoints from campus in the first place.

College DEI training programs discourage the open and candid discussion necessary for intellectual growth. They exacerbate divisions between groups, creating an environment of tension, fear and one-mindedness, and they have the pernicious effect of closing minds and shutting down thoughtful debate even before classes begin.

DEI attacks the integrity of the academic project. Instead of listening to divergent voices, ears are shut. Instead of the free expression of contrary opinions, chilling self-censorship takes place. Instead of a campus open to all, one finds a narrow doorway through which only an approved few may enter. If the right pieties and homilies aren’t made, ostracization and exclusion become the norm rather than the exception. Unanimity, inequality and exclusion—Orwellian indeed.

For the full commentary, see:

Matthew Spalding. “DEI Spells Death for the Idea of a University.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Feb. 11, 2023): A13.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed abbreviation, added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date February 10, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

Disabled Workers Flourish in Robustly Redundant Labor Market

(p. A1) The strong late-pandemic labor market is giving a lift to a group often left on the margins of the economy: workers with disabilities.

Employers, desperate for workers, are reconsidering job requirements, overhauling hiring processes and working with nonprofit groups to recruit candidates they might once have overlooked. At the same time, companies’ newfound openness to remote work has led to opportunities for people whose disabilities make in-person work — and the taxing daily commute it requires — difficult or impossible.

As a result, the share of disabled adults who are working has soared in the past two years, far surpassing its prepandemic level and outpacing gains among people without disabilities.

(p. A12) In interviews and surveys, people with disabilities report that they are getting not only more job offers, but better ones, with higher pay, more flexibility and more openness to providing accommodations that once would have required a fight, if they were offered at all.

For the full story, see:

Ben Casselman. “Disabled Workers Thrive in Tight Labor Market.” The New York Times (Wednesday, October 26, 2022): A1 & A12.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 25, 2022, and has the title “For Disabled Workers, a Tight Labor Market Opens New Doors.”)

Elon Musk Asks Twitter Employees for “Long Hours at High Intensity”

(p. B5) SAN FRANCISCO — Elon Musk gave Twitter employees a deadline of 5 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday [Nov. 17, 2022] to decide if they wanted to work for him, and he asked those who did not share his vision to leave their jobs, in his latest shock treatment of the social media company.

Mr. Musk made the announcement in an early-morning email to employees on Wednesday [Nov. 16, 2022]; The New York Times obtained the message, which had the subject line “A Fork in the Road.” In the note, Mr. Musk, 51, reiterated that Twitter faced a difficult road ahead and offered employees three months of severance if they did not want to continue working there “to build a breakthrough Twitter 2.0.”

. . .

In his note to Twitter employees on Wednesday, Mr. Musk said they would need to work hard — very hard. “In an increasingly competitive world, we will need to be extremely hard core,” he wrote. “This will mean working long hours at high intensity. Only exceptional performance will constitute a passing grade.”

For the full story, see:

Kate Conger. “Musk’s Ultimatum: Buy In or Get Out.” The New York Times (Thursday, November 17, 2022): B5.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed dates, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 16, 2022, and has the title “Elon Musk Gives Twitter Employees a Deadline to Stay or Leave.”)

Deregulating Entrepreneurship Enables Upward Mobility

(p. A15) I saw the power of entrepreneurship firsthand after co-founding the Home Depot. My experiences led me to believe that preserving and expanding entrepreneurship is the key to advancing racial and economic equality.

. . .

With almost no money, I had the idea to open a hardware store, a lumberyard and a garden store all in one. What began as a single store in Georgia grew to more than 2,000 locations nationwide and made me a billionaire in the process. Only in America could a member of an ethnic minority from a poor immigrant family write that kind of success story.

. . .

You can see the entrepreneurs driving around town in their trucks full of tools and material. Many of them are minorities. They don’t consider themselves victims of racial wealth or income gaps; they are actively overcoming economic disparities through work.

That isn’t happening only in building and landscaping. In almost every part of the economy, you’ll find entrepreneurial minorities breaking through difficult circumstances to achieve and live the American Dream. Accelerating this process is the key to bridging the country’s economic divides.

Unfortunately, government is moving in the wrong direction, erecting hurdles to entrepreneurship. My company wouldn’t have succeeded if it had started in today’s climate of regulations and taxes that disproportionately burden small businesses. The Home Depot almost went bankrupt several times in its first decade, and today’s policy environment would have tipped us into insolvency—as it does to countless entrepreneurs each year.

The biggest victims of bad government policy aren’t the elite; they will always be able to get into good schools and get their foot in the door of corporate America. The people hurt most by big government are those who lack advantages in becoming economically independent, often minorities.

For the full commentary, see:

Bernie Marcus. “Entrepreneurship Will Lift Minorities Up.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Jan. 10, 2023): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date January 9, 2023, and has the title “A History of Humanity in Cubits, Fathoms and Feet.”)

Marcus’s commentary is adapted from his foreword to this book:

Ortiz, Alfredo. The Real Race Revolutionaries: How Minority Entrepreneurship Can Overcome America’s Racial and Economic Divides. Conroe, TX: Defiance Press & Publishing, LLC, 2023.

Elon’s “Musketeers” Will Gladly Commit to “Long Hours at High Intensity”

(p. A12) Your boss probably hasn’t demanded a loyalty pledge and almost certainly doesn’t own a rocket ship, but the person calling the shots at your company might be more like Elon Musk than you realize.

. . .

What is consistent—and alluring to some bosses—is the billionaire’s unapologetically high standard for employees. He spelled it out last week in an emailed ultimatum, saying that Twitter employees must commit to “long hours at high intensity” or leave with three months’ severance.

. . .

Managers who think the working world has gone soft in recent years, with all the talk of flexibility and work-life balance, say they envy Mr. Musk’s unfiltered style and share his craving for maximum effort—even if they wouldn’t act quite as forcefully as the world’s richest person.

. . .

. . . he is the rare CEO with a fan base—“Musketeers,” as this male-dominated bunch is known—and might be able to fill the company’s ranks with devotees who believe in his vision of a more freewheeling and profitable platform and are willing to grind.

. . .

“He can do whatever he wants, and everyone that has an opinion about it can piss off,” says Derek Grubbs, director of sales development at Crux Informatics, a software company. “If everybody exits from Twitter, there are plenty of other people who will be ready to enter because it pays well, and working for Elon Musk has a flair to it.”

For the full commentary, see:

Callum Borchers. “ON THE CLOCK; The Bosses Who Want to Emulate Elon Musk.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, November 23, 2022): A12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date November 22, 2022, and has the title “ON THE CLOCK; Is Elon Musk Your Boss’s Anger Translator?”)

Regulation of Truckers’ Driving Hours Caused Higher Speeds and More Fatalities

(p. A13) Falling asleep at the wheel is deadly. “It is obvious that a man cannot work efficiently or be a safe driver if he does not have an opportunity for approximately 8 hours sleep in 24,” the Interstate Commerce Commission declared in 1937. Ever since, federal rules have limited the work hours of interstate truckers. Also ever since, truckers, their employers and their customers have circumvented the rules when they stand in the way of making money.

Congress tackled the problem in 2012 by requiring long-distance truckers to track their hours with an “electronic logging device” connected to the engine. The mandatory rest breaks and the limits on drivers’ daily and weekly hours didn’t change, but the Transportation Department estimated that monitoring compliance with an ELD would avoid 1,844 crashes and save 26 lives annually.  . . .

. . .

In “Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance,” Karen Levy makes a provocative case against this approach.   . . .  Her concise and lively book will interest anyone concerned with the complicated business of regulation.

. . .

. . ., Ms. Levy raises important questions about regulation in general by examining the unintended effects of a well-meant initiative designed to address a serious safety problem. She reports on a 2021 study linking ELDs to greater compliance with regulations but no reduction in truck crashes. Fatalities in crashes involving large trucks actually increased, as drivers sped up to cover as many miles as they could during their permitted driving time.

For the full review, see:

Marc Levinson. “BOOKSHELF; Miles of Mandates.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2023): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date January 3, 2023, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Data Driven’ Review: Miles of Mandates.”)

The book under review is:

Levy, Karen. Data Driven: Truckers, Technology, and the New Workplace Surveillance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022.

As Sole Owner Musk Was Able to Act Quickly to Cure Twitter’s “Systemic Paralysis”

(p. A17) Since Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he has undertaken a rapid restructuring that few large technology companies would attempt unless faced with an immediate liquidity crisis. Minutes after closing his purchase of the company, he started a process that reduced the workforce from 7,500 to 2,500 in 10 days.

Media pundits immediately slammed him, arguing that his slash-and-burn strategy would destroy one of the world’s most important social-media platforms—already in danger under the burden of $14 billion in debt. Much of this criticism came in the form of tweets, as the irony of using Twitter to denounce Twitter apparently escaped Mr. Musk’s critics. But the restructuring of Twitter won’t destroy the company.

Mr. Musk is trying to cure a degenerative corporate disease: systemic paralysis. Symptoms include cobwebs of corporate hierarchies with unclear reporting lines and unwieldy teams, along with work groups and positions that have opaque or nonsensical mandates. Paralyzed companies are often led by a career CEO who builds or maintains a level of bureaucracy that leads to declines in innovation, competitive stature and shareholder value.

Mr. Musk set his new tone immediately. He eliminated a 12-member team responsible for artificial-intelligence ethics in machine learning, the entire corporate communications department, and a headquarters commissary that cost $13 million a year (despite prior management’s pandemic decree that Twitter employees would be “remote forever”).

Three attributes give Mr. Musk a better chance of rebuilding Twitter into an innovative force in social media: He is an operator, an engineer and a sole owner.

For the full commentary, see:

Rob Wiesenthal. “Elon Musk Slashes Bureaucracy, Giving Twitter a Chance to Soar.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Dec. 9, 2022): A17.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 8, 2022, and has the same title as the print version.)

Workers Who Feel They Matter Are More Satisfied with Their Lives and Are “Less Likely to Quit”

(p. C5) So how do you know if your employees and co-workers feel that they matter? In a 2021 study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, researchers developed a scale to measure mattering in the workplace. In online surveys involving nearly 1,800 full-time employees at a variety of companies, participants were asked to rate on a 5-point scale how much they agreed with statements such as “My work contributes to my organization’s success” and “The quality of my work makes a real impact on my organization.” Other statements had to do with feeling valued and recognized: “My organization praises my work publicly” and “My work has made me popular at my workplace.”

Participants were also asked about job satisfaction, recent raises or promotions, and whether they intended to leave their job. What the researchers found was that mattering isn’t only good for employee well-being, it’s also good for a company’s bottom line. Employee turnover is costly and disruptive, and “when employees feel like they matter to their organization, they are more satisfied with their jobs and life, more likely to occupy leadership positions, more likely to be rewarded and promoted and less likely to quit.”

. . .

Research by Dr. Prilleltensky and colleagues shows that being treated fairly increases workers’ sense of mattering, . . .

For the full commentary, see:

Jennifer Breheny Wallace. “The Power of Mattering at Work.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 3, 2022): C5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 1, 2022, and has the same title as the print version.)

Jack Welch’s Protégés “Were Just Cost Cutters”

(p. 8) . . . in more than 100 conversations for “The Man Who Broke Capitalism,” my new book, from which this article is adapted, a broad range of people said some version of the same thing: While it has been more than two decades since Mr. Welch was C.E.O. of G.E., his legacy still affects millions of American households.

. . .

For a time in the early 2000s, five of the top 30 companies in the Dow Jones industrial average were run by men who had worked for Mr. Welch. “That’s why they got hired,” said William Conaty, G.E.’s longtime chief of human resources. “Because they had the playbook. They had the G.E. tool kit. And boards back then thought that was the answer.”

. . .

The Welch protégés who struck out on their own rarely fared well. At Home Depot, Albertson’s, Conseco, Stanley Works and many other companies, the same story seemed to repeat itself ad infinitum.

A G.E. executive was named C.E.O. of another company. News of the appointment sent the stock of that company soaring. The incoming leaders were lavished with riches when they took their new jobs, signing multimillion-dollar contracts that ensured them a gilded retirement, no matter how well they performed. A period of job cuts usually ensued, and profits sometimes rose for a few quarters, or even a few years. But inevitably, morale cratered, the business wobbled, the stock price sank and the Welch disciple was sent packing.

“A lot of G.E. leaders were thought to be business geniuses,” said Bill George, the former C.E.O. of Medtronic. “But they were just cost cutters. And you can’t cost cut your way to prosperity.”

For the full essay, see:

David Gelles. “Jack Welch and the Rise of C.E.O.s Behaving Badly.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sunday, May 22, 2022): 1 & 7-8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated June 27, 2022, and has the title “How Jack Welch’s Reign at G.E. Gave Us Elon Musk’s Twitter Feed.”)

The essay quoted above is adapted from Gelles’s book:

Gelles, David. The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America―and How to Undo His Legacy. New York: Simon & Schuster 2022.