Category: Labor Economics

Initially Socialist Israeli Kibbutzim Gradually Embraced Entrepreneurial Capitalism

(p. C4) Today, in a break with . . . [its] communal past, Ms. Barnea’s kibbutz is farming for profit, and its main cash crop is medical marijuana. She recently retired from managing the greenhouse that grows the drug.

The shift at Kibbutz Beit HaEmek is just the latest sign of how much Israel’s kibbutzim are changing, as both Israel and the kibbutz movement move away from their socialist roots to become more entrepreneurial and profit-driven.

“We have to survive,” said Ms. Barnea, now 64, walking around the greenhouse as the smell of marijuana wafted past.

. . .

Facing a bleak financial future, young people abandoned the kibbutzim in the 1990s. Meanwhile, Israel’s vibrant technology sector took off, providing an additional pull away from the communes.

To reverse the exodus, Israel’s kibbutzim dismantled much of their socialist model. In 1995, Kibbutz Merom HaGolan became the first to go through a so-called privatization process, paying members salaries on a scale.

Today, most kibbutzim have undergone some form of privatization. Many members now earn salaries outside the kibbutz but pay taxes for the community’s upkeep. New members can take out mortgages with banks and buy land on the kibbutz for their homes.

. . .

Only about 40 kibbutzim still share resources and give equal allowances as envisioned in the original model. Most of these communities had created successful businesses that helped them maintain the communal way of living.

One such community is Kibbutz Sdot Yam, on Israel’s central coast between Tel Aviv and Haifa. In the 1980s, the kibbutz opened a factory that constructed quartz surfaces for tables and floors. Despite that venture’s success, the kibbutz is now considering whether to allow members—most of whom work outside the community—to earn their own salaries, rather than sharing them with the commune, said Doron Stansill, a 47-year-old member.

For the full essay, see:

Rory Jones. “The Kibbutz in a Capitalist Israel.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Oct. 14, 2017 ): C4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date Oct. 13, 2017 , and has the title “The Kibbutz Movement Adapts to a Capitalist Israel.”)

Resilient Entrepreneurs Quickly Rebuilt Chicago After “Great Fire” of 1871

(p. C8) Along with the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 stands as one of America’s foundational urban legends, a story of death and rebirth, a monument to the resiliency of the nation’s character.

. . .

Photographs taken immediately after the fire show the utter devastation facing residents: a flattened, rubble-strewn landscape, with only the jagged husks of buildings jutting into the smoky air. But “Chicago’s Great Fire” goes beyond the disaster and its cause to recount the remarkable way the city sprang back. An energizing sense of optimism and opportunity, along with a heavy dose of boosterism, had fueled the city’s explosive growth, and those elements quickly went to work. “Almost immediately,” Mr. Smith writes, “many Chicagoans paradoxically came to see the heroic destruction of their city as an unexpectedly positive event, a stage in its irresistible upward development rather than a dispiriting setback.”

“CHEER UP,” exhorted the headline on an editorial in the Chicago Tribune’s first postfire edition, three days after the inferno started. Even while tens of thousands of residents remained homeless, an emissary assured Eastern financiers that the city warranted a new round of investment. Local entrepreneurs built crude shacks in the rubble to sell necessities. Debris not used for rebuilding was dumped on the edge of Lake Michigan, thus enlarging the size of the downtown.

For the full review, see:

Richard Babcock. “A Cow, a Lantern, a City in Flames.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Oct. 17, 2020): C8.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date October 16, 2020, and has the title “‘Chicago’s Great Fire’ Review: Rising From the Ashes.”)

The book under review is:

Smith, Carl. Chicago’s Great Fire: The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2020.

Fewer Jobs Require College Degree Than Prepandemic

(p. A3) The tight labor market is prompting more employers to eliminate one of the biggest requirements for many higher-paying jobs: the need for a college degree.

Companies such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Delta Air Lines Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. have reduced educational requirements for certain positions and shifted hiring to focus more on skills and experience. Maryland this year cut college-degree requirements for many state jobs—leading to a surge in hiring—and incoming Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro campaigned on a similar initiative.

U.S. job postings requiring at least a bachelor’s degree were 41% in November [2022], down from 46% at the start of 2019 ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to an analysis by the Burning Glass Institute, a think tank that studies the future of work. Degree requirements dropped even more early in the pandemic. They have grown since then but remain below prepandemic levels.

. . .

Lucy Mathis won a scholarship to attend a women in computer science conference. There, she learned about an IT internship at Google and eventually dropped out of her computer science undergraduate program to work at the company full time. The 28-year-old now makes a six-figure sum as a systems specialist.

“I found out I had a knack for IT,” she said. “I’m not good at academics. It’s not for me.”

More than 100,000 people in the U.S. have completed Google’s online college-alternative program that offers training in fast-growing fields such as digital marketing and project management, the company said. It and 150 other companies are now using the program to hire entry-level workers.

For the full story, see:

Austen Hufford. “Employers Rethink Need for a Degree.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Nov. 28, 2022): A3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 26, 2022, and has the title “Employers Rethink Need for College Degrees.” I am grateful to Zhigang Feng for calling my attention to the article quoted above.)

To End Inflation, Fed Should Commit “To Good Policy Rules,” and Not Stray to Increase Jobs

(p. A9) Growing up in Glens Falls, N.Y., Edward C. Prescott got an insider’s view of business from chats with his father, an engineer and later comptroller for a global supplier of pigments. Those insights made the economics courses he took in college seem less theoretical and more relevant than they might have seemed to other students.

. . .

With Dr. Kydland, he published an influential 1977 paper called “Rules Rather Than Discretion: The Inconsistency of Optimal Plans,” concluding that policy makers could err by straying from long-term goals to address short-run problems. For instance, central bankers might be tempted to ease up on their commitments to contain inflation in the short run as a way to boost employment. If so, the professors argued, people might start assuming that prices were out of control, creating a psychology that led to faster inflation for long periods.

Sticking to a sound policy was far more effective than jolting the economy with frequent adjustments, they argued. “You should not think in terms of controlling the economy,” Dr. Prescott said. “That leads to bad outcomes. You should think in terms of committing to good policy rules.”

. . .

Though revered by many of his students and colleagues, Dr. Prescott sometimes baffled them. The problem, he once explained, was that he thought much faster than he could talk. He sometimes jumped from one topic to another with no transition.

“His brain did not work like other people’s,” said Timothy Kehoe, an economics professor at the University of Minnesota who worked with Dr. Prescott for four decades, “and in some ways that was a tremendous advantage.”

For the full obituary, see:

James R. Hagerty. “Economist’s Policy Advice: Stick to Long-Term Plan.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, November 12, 2022): A9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Nov. 8, 2022, and has the title “Nobel-Winning Economist Edward C. Prescott Dies at 81.”)

Future Disney Fashion Designer Was “Fascinated” by “Snow White” Movie as a Child

(p. A20) Alice Davis, a Disney Company costume designer who created the outfits worn by the animatronic figures in two of the company’s most enduring and popular rides, It’s a Small World and Pirates of the Caribbean, died on Nov. 3 [2022] at her home in Los Angeles.

. . .

Ms. Davis had been designing lingerie and other garments for several years when Walt Disney himself asked her in 1963 if she wanted to work on the costumes for It’s a Small World.

. . .

She had been fascinated with animation since seeing “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” when she was 8 (“I just about vibrated out of my seat,” she said), and she hoped to pursue the form as a career.

. . .

She was steered to costume design, although Ms. Chouinard suggested that she also take an animation drawing class with a new instructor at the school: Marc Davis, who was by then one of a core group of animators Mr. Disney referred to as his “nine old men.”

She graduated in 1950 and married Mr. Davis in 1956; he died in 2000. She leaves no immediate survivors.

Ms. Davis’s other Disney work included establishing costuming and quality-control procedures for the company and creating standards for three-dimensional characters in other rides and shows.

In 2012, Disney recognized Ms. Davis as its most famous costume designer with a tribute that is among the company’s highest honors: a commemorative window installed on a storefront on Disneyland’s Main Street. It sits next to a similar pane honoring her husband.

For the full obituary, see:

Ed Shanahan. “Alice Davis, 93, Who Designed Outfits For Two of Disney’s Most Popular Rides.” The New York Times (Saturday, November 19, 2022): A20.

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

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Nov. 18, 2022, and has the title “Alice Davis, Costume Designer for Disney Rides, Dies at 93.”)

“I Was There and I Was a Part of This Wonderful Thing That He Was Doing”

(p. A20) If Snow White looked suitably snowy in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” if Pinocchio’s nose grew at just the right rate, if Dumbo was the correct shade of elephantine gray, all that was due in part to the largely unheralded work of Ruthie Tompson.

. . .

In 1922, after her parents divorced and her mother married John Roberts, a plein-air painter, Ruthie and her sister moved with her mother and stepfather to Los Angeles, where her mother worked as an extra in Hollywood movies. The family lived down the street from Robert Disney, an uncle of Walt Disney and his brother Roy.

The Disney brothers founded their first film studio nearby in 1923, and it happened to be on Ruthie Tompson’s route to school. Walking past it each day, she peered through a window, transfixed, as the work of animation unfolded.

One day, Walt Disney spied her.

“He came out and said, ‘Why don’t you go inside and watch?’” Ms. Tompson recalled some nine decades later in a podcast for the Walt Disney Family Museum.

“I was really fascinated,” she said. She returned to the studio many times, becoming something of a fixture there.

During those years, the studio was shooting the Alice Comedies, a series of silent shorts combining animation and live action, and sometimes enlisted neighborhood children as extras.

Among them was Ruthie, who appeared in several pictures, receiving 25 cents for each. Her cinematic salary, Ms. Tompson recalled, went toward licorice.

Her association with the Disneys might well have ended there had it not been for the fact that a decade later Walt and Roy chose to take polo lessons.

. . .

“Ruthie Tompson!” Walt Disney declared on seeing her there. “Why don’t you come and work for me?”

“I can’t draw worth a nickel,” she replied.

No matter, Mr. Disney told her: The studio would send her to night school to learn the rudiments of inking and painting.

“Of course,” Ms. Tompson recalled, “everybody around me said: ‘Don’t say no! Don’t say no!’”

. . .

In 1948, she was promoted to the dual role of animation checker and scene planner. As an animation checker, she scrutinized the artists’ work to see, among other things, that characters literally kept their heads: In the animators’ haste, different parts of a character’s body, often done as separate drawings, might fail to align.

The scene planner was tasked with working out the intricate counterpoint between the finished setups and the cameras that photographed them: which camera angles should be used, how fast characters should move relative to their backgrounds, and the like.

“She really had to know all the mechanics of making the image work on the screen as the director, the layout person and the animator preferred: how to make Peter Pan walk, or fly, in the specified time,” Mr. Canemaker explained. “What she did ended up on the screen — whether you see her hand or not — because of the way she supported the directors’ vision.”

. . .

In the Walt Disney Family Museum podcast, Ms. Tompson fondly recalled her long-ago association with Walt Disney and the unexpected career to which it gave rise.

“I never got over being awe-struck at the fact that I was there and I was a part of this wonderful thing that he was doing,” she said.

For the full obituary, see:

Margalit Fox. “Ruthie Tompson, Invisible Hand Behind Pinocchio’s Nose, Dies at 111.” The New York Times (Wednesday, October 13, 2021): A20.

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

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Oct. 12, 2021, and has the title “Ruthie Tompson Dies at 111; Breathed Animated Life Into Disney Films.”)

Cutting Out Time to Do Key Tasks on Vacation, Can Allow More Vacation Time and Choice

(p. A18) Loosening up the vacation vs. work binary opens up possibilities for living in new ways. Karen Raraigh, a Baltimore-based genetic counselor with a focus on research, gets a generous quantity of vacation days each year. But as with many professionals, her specialized projects won’t move forward in the same way if she’s not tending them — and she finds these projects quite meaningful.

“I like the work I do,” she told me. “The fact that I do a little work on vacation makes me feel a little better about taking more of it.” Her family spends multiple weeks visiting extended family in Maine, but she sometimes holes up for an afternoon to manage work matters while relatives play with her kids.

. . .

. . . if doing some work at the beach means you can be at the beach for two weeks instead of one, and moving work time around means you can play with your kids in the afternoons and still keep your clients happy, then those blurred boundaries might be working to your advantage.

For the full commentary, see:

Laura Vanderkam. “Go Ahead, Work While on Vacation and Vacation While at Work.” The New York Times (Tuesday, August 16, 2022): A18.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Aug. 13, 2022, and has the title “Don’t Feel Guilty About Working on Vacation — or About Vacationing at Work.”)

California Law Mandating $22 Wage for Restaurant Workers Is “Discouraging” Entrepreneurs

(p. A3) A government-appointed council could increase wages for California’s estimated half-million fast food workers to as much as $22 an hour starting next year, under a new law signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom Monday [September 5, 2022].

. . .

“You can’t charge enough for food to offset what will happen from a labor perspective,” said Greg Flynn, president of Flynn Restaurant Group, which operates franchise brands in 44 states and owns 105 restaurants in California. “California is already the most difficult state in the nation to operate as a restaurateur. This just makes it more difficult and less attractive.”

. . .

Michaela Mendelsohn, an El Pollo Loco franchisee in Southern California, said she recently put on hold plans to add to her group of six stores because of the measure.

If wages shoot up, she added, she will consider eliminating cashier positions or installing kiosks in her California locations that allow customers to input orders.

“We’ve gone too far here,” Ms. Mendelsohn said. “It’s just really discouraging.”

For the full story, see:

Christine Mai-Duc and Heather Haddon. “California Fast-Food Bill Signed, Opening Path to Higher Pay.” The New York Times (Tuesday, September 6, 2022): A3.

[Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.]

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Sept. 5, 2022, and has the title “California Governor Signs Fast Food Bill, Opening Way to Higher Wages.” The last two sentences quoted above appeared in the online, but not the print, version.)

Venezuelan Is Grateful Texas Governor Bussed Him to Opportunities in Washington, D.C.

(p. A1) When Lever Alejos of Venezuela arrived at the southern border penniless in July [2022], he gladly accepted a free bus ride to Washington, D.C., courtesy of the state of Texas. He had no family or friends to receive him, and spent one night in the plaza across from Union Station. He soon settled into a homeless shelter.

“I have nothing,” Mr. Alejos, 29, said on his third day in the city, “but I have the will to work and succeed.”

Two months later, Mr. Alejos is making between $600 to $700 a week, saving up to buy a used car and planning to move out of the shelter.

“There is so much opportunity here,” he said on Thursday [Sept. 15, 2022], at the end of a day’s work. “You just have to take advantage of it.”

Since April [2022], thousands of migrants, most of them Venezuelans, have been coaxed onto buses and planes heading to Washington, New York, Chicago and, last week, Martha’s Vineyard after enduring a perilous journey over land from their broken country to make a fresh start in the United States.

. . .

(p. A16) Democrats have called the stunts cruel, and many migrants have been left at least temporarily homeless as their new host cities scramble to help them.

But others, like Mr. Alejos, have called the free transportation a blessing. They are already employed and achieving some measure of stability. They have found jobs in construction, hospitality, retail, trucking and other sectors facing worker shortages in an economy still recovering from the impact of the pandemic.

“In most big cities, including the ones where governors are shipping migrants, employers are scrambling to find workers,” said Chris Tilly, a labor economist at the University of California, Los Angeles. “They are meeting a need.”

. . .

For himself, Mr. Alejos has acquired a new cellphone and ear buds, shirts and trousers, and shoes. “I try to keep my priorities straight,” he said. “I’m not splurging. I am trying to build an emergency fund.”

In three weeks, he hopes to buy a 2012 Honda Civic.

His only regret is that his schedule does not allow him to attend in-person English classes. But he has found a way to teach himself, the Duolingo language-learning app — and then he tries to practice with customers.

. . .

In his free time, Mr. Alejos explores his adopted city with fellow Venezuelans, visiting the Natural History Museum, the Zoo, Chinatown and the Capitol.

“I always try to see something new on my days off,’’ he said, and often during the outings he posts selfies on Facebook.

He misses his family, he said. But he is philosophical about his circumstances.

“Often you have to suffer to be compensated down the road,” he said.

. . .

“I feel fortunate the governor put me on a bus to Washington,” Mr. Alejos said. “It opened up doors for me.”

For the full story, see:

Miriam Jordan. “Bus Ticket Out of Texas Was a Ticket to Stability.” The New York Times (Monday, September 19, 2022): A1 & A16.

[Note: ellipses, bracketed years, and bracketed date, added.]

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 18, 2022, and has the title “After Texas Sent Him to Washington, One Migrant Launches a New Life.”)

Growing Number of Free-Agent Entrepreneurs in Technology Sector

(p. B5) Facing economic headwinds, companies are filling gaps in information-technology teams with freelance software developers, coders and other high-skilled tech workers, while pulling back on efforts to recruit full-time staff, recruiters and industry analysts say.

The number of job postings for software developers on Freelancer.com, an online freelance marketplace, rose 54.7% in the third quarter on a year-over-year basis, the sharpest gain among more than 2,000 job-related skills tracked on the platform, Freelancer.com reported this week.

. . .

On top of being drawn to unique tech challenges, a growing number of IT freelancers prefer the more flexible hours and remote-work opportunities they became accustomed to during pandemic lockdowns, said Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA.

“The pandemic and, more recently, the turbulence in the economy, spurred demand for greater labor flexibility both among employers and workers,” Mr. Herbert said. More IT workers are now choosing freelance jobs “as a preferred working model, rather than as a last resort,” he said.

For the full story, see:

Angus Loten. “Souring Economy Gives a Boost to Tech Freelancers.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, October 14, 2022): B5.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date October 12, 2022, and has the title “Souring Economy Gives Tech Freelancers a Lift.”)