Beneath the calm surface

The Productivity Commission's been working on 'Technological change and the future of work'. Last month it came out with the second report, 'Employment, labour markets and income', in what will be a five-part series (press release here, whole thing here). The big headline takeaway was that it might be well worth looking at systems like Denmark's 'flexicurity', where people's incomes are supported through employment volatility. The idea is that the labour market needs to be able to be flexible, and jobs will come and go, but people's incomes will be cushioned against the volatility through, for example, an employment insurance scheme. All very sensible.

Along the way Chapter 4 looks at the case for 'active' labour market policies, things like retraining to help people find new jobs. The Commission is somewhere between agnostic and outright sceptical about their value: "There is a large gap between good intent and robust evaluation of the effectiveness of labour-market programmes. Few programmes are subject to robust evaluation.  Of labour-market programmes, ALMPs ['active' ones] have received more evaluation effort. The results of those evaluations are not encouraging (p78) ... Overall, the Commission cannot say whether New Zealand’s labour-market programmes are effective or not" (p80).

The Commission may have missed the latest bit of evidence, which I wrote about in 'Let's get more active', and which was more upbeat about their potential. It found that two kinds of programme appeared to be effective (wage subsidies and helping people to go out on their own as self-employed), vocational training wasn't too bad an option, but brokering services (helping match job seekers and recruiters) were a waste of space. So if I were the Commission I think I'd be taking a modestly more constructive view of the potential to make the labour market work better, particularly as it's a vital economic issue.

For one thing, governments in many countries (though not Denmark, obvs) have been failing to live up to the social compact underpinning an open, flexible, market-based economy. The core bargain is that the national gains from openness will create enough income for the winners to be able to compensate the inevitable losers and still come out ahead. But the redistribution to the losers hasn't been happening, and the resulting resentment in the world's Rust Belts is feeding tear-up-the-old-rules populists everywhere.

For another, virtually nobody outside the economics trade (and not always inside it, either) realises just how vast the flows in and out of the labour market actually are. We learn from Stats, for example, that total employment went up by 16,000 in the June quarter, and by 6,000 in the September quarter. That doesn't look like a lot of movement.

But what is actually happening is that huge numbers of people change jobs, get fired, and get hired each quarter. The 6,000 in the September quarter is the small net effect of enormous gross flows in, out, and between.

In recent years, roughly 155,000 new jobs are created each quarter, which has happily been ahead of the 145,000 or so jobs that have gone bung in the quarter. The 10,000 or so increase in employment in each quarter is the outcome of very large gross flows indeed. The data, by the way, come from Stats' Linked Employer-Employee Dataset ('LEED'), which you can play with yourself for free on NZ.Stat. I've done rolling four-quarter averages to take out the pronounced seasonality.

And the big levels of job creation and job destruction are only part of the wider ferment in the labour market. People are moving around from one job to the next in very large numbers. A bit over 350,000 people each quarter change seats.

Are we out on a market-turmoil limb here? Not at all. In the States, for example, the increase in jobs in any given month is around 200,000: in December it was 266,000, which was thought of as quite a large increase at this late stage of the long U.S. expansion. But that is absolutely tiny compared to the gross flows. According to the U.S. JOLTS data, which show us the underlying gross flows, in the month of October alone (the latest to hand), 3.5 million people voluntarily quit their job in the month. Another 1.75 million were laid off or fired. Employers hired 5.75 million people. In one - one - month.

Bottom line. There are two reasons we ought to be helping people a lot more to cope. One is that moral compact: for both efficiency and equity reasons, we need to have a dynamic but not painful labour market. And the other - acknowledging that a fair amount of it is entirely voluntary, with people quitting (especially in good times) to do better for themselves in a new job - there's far more turnover in the labour market than you likely thought. Flexicurity, and 'active' labour market programmes, aren't just for the unlucky few in the meat processing factories: they're for all of us.