This piece originally appeared in The Hill.

The April Fool is anyone who reads Alex Nowrasteh’s column about H-1B guest-workers and believes his bunk.  If he had actually read the paper he cites about the effect of H-1B workers on American productivity he’d know that his claims are ludicrous. The paper doesn’t find that H-1B workers “have increased American productivity by 10 to 25 percent from 1990 to 2010”; it makes that estimate for the entire foreign STEM workforce, which includes one hundred thousand foreign students in the Optional Practical Training program who graduated with STEM degrees from U.S. schools, L-1 visa holders, and 300,000…

Click here to read the entire article.

As I wrote earlier today, while it may be too soon to sound the alarm, this morning’s Employment Situation Report should give us pause. The bottom line is this: only 126,000 jobs added in March and the downward revision of 38,000 jobs in February, together make for disappointing numbers. While it’s important not to put too much stock in a couple months of data—especially since February and March’s job creation numbers were likely dampened by the unusually large amount of snow that blanketed the country those two months—policymakers should be wary of any signs of any slowdown from the solid job growth over the previous year.

Other indicators make it clear that there is still ample slack in the labor market, most notably in the continuing trend of inadequate wage growth—private sector hourly wages are up only 2.1 percent over the year. The chart below looks at both private sector wages and the wages of production and nonsupervisory workers over the last several years, and it’s clear that wages according to either measure are far below target.

There was, however, one positive wage sign: a mild acceleration in quarter over quarter hourly wages. The annualized increase between 2014 Q4 and 2015 Q1 was 2.8 percent, reasonably faster than trend 2.0 percent. Despite this mild acceleration, we need to see even faster growth, and for a longer time, before we can say the economy is truly working for working people. The slow growth of private sector wages coupled with a few months of disappointing jobs growth mean that the Federal Reserve should not be thinking about tapping the brakes any time soon.

Nominal Wage Tracker

Nominal wage growth has been far below target in the recovery: Year-over-year change in private-sector nominal average hourly earnings, 2007–2015

	All nonfarm employees	Production/nonsupervisory workers
Mar-2007	3.5910224%	4.1112455%
Apr-2007	3.2738095%	3.8461538%
May-2007	3.7257824%	4.1441441%
Jun-2007	3.8062284%	4.1267943%
Jul-2007	3.4482759%	4.0524434%
Aug-2007	3.4940945%	4.0404040%
Sep-2007	3.2827046%	4.1493776%
Oct-2007	3.2778865%	3.7780401%
Nov-2007	3.2714844%	3.8869258%
Dec-2007	3.1599417%	3.8123167%
Jan-2008	3.1067961%	3.8619075%
Feb-2008	3.0947776%	3.7296037%
Mar-2008	3.0813674%	3.7746806%
Apr-2008	2.8818444%	3.7037037%
May-2008	3.0172414%	3.6908881%
Jun-2008	2.6666667%	3.6186100%
Jul-2008	3.0000000%	3.7227950%
Aug-2008	3.3285782%	3.8263849%
Sep-2008	3.2258065%	3.6425726%
Oct-2008	3.3159640%	3.9249147%
Nov-2008	3.6406619%	3.8548753%
Dec-2008	3.5815269%	3.8418079%
Jan-2009	3.5781544%	3.7183099%
Feb-2009	3.2363977%	3.6516854%
Mar-2009	3.1293788%	3.5254617%
Apr-2009	3.2212885%	3.2924107%
May-2009	2.8358903%	3.0589544%
Jun-2009	2.7829314%	2.9379157%
Jul-2009	2.5889968%	2.7056875%
Aug-2009	2.3930051%	2.6402640%
Sep-2009	2.3437500%	2.7457441%
Oct-2009	2.3383769%	2.6272578%
Nov-2009	2.0529197%	2.6746725%
Dec-2009	1.8198362%	2.5027203%
Jan-2010	1.9545455%	2.6072787%
Feb-2010	1.9990913%	2.4932249%
Mar-2010	1.7663043%	2.2702703%
Apr-2010	1.8091361%	2.4311183%
May-2010	1.9439421%	2.5903940%
Jun-2010	1.7148014%	2.5309639%
Jul-2010	1.8476791%	2.4731183%
Aug-2010	1.7528090%	2.4115756%
Sep-2010	1.8410418%	2.2982362%
Oct-2010	1.8817204%	2.5066667%
Nov-2010	1.6540009%	2.2328549%
Dec-2010	1.7426273%	2.0700637%
Jan-2011	1.9170753%	2.1704606%
Feb-2011	1.8708241%	2.1152829%
Mar-2011	1.8691589%	2.0613108%
Apr-2011	1.9102621%	2.1097046%
May-2011	1.9955654%	2.1567596%
Jun-2011	2.1295475%	1.9957983%
Jul-2011	2.2566372%	2.3084995%
Aug-2011	1.8992933%	1.9884877%
Sep-2011	1.9400353%	1.9331243%
Oct-2011	2.1108179%	1.7689906%
Nov-2011	2.0228672%	1.7680707%
Dec-2011	1.9762846%	1.7680707%
Jan-2012	1.7497813%	1.3989637%
Feb-2012	1.8801924%	1.4500259%
Mar-2012	2.0969856%	1.7607457%
Apr-2012	2.0052310%	1.7561983%
May-2012	1.8260870%	1.3903193%
Jun-2012	1.9548219%	1.5447992%
Jul-2012	1.7741238%	1.3333333%
Aug-2012	1.8205462%	1.3340174%
Sep-2012	1.9896194%	1.4351615%
Oct-2012	1.5073213%	1.2781186%
Nov-2012	1.8965517%	1.4307614%
Dec-2012	2.1963824%	1.7373531%
Jan-2013	2.1496131%	1.8906490%
Feb-2013	2.1030043%	2.0418581%
Mar-2013	1.9255456%	1.8829517%
Apr-2013	2.0085470%	1.7258883%
May-2013	2.0068318%	1.8791265%
Jun-2013	2.1303792%	2.0283976%
Jul-2013	1.9132653%	1.9230769%
Aug-2013	2.2562793%	2.1772152%
Sep-2013	2.0356234%	2.1728146%
Oct-2013	2.2486211%	2.2715800%
Nov-2013	2.2419628%	2.3173804%
Dec-2013	1.8963338%	2.1597187%
Jan-2014	1.9360269%	2.3069208%
Feb-2014	2.1437579%	2.4512256%
Mar-2014	2.1830395%	2.3976024%
Apr-2014	1.9689987%	2.3952096%
May-2014	2.1347844%	2.4426720%
Jun-2014	2.0442219%	2.3359841%
Jul-2014	2.0859408%	2.4329692%
Aug-2014	2.2064946%	2.4777007%
Sep-2014	2.0365752%	2.2749753%
Oct-2014	2.0331950%	2.2704837%
Nov-2014	2.1100538%	2.2648941%
Dec-2014	1.8196857%	1.8682399%
Jan-2015	2.2295623%	2.0098039%
Feb-2015	1.975309%	1.6601563%
Mar-2015	2.054232%	1.8536585%
Apr-2015	2.177486%	1.8518519%

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The data below can be saved or copied directly into Excel.

The data underlying the figure.

* Nominal wage growth consistent with the Federal Reserve Board's 2 percent inflation target, 1.5 percent productivity growth, and a stable labor share of income.

Source: EPI analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Employment Statistics public data series

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Hardcore fans of EPI’s labor market indicators will notice a change today. Our estimate of the number of “missing workers”—potential workers who are no longer classified as in the labor force but who will likely be working or looking for work if the labor market improvement continues—has been revised.

Our earlier estimates were built in large part upon projections for labor force growth contained in a paper published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2007. These projections examined labor force participation rates for age-specific groups of both men and women between 1986 and 1996 and between 1996 and 2006. The paper then projected age- and gender-specific labor force participation rates for 2016.

We used these projected rates to see what labor force participation “should” be in each month between 2006 and 2016, and interpreted shortfalls between the actual participation rate and these projections as how much participation was depressed due to economic weakness, as opposed to structural changes in the labor force, like the retirement of baby boomers. We chose to look at pre-2008 projections precisely because we wanted these projections to be free of any cyclical drag imposed by the Great Recession.

But looking again at these projections recently, we noticed some slightly worrying features. For one, the labor force participation rate for men 25-34 fell significantly in both the 1986-1996 and 1996-2006 periods, yet was projected to rise substantially between 2006 and 2016. Further, the unemployment rate in 1986 was 7.0, the unemployment rate in 1996 was 5.4, and the unemployment rate in 2006 was 4.6 percent. This means that the trends estimated in the BLS projections may be buoyed up by cyclical effects. The BLS projections made no attempt to parse trends in participation rates that were driven by long-run trends versus cyclical weakness in the economy.

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Eleven Atlanta educators, convicted and imprisoned, have taken the fall for systematic cheating on standardized tests in American education. Such cheating is widespread, as is similar corruption in any institution—whether health care, criminal justice, the Veterans Administration, or others—where top policymakers try to manage their institutions with simple quantitative measures that distort the institution’s goals. This corruption is especially inevitable when out-of-touch policymakers set impossible-to-achieve goals and expect that success will nonetheless follow if only underlings are held accountable for measurable results.

There was little doubt, even before the jury’s decision, that Atlanta teachers and administrators had changed answers on student test booklets to increase scores. There was also little doubt that Atlanta’s late superintendent, Beverly Hall, was partly responsible because she had, as a state investigation revealed, “created a culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation” that had permitted “cheating—at all levels—to go unchecked for years.”

What the trial did not explore was whether Dr. Hall herself was reacting to a culture of fear, intimidation, and retaliation that her board, state education officials, and the Bush and Obama administrations had created. Just as her principals’ jobs were in jeopardy if test scores didn’t rise, her tenure, too, was dependent on ever rising test scores.

Holding educators accountable for student test results makes sense if the tests are reasonable reflections of teacher performance. But if they are not, and if educators are being held accountable for meeting standards that are impossible to achieve, then the only way to meet fanciful goals imposed from above—according to federal law, that all children will make adequate yearly progress towards full proficiency in 2014—is to cheat, using illegal or barely legal devices. It is not surprising that educators do just that.

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The National Retail Federation (NRF) doesn’t know what the U.S. Department of Labor’s new rules concerning exemptions from overtime protections will be, but they know they’re against them.  Claiming to speak on behalf of managers who might be affected by the not-yet-released rules, NRF says: “Retail managers say the proposed changes to the federal Fair Labor Standards Act regulations show the Department greatly misunderstands their roles in the workplace and would effectively strip retail managers of their salaried status, generating negative consequences for the entire industry.”

But unless someone has leaked the proposed rule to them, NRF is just making things up! What are “the proposed changes to the federal Fair Labor Standards Act regulations” that the managers disapprove?  NRF doesn’t say. Equally important, what did NRF tell the managers it surveyed? Why do “75 percent of respondents” say “the changes would diminish the effectiveness of training and hinder managers’ ability to lead by example”? I personally doubt very much the proposed rule, if it is ever issued, will say anything about training.

Some of the NRF report’s “key findings” are pretty wild. For example, “Duties and salary are not effective litmus tests for successful management.” The Fair Labor Standards Act requires employers to pay an overtime premium to all employees, including managers, unless they are bona fide executives, administrators, or professionals. The definition of “executive” has always, since the FLSA was enacted in 1938, used duties tests and the salary level to determine who is a bona fide executive. That is the case today, so the “key finding” is nonsense. The question for the Department of Labor is what salary level is an executive salary? Is it $70,000 a year, or is it the current $23,660 threshold set by the Bush administration in 2004?

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Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to present findings from my recent report, The Impact of Full Employment on African American Employment and Wages, at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ Full Employment forum. This blog post is taken from my opening remarks, which you can watch on C-SPAN.

Talking about the labor market each month has become a bit like taking my children on a road trip—every couple miles one of them is asking, “Are we there yet?” In the case of the labor market, this question commonly refers to whether or not the economy has fully recovered. In both cases, my typical response is, “No, not yet.” If you’re familiar with either of these situations you know that answer usually leads to another question: “How much longer?” The answer to that question ultimately depends on the intended destination.

Clearly, going to a neighborhood park requires less time in the car and is cheaper than going to Busch Gardens. However, it’s also true that the payoff for these two destinations is not the same. Similarly, I would argue that full employment is a better destination with a better payoff than full recovery, and this is especially true for African Americans. The distinction is this: A full recovery is simply a return to pre-Great Recession labor market conditions. Whether or not that’s a good outcome depends on how well you were doing in 2007—while the national unemployment rate in 2007 was 5.6 percent, the black unemployment rate was 8.3 percent. On the other hand, full employment raises the bar to the point at which anyone who is willing and able to work at the prevailing wage rate can find a job.

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(Update of a blog post from March 14, 2014).

March 15^th was the third anniversary of the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS). President Obama said that the agreement would support 70,000 U.S. jobs. This claim was supported by a White House fact sheet that claimed that the KORUS agreement would “increase exports of American goods by $10 to $11 billion…” and that they would “support 70,000 American jobs from increased goods exports alone.” Things are not turning out as predicted. Far from supporting jobs, growing goods trade deficits with Korea have eliminated more than 75,000 jobs between 2011 and 2014.

Expanding exports alone is not enough to ensure that trade adds jobs to the economy. Increases in U.S. exports tend to create jobs in the United States, but increases in imports lead to job loss—by destroying existing jobs and preventing new job creation—as imports displace goods that otherwise would have been made in the United States by domestic workers. Thus, it is changes in trade balances—the net of exports and imports—that determine the number of jobs created or displaced by trade and investment deals like KORUS.

In the first three years after KORUS took effect, U.S. domestic exports to Korea increased by only $0.8 billion, an increase of 1.8 percent, as shown in the figure below. Imports from Korea increased $12.6 billion, an increase of 22.5 percent. As a result, the U.S.trade deficit with Korea increased $11.8 billion between 2011 and 2014, an increase of 80.4 percent, nearly doubling in just three years.

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