The great jobs boom

就业大繁荣

The rich world is enjoying an unprecedented jobs boom

富裕国家正在享受前所未有的就业繁荣

词汇

Unprecedented/空前的；无前例的

Capitalism’s critics are yet to notice

资本主义的批评者还没有注意到这一点

May 23rd 2019

EVERYONE SAYS work is miserable. Today’s workers, if they are lucky enough to escape the gig economy and have a real job, have lost control over their lives. They are underpaid and exploited by unscrupulous bosses. And they face a precarious future, as machines threaten to make them unemployable.

人人都说工作是痛苦的。今天的工人，如果他们足够幸运地逃离零工经济，并拥有一份真正的工作，就已经失去了对自己生活的控制。他们的工资过低，被无良的老板剥削。他们面临着不稳定的未来，因为机器有可能使他们失去工作。

词汇

gig economy/临时工经济

unscrupulous/ /ʌn'skruːpjʊləs/肆无忌惮的；寡廉鲜耻的；不讲道德的

precarious/危险的；不确定的

 

There is just one problem with this bleak picture: it is at odds with reality. As we report this week (see Briefing), most of the rich world is enjoying a jobs boom of unprecedented scope. Not only is work plentiful, but it is also, on average, getting better. Capitalism is improving workers’ lot faster than it has in years, as tight labour markets enhance their bargaining power. The zeitgeist has lost touch with the data.

这种黯淡的前景只有一个问题:它与现实不符。正如我们本周报道的(见简报)，大多数富裕国家正在享受前所未有的就业繁荣。不仅有大量的工作（岗位），而且平均来说，情况正在好转。随着紧张的劳动力市场增强了工人的议价能力，资本主义对工人的改善速度比过去几年快得多。时代思潮已经与数据脱节。

词汇

Bleak/  阴冷的；荒凉的，无遮蔽的；黯淡的，无希望的

Zeitgeist/时代思潮，时代精神

Just the job

仅仅是工作

In America the unemployment rate is only 3.6%, the lowest in half a century. Less appreciated is the abundance of jobs across most of the rich world. Two-thirds of the members of the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, enjoy record-high employment among 15- to 64-year-olds. In Japan 77% of this group has a job, up six percentage points in six years. This year Britons will work a record 350bn hours a month. Germany is enjoying a bonanza of tax revenue following a surge in the size of its labour force (see article). Even in France, Spain and Italy, where joblessness is still relatively high, working-age employment is close to or exceeds 2005 levels.

美国的失业率只有3.6%，是半个世纪以来的最低水平。大多数富裕国家的就业机会都很丰富，但人们对这一点却不太欣赏。经济合作与发展组织(OECD)的成员国中，有三分之二的人在15岁至64岁之间享受着创纪录的高就业率。在日本，这一群体中77%的人有工作，在6年内上升了6个百分点。今年，英国人的月工作时间将达到创纪录的3500亿小时。在劳动力规模激增之后，德国正享受着巨额税收。即使在失业率相对较高的法国、西班牙和意大利，适龄工人的就业率也接近或超过了2005年的水平。

词汇

Bonanza/富矿带；带来好运之事；幸运

The rich-world jobs boom is partly cyclical—the result of a decade of economic stimulus and recovery since the great recession. But it also reflects structural shifts. Populations are becoming more educated. Websites are efficient at matching vacancies and qualified applicants. And ever more women work. In fact women account for almost all the growth in the rich-world employment rate since 2007. That has something to do with pro-family policies in Europe, but since 2015 the trend is found in America, too. Last, reforms to welfare programmes, both to make them less generous and to toughen eligibility tests, seem to have encouraged people to seek work.

发达国家的就业繁荣在一定程度上是周期性的——这是大萧条以来十年经济刺激和复苏的结果。但这也反映了结构性转变。人口的受教育程度越来越高。网站在匹配职位空缺和合格申请人方面非常有效。越来越多的女性开始工作。事实上，自2007年以来，发达国家的就业率增长几乎都是由女性贡献的。这与欧洲的亲家庭政策有关，但自2015年以来，美国也出现了这种趋势。最后，福利项目的改革，既减少了他们的慷慨程度，也加强了资格测试，似乎鼓励人们去找工作。

词汇

Vacancy/  空缺；空位；空白；空虚

Eligibility/适任，合格；被选举资格

Thanks to the jobs boom, unemployment, once the central issue of political economy, has all but disappeared from the political landscape in many countries. It has been replaced by a series of complaints about the quality and direction of work. These are less tangible and harder to judge than employment statistics. The most important are that automation is destroying opportunities and that work, though plentiful, is low-quality and precarious. “Our jobs market is being turned into a sea of insecurity,” says Jeremy Corbyn, leader of Britain’s Labour Party.

由于就业市场的繁荣，曾经是政治经济核心问题的失业问题，在许多国家几乎从政治舞台上消失了。取而代之的是对工作质量和方向的一系列抱怨。与就业数据相比，这些数据不那么具体，也更难判断。最重要的是，自动化正在破坏就业机会，尽管工作机会很多，但质量低下，不稳定。英国工党(Labour Party)领袖杰里米•科尔宾(Jeremy Corbyn)表示:“我们的就业市场正变成一片不安全的海洋。”

词汇

Tangible/有形的；切实的；可触摸的

Precarious/危险的；不确定的

 

Again, reality begs to differ. In manufacturing, machines have replaced workers over a period of decades. This seems to have contributed to a pocket of persistent joblessness among American men. But across the OECD as a whole, a jobs apocalypse carried out by machines and algorithms, much feared in Silicon Valley, is nowhere to be seen. A greater share of people with only a secondary education or less is in work now than in 2000.

再一次，事实并非如此。在制造业，机器在过去几十年里取代了工人。这似乎是造成美国男性持续失业的原因之一。但在整个经合组织(OECD)内部，由机器和算法造成的就业末日——硅谷对此非常担忧——却没有出现。与2000年相比，现在只有中等教育程度或更低学历的人有更大比例的人在工作。

词汇

reality begs to differ/事实并非如此

apocalypse/启示；天启；大灾难

It is also true that middle-skilled jobs are becoming harder to find as the structure of the economy changes, and as the service sector—including the gig economy—expands. By 2026 America will have more at-home carers than secretaries, according to official projections. Yet as labour markets hollow out, more high-skilled jobs are being created than menial ones. Meanwhile, low-end work is becoming better paid, in part because of higher minimum wages. Across the rich world, wages below two-thirds of the national median are becoming rarer, not more common.

同样，随着经济结构的变化，以及服务业(包括零工经济)的扩张，中等技能的工作越来越难找。根据官方预测，到2026年，美国在家照看孩子的人数将超过秘书。然而，随着劳动力市场空洞化，高技能工作岗位的需求量超过了低技能工作岗位。与此同时，低端工作的薪资水平正在提高，部分原因是最低工资水平提高了。在富裕国家，低于全国平均水平三分之二的工资越来越少，而不是越来越普遍。

词汇

Menial/卑微的；仆人的；适合仆人做的

 

As for precariousness, in America traditional full-time jobs made up the same proportion of employment in 2017 as they did in 2005. The gig economy accounts for only around 1% of jobs there. In France, despite recent reforms to make labour markets more flexible, the share of new hires given permanent contracts recently hit an all-time high. The truly precarious work is found in southern European countries like Italy, and neither exploitative employers nor modern technology is to blame. The culprit is old-fashioned law that stitches up labour markets, locking out young workers in order to keep insiders in cushy jobs.

至于不稳定性，2017年美国传统全职工作在就业中所占的比例与2005年相同。零工经济仅占就业岗位的1%左右。在法国，尽管最近进行了改革，使劳动力市场更加灵活，但获得永久合同的新雇员所占比例最近创下历史新高。真正不稳定的工作是在意大利等南欧国家找到的，这既不能归咎于剥削型雇主，也不能归咎于现代技术。罪魁祸首是陈旧的法律，它缝合了（使饱和）劳动力市场，将年轻工人拒之门外，以便让内部人士保住轻松（又好赚钱）的工作。

词汇

Culprit/犯人，罪犯；罪魁祸首

stitch up/缝补【stitch sb. up  算计某人】

cushy/轻松的；容易的；轻松又容易赚钱的

Elsewhere, the knock-on benefits of abundant work are becoming clear. As firms compete for workers rather than workers for jobs, average wage growth is rising, pushing up workers’ share of the pie—albeit not as fast as the extent of the boom might have suggested. Tight labour markets lead firms to fish for employees in neglected pools, including among ex-convicts, and to boost training amid skills shortages. American wonks fretted for years about how to shrink disability-benefit rolls. Now the hot labour market is doing it for them. Indeed, one attraction of the jobs boom is its potential to help solve social ills without governments having to do or spend very much.

在其他地方，大量工作的连锁效应正变得越来越明显。由于企业争夺的是工人而不是工人的工作，平均工资增长正在上升，工人在薪酬这块馅饼中所占的份额也在上升——尽管速度没有繁荣时期所显示的那么快。紧张的劳动力市场导致公司在被忽视的人群中寻找员工，包括有前科的人，并在技能短缺的情况下加强培训。多年来，美国的书呆子们一直在为如何缩减残疾人福利而烦恼。现在火热的劳动力市场正在为他们做这些。的确，就业热潮的一个吸引力在于，它有可能帮助解决社会问题，而无需政府付出太多努力或支出。

词汇

Albeit/虽然，尽管

Neglected/被忽视的；未被好好照管的

Nonetheless, policymakers do have lessons to learn. Economists have again been humbled. They have consistently underestimated potential employment, leading to hesitant fiscal and monetary policy. Just as their sanguine outlook on finance in the 2000s contributed to the bust, so their mistaken pessimism about the potential for jobs growth in the 2010s has needlessly slowed the recovery.

尽管如此，政策制定者确实需要吸取教训。经济学家们再次感到谦卑。他们一直低估了潜在就业，导致财政和货币政策犹豫不决。正如他们对本世纪头十年金融业前景的乐观导致了泡沫破裂一样，他们对本世纪头十年就业增长潜力的错误悲观情绪也不必要地减缓了复苏。

The left needs to accept that many of the criticisms it levels at capitalism do not fit the facts. Life at the bottom of the labour market is not joyous—far from it. However, the lot of workers is improving and entry-level jobs are a much better launch pad to something better than joblessness is. A failure to acknowledge this will lead to government intervention that is at best unnecessary and at worst jeopardises recent progress. The jobs boom seems to be partly down to welfare reforms that the likes of Mr Corbyn have vociferously opposed.

左派需要接受的是，它对资本主义的许多批评都与事实不符。劳动力市场底层的生活并不快乐——远非如此。然而，许多工人正在进步，入门级工作是比失业更好的起点。如果不承认这一点，政府的干预充其量是不必要的，最坏的情况下，这将危及近期的进展。就业市场的繁荣似乎在一定程度上要归功于科尔宾等人强烈反对的福利改革。

词汇

Jeopardise/危及（等于jeopardize）；使…受危险

The right should acknowledge that jobs have boomed without the bonfire of regulations that typically forms its labour-market policy. In fact, labour-market rules are proliferating. And although the jury is out on whether rising minimum wages are harming some groups, such as the young, they are not doing damage that is large enough to show up in aggregate.

右翼应该承认，在没有形成其劳动力市场政策的典型监管措施的情况下，就业已经大幅增长。事实上，劳动力市场规则正在激增。尽管目前还不清楚提高最低工资是否会对一些群体造成损害，比如年轻人，但它们造成的损害还没有大到足以体现在整体上。

词汇

Proliferating/（数字）激增；

 

The jobs boom will not last for ever. Eventually, a recession will kill it off. Meanwhile, it deserves a little appreciation.

就业热潮不会永远持续下去。最终，经济衰退会将其扼杀。但同时，这也是值得称赞的。