This timely investigation reveals how sustained tight labor markets improve the job prospects and life chances of America’s most vulnerable households.

Most research on poverty focuses on the damage caused by persistent unemployment. But what happens when jobs are plentiful and workers are hard to come by? Moving the Needle examines how very low unemployment boosts wages at the bottom, improves benefits, lengthens job ladders, and pulls the unemployed into a booming job market.

Drawing on over seventy years of quantitative data, as well as interviews with employers, jobseekers, and longtime residents of poor neighborhoods, Katherine S. Newman and Elisabeth S. Jacobs investigate the most durable positive consequences of tight labor markets. They also consider the downside of overheated economies that can ignite surging rents and spur outmigration. Moving the Needle is an urgent and original call to implement policies that will maintain the current momentum and prepare for potential slowdowns that may lie ahead.

About the Author

Katherine S. Newman is Provost and Executive Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of California. She is author of fourteen books on topics including the working poor, social mobility, apprenticeship, the impact of regressive taxation, and downward mobility.

Elisabeth S. Jacobs is Senior Fellow at the Urban Institute and cofounder of WorkRise, a research-to-action network on jobs, workers, and mobility, for which she serves as deputy director. She has worked at the intersection of cutting-edge social science and public policy for nearly two decades.

Contents

List of Tables, Figures, and Maps

Introduction
1. The Dynamics of Tight Labor Markets
2. What Lasts? Durable Effects of Tight Labor Markets
3. Matching Up: How Employers Adapt to Tight Labor Markets
4. Leaning on Intermediaries
5. Entering from the Edge
6. Declining Drama
7. Family and Fortune
8. Policy Lessons from Tight Labor Markets

Appendixes
Personal and Institutional Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index

Reviews

"Astute and timely . . . . This is a valuable resource for activists, scholars, and policymakers on the front lines of the battle to end poverty."
— Publishers Weekly

"Overall, then, Moving the Needle provides a compelling account of the dynamics of tight labor markets with broad relevance to scholars of work and poverty, very broadly defined, and it serves as a useful model for a wide range of social science research."

— Social Forces

"Combining expert qualitative craft with quantitative evidence, Moving the Needle provides ideas, insights, and answers regarding how and why high-pressure labor markets reduce joblessness—and how social policy can prolong those benefits even when the pressure abates."—David Autor, Ford Professor of Economics, MIT

"One of the few accounts of what happens when jobs are ample and wages are rising. The authors show us how tight labor markets create benefits for all workers, including those often excluded from policymaking. This book is a call to enact policy that builds a stable and fair economy."—Mary Kay Henry, President, Service Employees International Union

"Moving the Needle makes the case—through exhaustive interviews with employers, intermediaries, and workers in two communities—for a set of urgent policy actions in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic to provide low-wage workers with ladders of opportunity that lead to self-sufficiency.”—Alicia Sasser Modestino, Professor of Economics at the School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs, Northeastern University

"Moving the Needle explores the actual institutions of the labor market, providing crucial insight into how job hunting, hiring, training, and retention work for low-income people. By bridging the chasm between macroeconomics and poverty, this book lays to rest decades of ill-conceived efforts to rectify behavior and instead focuses attention where it is needed: on the ready availability of good jobs for improving the lives of workers and their families."—Michael Ash, author of Shadow Networks: Financial Disorder and the System that Caused Crisis

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews