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Discussion Paper
Director's Welcome
The new Center for Workforce and Economic Opportunity will focus on employment and labor market issues. Director Stuart Andreason discusses the center's objectives in this post.
Discussion Paper
Creating Opportunities for Young Workers
Integrating young workers into the workforce, especially opportunity youth, takes a deliberate approach. Considering the needs and perspectives of young workers is critical to integrating them into the workforce. Involving young adults and opportunity youth in the design and development of programs and curricula that prepare them for work will help ensure that the programs address challenges young workers face in the labor market. Creating opportunities for early work experience also plays an important role.
Discussion Paper
Policies to Close the Southern Skills Gap
Southern states have a number of economic and demographic characteristics that make them unique from the rest of the country—and increase the need to build skills to advance economic development in the region.
Discussion Paper
Automation and the Future of Work
There are numerous reports that highlight potential effects that new technology will have on the U.S. labor market, and many of them are not exactly what you would expect. For example, with the advent of the internet and ubiquity of spreadsheets in the 1980s, analyst employment soared. The new technology unlocked latent demand for more analysis that had been simply too expensive before the new communication and productivity technologies became common. The need for more analysis led to more analysts…even though there were new technologies that made the work more efficient or productive.
Discussion Paper
Introducing the Unemployment Claims Monitor
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unparalleled economic slowdown and record numbers of layoffs. Even casual economic observers have seen reports of millions of workers filing claims for unemployment insurance—between the weeks of March 21, 2020 and April 25, 2020, 19 percent of workers covered by unemployment insurance filed an initial claim—but what exactly does this mean for unemployment?1 It is important to understand exactly what an unemployment insurance (UI) claim represents and how it provides information on what is happening in the economy.
Discussion Paper
Reemploying the Unemployed
From March 14 to 28, roughly 9.9 million people (when seasonally adjusted) filed new claims for unemployment insurance across the country.1 That represents roughly 3 percent of the entire population of the United States actively filing for unemployment insurance in two weeks. In addition, the vast proportion of people who are eligible for unemployment insurance do not make a claim. During “normal” times, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that 74 percent of unemployed workers do not file a claim, primarily because they think they are not eligible for unemployment insurance.
Discussion Paper
COVID-19, Workers, and Policy
As coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) spreads around the world and across the United States, many policymakers and public health officials are encouraging employers to tell workers to work remotely or to stay home when they or their family members are sick. There are significant questions, though, about how many people can work from home. Many U.S. workers in retail, restaurants, manufacturing, and other occupations cannot do so. This Workforce Currents post will explore who can work from home and identify practices and policies to support workers who cannot work from home in the event of a pandemic ...
Discussion Paper
The Digital Divide and the Pandemic: Working from Home and Broadband and Internet Access
The industrial makeup of a metropolitan area or state is an important factor in how it experiences economic disruptions, and concentrations of certain industries in a region make it more or less resilient and can affect its ability to rebound from a negative economic shock. Similar to effects felt in the industrial Midwest by other economic shifts and shocks over the last several decades, we know these places with heavily “nontraded” sector economies are likely feeling disproportionately negative economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. While industrial composition—meaning the key ...
Discussion Paper
Rework America Alliance: Helping Workers Move into Good Jobs
We see the current situation as a call to action—and an unparalleled opportunity to advance more effective and equitable systems to connect people to opportunity. Seizing this opportunity will require building new partnerships improving training systems, and prototyping new models of action. As such, we are excited to announce that the Atlanta Fed’s Center for Workforce and Economic Opportunity is partnering with the Markle Foundation and many other organizations to launch the Rework America Alliance, an innovative, nationwide initiative to help workers emerge from this crisis stronger. ...
Discussion Paper
Talent Finance: Exploring the Future of Workforce Partnerships
In 2020, our economy competes on talent. The labor market is dynamic, with in-demand skills constantly changing. A dynamic economy can create opportunities for workers, but it also creates risk. Investing in talent development—or talent finance—is imperative for companies and workers to succeed, but with the evolving nature of our global economy, our old systems of talent finance do not always work. Talent finance refers to the development and use of public and private instruments for investing in talent development and in managing related downside employment and income risks.As early as ...