Human Capital Briefs

For US firms, upgrading data protection compliance procedures will not just be a concern related to European operations. California has passed a measure, The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018, which is partially modelled after GDPR. An examination of The Conference Board Help Wanted OnLine® (HWOL) Data Series illustrates the mix of IT, legal, managerial, and marketing talent that companies will need to meet these new compliance challenges without sacrificing their digital ambitions.

The numbers are staggering: More than 65 million people around the world have been forcibly displaced. Only a small number of refugees—less than 1 percent of 17.5 million in 2016—will ever be resettled. In Syria alone, more than 5 million people have fled their war-torn country since 2011, 1 million of whom have settled in Lebanon. Nearly a quarter of those refugees are children not enrolled in school. Behind each of these numbers is a life that’s been put on pause.

There are many and varied definitions of the word innovation. The word often conjures up visions of scientists in white lab coats holding clipboards, but the most successful innovations that drive business results are often small and incremental cultural innovations rather than dramatic large-scale R&D endeavors.

Recent settlements in two cases appear to have been heavily influenced by the Investors Bancorp decision in ways that do not bode well for directors who determine their own compensation under shareholder-approved plans that do not limit their discretion to amounts that would not make it worthwhile for the plaintiffs’ lawyers to sue, or could be protected by the business judgment rule.

The faster growth in wages for blue-collar workers is somewhat surprising, especially since throughout most recent history, white-collar wage growth was higher. We expect labor markets to continue to tighten in the coming years, which will only apply more wage and price pressures across the economy. There are already signs that faster wage growth is already spilling over to producer prices.

The rise of women relative to men in the labor force—along with the relative increase in female-dominated and generally lower-paying service sector employment—may be one significant reason why wage growth in this economic recovery has not been as fast as expected or what we are used to experiencing. But it’s also a reason why we can think optimistically that the labor market (and our economy’s true capacity) still hasn’t maxed out.

Labor market data very clearly suggest that jobs in warehousing, delivery, and e-commerce, are unlikely to fully replace those lost in brick and mortar retail.

Observing labor demand using online job ad postings for a specific company like Amazon is possible with Help Wanted OnLine® data. Most importantly, HWOL allows us to analyze monthly trends in labor demand both in real-time and historically down to the most granular occupational level for areas throughout the United States. Analyzing trends in online job ads with the granularity of Help Wanted OnLine® broadens our understanding of the overall U.S. labor market.