It's not entirely out of the realm of possibility to think that there are more jobs because we have to work more of them to make ends meet.  It is also not out of the realm of possibility that this who job creation thing is a big MYTH.

And what, what are these beloved "productive" jobs they think we all have?  There are millions of burger flippers, hoardes of retail slaves, droves of office assistants who move paper from one pile to another, the population of which would dwarf some European countries.  Sure we are productive, but what exactly are we producing?

Oh, yeah.  We in America also need full time work for healthcare here.  So losing a job also means we better not get sick or hit by a car.  So being in between jobs could kill ya.  More jobs for the gravediggers, I guess...

People also don't take vacations here for fear of losing their jobs.  Oh, they are offered, but many times the company says, "Here's your vacation.  I dare you to take it.  Feelin' lucky, are ya punk?" ... That's how American companies interpret
"flexibility".  I get 3 weeks off.  Union.  

So on the one hand "job turnover" and "flexibility" might be a sign of sheer utopia.  But it might also be illustrative of a big social problem which is that companies are not investing AT ALL in the security or futures of their employees, the American people.  How that's good for the nation's economy is beyond me.  I guess as long as we keep buying disposable crap with our credit cards it doesn't matter if we can't afford college or health insurance or a small peace of mind.  

Anyway...  

Note to Europe: Please don't follow our example!  

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. -Voltaire

Working hours can be very demanding in the US.  I have spent a lot of time on a noon-midnight schedule.  Lots of people work the night shift, or weekends.

In rapidly ageing populations, we have to expect that most people will work at least part-time into their early seventies.  The alternative is to impose very high taxes on younger people who are still working.

This "employment protection index" is a measure of things like legal requirements for advance notice of layoffs and severance pay, and the degree of regulation of temporary employment contracts, where 0 means "little regulation" and 100 means "highly regulated."

In a graph:

For those with knowledge of statistics, the line in the graph is a regression line of the unemployment rate on the employment protection index.

The regression suggests that for every 10 points of increase in the employment protection index, the unemployment rate increases by about 0.4 points. However, variation in the EPI explains only 7% of the variation in unemployment rates, so it's not a very tight fit, as the graph indicates.

For what it's worth, this seems to indicate that labor regulations play some role in increasing unemployment, but there is little evidence for the overwhelming effects of labor market reregulation suggested by the "party line." For example, (taking the regression literally for a moment) if Germany were to deregulate its labor markets to Irish levels, the data indicate that doing so would knock only about 1.5 points off of the unemployment rate, which would be far from solving the whole German unemployment problem. And even that is probably an overestimate.

Here are some more sophisticated analyses along the same lines:

(1) Unemployment and Labor Market Institutions: The Failure of the Empirical Case for Deregulation, by Dean Baker, Andrew Glyn, David Howell, and John Schmitt

The authors conclude that the statistical evidence for the supposed beneficial effects of labor market deregulation is not strong:

[T]he evidence [for "the widespread belief that rigidities generated by labor market institutions lie at the heart of the unemployment crisis"] is far from conclusive. [T]here is no simple relationship
between any of the labor market institutions and the unemployment rate.

Furthermore, there is more than one path to low unemployment rates:

Countries with very different institutional frameworks have managed to achieve unemployment rates substantially below the OECD average. While the United States and United Kingdom stand out as countries that have achieved low rates of unemployment with relatively weak labor market protections, the OECD also includes examples of countries that have achieved comparable results - Austria, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden - with high levels of labor-market protections. A complete and convincing analysis of the relationship between labor-market institutions and unemployment must be able to explain the success of these more regulated countries as well.

(2) The Role of Shocks and Institutions in the Rise of European Unemployment, by Olivier Blanchard and Justin Wolfers

The authors conclude that labor market regulations do matter, but only in conjunction with macro-economic "shocks" (such as oil price increases, the post-1970 slowdown in productivity growth, shifts in labor demand, and so forth). Neither shocks nor institutions alone can explain both the rise in unemployment and current differences in unemployment rates across countries. This is because there is not enough differences in the degree of "shocks" across countries to explain current differences in unemployment rates, while many of the labor market institutions blamed for poor labor market performance actually pre-date the rise in unemployment.

And here is some historical data on the evolution of labor market protections across countries:

The papers in this book call into question many of the points made in the FT piece. Some of the book's conclusions:

• Little evidence that labor market flexibility is substantially affected by the presence of publicly-provided social protection programs such as employment protection, health insurance, pension benefits, unemployment benefits and income assistance, or childcare and maternity leave; nor is the speed of labor-market adjustment enhanced by limiting such programs.

• There is more than one kind of flexibility: countries with extensive social protection systems find other ways to adjust to recessions. For example, compared to the US, Germany relies more heavily on adjusting hours of work rather than employment when faced with an economic downturn.

• Social protection programs provide substantial benefits to workers. Any analysis of the effects of removing social protections must include the costs to workers of doing so, against any benefits in increased employment that might occur.

Ricardo Caballero, a professor at MIT (...) found that the links between hiring and economic growth are slower in countries with high legal protection against dismissal, especially where such protection was enforced.

In a "more flexible" economy they could have dumped them as soon as they liked, had them starve or freeload off the state and then re-hire them  when they needed them. Good for profits, bad for the community.

This turnover is a leading cause of job creation.

The writer, [Diana Furchtgott-Roth] a senior fellow and director of the Center for Employment Policy at the Hudson Institute, was chief economist at the US Department of Labor 2003-5

Hmm. Who are the Hudson Institute?

The Hudson Institute, is a hard-right activist think tank that advocates the abolition of government-backed Social Security and an end to corporate income taxes. It also campaigns heavily on environmental issues (pro-GM, anti-organic).

It's these "people":

As if the decision to treat terror as a criminal matter did not place a large enough impediment in the path of the security forces, we have the infatuation of the British establishment with multiculturalism, and the pride with which its members and the left-wing press point out that 300 languages (soberer sources put the number at half that) are spoken in London.

I didn't count them, but the first one was the most glaring:

Over the past decade, European employment has grown by less than 10 per cent, while US employment has grown by 17 per cent

Oh, what were the respective population growths again?... The EU-15's was a bit above 3%, the US just below 13%,   so relative job creation was just: the EU's 6,5% vs. the US 3,7% (!), and I didn't took different job statistics into account!!!

To emphasize, Europe had more job creation than the USA over the last decade in relative terms.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}

By how much has the working age population grown in the meantime?

For the US, the current number is usually estimated at 150,000 per month, or 1.8 million per year, or 1-1.5% per year, which means that over 10 years, the US have created just enough jobs for its growing population.

In an other thread, the numbers for France and the UK, two of the most dynamic countries, demographically speaking, were +12% and +6% for the working age population over 1994-2003. I seriously doubt that the European working age population has grown by more than 10% in the last 10 years, what with the current population decline and the stagnation that preceded it in most of the other countries.

So Europe can be said to have created MORE jobs than the US, relative to its population.

The US number for the past year (the only good year for Bush on that front in 5 years) barely above the natural growth of the working age population. As Krugan puts in in his latest column:

the administration hailed last month's job growth as something wondrous to behold, yet there were 68 months during the Clinton years when employment grew faster.

America grows while Europe stalls for many reasons, among them disparities in flexibility caused by employment laws. Europe will never recover until employment protection statutes are modernised and politicians restore flexibility to employers and workers.

1994-2003 GDP growth per person:
USA: 2.1%
France: 2%
Germany: 1.2%
Spain: 3%

Growth and stall. Right. Remember this:

Frequent job changes lead to better job matches and higher productivity. In 2004 there were 54m new hires and 51m job separations in a labour force of 147m. Over half these separations were voluntary - people who left jobs because of better opportunities. Younger baby boomers, born in 1957-1964, held an average of 9.6 jobs from age 18 to 36. This turnover is a leading cause of job creation.

51m job separations in a year? I don't see how you get such a high number without counting all the McJobs, student internships and temps. Same thing for that average number of jobs between 18 and 36. How many of these "jobs" are actual jobs, and how many are summer jobs, gigs to pay for your studies or to get started?

Ricardo Caballero, a professor at MIT, has shown that employment protection laws inhibit labour market flexibility, slowing turnover and economic growth, by looking at the effects of job security provisions in 60 countries. He found that the links between hiring and economic growth are slower in countries with high legal protection against dismissal, especially where such protection was enforced.

I like this last sentence "where such protection was enforced". How dare they!? Actually apply laws? What a quaint concept.

But I note that the study is about 60 countries, which is not a serious wayto make a point about Europe and the USA as it includes many developing economies which are too different to be comparable.

Another disadvantage of inflexible labour markets is that they encourage older people to retire early. (...)In 2003, 14 per cent of Americans 65 and older remained economically active, a figure exceeded only by Japan in leading industrialised countries. In France, Italy, Germany, Canada and Australia, only 1 to 7 per cent of older citizens were economically active.
 

Yep, that's a disadvantage indeed.

In sum, a comparison of US data with countries that have enacted so-called job protection laws shows that these laws increase unemployment, deter the shift of workers from unproductive to productive jobs and discourage the elderly from working. It is ironic that America's supposedly more porous safety net provides more job security than Europe's rigid labour laws.

You only supposedly "proved" that America provides more jobs (although I think I debunked that somewhat), but I don't see how that translates into providing "job security".

Hack. Hack. Hack.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

She got that one from Friedman?

ROFLMAO.

Someone above asked whether there is any country where there is no protection against unlawful dismissal, and the answer is probably not. But in the U.S. we have "employment at will" which means that you can be fired at any time, or quit at any time. What can make it illegal is if you are fired for certain specific reasons including race, gender, or age.

When you get "layed off" (which is a mis-use of the term, because in a union shop if you get layed off then when they start re-hiring it's done by seniority) from a big company they give you information about the demographic mix of the reduction, to show that the reduction of each group was taken in the correct proportion.

Regarding large American companies and how easy it is to get rid of people, perhaps a good current example is Hewlett Packard. HP is undergoing some problems and their new CEO recently (July 20) announced that the company would be cutting around 14,000 jobs around the world. Some people have already been notified, three weeks later, which means that they'll be out by the end of August.

There is NO requirement for prior annoucement except in certain cases where the local goverment is notified about plant closings.

In fact, not only Clinton raised taxes but his years were marked by a significant shift of power from employers to employees. Longer vacations, sign up bonus, stock options...

So the so called "flexibility" that she sings praises for was not in effect for 5 out of the 10 years she is measuring.

Were she to use only the years where the policies she advises were in effect, the results of her own study would tell a very different story...