So what else can be done? There is obviously a role for training and education to help workers meet employers’ rising demand for skills, especially at the beginning of their career. Fatih Guvenen of the University of Minnesota notes that the income of 25-year-old men starting their careers has declined sharply since the early 1970s and is now about where it was in the late ’50s.
But a strategy focused on education will not tip the balance. As Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute points out, the list of remedies is long. It includes raising the minimum wage, increasing unionization, banning mandatory arbitration for employment claims, ending arbitrary and unpredictable scheduling, and ensuring that companies that subcontract their low-wage work remain in some way accountable for the workers.
Or how about restoring competition to labor markets? Mr. Krueger and Eric Posner of the University of Chicago write that the government could stop companies from forcing low-pay workers to sign noncompete covenants, which bar them from better-paid jobs elsewhere. It should also ban no-poaching arrangements of dubious legality among franchisees of the same company, which also close off workers’ options.
