This event has been postponed and will be scheduled for a future date.

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Most research on poverty focuses on the damage caused by persistent unemployment. A central implication from sociologists and other social scientists is that labor market
participation plays a seminal role in building ladders to opportunity for poor workers, families, and communities. But what actually 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 job quality, 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 consider the downside of overheated economies, which can fuel surging rents and ignite outmigration. And they draw on the evidence to offer a call to implement policies
and practices on behalf of those workers who have for too long been shut out of opportunity to thrive.
 
PRESENTERS:

Katherine S. Newman
Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, UC Office of the President and Chancellor’s Distinguished Professor of Sociology & Public Policy, UC Berkeley

Elisabeth S. Jacobs
Associate Vice President + Deputy Director, WorkRise at the Urban Institute

MODERATED BY: 

Steve McKay, Professor of Sociology and Director of the UCSC Center for Labor and Community

SPONSORED BY:

The Center for Labor and Community and the Institute for Social Transformation at UC Santa Cruz.

Questions? Email clc@ucsc.edu