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Teaching Resources
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Cyberproblems & Solutions
Unemployment and Its Natural Rate
- Read How the Government Measures Unemployment, a document made available by the BLS. What are the problems associated with measuring unemployment in a country as large as ours? Is the government's strategy reasonable to you?
- Read the Unemployment Insurance Web Page of the Workforce New Jersey Public Information Network. The link takes you to the WNJPIN homepage. From there click on Unemployment Insurance Information. What are the basic services provided by unemployment insurance? Does your state has a similar Web page? (Let the National ITSC Web site help you.)
- Access the National ITSC Unemployment Insurance Web Site. Find the size of the labor force, number of unemployed persons, and unemployment rate last month. Find data on duration of unemployment for last month. What percentage of the unemployed had been out of a job for 15 weeks or more? 27 weeks or more?
- Read about the confrontation between the Graduate Employees and Students
organization (GESO) and Yale University at the GESO homepage. Do you think graduate teaching assistants should be able to organize and strike? Discuss the issues.
GESO, an organization largely composed of graduate teaching assistants, organized and demanded to be recognized. Yale University refused to recognize the organization on the grounds that TA teaching assignments were
part of the educational process and not real jobs. The TA's threatened a
strike of sorts. They would withhold grades from undergraduate students.
GESO eventually backed down. Many students using the text will be at large
universities that use TA and will easily be able to understand the
situation. Should TA's have the right to organize and strike? Is withholding grades an acceptable tactic?
- Search America's Job Bank.
Click on Instructions and then About this Service to learn about the purpose of America's Job
Bank. Then, return to the home page and click on
Job Seekers and then Menu (under Search for Jobs) to find a job vacancy
in
an occupation that interests you within 25 miles of your current
location.
If well-publicized and extensively-used, what impact should America's
Job Bank have on Unemployment and Its Natural Rate? Explain.
America's Job Bank is a service that economists have
speculated about for decades: a national computerized job bank.
Employers can list job vacancies while workers can list their resumes.
After reading the section on job search, students should recognize that
a
well-functioning job bank could reduce Unemployment and Its Natural Rate
by lowering the time needed to find new jobs and workers. Instructors
can modify the assignment to have students explain how the
service works and list some of the vacancies they find.
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