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March 9, 2005

IWPR’s Research News Reporter is distributed monthly to highlight inventive, informative, innovative, and sometimes controversial research relating to women and their families. Each selection includes a short description of the research and either a link to the report i tself or a citation. We sometimes include short pieces in their entirety.

In this edition:

• Who Are Social Security Beneficiaries?
• How Did the 2001 Recession Affect Single Mothers?
• The Lukewarm 2004 Labor Market: Despite Some Signs of Improvement, Wages Fell, Job Growth Lagged, and Unemployment Spells Remained Long
• Presenteeism and Paid Sick Days
• Job Sprawl and the Spatial Mismatch Between Blacks and Jobs

1. Who Are Social Security Beneficiaries?

Sunhwa Lee, Ph.D.
Institute for Women’s Policy Research
March 2005

This fact sheet discusses the characteristics of Social Security recipien ts. Using Social Security Administration data, the author finds that the majority of Social Security beneficiaries are retired workers and their families, accounting for 70 percent of all beneficiaries as of December 2002. Additionally, disabled workers and their families and survivors of deceased workers together make up about 30 percent of all beneficiaries. The author also finds that about one-third of women receive benefi ts based on their husbands’ earnings, while 28 percent in 2002 are “dually entitled,” meaning they receive benefi ts on the basis of both their own earnings and that of their husbands, and 39 percent receive benefi ts based only on their own earnings records. The fact sheet also describes the types of benefi ts received by women o different races.

http://womenandsocialsecurity.org/Women_Social_Security/pdf/D461.pdf

New from IWPR:

March 13:

Sunhwa Lee
Women's History Month Event for Federally Employed Women (FEW)
Women and Social Security
Holiday Inn, Clarendon, VA

June 9 & 10:

Avis Jones-DeWeever
National Conference of Black Political Scientis ts (Conference)
Avenues to Opportunity: Accessing Higher Education in the Context of Welfare Reform
Hyatt Regency Crystal City, Arlington , VA

http://www.iwpr.org/Media/Media.htm

2. How did the 2001 Recession Affect Single Mothers?

Robert Lerman
Single Paren ts’ Earnings Monitor
The Urban Institute
January 2005

This report examines the effect of the 2001 recession on job retention and growth among single mothers through analysis of Census Bureau data. The author finds that, overall, though the weak labor market of 2001-2003 retarded some of the economic progress single mothers enjoyed during the preceding years, employment and wage levels of single mothers remained above 1996 levels.

The employed share of single mothers dropped by almost 5 percentage poin ts from i ts peak of nearly 75 percent in November and December 2000 to about 70 percent in March and April 2003. Still, single mothers did retain most of their post-welfare reform gains in employment, as the proportion of single mothers holding jobs was 70 percent in June 2003, compared with 64 percent in August 1996.

http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/311128_single_mothers.pdf

3. The Lukewarm 2004 Labor Market: Despite Some Signs of Improvement, Wages Fell, Job Growth Lagged, and Unemployment Spells Remained Long

Sylvia Allegretto, Jared Bernstein, and Isaac Shapiro

Economic Policy Institute and Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

February 16, 2005

This report uses Bureau of Labor Statistics data to describe the state of the U.S. labor market in 2004. Job growth occurred in every month of the year; the unemployment rate fell from an average of 6.0 percent in 2003 to an average of 5.5 percent for last year. The authors say that, despite these positive trends, several other indicators and comparisons showed a labor market that “remains distinctly weak.”

Wages fell (relative to inflation) among nearly all groups of workers; job growth fell 1.4 million jobs short of the number that would be typical for a recovery; and long-term unemployment levels remained exceptionally high. In addition, the report found that the only group with a significant wage gain from 2003 to 2004 was men with advanced degrees. The author says that wages fell the most for high school-educated women, as their wages fell 1.1 percent last year.

http://www.epinet.org/issuebriefs/20050216_epi_cbpp.pdf

4. Presenteeism and Paid Sick Days

Jodie Levin-Epstein
Center for Law and Social Policy
February 28, 2005

This report makes the argument that presenteeism, or lost productivity that occurs when employees come to work but perform below par due to illness, could be addressed by passing the Healthy Families Act, which would give workers the opportunity to take time off for preventive health care to avoid infecting other workers..

The author, who cites the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and the Harvard Business Review, among others, says that presenteeism, viewed by nearly 40 percent of employers as a problem in their organization, is a workforce health problem and a public health problem. According to AdvancePCS data, the estimated annual cost of presenteeism in the U.S. is $180 billion, and a Cornell University study says that presenteeism could account for as much as 61 percent of the total cost of worker illness.

The report argues that passing the Healthy Families Act could help build employer awareness of presenteeism and ensure that all employers equally share the job of protecting against contagion.

http://www.clasp.org/publications/presenteeism.pdf

5. Job Sprawl and the Spatial Mismatch Between Blacks and Jobs

Michael A. Stoll
The Brookings Institution
February 2005

This analysis, on the location of people and jobs, including a “job sprawl” measure of employment decentralization ( the distance ou tside the city center that people seeking employment must travel) sugges ts that job sprawl exacerbates certain dimensions of racial inequality in America. The author sugges ts that, by better linking job growth with existing residential patterns, policies to promote balanced metropolitan development could help narrow the spatial mismatch between blacks and jobs, and improve their employment outcomes over time.

The analysis, based on calculations primarily from Census Bureau data, found that: metropolitan areas with higher levels of employment decentralization exhibit greater spatial mismatch between the relative locations of jobs and black residen ts; greater job sprawl is associated with higher spatial mismatch for blacks, but not for whites; blacks are more geographically isolated from jobs in high job-sprawl areas regardless of region, metropolitan area size, and their share of metropolitan population; and metropolitan areas characterized by higher job sprawl also exhibit more severe racial segregation between blacks and whites.

http://www.brook.edu/metro/pubs/20050214_jobsprawl.pdf

This edition of IWPR’s Research News Reporter was prepared by Elizabeth Circo.