Reference no: EM133215182

Below is a summary of the Wall Street Journal article "The Vanishing Executive Assistant" written by Rachel Feintzeig on January 18, 2020.

Please answer the questions below.

Executive assistants once ran the office. Increasingly, the office runs without them. The decline of what has been a solid career path for women without college degrees has been quiet and gradual, but in magnitude it has mirrored the downturn in blue-collar factory work, economists say.

Technology and automation have chipped away at duties like papers to be filed and landlines to be answered. A new generation of corporate leaders are content to schedule meetings and book flights on their own. Glad to cut costs, companies have culled their administrative ranks, transformed the role for many of those who have managed to hang on and moved some positions to cheaper parts of the country.

More than 1.6 million secretarial and administrative-assistant jobs have vanished since 2000, according to federal data, an almost 40% decline, comparable to that in manufacturing. The losses have not garnered much notice. Unlike a plant closing that leaves thousands of Americans unemployed in one go, jobs in a traditionally female sector have evaporated in dribs and drabs.

Many of the women whose positions vanished are now in their 50s and 60s and some are finding that the only jobs they can get are low-paying and often physically demanding, such as stocking shelves or ferrying ride-hail passengers. The workers taking their place are often younger with college degrees; some make half as much money while supporting more executives.

That is the model at Ernst & Young. The U.S. affiliate of the big accounting and consulting firm has hired 460 remote executive assistants in five low-cost cities, including Tucson, Arizona, and Louisville, Kentucky, who support executives in places like Manhattan and Los Angeles. Many of the traditional executive assistants are gone.

Ernst & Young piloted the remote program in 2014 after realizing that due to business travel, partners were increasingly away from the offices where their assistants sat, says Megan Hobson, an Ernst & Young partner who oversees administrative operations. "If somebody's not in our office, yet we have somebody commuting into the office to be their assistant, where's the disconnect?" she says.

This article can serve as a catalyst to discuss the issue of unemployment. After reading the summary above, answer the following questions.

1. What is the natural rate of unemployment in an economy?
2. What are the two components of the natural rate of unemployment?
3. The article describes how the decade of the 2000s lead to the loss of executive assistants' jobs that were mostly held by women. Would you characterize this job loss as frictional unemployment or structural unemployment? Is this unemployment short-term or long-term?
4. The loss of jobs of executive assistants mirrors the loss of blue-collar jobs in the manufacturing sector. Is this a natural process in an evolving economy where technological progress changes the demand for different kinds of labor?
5. Do you have any suggestions for public policy to deal with this kind of unemployment?