 Thank you for having me, for the record, my name is Matthew Barrow, it's Economic and Labor Market Information Chief for the Vermont Department of Labor. Good morning. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate the opportunity to come and speak about the overall economic conditions and certainly if there are some questions about the overall economic conditions, I'm happy to field those to the best of my ability. If I can get you the answer today, I'll do my best to get you an answer in a timely fashion. Excuse me. And as it relates to any other questions regarding currently pending legislation, I'll certainly do my best to answer those. I think it's important just to recognize that my position is apolitical. I'm a state employee 100% federally funded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and Employment and Training Administration both within the US Department of Labor. So I am here as an economist to provide information to help you make a decision and overall to be an update on the status of the economy. So what we have here on this graph just for a little read or guidance before everyone gets overwhelmed with colors and lines is an economic trend. It's been put into percentage terms so that it is all relative. The left to right, what you're looking at is months, the number of months. And up to down is percent job loss or job gain. And so what this chart is depicting is from the last peak of the last business cycle, which is December 2007, what has happened. And so the green line represents Vermont. We included the blue line as well to represent the US. But in short, and we've had these conversations before, during the recession, during the depth of the recession, four out of every 100 jobs in the Vermont economy were lost. Conversely, six out of every 100 jobs in the US economy were lost. So you see the blue line goes lower than the green line. I don't know, would you permit a point? All right, I'm kind of like pointing here. I'm going to just call it a point. Yeah, it's probably just because those of us that are color efficient appreciate it. So the US lost six out of every 100 jobs during the depth of the recession. So this left to right is months. And then percent job loss or percent job gain. So Vermont was right here about four out of every 100. And then once we bottomed out, we had economic recovery. And so that's around the summer of 2010-ish. And you can see that the US economy started growing at a faster rate than Vermont. And that's customary, just like we didn't get as low during the economic downturn. We don't get as hot during economic upturns. Can you just tell me what NECTA is? NECTA is technically ensured it's a metropolitan statistical area, an MSA. New England technically doesn't have any MSAs because we're organized by towns. So that is New England cities and towns areas. What a series of New England city town areas. So that's just showing basically Burlington's growth is just shot off compared to the rest of Vermont. Yeah, and that's where I was going to go next. They have no problem. No. That's where I was going to. Yeah. Basically my question is, what can I exaggerate on that a little bit? So just blasting into this right here, it looks like I'm looking at Burlington's economy and then I'm looking at hinterland's economy. And it substantiates everything I've been saying. Yeti Bob, good job, right? Good job. So what makes this? Just a clarification. When you say Burlington, is that the city of Burlington or Chittenden County? Or the, I'm from Colchester. Yeah. So yeah, they're weird. Good. Everyone had their caffeine this morning, ready to go? Good. This is great. So when we look at the Vermont economy, we can break it down into two parts. We can break it down into the Burlington labor market area, which is the Burlington, South Burlington NECTA, which includes all the way up into Swanton. The northern part of Addison County, not Waterbury. So kind of that way. So it represents basically the northwest corner of the state. Including Colchester. Including Colchester, it definitely does. And St. Aldens. And so it represents about a third of the population in the state of Vermont, about 40% of the jobs in the state of Vermont. So this is what they consider when they use the term economic engine of the state of Vermont. This is the area we're talking about. And labor market areas are defined by where people live, where people work, and where people shop. So commuting patterns. So the commuting patterns for Burlington actually have gotten bigger. When we looked at the 2000 census, Swanton wasn't part of the Burlington, South Burlington labor market area. By 2010, it was part of it. Because there's more commuting coming from north. And so anyone who goes by the interstate exit outside Burlington around 5 o'clock, you can see the traffic heading north. Which is like my Ferrisburg is the top part of Ferrisburg is. Yeah. So where this information gets interesting and new is that for a while, this story wasn't so interesting, because it was an economic recovery. But this data is based on monthly estimates. We create monthly estimates of what the jobs are in the state of Vermont. And then after we do a year's worth of estimates, this is just shorthand. If anyone's interested in the technical details, I can go back and explain it. But after a year's worth of monthly estimates, we go back and true it up and say, how do we do? So that we can baseline where we start off for our next 12 months of estimates. And then we come back and say, how do we do? So where this story is, if we separate the state of Vermont into two parts, the Burlington labor market area or the rest of the state, which is the balance, everything from South to Central to the Northeast Kingdom, you get the purple line and the red line. And you can see where the economic growth has happened. And within a short period of time, Burlington was back to where it was in 2007 and beyond. And so this positive economic growth, meaning jobs, in the Burlington labor market area, it had significant rate of growth over time. The red line represents what's happening in the balance of the state. We were producing estimates last year that actually showed that this part of the state had recovered and that Burlington was continuing to grow. When we just completed, this is new information, we're still digesting it because we had to complete it in February and released it in March. When we actually went back and looked at what happened in those 12 months, we realized we were overestimating in both those areas. We, meaning the US Department of Labor, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Vermont is a partner to them, but we have little control over the estimates. They come out of DC and they say, we don't like them. They say, tough. So what happened is this revision down pushed the balance of the state to a point where they're not even back to where they were in 2007. Plus, you see that sharp decline in the Burlington labor market area where it's like, shoo. We're now seeing an over-the-year job loss in Burlington by about 1,200 jobs. And when I talk about this economic recovery, if you've heard me talk, anytime since 2010 forward, when I talk about the economic recovery, I talk about the national storyline that this is an urban-based economic expansion. Across the country, it has been urban centers that have been experiencing all the job growth. It is the big cities, and that has been no different in the state of Vermont, where our big metropolitan area has been significantly growing. And so where this is, where I'm currently up all night thinking about things like this and what the Vermont economy is up to is that if our biggest urban center, after going through this annual revision, we thought we were growing in that we're not growing over the year, what does that mean for the overall health? And so when I look of the state, we are a small state subject to the winds of the US economy. And what's interesting to know in the last recession, Vermont actually started showing economic downturns about three to six months before the US did. So when I start, I'm a bit of a recession, too. So it's the fun of my job is you're like, well, when's it going to happen? When's it going to switch? So I'm not saying it's going to happen today or we're in a recession or three months or six months or maybe even a year or two years. We don't know where it's going to go. This could be a plateau. It could be the data could revise again. Most likely it won't revise significantly to move it back positive. But there could be more fuel for this economic fire. We just don't know where it's going to come from yet. You've answered part of my question regarding what does the rest of Vermont look like. And I see we're still down 1%. But now I want to go to a different question. Do you have any concept of what the driver of that job loss in the Great Burlington area is? That's a great question. And I did pull the data to see, and again, this is all, we're still sorting through this. It's only a couple of weeks old and we're trying to understand it. But it is very broad-based. And that was what gave me a little bit of pause. So we're seeing declines in manufacturing. We're seeing declines in retail trade. We're seeing declines in professional and technical and business services. And those are the primary drivers of the decline in Burlington labor market area. So is it that because we don't have people to fill the jobs, the jobs are being moved elsewhere? Or are the jobs being automated? Or some of both? Yeah, that's a great point. And the commissioner raises that point frequently, is that these are a count of heads people employed. It is possible that employers are trying to hire. They could have 5,000 open jobs in Burlington labor market area and they can't fill them. And as a result of just natural churn, they actually have it down. But yes, so it could be. Is that a good show here? No, these are just employee counts as reported by employers. So it doesn't speak to how many open jobs there are. But we do believe that with Burlington being, I believe, the tide for seventh lowest unemployment rate for all metropolitan areas across the country, tide for seventh, which is pretty low. I think they track 250 or something. We do know that there is a tight labor market. And so some of it could be just lots of jobs opening. I'm filled. Ma'am, four years ago when I was on commerce, and you came and presented that, and this is four years ago, you were anticipating a recession. Or you said we were overdue. I want to say we were overdue. You weren't anticipating. But you said we were overdue. So that was four years ago. And coupled with your statement that with the last big one we had, Vermont was three to six months ahead of that, are we heading in your best professional opinion for a recession? That is a great question. So the back story of the initial testimony that I provided is that typically a business cycle goes seven, eight years. And so we're talking since 2007 a business cycle includes both the up and the down. So if we were looking at this business cycle, we're already at 10 years. Because 2007 was the high point. And if we already have a trough, now we're looking for a peak, we're plus 10 years out. So anywhere from two to three to four years past what an average business cycle is, this is already, I believe, the second longest economic expansion in US history. So but then the old adage comes first and foremost. Economists have success. What does it? Economists have predict. What is it? I tried to get this joke before I came in here. What does it do? Economists have play is it? There are a few jokes on the con. I know. Yeah. Oh, gosh. And none of us saw it. It's all light of life. Yeah, you're right. We know the joke. It's something that they've made 15 correct predictions about the last three recessions, something like that. Or 100% of the time, we're able to tell you when a recession happened in the past, something like that. We're not good. That's where I really hold my line as an economist, is I'm here to provide information. I can't give you an opinion, because as soon as I do, I'm outside my bounds. If we make it to 19, I believe then we'll get the longest period of growth. But our growth hasn't been stellar. It's been constant and slow, but nothing like to knock your socks off. Right. And so there probably will be a correction, but as you said, nobody can really determine when that correction will be. And there's signs that we can be looking for. And so even the last three recessions, they've been getting farther apart, but they've been taking longer recoveries. So we're actually kind of consistent with how, since the 1990, the 2001, and the 2007 recessions have looked. They just slower recovery, longer durations between downturns. And I think that's the interesting part about this, is I even want to ask national economists, they say, what is the risks of this current economy from a US perspective? And a typical answer I get from many is, well, there's international risks and there's domestic risks. And that's the end of that quote. Thank you, but it doesn't help me much. Where we can point to high stock market prices, we can point to a lot of debt, potentially. But how this all unfolds, or how it all puts together in terms of some sort of lighting the match towards an economic downturn, I don't know. And that's the interesting part of how does it go forward? Because no one can really see where the structural weaknesses are right now. Certainly discussions about international entanglements, whether military or economic adds question marks. Mary had a question in the box. Can you talk to us about what's happening in the rest of Vermont, so what the economy is looking like, what the jobs are, and if you can talk about it regionally, if you can break it out that way? I would. I can do a little bit off the cuff right now, but I do not have sufficient information to give you a detailed picture on that. But what we do hear, and we've been hearing from employers across the state, not just the Burlington labor market area, but employers are trying to hire. And they're finding a limited number of applicants. And so there are employers that are trying to grow in other parts of the state, and they're just not successful in the recruitment or attention. The census numbers, between the 10-year census, the numbers for Vermont are always a little squishy in my mind. But there are showing some significant declines in certain counties. There was recently an article saying how many counties that had showed population loss. And that certainly puts downward pressure on traditional economic growth, this population loss. But it's the employers that, you know, it's everything from medical to construction. The Vermont Department of Labor just had a very large job fair specifically related to construction. And we had 30-plus employers saying, we're hiring right now, looking for people for the season. But it's also leisure and hospitality. It's professional and business and technical services. Vermont is a very balanced economy, and we're not seeing any particular wine area that's not feeling the pressure of this constricted labor market. So business, leisure, what was the third? Construction and manufacturing and health care. It's really broad-based. Not land-based, not agricultural, or value-added agricultural sort of work. The Vermont Department of Labor, our ability to see data, is really based on the federal laws associated with unemployment insurance. And agriculture falls. A lot of agriculture falls outside of our ability to see. So I'm not even the best answer about how agriculture is reacting to this current situation. Bob, are they cutting? Oh, I'm all set. I kind of got an answer. Are they cutting? What about the uncertainty in trade? I'm really worried because we do have a significant amount of trade, not as much as we used to. But I'm wondering how that's affecting our labor market here. Are people hesitant to hire because they don't know if they can get their goods out? I'm not sure. That's a great question. I don't know the answer to that. I don't think I'm not seeing so much of a hesitancy of employers to hire. It's actually lack of the skills that they're looking for. So that employers are really saying, this is a good economic climate for us right now. We're trying to either backfill people retiring or a typical job turn. Or they're trying to say, we're growing. We're trying to grow. And we're reaching barriers associated with labor supply. We hear that a lot, which is one of the reasons I think the department is trying to focus with a lot with young people and people who are currently outside the labor force to say, how can we bring people into labor force? How can we retain youth? How can we educate youth about the employment opportunities that are available right now for the skills they have? Because many employers have, it seemed like during the recession, employers raised the bar on the criteria they're looking for for employees. Because when they put out an application, they would get 100, and they wouldn't want a sort. So they said, well, let's move up what we're looking for. And now I think we're finally starting to see them go down where they say, we just need someone to show up on time, work well with others, and we can train the rest. And we're really more engagement regarding apprenticeships, more engagement regarding training programs, more engagement even in the high school levels saying, let's work with you to figure out what people are going to be doing post-graduation, and how can we get them right into employment opportunity here in Vermont? But how are we keeping people here when our wages are less than they are staying in Boston, or some of these places? The wage question is a difficult one for me, because when I look at income statistics, Vermont, from an income standpoint, we're in the top half for the country. Our median wage is typically higher than the national, but our average wage is lower. And a lot of that has to do with our industry structure here. We don't have the big corporate headquarters or the big finance years. And so there are certain occupations we can't review with Boston. If you're solely looking at a dollar-for-dollar paycheck, IT infrastructure, oh, sorry, I have actually copies that I didn't know. Are you doing math? No. Is he doing math? I think he knows how to do math. We've got some for you, Nick. You don't. You can do paper, but it's so pretty. It's only one page. But I'm going to bet. I know the question, and then Mary has a question. Kathy, are you done? Yes. I have a question, and then Mary has a question. Are there trends or statistics that show movement over the start period of time where people tend to, you know, there's this big movement toward urban areas. And then I'm thinking back in the 60s, the movement back to the land. And do we see trends where it seems like right now it's a big urban movement? Kids want to be, I mean, Burlington's all we've got for Vermont. And if that's not doing it, then you are going to look at Chicago, or Boston, or Montreal, or wherever you're going to look. So are there trends that show this, OK, we're in an urban push. Now we're in a rural push. Are there trends like that, or is that happenstance? The only information I have that certainly outside of my role at the Department of Labor is more is just the interest in social science and just kind of talking to demographers and people who study generations. And from an economic standpoint, I've talked about this a lot, is we talk about taste and preferences. And if the taste and preferences, which currently are more urban, or they have been, even the taste and preferences of a fraction of a percent of the people that live in, say, LA changed, that would look like a population boom in the state like Vermont. And so I think there is evidence that there's it's starting to see a little bit of that pendulum swing. I mean, for example, the Department of Labor, I'm on a hiring committee for a position that we're trying to fill. Someone, a corporate lawyer from Seattle, they did a comprehensive search of where they wanted to live in the entire US, and they settled on the rule of Vermont because they said it aligned with their politics and aligned with the rule they were looking to establish. And they left Seattle because of it. Can we put that in headline? Yeah. I'm the first. What? Yeah. Yeah. Were you getting signed? I was just going to say that that is aligned with people who move into my district, too, that I find people who come up to me. I mean, we just moved here from Seattle. We just moved here from Indiana. They've never been to Vermont. It's not like they're moving here because of family for other reasons that I would typically find. And I asked them, and I don't mean to be so rude, but I asked them why. You know, because it would not be the typical place. But for a lot of what you're saying is true. What they bring up, they come here to retire. Retire or raise their kids? Well, if anyone's new, they're OK to retire. But there are people that have moved here because their kids are here. But grandparents have moved here because their children are here and their grandkids are here, and they can move. They're more mobile. So yeah, with all the granny nannies. Mary? Are you seeing any evidence that wages are moving up? Yeah, I'm sure. I meant to pull some newer data. So I'm just going to have to, I can provide whatever statistics you're looking for, right off the cuff. Yeah, about, I would say 18 months ago, we really started seeing a market increase in just how wages were being paid. And what we're doing right now, and this is a summer project for us, we invested in some technology last year to increase our computing power because the Department of Labor has access to a lot of wage data, but we weren't able to comprehensively analyze it in a way that was time feasible. So we're actually trying to dive in because what can happen in wage statistics is that there can be problems. And maybe this is a segue to another topic, but the outliers, so high income earners, can be really driving it. And so what we're trying to figure out is how are the quintiles doing? How are people in the lower quintiles doing? How are the people in not? Because if you just look at average wage, average wage has been increasing in the state of Vermont. Pretty good clip, two, two and a half, 3%, which is about inflation. But we're wondering how much of that is being influenced by large returns because when we look at more national data, we see that the tremendous amount of wage gains associated with highly skilled, highly professionalized positions. Because they are the professions that are able to capitalize from the newest technology. And so all the productivity and the productivity gains associated with new technology is being captured by the people with tremendous skills because they're able to wield that powerful sword. And so this is where Noah has to come in and talk about the overall economy as well as the minimum wage. And this is where some of the challenges we're seeing in the minimum wage is that lower skilled positions are competing with technology. They're not complementary. They're substitutes. As opposed to the wage increases that we're seeing where the people are actually getting returns on education, return on skills, it's because they're complementary to the technological advances. And so we have concerns about that. So I'm interpreting or referring from that statement that people who are hovering around the minimum wage level are not likely to see their wages being pulled up by whatever they can do to increase their value. Just because of the market that they're living in. If they were in a different market than they'd be able to. And by market, I mean job skills and an ability to. Yeah, like occupational family. And so they have to go, if you are a low skilled worker, you have to go through the traditional way of like increasing your skills, increasing your tenure, increasing your value for your company and demonstrating success and rising through the ranks. And so it's a challenge. And so when you're saying increased wages, I think about wages on an annual basis, not an hourly basis. So even though there has been, if you can increase someone's hourly earnings, it doesn't necessarily translate into annual increases because we even have two different data sources that are pointing to the fact that hours are being cut. And so a survey from private employers saying in the private sector, how much do private sector employees work? They've gone down 3% over the last six years. So that's a 3% cut in hours. And I would bet dollars to donuts that those decrease in hours are disproportionately felt by lower skilled workers. In addition, when you go to a household survey, now we're not talking to businesses, we're talking to households, we're talking to Vermonters, and we say, what's your work situation? And some people are saying part-time. And you're saying, would you take more hours if you could accept more hours? And they'd say yes. And so there's this cross-pressure that we're getting from two surveys saying there are workers out there who would like more hours, but because of economic reasons, they're not getting the offer to have more hours. And then it becomes a question of, well, why is that? And unfortunately, we don't have that. That's where the survey ends, unfortunately. Could you do kind of a similar map or chart for wages in holding constant in some, you know, $18 in showing us the wage trend? Sure. Yeah. It would be, I could do it by county, if that's helpful. And, but it would be only in averages. It would only be averages. So again, you'd have that high wage problem this year. You can't do it by quintiles. Not to that level of detail. We're still trying to break down the Vermont economy even in quintiles as it is. It presents analytical challenges about how you do that. Yeah, it would be small, too. No, not for the whole state. We're looking at about 500,000 records a year. But I was thinking, but if you did it by county, you know. Oh, yeah. Then it just... Yeah, it does start breaking down, but even for, as long as you were, yeah, Essex County or Grand Isle would be tiny, but the others would be okay. That would be interesting. Yeah, I can do that. If you could pay those constant dollars, that would be, you know. Okay, above that, Kathy. I don't know just how to word this, but... So you've got these little spiky little ups and downs, but then you've got some more rolly ones. I guess my question is, do you monitor or try to, in any way, the effect of what this building does one way or the other, and how it might show up here? Is that it? That is a good question. I had a similar question before, and yeah, yeah, I don't know how to go about that. You know, there can be, with the complexities of the economy, like there have to be a significant change. Like, for example, if you look at these jaguines, if you look at the blue line, there is a spike in the U.S. towards, well, we're not here anymore, but... Where's the blue line? There's this little bump. That's the 2010 census in the... You see that little gap? And the smaller the geography, the more jagged it's going to be. So even the blue line is pretty smooth, Vermont is okay smooth, but then the red and purple lines are more jagged. And so some of this stuff is it's like, it could be either just sample noise, or it could be seasonal patterns, like I'm looking at, say, you know, late summer 2016, there seemed to be something going on in rural Vermont and Burlington that gave... Everybody, yeah, it's like a little bump. And I don't know, it's interesting to think about what could happen. What do we do? What do we do? 2015. I don't know. Maybe we didn't do nothing. Summer of 2016. The economy did well. Well, we stabilized the memory. It was a campaign summer. Right. Was that 15? I don't know. Is it 16? It was explored then. It was done with the automatic indexing program. Okay, well... Matt, your question was answered. Bob asked my question. Okay, Kathy? My question was answered because I wanted the seasonal effect to be addressed. Can we... Are you going to go to this question? Sure. And I keep going back to my same question, so I just want to make sure everyone hears that. When I read through A through E, it appears that we better start dovetailing education with labor. Because when you look at the unskilled labor and the demands there and the demands for more skilled labor that are higher salary and we don't have the people to fill it, are we looking at education and looking at labor and doing this? And I don't think we've done it in 200 years. And if we don't start doing it, we're not going to turn anything around. So tell me, what are you thinking? And, you know, how do we address education so it benefits what we need for workers? We talk about it, but we don't do anything. Am I wrong? No, I was trying to think if there was a question I was supposed to answer in there, or just a statement. I guess it was a statement, but is my statement wrong? I mean, do we do a good enough job dovetailing education with being prepared for our labor markets or are labor markets changing so fast that we just keep education the same and it's down here and we're not preparing kids for what the jobs that they need to be prepared for. It's a fair question. And first, thank you for entertaining this graph and it's completely not to scale and it's something that I kind of came up with having worked on a federal committee that I just thought it needed to be shared or at least visualized what I call the cello diagram. Where, you know, we do have a population that top half of the cello where there's a good part population that is getting educated, but in some instances you look at the people in category B they're getting educated in ways that aren't transferable directly to the labor market and they potentially could be graduating with a significant amount of debt and then wondering how did I get here. And in addition, what I think you're pointing to is C is that when the department looks and has conversations with employers we look at our apprenticeship program which has guaranteed employment at the end of this program we say we can't fill them fast enough those apprenticeship spots and how is it that people are graduating from high school and then say I don't know what I'm gonna do and then they kind of end their long. And so I think there's been a big passion of mine and the departments to focus on career awareness and getting out in the communities to talk to young people in any place that will invite us so we've tried to do a grassroots approach because we are so small. But I think the point I look at is E as it relates to this graph is that the individuals are unemployable at this point they have low skills. The you know, and this goes I think to your point about education is that high school people without a high school graduate the employment outcomes the labor force outcomes are just really poor. You know, like something in the order of 30% are even potentially in the labor force so you're losing a big part of them. So if you don't graduate high school there's little chance that you're gonna be going on into employment. But you know, I've had this discussion because I am married to an educator and so I can't, you know I've heard we've had this discussion about what's education role, what's labor's role and how do they come together and it's a philosophical. Do you see the Department of Labor and the Agency of Education having conversations or are we still silent in the state? Because of WIOA, the workforce and the Investment Opportunity Act our federal partners have said you guys are gonna work together whether you like it or not and so there's actually been an incredible amount of partnership over the last few years talking to, we work very closely with the career technical education, individual CTEs but you know, public education as they're playful, just speaking from my voice perspective they have their playful trying to figure out how they're gonna handle things. If they have CTEs coming in we're understanding they're underutilized and the kids don't access them and so we'll hear from that as well. I just am really concerned that we have this old model of education that isn't keeping that it's way up-paced and you know, even though we have these types of training programs or some things that are underutilized you know, it's almost like we need to, well. You need to be careful. I mean, as Peter has a question and then Maureen and... So this is, I definitely wanna dovetail on this because I was talking to Maureen yesterday about this in that as Kitty has said we have an old model of education that requires an individual to obtain 26 credits to be able to graduate high school but you cannot put credits that you obtain in CTE into those 26 credits and so are we disincentivizing individuals to maybe go into CTE and get some things that would really help them by doing that and you're not gonna be able to answer that, that's okay but what I wanna know is what do you mean by skill when it comes to the chart that you've got up there and what do you mean by education when it comes to the chart that you have up there because that would help to inform the conversation that I wanna have about CTE and schools still essentially 100 years ago they're getting what they, you know, it's new courses but it's the same thing. You gotta have X number of credits to graduate. Yeah, I think when I talk about skill and I will just point out quickly that skill is highly correlated with wage so you could almost look at this as a wage scale as well and that's why the red pyramid being the labor demand the one thing you're not gonna change about a capitalist economy is there's gonna be one person at the top they're gonna have a close net of upper management and you have middle management and your professionals are probably in the middle but then you have frontline production staff and those frontline production staff are always gonna outnumber the people at the top, right? And so your opportunities to make sure that individuals are skilled and able to work in the positions that are in demand. I think when I talk about skill it can be anything from formal education to informal education, you grew up on a farm I bet you have a ton of skills you might be able to stick well to who knows and it's those type of skills it doesn't have to be demonstrated in any form of official capacity but you have to be able to demonstrate it in a way to an employer. So when I talk to parents of young people who are very skilled in say graphic design and they're talking about which college should I go to it was like for graphic design you might not even be thinking college because what you're thinking about is a portfolio approach you have to demonstrate you have the skills and therefore putting out a portfolio but if your skills are not suitable for developing a portfolio how do you go about that through certification through career technical education through other signaling effects like high school or adult technical education as well. So there's gotta be a way that you can demonstrate it and so when I talk to young people I talk about articulating their skills it's actually in some ways the deficiency might not be that the people graduating don't have the skills and demands they can convince someone else they have it because they don't have the ability to articulate that I can show up on time I can work well with others and that's gonna be the message I bring to betting tonight on Monday it's gonna be the message I bring to pastel tonight Saturday what are your skills and be able to say them clearly. Okay so then as a follow-up we talk about education and sending everybody to college may not be the best option for what our economy needs now or certainly into the future. I'd like you to comment on that but also and I'm trying to figure out how to just say this question. Individuals who graduate from college with degrees that we've heard about are seemingly not useful. Are they considered educated or how are we looking at them? Though in this graph they're represented by B their people outside they have skills a high level of skills but they're outside the demand of what the workforce is looking for or the labor force is looking for so potentially a PhD in philosophy if you're not a professional philosopher or an instructor of philosophy at the collegiate level maybe a PhD in philosophy is not gonna translate into marketable skills. Yeah and you know the Department of Labor believes that post-secondary education is very important but post-secondary education is a broad swath that would include apprenticeships that would include a technical education that would include on the job trainings it would not necessarily be a four-year degree it couldn't be a two-year degree. So final question comment is there a better term than education as it pertains to post-secondary education because everyone you say post-secondary education everyone thinks college. Yeah when we placed our bat a couple of years ago on this we just said we're gonna start making sure when we say post-secondary education we explain use the caveat we're not talking about four-year degrees we're talking about the spectrum of post-secondary education you're right maybe a better term would be a way to help in that conversation. Maureen. Well my political science degree got me here. How about? There you go. I'm using it. I'm making a big bucks. You're making a big bucks right? But there's in terms of education and labor there is now and most many of us our teachers are been on school board there is no system with more inertia than the education system. You to make a change in curriculum to make a change. At the bottom. I mean it is impossible. We live in a state with 630,000 people we can't even have a statewide schedule. We can't even get our kids off school at the same time. It's called local control. Yeah well but I'm saying it's an ursha it's a kiddie's point it hasn't changed in 200 years. We're still married to the schedule that people have to go home and work on the farms in any way out of it. To get education to change is a bigger challenge I think than expanding on labor and what definitions of higher education is. And I look at some of the private schools like a Champlain College. They turn on a dime when they know that there's a demand in the area for certain school. They get a curriculum and they get people in there and they turn out these these people. But the public school system is just it's just you can't move it. So I think it needs to have some more of these external factors with labor and that sort of thing. I think that's my you know that's my sermon today. Did Diane. So sort of on so here's where I come at this it's really good that we can match up to make sure that children who are getting that are going through our system have the skills that when they step out the door that they can get the job that they're looking for that they plan for. But one of the things that I worry about is our children are not widgets. They are not something that we're trying to mass produce out the door to fit a corporate driven industry that we're trying to form fit them. I worry about the artist who's not being developed because we need scientists or STEM which is good if you like STEM. And so here's the right question on that or what brought me to this is that historically and I know you do a lot of work and you're so good at your job. Thank you. But I don't know if this is your but historically like I think 50 years ago 30 years, 50 years ago even you know my father's generation too. The GI Bill of Rights changed the face of this country with education for when after World War II and it allowed industry to grow as strong as it did because they could come home, they got to work, they got jobs where you could buy a house and have a family and send their kids to school. And I think we're almost back to there again. But there was a significant population that did not graduate that it wasn't it wasn't where they were at you know that didn't finish high school but still were able to make a living. I don't know if we have data as the percentage of this one as the percentage of the group of people not finishing high school or going into school changed over time. Is it historically been 30% this isn't where you go but they could find a niche in the world because they could work in a farm, they could work in a factory but those jobs aren't there anymore. So now that same percentage is really stuck. So that would be my question is like has it changed or is it just because the skills that it takes to live in this world have changed and now people who don't fit that mold are struggling? Yeah, I think that's a long question. That's your first question. Educational attainment has improved. And so more people are graduating high school than before. So it is a smaller share. I don't even know the number off the top of my head. There was a small population of people in Vermont that not graduated high school as I said their employment outcomes are very, very low. If you wanted to see that data I could certainly provide it. But before there were opportunities to move from one area into, you didn't graduate high school. Sometimes it was out of economic necessity to help the family because you were leaving high school because you knew there was employment and you would go seek that employment. But as you mentioned there, manufacturing for example is, it has changed so that it's a different skill set they're looking for, right? And so it's not just someone who can show up on time, standard attention at this particular part of the production line. That person might be able to have to troubleshoot, have to be able to read complicated, yeah, critical thinking, be able to understand complicated decimals and understand very, very precise machinery. Maybe to your point, this is a conversation I've had with Georgetown University who puts out a ton of material about the importance of post-secondary education. Typically they're talking about college and they talk about how the skills of the future and how the Bureau of Labor Statistics has it all wrong and that this pyramid is all wrong basically and that we need 70% of the people need to have post-secondary education, not one third, which is what the Bureau of Labor Statistics says and I've had conversations with them about that. I said, well, what is it about? I said, if you wanted to be an auto mechanic, is it that 12 years isn't enough that you need 16 years of school or is it that within those 12 years you need to change what you're looking at and how you're learning and it's not the duration of education that's important. It's the content of the education that's important and so Georgetown didn't have an answer for me on that because the truth is somewhere in the middle. Bureau of Labor Statistics clearly states this is a minimum entry requirement that one third of all jobs need something of post-secondary education and most just need high school education and Georgetown looks at educational taming and captures the top of the challenge as it must be necessary. So this is why I'm so strong on the after school experience that your core education piece, your reading, writing, arithmetic, but that after school, experiencing, exploring, welding, knitting, cooking that allows students to be able to have a feel or a flavor for something that they can now start to focus in within that 12 years that they're within that system. So before you leave in 10 minutes, I want to make sure we go back to the reason that we have you here. Okay. Because we like this. I wanted, we are discussing the minimum wage and you brought in some economic indicators and so if you could provide us with just a quick summary of what the, there's a bill out there that would increase the minimum wage, the $15 an hour over us by 2020 or 2024. If you could weigh in on the factors that we should consider but I do have a statement because I can't hold it back. My statement then Bob and Mary had a question after you bring us back on track. I'm just wondering after I sit and listen to this conversation, sometimes when you pick colleges, I keep thinking of North Eastern and Boston, they do that five year program and they hammer, 98% of our kids have jobs or X% go on for their master's degrees. I wonder if we should do that with our high schools. What percent are going on to higher education? What percent are going on to training for electrician plumbing? I mean, those are real professions. And to get an idea, are we keeping pace with what the labor needs are? All we measure is our high school graduation rate. And is our graduation rate giving us the information we need to make important decisions to have kids ready for the labor market? And I would be curious if we measured it like colleges do to entice kids to come. If you come here, you have a 98% chance of having a job while I'm thinking, well two out of a hundred, I might have a job, I might as well go. I know that's simplifying it and I'm getting a glare from Mary. But I just wonder if we're measuring the right things that give us the information to move forward. But can you please go back to our minimum wage? Sure. And then, so I'll just start here and then we'll kind of pivot. So again, I'm not politically appointed. I don't have a political opinion. And what I'm just trying to, I was assigned to represent the Department of Labor on the summer study committee for the minimum wage. Unfortunately, I didn't have an opportunity to participate because they had such a full schedule. But I was witness to the conversation. As a result of witnessing the conversation, seeing the work that the committee did. My questions, they did a lot of great work but I think there was one question that was not asked. So again, I'm just here to provide information and help you make a decision. There seemed to be a tremendous amount of focus about what will happen. If we do this, what will happen? And my question was we've raised the minimum wage four times in the last four years, what has happened? And this led me down the hole of realizing that part-time employment has increased for economic reasons, means people want more work. That private employers are decreasing the number of hours worked. And we've already talked about that. It caused me to look at this diagram differently because of this diagram, if we accept it for what it is that the red is labor supply or labor demand and the beige is labor supply, the minimum wage represents this bottom line. And what we're doing is raising it. And so from the Department of Labor standpoint, because our focus is both on employers and employees, anyone who wants to come in the door and receive assistance from the Department of Labor, Department of Labor's concern is that population E. People who aren't even employed at $10.50 an hour, how are they going to be employed at $15 an hour? So our concern, or my concern as an economist is like, this is one, there's the spirit behind I think the move in the minimum wage is clear and everyone would agree, we'd love to see better outcomes for all of our monitors. The challenges associated with that is that the poverty statistics, as we've seen, have not looked positive in the last year. They've gone up. When the minimum wage increased, the poverty statistics went up. When we look at wage inequality across the country, there doesn't seem to be any correlation with minimum wage. The statistic that Art Wolfe has quoted on VPR is saying is that 50% of people who live under the federal poverty limit don't have any income at all, like no wage income. So changing the minimum wage would not help 50% of the people living in poverty. So this could be a strategy to help individuals who have employment and the companies that will be best adapt to handle a change in minimum wage, which typically be larger employers. But there's got to be a strategy to assist the others, because that population is going to increase, because it's going to improve, or it's going to increase the return on investment associated with things like technology. It's going to change the business dynamics. And so that's the short kind of. And the other thing I would just say is that I've been an economist for 13 years, and one of the things that's most studied and the fewest amount of conclusions is minimum wage, about what it does and who it helps and who it doesn't help. And so in 13 years, for example, traditional economic theory would say, if minimum wage is going up, labor force participation rate would go up. And that's not what we've seen. We haven't seen labor force participation go up. We haven't seen any young people go up. If best, it's flat. At worst, it's going down. So there's some indications to me saying I don't have a clear understanding of what minimum wage does relative to the economy, once all the intended and unintended consequences triple through. So again, the concern is annual income in my book, not hourly income. So we've got to figure out, are people, what has happened? Has the benefits been realized? Have there been savings to the state government for state services? Have there been an increase in annual wages? And these are some of the questions that just haven't been explored or answered. Mary, Matt, Kathy, and Bob, you had a question too, right? So maybe we're running somewhere or something. So it's Mary, Bob, Matt, Kathy. Yesterday, we were talking about the inability to understand the consequence of minimum wage increases in the past. And is it, are we unable, or have we just not studied enough to see what has happened in the past? I think both. At least in this last go around, we haven't asked what has happened in these last four or five years. We haven't asked. We haven't asked. And so no one's looked at it. What are the things that we ought to be looking at there? Well, those things I mentioned, labor force participation rate, annual earnings. But as I said, unfortunately, with the reduction in hours, that puts a hamper on the end. It's not an unknowable question. It would just have looked at it. It's something that is tough, because we can't figure out who the minimum wage earners are and what their household circumstances are. Such to determine, are these individuals better off? That's why we look at people who are working part-time for economic reasons as opposed to part-time for non-economic reasons, which is kind of a very dirty way of trying to determine part-time by choice and part-time by not choice. Bob? Yeah, mine's just a brief one. You said earlier that you're going to Castleton on Saturday. What are you doing there? Yeah, V-SAC has been putting on seminars for students. They've done three. So I've done St. Mike's and Johnson. And what they're doing is inviting any students or parents in the neighborhood to come and learn. And they put together workshops. And one of the strain of workshops is related to employment and career awareness. Some of them are related to social life in college, how to pay for college, other things like that. So I'll be there talking about career awareness. Do you run this thing kind of thing past them? No. We will keep it high end. We'll talk about skills. We'll talk about careers. We'll talk about how education translates, how education translates into skill, skill translates into wages. Thank you. Matt and then Kathy, and then we need to go back. Just to clarify. Oh, we're almost matching. I just a little, yeah. It's been very, very, very long. Whoa. Same here. Mine's gray. I said warm up. I'm just confused by the statement you made in the beginning to sort of frame everything. So you said you're not a political appointee. And typically when we have the political appointees in, they have to sort of walk the administration line, which we know is not positive on this particular legislation. So were you saying that just to let us know that what you're telling us is your opinion separate from the administration and not influenced by the direction that the administration and the Department of Labor as a whole has gone with this? This is your opinion as an economist. Was that why you made that statement? Yeah, thank you for clarifying. You're correct that if the administration has an opinion, they would share it with you directly. Hopefully I have shared no opinions with you. That's my goal. If you've heard an opinion, then please allow me an opportunity to clarify. What I'm just saying is that I've heard the conversation. So typically in a conversation about public policy, I would come in and say, on one hand, you have this. And on the other hand, you have this. By having been witness to the conversation of minimum wage, hearing things that haven't been discussed. So if you want to talk about what has been done or the reports or people's opinions about what they will have, they can fill in all the gaps. This is the conversation I haven't heard anyone ask. Has anyone looked at labor force participation rates? Has anyone looked at hours work? Has anyone looked at annual earnings? I didn't mean to imply that I heard an opinion from you. It was more, I think, when we're hearing things from the administration or from this group or that group, they sort of get put in a box of, well, this group is a forward and this group is against it. And just putting it into the perspective of where you're coming from with it and sort of a neutral opinion giving information is helpful. Yeah. And you talked with Mary a little bit about the lack of information regarding the minimum wage. Has there been any data that's substantial enough that you've been able to look at from places that have raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour to give any indication of what that has meant in those areas? Or is that just an area that's not enough information out there yet? When I look at the body of research, and I'm not a minimum wage expert, but I've looked at enough of it, people who do the research typically fall in a couple of camps. And normally they're either advocates saying we're either for or against this. And I would say it's probably like 80, 20 on people for minimum wage versus against minimum wage who are doing studies. And then you have a smaller group of people who are trying to do independent research. But like so the Washington studies, there's a couple of big ones I know people talk about. The only one I put really stock in is the one that was conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research. And they came up with inconclusive at best, or potentially harmful because of decreased hours. OK. Thank you. Kathy, and then the audience. I didn't really have a question, but I had a statement. You know, I've been giving minds to you. Yeah. And I love having Matt come in, because I think he tells it like it is. But I've been in this building long enough so that I know that they're, depending on the makeup of the committee, and it usually is made up with a self-fulfilling prophecy. And probably I'll get dirt thrown at you. No more than I did. Matt, thank you very much for coming in. It was interesting and helpful and I really enjoyed having you.