Just nine months behind BTP, the Economist has discovered the productivity slowdown, dating the middle of 2004 as a turning point. While most of the story seems right, I will correct their claims about employment in residential housing construction. This is a sector that relies heavily on undocumented workers. The article suggests that firms are reluctant to lay people off and therefore are "hoarding" workers in the face of the housing downturn. That is behavior that you would expect to see in a heavily unionized sector. It is more likely that many of the undocumented workers never showed up on the payrolls during the upturn, so there is no job loss recorded when they stop being employed during the downturn.
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