"It's been a very, very serious and critical situation, " said John David, a West Virginia University Institute of Technology professor and volunteer with the South Appalachian Labor School who has been working in Fayette County.
Today, less than 10% of the native-born men in the labor force are high school dropouts.
In 1960, half of the native-born men in the labor force were high school dropouts happy to do physically demanding, low-skilled work.
"This is an industry where if you get your costs out of line and business is not so good, you're dead, " says Sam Peltzman, an economics professor at the University of Chicago business school who studies labor and the airline industry.
Mr. HARRY KATZ (Dean of the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University): What happens in the long run to Delphi and GM and the UAW is still very much up in the air.
One major concern is that crowdsourced labor risks creating what Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain has called "digital sweatshops, " where workers who may be underage work long hours on mind-numbing tasks for very little money -- or, if the work is structured as a game, for no money at all.
The prospect of a higher wage encourages people to drop out of school and participate in the labor market (where they might crowd out those who are even less productive).
"This is an industry where if you get your costs out of line and business is not so good, you're dead, " says Sam Peltzman, a University of Chicago business school economics professor who studies labor and the airline industry.
And Bernard Anderson is professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and former assistant secretary of Labor under the Clinton administration.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate for high school grads age 20 to 24 with no college under their belts was 17.9% in 2012, compared to 7.7% for those with college degrees.
He organized the extra throwing sessions Coughlin would have (if a labor agreement had allowed) at Hoboken High School and on Duke's campus and he left no hands empty, even eventual practice squad player Danny DePalma's, who "became" Wes Welker these last two weeks.
On March 7, the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, students, parents, labor allies and community leaders will rally at the School District of Philadelphia to protest planned cuts to teacher contracts in the City.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 68.3% of 2011 high school graduates headed off to college last fall.
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And look, I think in terms of school supplies and stuff -- look, I remember when I was in school in Alabama, we went the Tuesday after Labor Day.
Strong labor markets can also push people out of the labor market when they consider alternatives to working, specifically staying in school.
Marc Edelman is an Associate Professor of Law at Barry University School of Law, where he writes regularly on sports labor and antitrust issues.
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Last month, the school's directors agreed to work on a child-labor radio project with the International Labor Organization.
In the 1970s the International Labor Organization popularized a view of the informal economy known as the dualist school of thought.
Betsey Stevenson, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and former chief economist at the U.S. Labor Department, said that for some women, greater career ambition means less free time and a decline in overall happiness.
In fact, the largest portion of jobs in our labor market (nearly half) require some kind of technical training beyond a high school diploma, and these "middle-skill" jobs are experiencing the greatest shortages of skilled workers.
New GOP presidential front-runner Newt Gingrich has gotten into some hot water lately over his comment that child labor laws should be amended or even repealed to allow kids to earn money in school by cleaning bathrooms or working in the cafeteria.
"I'm blown away by the labor it must have involved, " he said, noting that it was probably a school project.
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D. from the Columbus School of Law at Catholic University of America, and an LL.M. in Labor Law from the Georgetown University Law Center.
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He's a former assistant secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton and now a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.
Getgen, who works with students at Cornell Law School, said strained legal aid organizations and nonprofits will want to take in the "free" labor.
In 2004, her organization -- the People Improvement Organization (PIO) -- opened a school at Phnom Penh's largest municipal trash dump, where children are a large source of labor.
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