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Groton Daily Independent
Saturday, June 09, 2018 ~ Vol. 25 - No. 330 ~ 55 of 59
abide by all reporting laws.
The resolution’s author, Midwestern Seminary president Jason Allen, bristled at the notion that wives
should endure abuse to save their marriages.
“We can work against our matrimony-shattering ‘no-fault’ divorce culture and shore up marriages,” he
wrote. “But this needed work never means asking women to suffer abuse.”
The draft resolution received a mixed review from Ashley Easter, a writer and speaker from Raleigh,
North Carolina, who is an advocate for victims of abuse and an organizer of Tuesday’s planned protest rally. She and the others want the SBC to create a database of clergy sex offenders and require all pastors
and seminarians to undergo training on how to address domestic abuse and sexual assault.
Easter said she wishes the SBC would change its doctrine about gender roles but doubts that is imminent. “When you have a patriarchal theology, with one person in power and control of the other, some will
use that theology to abuse,” she said. “It’s unsafe for women not to be in an equal place.”
A rally organizer, Texas-based author and speaker Mary DeMuth, commended the draft resolution but expressed dismay that women were given minimal speaking time at the two-day SBC meeting. She said she wishes for an SBC in which women “are no longer dismissed, stereotyped or relegated to subcommittees.” At least one of the scheduled speakers at the rally is a man. Wade Burleson, an author and lead pastor of Emmanuel Enid church in Enid, Oklahoma, is critical of the way many of his fellow ministers restrict
women’s roles in the church.
“I believe they are misinterpreting the Scriptures big time,” he tweeted recently. “I also believe change
is coming soon in the SBC to reflect a more biblical approach toward women. The Southern Baptist Con- vention may even have a female President sooner rather than later.”
How big is gig economy? Gov’t study shows how little we know By CHRISTOPHER RUGABER, AP Economics Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) — Look around, and it seems more Americans are working outside traditional full- time jobs — whether as freelance graphic designers or independent contractors or Uber drivers.
Or maybe not. A government report this week suggested that the proportion of such jobs hasn’t budged in the past decade. Yet the data carries limitations that indicate there’s still plenty we don’t know about the evolving U.S. job market.
The Labor Department’s report concluded that more than 15 million Americans were working as in- dependent contractors, on-call workers, temporary workers and for contract companies as of May 2017. That’s equal to about 10.1 percent of the American workforce, down slightly from 10.8 percent when the government last conducted the survey, in 2005.
That conclusion contradicts a body of academic research that has found a significant increase in what economists call “alternative work arrangements.” Two leading economists, Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger, found in a 2016 study that the number of people in alternative work had risen by more than 50 percent in 2015 from a decade earlier, to 23.6 million.
And the Federal Reserve released a report last month that said nearly one-third of Americans rely on side jobs or so-called “gig” work to supplement their incomes.
So what might explain the disparities between the government’s report and other research?
Here are areas where economists agree with the report’s conclusions, where they found it lacking and why it all matters:
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GIG ECONOMY HYPE IS OVERDONE
You may be able to grab an Uber in every big city. But that doesn’t mean the nation as a whole is
engulfed by people finding work through mobile apps. The government’s report appears to put the “gig economy” in proper perspective: Such jobs hardly seem to represent the future of work in America. Katz and Kruger’s study found that just 0.5 percent of workers engaged in online gig work in 2015. The growth they found had occurred mostly among independent contractors and workers for companies that provide