Today’s papers tout that April’s job losses aren’t quite as bad as feared. One possible exception to that would be if you’re the one affected.
U.S. employers cut only 20,000 jobs in April - some economists had predicted four times that number. That gap’s not surprising considering all the announced corporate layoffs, particularly in the automotive and financial sectors, but some of these won’t go into effect immediately.
April marked the fourth consecutive monthly decline, according to the NY Times. The unemployment rate dropped from 5.1% to 5%, not a big drop, but given that under 5% is a proxy for healthy national employment, these numbers matter in an election year.
Just recently, AT&T said it would layoff 3,550 workers; United Airlines said it would release 1,100 by year’s end; and Citigroup would trim another 7,000 jobs. Even the tech sector expects further cuts with announcements by Yahoo and AMD among others.
When economists look under the hood they find that Americans are working longer hours for less pay and salaries aren’t keeping up with inflation.
Are conditions ripe for a third Bush term? Just kidding, there’s a rule banning third terms, but none preventing candidates from continuing the policies of a sitting president. I want to hear from those of you who feel we’re headed in the right direction and why. And from those of you don’t.
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“When economists look under the hood they find that Americans are working longer hours for less pay and salaries aren’t keeping up with inflation.”
This is really at the core of the economic malaise and middle class squeeze most of us are experiencing despite the government statistics wrangling.
Let’s also consider the following realities:
1) People living from paycheck to paycheck.
2) Alarming rates of home foreclosures.
3) People using their home equity as a piggy bank (See #2)
4) Manufacturing and industrial jobs disappearing and not being replaced
fast enough with…something.
5) Millions of unemployed people who aren’t officially counted as unemployed when their unemployement benefits run out…Where did they go?
6) Formerly unemployed college graduates and executives re-entering the workforce as burger flippers and retail clerks…Look folks, we’re creating new jobs!
7) Teenagers competing with their parents for summer jobs
8) Stock prices being the be all and end all of business performance.
How fast can we make a 180?
Great points, Michael.
The problem with unemployment statistics are that they do not measure UNDER employment as you alluded to.
What else is not measure in the current unemployment stats. How about 7,500 employees at IBM receiving a 15% wage cut around one month ago, or the 75,000 UAW workers at Ford, GM, and Chrysler being asked to take a buyout offer. Let me ask you, are buyout’s offers included in unemployment stats…what do you think?
The buyout offers are not because there is no work. They are being used to churn the workforce to bring in lower paid drones. These positions will go from on average of $50~60K a year to about $17.00/hr or $32K a year.
Wage cuts are happening across the board everything from high tech, to manufacturing to the clerks at Ciruit City.
To measure unemployment numbers like they do, and then point to them as an indicator that everyone is really living the good life is nothing more than a diversion from reality.
Nothing more than a ploy to make you feel as though.. gee, everyone else is doing okay, I guess I just have to work a little harder that’s all …
IF you want a better measure of how people in general and this economy is doing take a look at the food stamp caseloads for example. They have gone from around 17 million people in 2000 and are now pushing 28 million.
Kind-a tells you what kind of jobs America is creating doesn’t it?
What I find particular disturbing is the replacement of our manufacturing jobs with “debt industry ” jobs. You know the ones that deal with virtual numbers on a spread sheet, or in a computer.
The debt jobs, they do not contribute anything of lasting value to the future generations of our society. It’s all busy work, shifting number into different columns on a spreadsheet.
There is no mining, farming, science discoveries, no real effort needed to creat a “debt” type job.
You create debt jobs by issuing credit, or by having someone sign a loan agreement. Then you take that worthless piece of paper with the signature on it and you flip it. You bundle it up with a bunch of other papers and sell them as investments
I find it amazing that we can take a piece of paper with words type on it that costs maybe a fraction of a cent in raw materials, add a signature on it and it then becomes worth thousands, or millions of dollars..
Yeah I know, I know, these positions do the financing of what I call real business. However I’m talking about the physical activities of these debt jobs themselves..
Maybe it’s just me..it seems like we are doing less and less in the area of real meaningful work and more in this finical y debt work and I don’t see it as a good thing.
The debt industry is a $2 trillion dollar business now, Pay day loan stores, credit cards, mortgage loans, credit counselors, bankruptcy lawyers, Auctions rate securities, and municipal bonds..etc..
Wouldn’t we be much better off if we just stopped counting things and tacking to make sure that person “A” doesn’t have more than person “B” and had these people working as engineers or scientist making discoveries..or even farmers planting crops or miners mining raw materials. You know creating raw, hard assets
Oh well, I better quit while I’m ahead. I intended to leave a brief comment and got carried away sry.
Let me just sum it up to say that to me, if you have a job in the debt industry, it’s like having a job in the virtual world game called Second Life. Doesn’t require any raw materials to get started, it will keep you busy for hours on end but at the end of the day whayt can you point to and say I did this and it will my future generations a better place to live..I just don’t sse it.
Ynx for reading