Job One
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One of the bedrocks of being alive and being anywhere near ‘successful,’ is having a job — working a wage.
And although job openings in the U.S. rose in March to the highest level in more than three years, Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President Jeffrey Lacker noted yesterday unemployment remains at “a very elevated rate“ and the whole process will take time — a long time.
Numbers involving employment can be way-deceiving, creating a picture that’s more Pablo Picasso than Norman Rockwell.
(Illustration found here).
Arithmetic is nowhere near my strong suit.
Bloomberg explains:
The Labor Department reported that as of April, 58.4 percent of the U.S. population was gainfully employed.
That’s down from 58.6 percent in February, and exactly where the employment-to-population ratio stood a year ago.
The decline reflects the fact that job gains aren’t keeping up with population growth.
It also demonstrates the illusory nature of April’s reduction in the unemployment rate, to 8.1 percent from 8.2 percent in March.
The Labor Department, in its monthly household survey, counts people as unemployed only if they’re in the labor force, meaning they’re actively looking for work.
In April, the estimated number of people in the labor force fell by 342,000.
So the unemployment rate fell, too, even though the survey counted 169,000 fewer people with jobs.
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, there’s about 12.5 million US peoples unemployed right now with about 5.1 million of those on what’s called ‘long-term unemployment’ (27 weeks or more) and those guys are the in the pits.
Despite all that, US employers added 3.74 million job openings in March, the highest in nearly four years, to create a sense of a kind of sunshine: That means an average of 3.4 people competed for each open job. While that’s far better than the nearly 7-to-1 ratio when the recession ended. In a healthy job market, the ratio is usually around 2 to 1.
Jobs are still hard to come by and customers at the liquor store I manage are always waxing sad about finding a job — the unemployment rate up here in northern California is way above the average at about 11.3 percent, pretty heady.
Along with the precarious job market, there’s the assholes working to strip what’s left off the bones.
In the defeat yesterday of Indiana’s Dick Lugar to a Tea Party nit-twit is just another sampling of what’s in store for the job market.
GOP peoples blame the jobless for being without a job.
One asshole Tea-Bagger is Maine’s Governor, Paul LePage, who blubbered that to get these shiftless people off their asses is to gut unemployment benefits.
(Via Think Progress):
There is such thing as a free lunch, but you’re picking up the tab.
Maine’s welfare program is cannibalizing the rest of state government.
I am compassionate and committed to our children, our elderly, and our disabled.
But to all you able-bodied people out there, get off the couch and get yourself a job.
What a liar — compassionate?
Paul Krugman in his new book — “End This Depression Now!” — discusses the job market and how being employed is part and parcel of the so-called American Dream.
In an excerpt found at HuffPost, Krugman talks about working and how the GOP/Tea Party looks at the jobless, as in ‘involuntary unemployment’ and how to gaze back at them:
The classic answer to such people comes from a passage near the beginning of the novel The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (best known for the 1948 film adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston): “Anyone who is willing to work and is serious about it will certainly find a job. Only you must not go to the man who tells you this, for he has no job to offer and doesn’t know anyone who knows of a vacancy. This is exactly the reason why he gives you such generous advice, out of brotherly love, and to demonstrate how little he knows the world.”
Quite.
Also, about those McDonald’s applications: in April 2011, as it happens, McDonald’s did announce 50,000 new job openings.
Roughly a million people applied.
Later, he offers up this insight between the 1930s and the nowadays:
Nor is America immune.
Can anyone deny that the Republican Party has become far more extreme over the past few years?
And it has a reasonable chance of taking both Congress and the White House later this year, despite its radicalism, because extremism flourishes in an environment in which respectable voices offer no solutions as the population suffers.
Krugman paints a picture worse than we think it is, and although he claims the problems can be lessened with more cash flowing into US peoples pockets, this country is still a Tea Party world, and those with the biggest mouth, whether lying or not, still gets the most attention.
A full-time job just listening to the shit.
Payroll Thursday
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Today is payday for our five employees at my liquor store and putting together the payroll is the main concern this morning — we’re a rarity as we pay weekly, not every couple of weeks like most businesses.
And we’re holding our own in this way-depressed economy, although we’re well off the mark we were prior to the 2008 financial blowout.
We’re unique, too, in that people will drink and smoke all the way to the poorhouse, and once there, will try and figure out how to get a cigarette and a shot of whiskey — hard times cause more smoking and drinking.
(Illustration found here).
Employment in the US seems to have settled into the gloom: Most analysts predict that Friday’s official data for last month will show the economy having spawned a total of just 85,000 net nonfarm jobs, down from 103,000 in September, with private posts falling by 20,000, to 117,000.
Nothing new here.
And no encouraging future news: And on top of that, the Federal Reserve released its newest forecasts which showed it expected the unemployment rate to fall to no better than 8.5 percent by the end of 2012, compared to its June prediction of 7.8 percent.
The unemployment rate has stalled at 9.1 percent, and economic forecasts don’t say it’ll get better — there was 6,000 less jobs added last month over August.
Across the pond, the shit continues to hit the financial fan — Greece is trying to get its act together this morning as Prime Minister George Papandreou appears to be heading toward for defeat in a confidence vote after growing opposition within his own party to a surprise referendum call on the EU bailout plan.
From the BBC:
Early on Thursday, Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos spoke out publicly against the idea of a referendum.
He is a longtime rival to Mr Papandreou and a former Pasok leadership candidate.
…
“If we want to protect the country we must, under conditions of national unity and political seriousness and consensus, implement without any delay the decision of 26 October.
Now, as soon as possible,” Mr Venizelos said.
…
On 26 October, eurozone countries agreed to give Greece a second bailout of 130bn euros (£111bn; $178bn).
Private banks would also write off 50% of the Greek state debts they hold.
In return, Greece must enact austerity measures, cutting wages and salaries, and making thousands of civil servants redundant.
Greece could make world history once again — out of ancient times to nowadays — and bring down the global economy with one fatal slap as apparently the Greek government is on the verge of collapse.
According to Aljazeera English: Costas Panagopoulos, managing director of pollsters ALCO, said: “I don’t think the government will last until tonight.”
Although Greece could suck the world down through the financial drain hole, they’ve had a good run.
This oddity from the UK’s The Telegraph:
Jubilation about the German deal to save the euro could prove short-lived if fresh news of Greek tax evasion gains wider currency.
There are more Porsche Cayennes registered in Greece than taxpayers declaring an income of 50,000 euros (£43,800) or more, according to research by Professor Herakles Polemarchakis, former head of the Greek prime minister’s economic department.
…
Something can’t be right when the modest city of Larisa, capital of the agricultural region of Thessaly with 250,000 inhabitants, has more Porsches per head of the population than New York or London.
Living is easy and all this shit coming down as the hot shot G20 summit is taking place right now in Cannes, France, site of the movie festival.
President Obama is reportedly on his way there.
Just another payday Thursday.
Jobs and Wall Street
Filed Under Bullshit, Economy, Politics, Work | Leave a Comment
(Illustration found here).
Yesterday’s suck hole on Wall Street is most-likely a harbinger of an anxious future.
Scared of all kinds of money-entangled shit, the stock market cratered more than 500 points, the Asian markets following with the European markets this morning still tracking downward.
Oops, we were wrong: “The conventional wisdom on Wall Street was that the economy was growing — that the worst was behind us,” said Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital. “Now what people are realizing is the stimulus didn’t work, and we may be headed back to recession.”
Investors are scared of the numbers.
Especially today’s jobs report: Economists forecast that employers added only 90,000 jobs last month and that the unemployment rate was unchanged at 9.2 percent, according to a survey by FactSet.
Reports also indicate that temp jobs are here to stay as in the next five years, more than half of employers expect to rely more on temporary, part-time and contract workers for a variety of duties, and the long-term unemployed will stay that way.
And the number of people still receiving benefits under regular state programs after an initial week of aid rose 10,000 to 3.73 million in the week ended July 23.
And employers are just freakin’ frightful of hiring: “They were laying off acquaintances and friends. Those cuts were so painful that they were unwilling to rehire out of fear that they would, at some point, just have to lay off again,” Mayland (Ken Mayland, economist with ClearView Economics) said.
Time now to spend hours listening to The Cure, or maybe take heart-words from Edgar Allen Poe and his, “Epigram for Wall street:”
I’ll tell you a plan for gaining wealth,
Better than banking, trade or leases —
Take a bank note and fold it up,
And then you will find your money in creases!
This wonderful plan, without danger or loss,
Keeps your cash in your hands, where nothing can trouble it;
And every time that you fold it across,
‘Tis as plain as the light of the day that you double it!
Poe didn’t cap ‘street’ in the poem’s title — maybe he knew something there.
No capital, no problem.
Jobs in an ‘Acute Talent Shortage’
Filed Under Economy, Finance, Jobs, Politics | Leave a Comment
As John ‘The Boner’ Boehner blubbered last night about not “going mano-a-mano with the President of the United States” after trying to refute President Obama on the debt ceiling shit-storm, the mass of US peoples are hurting for work.
The Boner and his GOP suck buddies haven’t a clue (or if they do, don’t give a shit) how cruel this current financial nightmare is for folks seeking jobs even as everyone knows the cry baby hasn’t anywhere the balls to stand man-to-man with Obama — the US suffers while these assholes play.
One the biggest screw-ups the past three years is the lack of any kind of heavy-duty employment program to work out the kinks on the pipeline for the millions of jobless to regain some kind of work history.
(Illustration found here).
And the employment trouble in real time is horrible.
From CNN on Monday:
Has anyone in Washington noticed that 20 percent of American men are not working?
That’s right.
One out of five men in this country are collecting unemployment, in prison, on disability, operating in the underground economy, or getting by on the paychecks of wives or girlfriends or parents.
The equivalent number in 1970, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, was 7 percent.
…
This is a conversation that goes beyond a stubbornly high 9.2 percent unemployment rate and last week’s unnerving news that company layoffs are ticking up again.
While we all know there is a job shortage, employers are increasingly talking about a “talent shortage” — they can’t find qualified workers even for the jobs that are available.
“We found that 30 percent of companies surveyed had openings for six months or longer, and can’t find the right person,” says Susan Lund, research director for the McKinsey Global Institute
…
The longer a worker is unemployed, the farther he or she falls behind in sellable skills in a fast-paced global economy.
But there is an even more fundamental question behind the rise in long-term employed rates: Are our public policies contributing to the rise of millions of Americans who lose the habit of work?
Whether you believe (as some economists do) that unemployment insurance discourages immediate job searching — or not — it’s worth asking whether the American “unemployment” system should more closely follow a program like Germany’s “re-employment” system, which cut stubborn long-term unemployment rates in that country.
And then there is federal disability insurance, where the percent of American adults collecting checks has doubled since 1989 — even though the American population isn’t any less healthy, or more mentally disabled (the fastest growing disability claim).
“It is difficult to overstate the role that the [disability program] plays in discouraging…the ongoing employment of non-elderly adults,” concludes a study by MIT’s David H. Autor and the University of Maryland’s Mark Duggan.
And like a lot of other shit, the employment situation in the US needs an overhaul.
Or get The Boner out on the street looking for a job, maybe then he can go mano-a-mano with a yard broom.
Krugman at 4 AM — Jobs Limited
Filed Under Finance, Work | Leave a Comment
Trying to find a job in the US is getting to be worse than a bitch.
From Calculated Risk:
For the current employment recession, employment peaked in December 2007, and this recession is by far the worst recession since WWII in percentage terms, and 2nd worst in terms of the unemployment rate (only the early ’80s recession with a peak of 10.8 percent was worse).
The number of workers only able to find part time jobs (or have had their hours cut for economic reasons) declined slightly to 8.972 million in November. This has been around 9 million since August 2009 — a very high level.
…
According to the BLS, there are 6.313 million workers who have been unemployed for more than 26 weeks and still want a job.
This was up from 6.206 million in October. It appears the number of long term unemployed has peaked, however the level is extremely high – and the increases over the last two months is very concerning.
Check the link for some grim graphics on joblessness.
And a college degree don’t make no difference — The jobless rates for Americans who had at least a bachelor’s degree hit 5.1% in November, the highest in 40 years, USA Today reported. In September, the rate was just 4.4%. In total, there were 2.4 million unemployed people with a bachelor degree or higher.
Paul Krugman, in his New York Times piece this morning, says push back on the hard-hearted GOP:
Think about the logic of the situation.
Right now, the Republicans see themselves as successful blackmailers, holding a clear upper hand.
President Obama, they believe, wouldn’t dare preside over a broad tax increase while the economy is depressed.
And they therefore believe that he will give in to their demands.
But while raising taxes when unemployment is high is a bad thing, there are worse things.
And a cold, hard look at the consequences of giving in to the G.O.P. now suggests that saying no, and letting the Bush tax cuts expire on schedule, is the lesser of two evils.
Among many evils, one might say.