Clear, clean and a bit chilly this early Friday on California’s north coast — and really bright, too.
We’re forecast for warmth, but here near-directly on the shoreline, those ocean breezes keep the high degrees on the down low.
If the winds go calm, though, it’s T-shirt weather.

Amongst other shit sure to come via end-of-the-week dump-day, first out of the news hat was the monthly jobs report — the national unemployment rate for September dropped to 5.9 percent, its lowest level in six years.

A dark, backside of the employment situation, though, came from the depressed side of town: ‘Discouraged workers are persons not currently looking for work because they believe no jobs are available for them.’

(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘The Frugal Meal’ found here).

Gloomy, deep-misted despondency and dejection there, even as the US economy added nearly 250,000 new jobs last month. And a good-side to that bad-side is there’s less of these ‘discouraged workers’ — from FiveThirtyEight:

Other measures of joblessness are also falling: Fewer than 700,000 people report that they’ve given up looking for work because none is available, down from more than a million four years ago; the number of long-term unemployed, those out of work more than six months, is now under 3 million for the first time during the recovery; and layoffs recently hit a 10-year low.

And still, the big hole is wages — stagnant for the average worker:

For the first time in the recovery, job losers make up less than half the jobless, meaning most of the unemployed either quit their jobs or are deciding to start (or restart) their job searches. That’s a sign of confidence in the economy.
…
The monthly employment reports give only a limited window into that question — they don’t break down hiring by how much the jobs pay or by job title — but we can get a hint by looking at which industries are adding jobs.
In September, a quarter of job growth came from the typically low-paying retail, restaurant and hotel sectors.
The better-paying manufacturing and construction industries, meanwhile, posted only modest gains.

Hence, the report last week the US has more low-paying jobs than any other country in the developed world: The OECD defines “low-paying” as jobs that earn less than two-thirds of a country’s median income. On average, around 16 percent of jobs in OECD countries are considered low-paying. In the U.S., over 25 percent of all jobs qualify as such.

And we average walking-around people on the street don’t even nearly-grasp the major, major problem in inequality of wealth and income: “The lack of awareness of the gap in CEO to unskilled worker pay — which in the U.S. people estimate to be 30 to 1 but is in fact 350 to 1 — likely reduces citizens’ desire to take action to decrease that gap,” says Norton.

Still no jobs for discouraged workers — maybe they should form a union.