Herbert: Despair of the Jobless

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Date: Thu, 07 Aug 2003 00:01:01 -0400 (EDT)
> From: "John F. McMullen" <observer () westnet com>
> Subject: [johnmacsgroup] Herbert: Despair of the Jobless
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> >From the New York Times --
> http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/07/opinion/07HERB.html
>
> Despair of the Jobless
> By BOB HERBERT
>
> The folks who put the voodoo back in economics keep telling us that
> prosperity is just around the corner. For the unemployed, that would mean
> more jobs. Are there more jobs just around the corner?
>
> This alleged economic upturn is not just a jobless recovery, it's a job
> loss recovery. The hemorrhaging of jobs in the aftermath of the recent
> "mild" recession is like nothing the U.S. has seen in more than half a
> century. Millions continue to look desperately for work, and millions more
> have given up in despair.
>
> The stories have been rolling in for some time about the stresses and
> misfortunes that are inevitably associated with long-term joblessness: the
> bankruptcies, foreclosures and evictions, the dreams deferred, the mental
> difficulties  anxiety, depression  the excessive drinking and abuse of
> drugs, the family violence. There are few things more miserable than to
> need a job and be unable to find one.
>
> How bad is it? The Economic Policy Institute in Washington reported last
> week that "since the business cycle expansion began in November 2001,
> payrolls have contracted by 1 million (1.2 million in the private sector),
> making this the weakest recovery in terms of employment since the [Bureau
> of Labor Statistics] began tracking monthly data in 1939."
>
> John A. Challenger, who runs the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray &
> Christmas, said it is taking an average of 20 weeks for job seekers to
> find employment, and many are unable to match their previous salary.
> "Employers have all the cards," he said. "Not only are they sharpening
> their salary pencils, but the screening of candidates is probably the
> toughest it has ever been."
>
> The official jobless rate, now 6.2 percent, does not come close to
> reflecting how grim the employment situation really is. The official rate
> refers only to those actively seeking work. It does not count the
> "discouraged" workers, who have looked for jobs within the last 12 months
> but have given up because of the lack of offers. Then there are the
> involuntary part-timers, who would like full-time jobs but cannot find
> them. And there are people who have had to settle for jobs that pay
> significantly less than jobs they once held.
>
> When you combine the unemployed and the underemployed, you are talking
> about a percentage of the work force that is in double digits. That's an
> awful lot of lost purchasing power for a society that needs broad-based
> wage growth among its consumers to remain economically viable. Most
> Americans depend on their paychecks to get from one week to the next. If
> you cut off that paycheck, everything tends to go haywire.
>
> Right now there is no plan, no strategy for turning this employment crisis
> around. There is not even a sense of urgency. At the end of July the Bush
> administration sent its secretaries of commerce, labor and treasury on a
> bus tour of Wisconsin and Minnesota to tell workers that better days are
> coming. But they offered no real remedies, and the president himself went
> on a monthlong vacation.
>
> The simple truth is that the interests of the Bush administration's
> primary constituency, corporate America, do not coincide with the
> fundamental interests of workaday Americans. On the business side of this
> divide, increased profits are realized by showing the door to as many
> workers as possible, and squeezing the remainder to the bursting point.
> Productivity (based primarily on improvements in technology) is way up.
> Hiring, of course, is down. Part-time and temporary workers are in;
> full-time workers with benefits are out.
>
> And then there's the ominous trend of sending higher-skilled jobs overseas
> to low-wage places like India and China, an upscale reprise of the
> sweatshop phenomenon that erased so many U.S. manufacturing jobs over the
> past quarter century.
>
> Working Americans need jobs just to survive. But the Bush administration
> equates the national interest with corporate interests, and in that
> equation workers can only lose.
>
> There are ways to spark the creation of good jobs on a large scale in the
> U.S. (I will explore some of them in a future column.) But that would
> require vision, a long-term financial investment and, most important, a
> commitment at the federal level to the idea that it is truly in the
> nation's interest to keep as many Americans as possible gainfully
> employed.
>
> Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company
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>
>    "When you come to the fork in the road, take it" - L.P. Berra
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>                           John F. McMullen
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