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Photo: Doug Geisler / Flickr
The ADP Report on private sector jobs came out today and showed an increase of 158K jobs. David Dayen at the FDL News Desk discusses this report and the Bureau of Labor Statistics report that will be issued tomorrow morning (Friday, November 2):
Plug this all in and what have you got? The consensus forecast calls for an increase in 125,000 jobs. That would be an increase from last month’s increase of 114,000, but below the increases in July and August (August and September will get revised in the report). This generally matches what we’re seeing in the ancillary reports, and shouldn’t be a number that would arouse joy or sadness in either Presidential campaign. However, with the volatility of last month’s topline unemployment rate, derived from the household survey, I wouldn’t be surprised if you saw it increase from the current level of 7.8%.
Either way, it’s a preliminary report, and we probably shouldn’t put as much weight on it as we will, especially with the political implications headed into the election.
While the weekly report of initial unemployment claims was lower than expected (economists surprised!), even this moderately good news is not all that great.
The reality for many millions of us among the long term un and underemployed is the good jobs just are not there. At the end of August, Catherine Rampell of the NY Times had an article headlined “Majority of New Jobs Pay Low Wages, Study Finds.” As I noted in this post, it was very similar to an earlier post from April ’11 I had written that was based on a Washington Post article. Both the Times article and the Post article were based on reports from the National Employment Law Project.
Sunday in the NY Times, Steven Greenhouse had this article on how employers in retail and hospitality industries use (and abuse) part time workers:
But in two leading industries — retailing and hospitality — the number of part-timers who would prefer to work full-time has jumped to 3.1 million, or two-and-a-half times the 2006 level, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In retailing alone, nearly 30 percent of part-timers want full-time jobs, up from 10.6 percent in 2006. The agency found that in the retail and wholesale sector, which includes hundreds of thousands of small stores that rely heavily on full-time workers, about 3 in 10 employees work part-time….snip…
A 2011 survey of 436 employees at retailers in New York City, as diverse as luxury establishments on Fifth Avenue and dollar stores in the Bronx, found that half of the city’s retail workers were part-time and only one in 10 part-time workers had a set schedule week to week. One-fifth said they always or often had to be available for call-in shifts, according to the survey, which was overseen by researchers at City University of New York.
…snip…
Mr. Flickinger, the retail consultant, said companies benefited from using many part-timers. “It’s almost like sharecropping — if you have a lot of farmers with small plots of land, they work very hard to produce in that limited amount of land,” he said. “Many part-time workers feel a real competition to work hard during their limited hours because they want to impress managers to give them more hours.”
What? Could someone have actually spoken a truth here? The modern day wage slave, complete with sharecropping as the ideal.
While CNN has an article this morning attempting to paint the rosy glasses scenario on how the jobs are not all part time minimum wage, even they have to acknowledge the reality of the lower wage since 24% of the “new” jobs are in hospitality and retail:
It’s true that the economy has added a lot of low-paying jobs over the last two years. Restaurants and bars, which pay a median wage of just $9 an hour, have accounted for 15% of all the jobs created in the recovery. Retailers, which pay a median $11 an hour, make up another 9%.
The Cincinnati Enquirer reported on Monday on the long term un- and underemployed of Ohio:
According to the government, 780,000 Ohioans are underemployed or unemployed, a number that does not include persons working more than 35 hours. The report does not compile local underemployment numbers.
…snip…
More people are working multiple part-time jobs, a practice Pautke cites as the only means of increasing the person’s take-home pay.
And this point goes back to the job scheduling practices noted in the NY Times article above — it is rather difficult for a part time wage slave to work those two or more part time jobs if/when the employers want the “flexibility” to schedule the work shifts the day before.
This is the “new normal” for far too many workers. So somebody please explain to me where all those jobs are from the “job creators?” Businesses in multiple industries are posting record profits (here, here, here, here, here, here) yet there are still millions of people in long term un and underemployment, people wanting to work, people with skills asking only for an opportunity to earn a decent wage with fair benefits.
And because I can:
Cross posted from Just A Small Town Country Boy by Richard Taylor
24 Comments
Great diary.
This is the situation one of my kids faced: got a part time gig, with the employer constantly promising it would go to full time. [Never did; 13 months of waiting.]
When kid requested some sort of “schedule” at Job #1 to be able to look for a second job [Job #1 was not sufficient to live on], employer insisted on kid’s “flexibility” and made it impossible to secure that second job.
Thankfully, a “real” job finally materialized. We are all relieved.
“long term un and under employed”…..there’s got to be a tiny url for that./s
Great Post.
I get all affirmed and validated when others tell the overeducated me, that I need to get more training if I want to get a job../s
Great Post, thank you. It breaks my heart that this is “normal” after all these years. I’m numb from anger at “businesses” that are purposely not hiring when they can.
Recommended. The part about part-timers is on target. Which is why under-employment is a persistent part of the picture.
Wait until you are told that you’ve got too much education.
Yes. The new normal. I’ve been calling it ‘the beginning of the end of the middle class consumer economy’ for some time now. Maybe it’s the middle of the end, as I think the shrinkage of the middle class has been going on for a couple of decades. Anyway, I do see an end to the economy we’ve known since the end of the Second World War.
I’m wondering, what comes next? Do even the MOTU know what to expect? How will this play out in the context of shrinking payments to Medicare providers and simultaneous shrinking of Social Security?
When I began my present employment back in 1993, the consensus was that our company was doing the work of ten people with seven, or eight.
Over time it has become clear to me at least, that the whole of American business is attempting to do the job of ten people with four or five.
They expect those four or five people to be glad they have a part-time job, and to be ready to answer the phone and get to work with twelve hours notice.
These are unreasonable expectations that lead to unhappy employees, which leads to disappointed customers and low productivity.
In the end they wonder why it’s not working.
Capitalism is Fraud.
Slow learners here.
For people in rural areas, part time work is not even thinkable. The price of gas in rural California is close to $ 5 a gallon. If you need to spend 10 bucks on gas to get to work and back each day, working four or five hours a day, minus the gas, minus the taxes, means you end up working for around $ 5 an hour.
Add to that the salaried white-collar office positions that expect 60 hours per week with no additional pay, perhaps a day off here or there in lieu, when there isn’t a computer crash or project deadline.
As college-educated ‘professionals’ they(we) looked down on those unionized blue-collar types out in the plant. Well hey, last laugh.
The new normal: a relative of mine who is short of a Ph.d in psychology only because he could not do his dissertation before his time ran out has two part-time jobs, neither of which has a single benefit–no sick days, no vacation days, no health insurance, nothing. His wife is working at a low-paying, menial job and has no benefits either because she is working off the books.
It was the only job she could find and they were about to lose their home if she did not start working. Their house is underwater and their mortgage is high interest. They have never missed a mortgage payment. They can’t get re-financing, though, in part because his wife is getting paid “under the table,” but mostly because the place is so far under water.
He is 50. He had a minor stroke earlier this year, probably from all the stress. He had to pay for his several days in the hospital out of pocket, though, because the deductible on his health insurance is so high.
And I urged him to vote for Obama in 2008 because of the public option. God, I hope he did not listen to me.
Both my parents were factory workers. Both were very proud union members.
They both worked incredibly hard or I would not be an educated professional. The college education of my sibling and me is the product of their American dream and their hard labor.
They would never laugh at anyone being out of work.
I have no words for anyone who looks down on people like that, or ever did, so I hope you are only using a figure of speech.
Trying to wash us away.
Maybe that’s their final solution for dealing with global warming. It will slow considerably after the population is significantly reduced.
Rec’md.
Thanks for this, Dakine. Love the Aaron Neville song.
And, always worth mentioning, with a scant 5 days until the election, Obama (the “Democrat”) still won’t even raise the issue of extending unemployment benefits.
Never since Federal Unemployment Extended Benefits were originally introduced has the UI rate been at 7.2% or above without benefits being offered. Instead, come December 30th, everyone out of work for longer that 26 weeks (the period covered by the states) can now go f*ck themselves, that’s the official position of the “People’s” Party and its Prostitute, er, President.
Of course, not since the current definition of the workforce was adopted in 1947 has a President presided over three consecutive years of 8% or greater unemployment…not until Obama. This year’s final figures, despite all the fudging of the workforce/population ratio that the BLS has been doing, will probably make it four consecutive years of economic disaster, meaning Obama has doubled the previous record.
And yet, this Piece of Thoroughly Unscrupulous Shit, PoTUS Obama, will almost certainly be re-elected on Tuesday. Hail, Victory! Hail, the Obama!
(On a mostly-unrelated personal note, I not only remain unemployed, unable to meet my rent and likely to be evicted, homeless, dispossessed and suicidal in the very near future, but now the person at the local mental health center who was trying to get me into the “Shelter-plus” program so I could maintain my residence seems to have disappeared, and no one there is returning my calls. [And I'm almost out of minutes on my "Obamaphone", to boot!] So suicide seems more and more of a certainty.
I just wonder if I should do it on Tuesday, during Obama’s victory speech? Has a certain poetry, I’d think.
[Eh, don't worry…I'll probably cling to false hope until I'm officially human flotsam. Probably no suicide until they actually take my few meager possessions…perhaps mid-Decemberish. So Obama shouldn't feel bad about cutting of my UI…I wasn't going to make it to 2013 anyhow. Cheers!])
No figure of speech, ncbb. It is how class war works. ‘We’ in the front office were ‘better than’ the guys and gals out back fixing cars or making nails or whatever. We were taught to consider ourselves better educated, more dedicated, more professional and on-track to ever-higher levels of management. Actually, we were just worker-bees in offices, banks, and accounting departments everywhere, IT types, programmers, tech’s and engineers. We did not see this coming. Greatly ironic. My best friend was ‘disemployed’ from a huge bank — she was records administrator for the work measurement dept. Hah! She and her department had prepared the way for automated and on-line banking, but never thought it would apply to *them*!
This is how class warfare works and this is how they kept us from seeing the need to organize. That is why my bitter ‘last laugh’ remark — we have *all* had our jobs move to China, India or cyberspace.
Commenter Terrance on Dimitry Orlov’s blog said
Seems about right… It is unthinkable that one human who has food would let another human starve. Yet we are so conditioned (or is it ‘natural’?) that we do it every day. I think that cooperation, local cooperation, is the only way we can manage to survive, but the obstacles are daunting. OTOH, so are the consequences if we don’t figure out how to do it.
Finally, I have to admit that I totally do not understand economics. There are people who need and want to work. There is work that needs to be done. Why do we have *any* unemployment?
Oooh! Ooooh! I know! (RIP Ron Palillo)
Because those in power (not necessarily those in office) see maximizing profit/wealth as more important that performing wealth/providing for their “fellow citizens”/having a functional economy?
Deutschmarks* Über Alles!
(And Dollare/Pounds/Euros/etc, of course. And I know you were likely being sarcastic and knew this already. I’m just venting.)
Yeah, but don’t we have *skills* and *stuff*? Can’t I trade my mechanical skill (ie, fix your bike or your toilet) for your gardening skills (chard, yum!)? I also can cook, clean, help you paint, I can even make paint, with a few fairly cheap ingredients. What gives? Why are we all broke, bored and hungry?
Although you are totally right about the money part. My mom was from a farming family, she said she never even noticed the depression. They grew most of what they needed to eat and could barter for the rest, and including gasoline (mostly for the tractor and driving to church on Sunday). Crews of thrashers came around in the fall and were paid in grain, which they could sell to the local mill (which is still in business). There was no income tax back then and my grandfather paid his property taxes by working for the county — drove snowplow during the winter, when he wasn’t busy anyway.
For WWII they instituted the income tax, payable in USD only, of course, and the county followed suit requiring taxes paid in cash shortly after. So then they had to have cash crops. The world became totally different then.
Not “we.” You.
Since you reference sharecroppers, dakine, in this excellent diary, I am transferring here a poem I first posted on wendydavis’s diary, “Inspirational Gifts”, as there I somewhat mangled it so I am making corrections here. It is a poem from the book “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” which is James Agee’s epic description of tenant farmer families in the mid 30′s. Walker Evans did the photography for the book, and I found it in a used bookstore only yesterday:
(To Walker Evans.
Against time and the damages of the brain
Sharpen and calibrate. Not yet in full,
Yet in some arbitrated part
Order the facade of the listless summer.
Spies, moving delicately among the enemy,
The younger sons, the fools,
Set somewhat aside the dialects and the stained skins of feigned madness,
Ambiguously signal, baffle, the eluded sentinel.
Edgar, weeping for pity, to the shelf of that sick bluff,
Bring your blind father, and describe a little;
Behold him, part wakened, fallen among field flowers shallow
But undisclosed, withdraw.
Not yet that naked hour when armed,
Disguise flung flat, squarely we challenge the fiend.
Still, comrade, the running of beasts and the ruining heaven
Still captive the old wild king.
Agee went back to Shakespeare to point out the delusions that come about when wealth ignores poverty. In these Katrina-CasSand[y]ra days, I think it doesn’t go amiss to go back to Agee.
And very much recommended, your post!
Homeless and dispossessed is something to be proud of these days, VC – we’ve got a vice-presidential candidate who was in your shoes, and with a child to boot. Truly you don’t need that obamaphone! Chuck it. Change is coming so please, hang in there. My son was all those things right back at 9/11, and rather mindchallenged to boot. He set out walking, just picking up trash along the highway. He didn’t beg; people helped him anyway. Even joking about suicide is a serious matter and we need you to help us fix when things get truly broken. Really, we do.
Even nature at its worst is awesome. Frightening and destructive and we lose people and things we love. Big hug. You can do it. Hang in there. Things are just things. It’s people that leave a void behind. Don’t purposefully leave or even think to do so. Please!
Sorry, that was VS – I really should turn in this brain for the latest model.