Where Are The Breadwinning Jobs?
When my daughters were little, we used to go to a now defunct department store in Miami that had the highest quality merchandise made in America. I remember the little dresses…there was embroidery and lace; there was fine material and excellent workmanship. These little dresses sometimes came with an accompanying hat and my daughters loved them. The store was Burdines’.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2211841155&v=wall
The prices were not low…some of those little dresses sold for more than $50.00, and 30 years ago that was a substantial amount to pay for any article of clothing. Fast forward to the present and I had to buy a little dress for a friend’s little daughter’s birthday; I went to a store that was the chain which swallowed Burdines’ and the prices for any of these items went from $80.00 and above…nothing to write home about; they were of poor quality, shoddily made and were cotton…made in Sri Lanka.
All the while we have seen thousands and thousands of garment manufacturers close their doors and send the seamstresses to the unemployment lines. I happen to know this well since my own mother worked until she was 87 years old as a seamstress making tutus and at 95 today she would still be working there had they not closed the factory. The same thing has happened to light manufacturing and even appliances and the like…very little is made in America any more.
What is the result of all this? There is wide spread unemployment, there are chains of department stores like Wal-Mart that are the worst employers because they pay lousy salaries and offer no benefits. They are located in malls just outside the city limits of Small-town, U.S.A. by the Interstate and managed to put out of business that family operated store downtown which had been in operation since the grandfather opened it back in 1910.
As consumers we really have few options; we can buy the cheap stuff at Wal-Mart…shit made in Sri Lanka or China by workers who make $4.00 a day and do it in 12 hour shifts in sweat shops or we can refrain from buying at those places and try to find something AMERICAN MADE…and that is difficult.
The employment sections of most newspapers are now less than a page
It is not surprising then that we have such high unemployment. Aside from the fact that we don’t manufacture much these days; there is the ever greedy business owner who will exact longer hours and more productivity by simply threatening to send the workers to the unemployment lines.
You see the rich and business love this high unemployment situation because they have a large labor pool and they can pick the best for less money. It is an employer’s paradise.
Do you think that they are going to hire more people when they can sustain productivity with the existing workforce by squeezing more production out of them and making them work longer hours? Do you think that they have any incentives to give them any perks or benefits? That is basically why we have such alarming numbers in unemployment…again the old, tired Reaganomics concept of “TRICKLE DOWN ECONOMICS” that just doesn’t work…you give money to the rich and they will hoard it.
So, go ahead, KEEP VOTING FOR REPUBLICANS and this is what you have to look forward to; more of the same:
You will be working at Wal-Mart or Burger King for minimum wage, flipping hamburgers until you are 72 years old to get Social Security (If the GOP doesn’t eliminate it) Then your children will not be able to go to public schools because there will be none; you will not have HEALTH INSURANCE so that if you have the most insignificant of ailments like a urinary tract infection you will wait in the EMERGENCY ROOM at a local public hospital for 18 hours to get a prescription for antibiotics.
That is not even the tip of the iceberg; because your salary is not enough to keep you solvent, you will have insurmountable debts and certainly you would not be able to put any money away for your old age. If they do away with Social Security, and somehow you manage to put some money into a PRIVATE RETIREMENT ACCOUNT you might as well take a match and set those dollars on fire because when Wall Street gets through with your account with their Ponzi schemes there will be nothing left.
And I am not saying this without solid evidence that supports it. Most of the economists and financial gurus of our time have reached the same conclusions; they are predicting a very bleak future for employment in America if things don’t change. (*)
For example, Isaiah J. Poole wrote on January 7, 2011 – after the unemployment report came out:
“There isn't much cause for gloating in today's unemployment report; with the number of jobs created during December—103,000—being lower than most analysts expected. But, more critically, we're not even treading water on creating a sufficient number of "breadwinning jobs" needed to grow and sustain America's middle class.
Conservatives shouldn't be quick to pounce on this morning's report, either, because the policy prescriptions they are putting forth offer nothing to help the middle class get back on its feet.
That "breadwinning jobs" term was used last month by none other than David Stockman, President Reagan's first budget director. Lately he's become a sharp critic of his conservative brethren who he believes are wrong-headed in continuing tax breaks for the wealthy while feigning alarm over the budget deficit. He's also rapping them for the vacuity of their economic growth ideas. In an interview with CNBC, he said that the real employment story to watch is what's happening with the jobs that pay an annual median wage is $50,000, enough to support the average middle-class family (h/t gjohnsit at DailyKos).
If you take core government plus the middle class economy (65 million jobs), that's the breadwinning economy, if we take some numbers—how many jobs in the "core economy" in November—zero; how many jobs since last December: net zero; how many jobs since the bottom of the recession in June 2009: still a million behind from when the recession ended.
In December, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, most of the new jobs were in leisure and hospitality (47,000) and education and health services (44,000). Retail trade created 12,000 jobs. There were 16,000 fewer construction jobs, and only 10,000 new manufacturing jobs.
The unemployment rate drop to 9.4 percent was influenced in part by a decline in the number of people in the labor force. Also, since December 2009, there has been a net increase of 389,000 in the number of discouraged workers, the people who are too pessimistic about their ability to get a job to even try.
Over at The Atlantic, Eve Tahmincioglu says this is the result of a conservative "political and economic assault on the middle class." The recent announcement that Dollar General will create 6,000 retail jobs that will pay between $20,000 and $30,000 a year, in her view, is not particularly good news but is more an ominous "sign of the times."
Low-wage jobs, including everything from retail sales associates to home health aides, are the bread and butter of our employment boom, while middle income jobs are on the decline.
Among the top ten occupations projected to have the largest numerical growth in the next decade, seven pay median wages under $30,000 a year, including food preparers and servers earning $16,000, and retail and home care workers who make $20,000. Home aides and retail workers are expected to add about 1.4 million positions this decade while middle-class manufacturing jobs are projected to lose more than a million jobs.
This is not the kind of job swap you want to see in a world-leading economy. Peter Creticos, president and executive director for the Institute for Work and the Economy, calls it the "down waging" of American jobs, and he fears it has and will continue to hurt the economy, blunt innovation and impoverish society at large.
Between January 2007 and November 2010, we've lost 2.2 million manufacturing jobs and 1.7 million construction jobs, and we've replaced them with 1.8 million education and health services jobs, and fewer than a half-million leisure and hospitality jobs. The manufacturing and construction jobs that were lost would today have paid an average annual salary of $48,200; the average salaries for education, health care and hospitality jobs range between $23,000 and $41,000.
"We are now America, the downwardly mobile," wrote Harold Meyerson this week when he offered his own analysis of what has happened in the job market in recent years. The shortage of breadwinner jobs exacerbates the middle-class economic decay that began with the economic policies of the Bush administration and the conservatives in Congress. As Meyerson points out, median household income (in 2007 dollars) went from $50,557 in 2000 to $50,233 in 2007 and $49,777 in 2009.
"A rational political system would long since have created a 21st-century version of the Works Progress Administration — we’d be putting the unemployed to work doing what needs to be done, repairing and improving our fraying infrastructure," Paul Krugman wrote this week. Indeed, members of the House Progressive Caucus had tried to get Congress to pass a modest version of such a program called the Local Jobs for America Act. If Congress had put that legislation on President Obama's desk, along with what is now a past-due program to fund repairs and expansion of the nation's highways and public transit systems, we would today see the beginnings of real progress in getting unemployed people into the kinds of jobs that will enable them to support families and contribute to the economy's revival.
As it stands, we have conservative leaders who are bent on ending any stimulus spending, and cutting back on investments in infrastructure and transit. At the same time, while House Democrats last fall began promoting a "Make It In America" agenda to encourage the growth of manufacturing, House Republicans are instead asking industry what favors they would like the government to do for them.
With that mind-set, conservatives have no answer to what Meyerson calls the "institutional" factors that are keeping breadwinners from getting breadwinner jobs, "the decisions by leading banks and corporations to stop investing in the job-creating enterprises that were the key to broadly shared prosperity."
A study by the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Council Foundation found that the share of the profits of U.S.-based multinationals that came from their foreign affiliates had increased from 17 percent in 1977 and 27 percent in 1994 to 48.6 percent in 2006. As the companies' revenue from abroad has increased, their dependence on American consumers has diminished. The equilibrium among production, wages and purchasing power - the equilibrium that Henry Ford famously recognized when he upped his workers' pay to an unheard-of $5 a day in 1913 so they could afford to buy the cars they made, the equilibrium that became the model for 20th-century American capitalism - has been shattered. Making and selling their goods abroad, U.S. multinationals can slash their workforces and reduce their wages at home while retaining their revenue and increasing their profits. And that's exactly what they've done.
Deregulation, tax breaks and bad trade deals helped set the stage for this state of affairs. The conservative agenda in 2011 is more deregulation, more tax breaks and more bad trade deals. The answer is the kind of jobs and economic growth agenda that President Obama laid out at the beginning of the year and Robert Borosage has praised:”
President Obama got it right:
We are...riding a few months of economic news that suggests our recovery is gaining traction. And our most important task now is to keep that recovery going. As President, that’s my commitment to you: to do everything I can to make sure our economy is growing, creating jobs, and strengthening our middle class. That’s my resolution for the coming year.
And he added, a short-term boost isn’t sufficient, we’ve got to:
“... make some serious decisions about how to keep our economy strong, growing, and competitive in the long run. We have to look ahead – not just to this year, but to the next 10 years, and the next 20 years. Where will new innovations come from? How will we attract the companies of tomorrow to set up shop and create jobs in our communities? What will it take to get those jobs? What will it take to out-compete other countries around the world? What will it take to see the American Dream come true for our children and grandchildren?”
The headline of today's job report, and in fact the headline for each of the jobs reports that the Bureau of Labor Statistics will be issuing this year, is not in the number of jobs created but in whether we are moving closer to building an economy that strengthens the middle class. We need to keep asking House Speaker John Boehner not just "Where are the jobs"—to which the answer would be, "At the Dollar General"—but "where are the breadwinning jobs that will support our families and bring about a real Main Street recovery?"
http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2011010106/where-are-breadwinning-jobs
(*) Job creation weaker than expected. Jobless rate falls to 9.4%
by Meteor Blades
Fri Jan 07, 2011
Since November 2009, when new job creation first took a baby-step into positive territory after nearly two years of disastrous news for working Americans, there have been a lot of crossed fingers in the days before the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its monthly employment report. Throughout the period, many analysts have repeatedly predicted that this time, this month, finally, we'd see a big breakthrough in the economic measurement that matters most to working Americans, or those who would be working if they could find employment. Hopes were especially high for today's report. Once again, it failed to deliver.
Seasonally adjusted, the BLS business establishment survey showed that 103,000 new jobs were created in December. That was 113,000 private-sector jobs and a loss of 10,000 government jobs. The expert consensus – which had risen Thursday after release of a private company's stunningly positive job report – was for 150,000 new jobs, with some analysts saying there would be a lot more. Job-creation numbers for October and November were revised significantly upward today, from 172,000 to 210,000 and from 39,000 to 71,000, respectively. The ranks of the officially unemployed fell from 15.1 million to 14.5 million.
The unemployment rate, which is based on a different survey, fell to 9.4 percent, the lowest level in 19 months. This marks the first month in 17 that unemployment has been lower than 9.5 percent. Some analysts see that as a fluke caused by seasonal hiring. Others see it as a precursor of better months to come. At least part of the reason for the drop in the unemployment rate was that the labor force fell by 260,000. If they had stayed in the labor force, today's rate would have been 9.6 percent.
The civilian labor force participation rate, which has been drifting downward for the past three years, fell to 64.3 percent. The population participation rate rose slightly to 58.3 percent.
The number of workers who have been unemployed for six months or more rose from 6.3 million to 6.4 million.
U6, an alternative BLS measure that takes into account the unemployed, part-time workers who want full-time jobs and discouraged workers who have sought a job in the past 12 months but not in the past four weeks fell to 16.7 percent.
Marty Feldstein, the president emeritus of the official arbiter of when recessions begin and end, the National Bureau of Economic Research. told CNBC this morning that the jobs numbers are still "not good enough" because they barely keep up with population growth.
Attention (and crossed-fingers) will now shift to the February jobs report.
Click here for a larger version of this Calculated Risk chart.
While many analysts have grown more optimistic about the economy in the several months, it's still likely the unemployment rate will be above 9 percent at the end of 2011, and above 8 percent at the end of 2012.
Among other statistics from todays jobs report:
• The jobless rate: for adult men (9.4 percent); for adult women (8.1 percent); for teenagers (25.4 percent); for whites (8.5 percent), blacks (15.8 percent); Latinos (13 percent); Asians (7.2 percent). Rates for American Indians are larger than all these but not included because the survey sample is not large enough to accurately gauge this demographic
• The number of people employed part-time because they can't find a full-time position fell from 9 million to 8.9 million.
• The average workweek for all employees on private nonfarm payrolls held steady at 34.3 hours. Average hourly earnings rose 3 cents to $22.78.
• In professional and business services, employment in temporary help services was up 16,000.
• Leisure and hospitality: +47,000
• Health care: +36,000
• Mining: +5,000
• Retail trade: +12,000
• Manufacturing: +10,000
• Construction: -16,000
So, anytime any of these Teahadist-Republicans spew out their talking points, simply tell them they are liars and point out the unemployment crisis and ask them “Where are the bread-winning jobs?”
SOURCE: http://www.freakingnews.com/Unemployed-Pictures-2810.asp
