JOBS
Today we got the new jobs number for September. The September Jobs Report showed that non-farm payrolls were up by 194,000 jobs. The estimates were for 500,000. Immediately, the business news media started to downplay this information. This number will not hurt the stock market but this huge underperformance is a big deal. It is stunning, actually.
Across our country and across many industries, employers are desperate to hire new employees. FedEx reported some disconcerting projections to Wall Street because they are operating at 65% of full employment in certain vital warehouses that unload shipments coming to the USA on the West Coast. Amazon now has a budget for TV advertising that is not focused getting people to shop at Amazon, it is focused on getting people to WORK at Amazon. That’s a big business story.
I visit bars and restaurants in New York City and Asheville NC as often as I can. I’m good like that – Haha. All of these venues are coming out of the pandemic just fine when it comes to customers but they are desperate for more help – more employees. Even inexperienced people get hired in a New York minute.
We have a nursing shortage. We have a truck driver shortage. We have a huge shortage of school bus drivers. And on and on.
The Trumpublicans told us that the bleeding heart libs were just way too generous with unemployment payments so our nation stopped all of the pandemic expansions of unemployment payments which cut off SIX MILLION people from this safety net overnight.
What a surprise. The rush to go back to work did not happen. THAT MEANS THAT ALL WE DID WAS CUT A LIFELINE FOR THE MOST DESPERATELY HURTING AMERICANS as opposed to forcing a bunch of lazy Americans to go back to work.
It’s important to understand that unemployment numbers are very low. Just 4.8% according to the latest report. 4% unemployment rates are considered to be “full employment” because 4% of the working population is always in flux. We still have a big problem with unemployment among minority groups being far higher but that is an entrenched problem rooted in American history. It’s important to focus on this and to fix it, but the socio/economic subset problems with unemployment don’t tell you the basic story about jobs in America today.
The problem is that a huge part of our population has dropped out of the work force altogether. They are not working but they don’t show up in the unemployment estimates because they are not filing for unemployment and they are not actively looking for work.
Put all the pieces together and we are living in a country where small businesses, large corporations and social services are all trying very hard to hire people and at the same time, a very significant part of our society that is competent to fill these jobs is not even trying anymore.
How can this be? The answer is not because Americans are lazy. That is Trumpublican bullshit and one helluva lot of the non-workers are white people living in voting districts that Trump won by 50 points. So, don’t go there with racist innuendos hinting at the laziness of black people. That is just total bullshit.
No, this combination of open jobs and available workers not coming together is because the USA has destroyed the value of working. For many decades, the “return on investment” for doing lower middle-class jobs in America has been eroding and we have finally taken it to the point where the ROI for working is a net negative for the worker. Even doing jobs that pay between $60,000 and $100,000 are just not worth it.
The minimum wage in America is a joke.
The USA is the worst country in the developed world for using tax payer dollars to support childcare programs for working parents.
The taxes on average people trying to make it into the middle class and rise up even just a bit is crushing – we all focus on the Federal Income Tax because we don’t want to talk about the much deeper challenge – state income tax, city income tax, sales tax, gasoline tax, property tax – these insidious taxes crush people in the bottom half of the middle class.
“If you were a mom who could get a job for $20 an hour but you had to pay a baby sitter $15 an hour, would you do it?” That’s a quote from our Commerce Secretary.
The September Jobs Report cited at the start of this article also pointed out that the Labor Participation Rate in the USA is now down to 61.6%. The formula for the LPR number is the sum of all workers who are employed or actively seeking employment divided by the total noninstitutionalized, civilian working-age population. In other words, 38% of Americans who could work if they wanted to are not “participating.”
We have a huge jobs problem in the USA because we have created an environment for workers that totally sucks.
Stop blaming the people who are not going back to work and start blaming the political leaders, mainly those in Congress, for having allowed our nation to deteriorate from the greatest country in the world to find a job to one of the worst. Don’t blame the Republicans, this has been a team effort by all of our political leaders that tracks back to 1992, or 1980, depending on your political bias. Lobbying runs Congress. Congress does not work for the people, they work for their biggest donors.
If we want to fix the jobs problem in America, we are going to have to fix the way that the members of our Congress do their jobs.
This post was not anti-wealth, many billionaires are OK with me. But, it was about the shrinking middle class so I want to add an astonishing statistic that I just learned today. The wealthiest 1% of American citizens hold 27% of the nation's privately held wealth. The middle 60% of American citizens hold 27% of the nation's wealth. 1% = 60%. The middle class' share of real estate, equities and private businesses fell quickly over the past generation. Don't complain about the top 1% getting too much. Complain about the middle 60% getting far too little. This has much more to do with our political strategies and our tax system sucking the wind out of the middle class. The super rich created millions of middle class jobs but those jobs were underpaid and over-taxed for reasons that the business creators do not control.
One of our co-readers provided me with a comment via email because they can't link their name to anything controversial online and hey, today everything is controversial. Here is the comment: "I would just add a caveat to your final sentence, Mark, “[a]nd how members of our Congress get their jobs.” --- This is a GREAT point. We are still a nation of voters and we get what we ask for when we vote these people in. Maybe we are starting to take some power back - all of these Trumpublican state laws to restrict voting best-practices are because voter turn-out is going UP and new voters (conservatives or liberals or whatever) are rejecting bullshit politics.