corrente

David Streitfield of the LA Times has a long insightful article on contrasting the official unemployment rate to the reality of uenemployment, underemployment, and dropping out of the work force entirely.

The nation's official jobless rate is 5.9%, a relatively benign level by historical standards. But economists say that figure paints only a partial — and artificially rosy — picture of the labor market.

To begin with, there are the 8.7 million unemployed, defined as those without a job who are actively looking for work. But lurking behind that group are 4.9 million part-time workers such as Gluskin who say they would rather be working full time — the highest number in a decade.

There are also the 1.5 million people who want a job but didn't look for one in the last month. Nearly a third of this group say they stopped the search because they were too depressed about the prospect of finding anything. Officially termed "discouraged," their number has surged 20% in a year.

Add these three groups together andthe jobless total for the U.S. hits 9.7%, up from 9.4% a year ago.

Yikes! So the numbers aren't exactly cooked; but they certainly don't reflect the very precarious and painful situation of millions of Americans who played by the rules and used to go to work every day.

And under the most optimistic scenarios, the numbers won't improve.

By any normal standard, things should have been improving on the employment front long before this point. More than 2 million jobs have been lost in the last three years, a period that encompassed a brief, nasty recession and a recovery that was anemic until recently. Even in the best-case scenario, Bush will end this term with a net job loss. That hasn't happened to a president since Herbert Hoover at the beginning of the Depression.

This despite what should be massive Keynesian stimulus—the havetax cuts for the super-rich did nothing, but the war and Homeland Security largesse should have helped. (If you've been to DC lately, have you seen all the new construction? No wonder the Beltway thinks all is well with the country!) Instead, we have the Wecovery: lots of numbers but no jobs. Even the experts are puzzled:

Many economists are mystified about why a suddenly booming economy is producing so few jobs.

"We're all sitting there and saying, 'When are they going to return?' " says Richard B. Freeman, director of the labor studies program at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Maybe I can help the NBER out, since I have some experience being unemployed, underemployed, discouraged, and self-employed...

One reason the jobs aren't returning is that they've gone off-shore, particularly those once well-paying IT jobs. (A friend of mine from Pennsylvania says that IT today reminds him of the steel industry in Pittsburgh in the '50s: everything's being shut down and all the plants are shuttered.) Doubtless this trend will level off at some point—in fact, after a year of experience with off-shore, some companies are discovering that it isn't as cheap, when all the factors are considered, than they thought it would be. But I think the main factor is something that Bush causes in whatever he does:

Fear

One number that has gone way up is Productivity. This has to hold the unemployment figures higher, since when companies can get more done with the same number of employees, they don't higher new ones.

Why would productivity numbers jump? Why would people do a lot more work for the same amount of money?

Fear. Fear of losing their jobs again without recourse (since the Bush economy looks bad as far as the eye can see). Fear of losing their health insurance (since the Republicans prevent universal health insurance). Fear of not running out of unemployment benefits (since the Republicans slash them). Fear of falling behind on the house, or on debt. Fear of another 9/11 causing the whole economy to tank once more.

Why do we never hear FDR's words from Bush: "The only thing you have to fear is fear itself"? Because to Bush, fear is a management tool. The Republicans manage with the lash, as befits the southern Partisan.

FInally, here's the Worst Case Scenario:

In some eyes, a nation of burger flippers, temps and Wal-Mart clerks isn't the worst scenario for the economy. The worst is that companies continue to eliminate jobs faster than they create them, setting up a game of musical chairs for the labor force.

That prospect alarms Erica Groshen, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. "If you plot job losses versus gains on a chart, it's shocking," she says.

Losses are running at about the same rate they were in 1997 and 1998, two good years for the economy. But job creation in the first quarter of 2003 — the most recent period available — was only 7.4 million, the lowest since 1993.

"If this goes on too long, you'd have to worry there's something fundamentally wrong," Groshen says. Although the economy has picked up since March, "so far I haven't seen anything that suggests job creation is picking up."

And now that the Bush deregulators have managed to poison the meat supply... Well, tofu flipping, anyone?