The real state of the labor market
Submitted by gjohnsit on Fri, 04/07/2017 - 10:51pm
The unemployment rate dropped to just 4.5% in March, the lowest since 2007. Happy days are here again, right?
For some reason, America's workers don't feel like celebrating.
Even as the unemployment rate drops, the anxiety grows.
Over the past two years, an average of 67% of lower-income U.S. adults, up from 51% from 2010-2011, have worried "a great deal" about the problem of hunger and homelessness in the country. Concern has also increased among middle- and upper-income Americans, but they still worry far less than do lower-income Americans.
...It is unclear why Americans are worrying more about hunger and homelessness now, since it is an ever-present problem
Unclear, huh? Let's look at another study from this week that might make it more clear.
More than seven years after the Great Recession officially ended, there is yet more depressing research that at least half of Americans are vulnerable to financial disaster.
Some 50% of people is woefully unprepared for a financial emergency, new research finds. Nearly 1 in 5 (19%) Americans have nothing set aside to cover an unexpected emergency, while nearly 1 in 3 (31%) Americans don’t have at least $500 set aside to cover an unexpected emergency expense, according to a survey released Tuesday by HomeServe USA, a home repair service. A separate survey released Monday by insurance company MetLife found that 49% of employees are “concerned, anxious or fearful about their current financial well-being.”
One illness can push people to the brink of financial ruin.
No savings. One bad break away from ruin. Yeh, that explains the anxiety to me.
And then there's the debt.
One explanation: Americans are crippled under the same amount of debt as they had during the recession. The New York Federal Reserve on Monday predicted that total household debt will reach its previous peak of $12.68 trillion in 2017. The last time it reached that level was in the third quarter of 2008, during the depths of the Great Recession. Indeed, it’s already close: Total household debt in the fourth quarter of 2016 was $12.58 trillion. Fewer borrowers have housing-related debt in 2017 and, instead, have taken on auto and student loans.
The lack of savings and the debt are just the symptoms. The real source of troubles is the labor market.
Unemployment fell to a 10-year-low of 4.5% in March from 4.7% in February, but the “real” unemployment rate that includes part-time workers who would rather work full-time and job hunters who gave up searching for work was 8.9%, although this was also down from 9.2% in February....
There’s a prolonged “structural shift toward more intensive use of part-time employment,” the Economic Policy Institute report found. Aside from the frequent lack of sufficient work hours, these part-time workers must also “navigate unpredictable and/or variable hours,” with their work schedules varying week-to-week at a rate more than double that of full-time workers, it added. What’s more, part-time workers suffer from a lower rate of pay and benefits coverage than full-time workers, such as access to health insurance and paid time off.
Perhaps not surprisingly, involuntary part-time workers tend to earn less than their voluntary part-time counterparts. Approximately 40% of involuntary part-time workers report a total family income of less than $30,000, compared with just 18% of the latter and 29% of the population as a whole, according to an earlier report — “A Tale of Two Workforces: The Benefits and Burdens of Working Part Time” — published in 2015 by Rutgers University. More than four out of every five involuntary part-time workers says it’s hard to save for retirement and about seven out of every 10 say they earn less money than they and their family need to get by and pay bills.
Even many of those who can find full-time work end up in the gig economy. Millions are there by choice, but for tens of millions of others...
Most of the estimated 68 million gig workers choose the freelance lifestyle for better work-life balance. But nearly 20 million of them do it out of necessity because they can't find better work or pay, according to a report by McKinsey Global Institute, a consulting firm.
... Experts say income is very volatile for freelancers, which makes paying ordinary bills a challenge.
And the average freelancer is stiffed by employers on $6,000 a year, according to the Freelancers Union, which represents 300,000 independent workers across America.
It's not just about getting stiffed on a paycheck. Freelancers are challenged with registering for health care. About 35% of independent workers are uninsured, according to Stride Health.
That wonderful, modern gig economy.
As usual, this news comes out on Friday when few are looking.
Comments
Same shit different decade.
As a UC employee in the late '80s, my salary was decided to be X. But, the law said that full time employees were to get medical, dental, vested retirement etc. So...even though I worked as a grad student, and later post-doc, much more than 40 hours a week, my position was officially set up to be "full time" is 2X/yr salary, but I was then registered as "49%" time. I was therefore "part-time" and never vested, despite over 10 years of employment.
I suspect this sort of "work-around" happened to a lot more folks in the private sector as well.
Then again, I knew at the time I was being screwed. It is the norm now. It's seems to be what folks expect.
What amount of this is the age structure in the US (world)?
Boomers are retiring or have given up. Gens X, Y, Z? Millennials (sp) that I know (my kids and their friends) are employed. For less than they want. Son was offered a higher level job, with no pay increase. He deferred.
Hey! my dear friends or soon-to-be's, JtC could use the donations to keep this site functioning for those of us who can still see the life preserver or flotsam in the water.
I guess their are some things that you can blame
on the weather, but only when it please your narrative
https://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/
As you may have heard by now, the American President decided over dinner in his Domus Aurea to assume the mantle of miles gloriosus, which has proven to be an irresistible temptation for American presidents of the postwar period, who have never personally known war. He ordered a massive cruise missile attack on the Syrian air base which purportedly was the point of origin for a dreadful chemical attack on innocent civilians. And that was that.
This juiced up the flight to safety trade on the overnight with stocks slumping and the metals rallying.
The Jobs Report came in so light this morning that when I first saw the print I thought it was a typo. I was astonished that the markets were seemingly ignoring it. And the Atlanta Fed downgraded its estimate of 1Q GDP to 0.6%. That barely registers a pulse. What the heck?
But luckily the financial spokesmodels and analysts, such as a learned economist from Deutsche Bank, were able to explain that the entire report and the economic data, except for the decline in the unemployment rate, was being discounted due to the weather. Huzzah!
And we are also being plagued by 'bad seasonals' which are a leftover from the crushing economic slump from the first quarter of 2009. Apparently those highly paid professionals and statisticians are like our modern CEOs, who turn out to be disconnected and barely aware of their own business, when things go wrong. What's that? The customer accounts were looted? Hey I just show up for work. That does not mean I was ever involved with anything of substance. We are just illusionists.
I wonder what sort of weather phenomenon will be blamed when that great lumbering pustule of hubris that is Deutsche Bank, and its plug ugly sisters in America and Europe, roll over and sink into the dustbin of excessive leverage and the mispricing of risk. An iceberg?
So the risk perception of the public having been tamed, stocks managed to finish largely unchanged.
The precious metals and the risk trades pretty much gave up all of their gains. How could it be otherwise, since we assured that everything is under control, and that all is well with the status quo, guided as it is by the plutocratic princes and their technocrats.
And if anything stands in our way, we will either drone it or print it out of existence. So there. It is a very attractive alternative.
Silver, which is in a not particularly active month, and for which there is ample supply in the Comex warehouses to back the paper betting, took it particularly hard, barely managing to hang on to the 18 handle.
We are fortunate, perhaps, that the mills of God's justice grind slowly.
Have a pleasant weekend.
I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish
"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"
Heard from Margaret Kimberley
So just how is the 1% doing?
Very, very fine, than you very much!
The real SparkyGump has passed. It was an honor being your human.
I can't even get a part time job.
This is what happens when you have disabilities and no ability to acquire a drivers' license.
Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.
Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.
Good luck to you.
I have those advantages you mention, and advanced degrees and after being laid off I still cannot find a job. Can't even imagine your hurdles. I think there is one issue for me and that is age. There is just story after story and story about qualified older workers not be able to find jobs. One work pundit looking at high tech jobs says that 35 is now the cut-off point where a person is considered "old". And this has nothing to do with "out dated" skill sets--that is just bullshit put out by lackey HR departments and business writers to justify getting rid of older and more expensive workers.
@MrWebster
Great, can this be applied to CEOs and government representatives? Get rid of the already-rich-by-sucking-the-public-dry lot as well?
Edited to add forgotten block-quotes. Makes a nice change from typos...
Lol, and again because I cleverly used bold instead... probably a couple of months of renos and in-house chemical exposures still to go and it seems to affect me more every day...
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
This is simply another way
that big money is impoverishing the people of this country. Neo-liberalism, which is fundamentally behind how our economy now operates, is based upon funneling money upwards. In the days of many small businesses, one of the best ways for a business to be competitive was for them to offer higher quality service. This meant that employees were a very valuable resource since longer term employees had the knowledge and expertise plus a vested interest in the business. As mega corporations bought out or put small businesses out of business, the main interest was not long term customer relations, but maximizing quarterly profits for investors. This meant cutting costs and one of the easiest ways to cut costs is to cut the cost of personnel. Employees were no longer a valuable long term resource, but became a very expensive commodity to maintain long term.
I saw this philosophy creep into local government near the end of my employment there in the early 2000's. The government sought to cut costs, particularly personnel costs by pushing out long term employees by offering early retirements or even cash buy outs. Another way the government has cut costs is by hiring employees as OPS or temporary help. OPS employees are basically contractual workers who earn zero benefits. Temporary, part time employees who work less than 30 hours a week allow the employer to avoid benefits, including health care, holidays, and annual and sick leave.
The bottom line is that this philosophy of disposable employees permeates nearly every aspect of our economy. With the exception of top management or highly skilled technical workers, nearly every one else is considered not to be an asset, but a liability to the bottom line.
What I have witnessed is that there is a very distinctive generation gap in understanding this problem. Many people from my generation and older (over 60 years of age) never personally experienced the gig economy or the concept of being considered a liability. Because of this, they do not understand that what we are witnessing now is a distinct part of the entire philosophy of our economy and those who run it. They attribute the problems of increasing impoverishment of our citizens to individual moral failings, even in the face of clear statistical evidence to the contrary.
Thank you for this excellent essay, gjohnsit.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
Ah, same to you
"Thank you for this excellent essay, gjohnsit."
And thank you for an excellent comment about your observations during your career. As a long time corporate employee, I've see this exact approach you describe, over the course of the 2+ decades I've been employed by this current co.
I still hear it in the monthly 'town hall' virtual meetings we attend, where we listen to the VPs of the corporation hammer on about nothing but our stock price, how to improve it, nothing about actual productivity, their continual cutback measures, wage freezes, facility closures, cost cutting measures, all to boost that stock price. Because that is all that their social tier deal in; they are all millionaires, wheeling in the market they own, trading amongst their own, turning their wealth into more wealth. I am not kidding when I say that the entire hour 'meeting' each month is 100% devoted to that one subject.
When these 'cost cutting measures' finally collapse the viability of the corporation itself (after all, closing plant after plant, terminating 100s of employees each quarter, it's inevitable), the corporation will cease to exist, but since all these people deal with is virtual wealth in the stock market casino they shuffle thousands of stock trades for gain each day, they will simply find another to play with. They own it all, and wealth begets wealth. The remainder of us that have luckily survived to this point at our dwindling company, simply grinding through as a means to pay our bills, will wind up seeking another grind to scrape by, like so many of our peon peers before us.
retail employment recession
we're already there
Sears
I actually worked for Sears as a full time, non-sales employee for about a year several decades ago. The biggest sales came from hardware (Craftsman tools), small appliances, and large appliances (Kenmore) at our store during the time I worked there. Sears had a great profit sharing plan for their employees too. My former father in law, who was a division manager for small appliances and a career employee, greatly benefited from that plan
As part of the "turn around" or fleecing of the Sears corporation, the asset strippers at the top of the corporate chain decided to sell of the Craftsman tool brand and are considering selling off the Kenmore appliances brand. Without their two greatest brands, Sears cannot survive. This plugs directly into the entire idea of asset stripping until a corporation is left with a shell. But the guys at the top will come out of it with bundles of cash while the company goes bankrupt.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
Managers Decidedly Not Creative
Sears started eliminating creative managers in the 1980s. I remember my wife saying that the local store was suddenly substandard one fine sunny summer afternoon. Weird, because as usual at that time the manager was "out and about" and quite on top of it all, although I hadn't seen him recently. Turns out he had been replaced and had moved away. My wife suggested they hired "humorless accountants" to run their stores into the ground.
Recently, a friend worked at the local Sears store. He was only able to put up with that job for a few months. He now works in a situation where he is valued rather than used.
@gulfgal98
Similarly, I previously worked in a local facility here, but several years ago, got transferred to a corporate position. That local facility had sales offices throughout the nation, $100 million annual sales, owned their building/lot outright, they had been in business since 1950s, but several years ago, this corporation bought them up. The corporation itself, owns many facilities of similar nature, throughout the nation, a collection of them.
Since owning this local plant, corporate forced closure of this facility's regional sales offices, decimating its ability to sell nationally, sales numbers down...it forced sale of the building/lot to someone else, pocketing the cash, and now the local facility gets to add the lease expense to it's vanishing sales. Well, with no sales, added lease expenses, we're gonna have to lay off tons of workers...900 employees soon became 175. Then, just this last month, after 'a couple years of poor performance' they just closed it down, shut the doors, everyone else terminated. They're done, with nothing to show for it. I escaped because someone at corporate had snatched me up for my certain abilities matched what he needed in his department. Else, I would have been alongside my old acquaintances in the unemployment line as of 3/31/2017.
But, that land/building sale, and now the stripping/selling of the remaining machine assets being sold off, money made!
@gjohnsit
They never count the great mass of people who can't afford to buy things they could a few decades back because of such worker-draining policies as are being discussed.
When you dam the river and water-starve life downstream, sooner or later, you wind up surrounded by desert. When sand gets in your eyes, only then you begin to understand the cycle you've destroyed.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
@gulfgal98
Thanks for so accurately detailing the situation, beautifully done, as usual. This is the sort of thing that ought to be passed out as information sheets to the corporate-media restricted.
Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.
A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.
Victory!
Every time I hear them touting jobs numbers
I think of this: Almost all the jobs created since 2005 are temporary.
We wanted decent healthcare, a living wage and free college.
The Democrats gave us Biden and war instead.
More from gjohnsit's link to Market Watch
He probably could not share more without triggering fair use issues, but I can because this paragraph relates to your comment above.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
I guess this proves America is Great Again
Great at producing low-paying part-time jobs.
Great at producing tem/gig jobs.
Great at creating more people who have stopped looking for work.
Great at creating debt (individual and government).
Great at siphoning off people's money with usurious fees, penalties, etc.
Great at increasing speculation in stocks.
Great at lowering life expectancy.
Great at having the most expensive health care on the planet.
Gosh, so many great things I could add to the above list, but alas, all this is making me feel greatly fearful of the day when the inevitable shit hits that great big fan.
"You can't just leave those who created the problem in charge of the solution."---Tyree Scott
Speaking of usery
credit card interest rate hit all-time high
Lets not forget
our Great prison population and the Greatest MSM and Pols for lying about or overlooking all of the above.
Stats which distort and those which inform.
I was in the comments section of a article in a local paper, complaining about the gains of the Obama economy were not good, and a partisan democrat came on with a blizzard of stats which were political cover. this same poster justified a democratically controlled Senate reducing food stamps which they did under Obama because people were finding jobs--even though I had quotes from organizations and people involved with food insecurity saying the cuts would hurt.
If you believed the dem stats, happy times are here again. But then there are stats like how many people can get through a $500 emergency, the debt load a person has when they die, etc, that show you what life is like when using the measures of a person's life here-and-now. (You have expertly exposed these bullshit work force stats in previous essays.) And the conclusions are not good.
Wow. I just turned 33 a week ago so I guess I'm screwed.
@MrWebster: I also have 2 degrees myself that are considered useful in the eyes of big business, yet with my limitations I'll always be held back.
I pick up skills very quickly but that's not what HR wants these days. I actually did just that in an internship a few years back and I did the job as well as some of the more experienced people in the office. I guess it helped that I had prior knowledge of databases and their functions but Oracle and ArcGIS each have their own quirks. They would have hired me were it not for my limitations, I'm sure.
Modern education is little more than toeing the line for the capitalist pigs.
Guerrilla Liberalism won't liberate the US or the world from the iron fist of capital.
Thomas Frank