Free Republic

A bleak jobs report suggests the recovery from the Great Recession will be longer and bumpier than many economists had envisioned. Most economists say job growth should strengthen later this year as gasoline prices drop further and the economy recovers from the effects of natural disasters in the U.S. and abroad. But the recovery is starting to weaken 17 months before the 2012 election, which could hurt President Barack Obama's re-election prospects. The unemployment rate in May inched up to 9.1 percent from 9 percent, the Labor Department said Friday; when Obama took office, it was 7.8 percent. The Conference...

According to the unemployment data released this morning, the economy added only 54,000 jobs, pushing the unemployment rate up to 9.1 percent. However, this report from MarketWatch suggests data is much worse than that: McDonald’s ran a big hiring day on April 19 — after the Labor Department’s April survey for the payrolls report was conducted — in which 62,000 jobs were added. That’s not a net number, of course, and seasonal adjustment will reduce the Hamburglar impact on payrolls. (In simpler terms — restaurants always staff up for the summer; the Labor Department makes allowance for this effect.) Morgan...

When a fast-food "National Hiring Day" resembles the Depression's unruly food lines, it doesn't back up President Obama's rosy picture of economic recovery. Want some fries with that "hope and change"? If it were a Republican president in office at a time when high unemployment is so persistent that McDonald's holds a nationwide help-wanted day, the establishment media would be sinking their teeth into him like a Quarter Pounder with Cheese. The legendary hamburger chain has promised to expand its company workforce by 7% by hiring 50,000 new employees in a single day, thus scoring a publicity boon by having...

The late Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that the meaning of a word was derived from the way it is used in language. Not according to McDonald's. The fast-food giant is currently lobbying dictionary publishers to change the meaning of the word McJob — or remove it altogether — on the grounds that it denigrates the company's employees. First used some 20 years ago in the United States to describe low-paying, low-skill jobs that offered little prospect of advancement, the term McJob was popularized by the author Douglas Coupland in his 1991 slacker ode Generation X, which chronicled the...

JULIE MASON Copyright 2006 Houston Chronicle Washington Bureau NEW DELHI - It's a touchy, politically charged issue and President Bush dove right into it last week, defending outsourcing as a reality of the global market that should be embraced, not feared. "Globalization provides great opportunities," Bush said, although he conceded that "people do lose jobs as a result of globalization, and it's painful for those who lose jobs." Outsourcing is still in its early stages, but nonetheless cuts to the heart of American anxiety about the economy. Bush, who has an MBA from Harvard, takes the long view of what...

<p>Since George W. Bush became president the economy has lost 2.8 million factory jobs, but his administration is floating an idea that could dramatically boost manufacturing jobs overnight. It sounds too good to be true. And it is.</p> <p>The presidential proposition wouldn't actually create any new jobs but would reclassify them and thereby swell job statistics in a declining sector of the economy. Poof! Problem solved.</p>