Posted on 07/27/2005 6:21:50 AM PDT by A. Pole
The June payroll jobs report did not receive much attention due to the July 4 holiday, but the depressing 21st century job performance of the U.S. economy continues unabated.
Only 144,000 private sector jobs were created, each one of which was in domestic services.
Fifty-six thousand jobs were created in professional and business services, about half of which are in administrative and waste services.
Thirty-eight thousand jobs were created in education and health services, almost all of which are in health care and social assistance.
Nineteen thousand jobs were created in leisure and hospitality, almost all of which are waitresses and bartenders.
Membership associations and organizations created 10,000 jobs, and repair and maintenance created 4,000 jobs.
Financial activities created 16,000 jobs.
This most certainly is not the labor market profile of a First World country, much less a superpower.
Where are the jobs for this year’s crop of engineering and science graduates?
U.S. manufacturing lost another 24,000 jobs in June. A country that doesn’t manufacture doesn’t need many engineers. And the few engineering jobs available go to foreigners.
Readers have sent me employment listings from U.S. software development firms. The listings are discriminatory against American citizens. One ad from a company in New Jersey that is a developer for many companies, including Oracle, specifies that the applicant must have a TN visa.
A TN or Trade NAFTA visa is what is given to Mexicans and Canadians who are willing to work in the United States at below prevailing wages.
Another ad from a software consulting company based in Omaha, Neb., specifies it wants software engineers who are H-1B transferees. What this means is that the firm is advertising for foreigners already in the United States who have H-1B work visas.
The reason the U.S. firms specify that they have employment opportunities only for foreigners who hold work visas is because the foreigners will work for less than the prevailing U.S. salary.
Gentle reader, when you read allegations that there is a shortage of engineers in America, necessitating the importation of foreigners to do the work, you are reading a bald-faced lie. If there were a shortage of American engineers, employers would not word their job listings to read that no American need apply and that they are offering jobs only to foreigners holding work visas.
What kind of country gives preference to foreigners over its own engineering graduates?
What kind of country destroys the job market for its own citizens?
How much longer will parents shell out $100,000 for a college education for a son or daughter who ends up employed as a bartender, waitress or temp?
What was the wage differential between H1B and native born?
So the monicker "Neutron Jack" applied to Welch (...the buildings are standing but nobody's inside anymore..) now applies in more ways than one, eh?
Whaddya expect from a guy who massaged GE's numbers every quarter for what, 10+ years? Nobody, but NOBODY, could possibly produce perfectly incremental sales growth the way his numbers did--and by gum, only AFTER that sniggering jackass retired did GE decide to get with the program imposed on them by the Feds SOX legislation.
Yup good bye ship building another victom of free trade. Let us hope that the Chicom will allow us to use our little Navy every now and then. Seems the Chicoms have no trouble keeping shipyards busy.
Whatever. There was always money and therfore always ways of making it regardless of those who are clueless.
I'm sure it looks great to all you "inside the beltway" boys.
As for me, I'm OK. I opted out of the rat race some time ago, the rats won.
However I do have eleven kids and stepkids, and seventeen grandchildren that I do give a care about.
But, I digress. My sense is that if you have married at all, you've had a boy, had a girl, bought a dog, and planted a tree.
Wasp heaven. And, comfortable in the bosom of current day politics.
Bingo. Thanks for being a voice of sanity in an insane political forum. 'Pod.
Why is math and science down in the US? Because white males tended to be good at it. This had to stop. A stop was put to it sometime in the 60's.
I don't think so. Replacing infrastructure takes time. You just don't slap stuff like that together overnight. Once you've scrapped a major facility, restoring it takes a concerted effort, if you are able to do it at all. Better to keep what you have rather than trashing it for short-term "gain", then having to scramble to recover it when you get caught with your pants down.
Harder to replace is skilled labor and intellectual capital once that goes away. I was involved with an R&D project a few years ago that needed some specialty nuclear materials that used to be supplied by Oak Ridge. I called down there and the division that used to handle that stuff was disbanded a few years prior. The people that worked there were laid off and scattered to the four winds. They finally found an old-timer that had previously worked there that they kept on as a janitor or something. He checked into the possibility of restarting the work and found that all the machinery and equipment used to make the materials had either been scrapped or sold to the highest bidder on the foreign markets. The only supplier I found for the materials was a company in Europe and they said it might take up to two years to get an export license (for me to import technology that, ironically, had been invented and developed here). The research program was canceled as a result.
Sorry giving away nuclear secrets is 10 times worse than losing factories..
Married, but we're DINKS and plan to be that way for a while. Two cats, no trees and a townhouse.
Wasp heaven.
You've got the "W" from WASP right, but none of the other initials apply.
Germany is in a funck. Japan is not doing to well either..
No.
There will be plenty of money here.
But you probably won't have much of it.
Yeah, but their populations don't harbor the same fears. There is no place where you can climb higher or fall lower than the U.S. It's the falling part that has people a little on edge...
Where in the Constitution does it say that every American has a good paying job?
Amoral moderates (especially Willie).
What do you call them?
Why do say that? Nothing in the data you present on the declining *share* of Gross Domestic Product from the manufacturing sector supports this statement. The total (not relative) value of output in manufacturing has risen slightly since the most recent recession, but the total number of manufacturing jobs has continued to decline, as it has for 30+ years. It must be true, therefore, that output per worker ("labor productivity") is rising, as it has for 30+ years.
If a factory produces 1,000,000 widgets with 1000 employees in a given year and then produces the same amount of widgets the following year with less employees then that is a result of a productivity gain and jobs lost are a result of that productivity gain.
If the same factory closes shop and widgets are now made overseas then the jobs lost are not a result of productivity gains.
Since manufacturing continues to shrink as a percentage of our GDP it follows that productivity increases are not sufficient enough to grow manufacturing at the same rate as the economy. The net difference is not productivity job loss, it is manufacturing moving overseas job loss.
Put your multi-cultural, multi-loyalties where the sun don't shine.
Ah, there's the rub!
As for me, I will never do it again.
"Why is math and science down in the US? Because white males tended to be good at it. This had to stop. A stop was put to it in the 60's."
Although my cynical side is sympathetic to this argument, something more fundamental, and disturbing, is going on with white (and, even more so, black) males. They simply aren't going to college at the rate they were 35 years ago. Your typical state university is about 56% female now, and some formerly male-dominated, science-related fields such as pharmacy and vet med are now majority female. Somehow, we (parents, schools, the general culture) are doing a disservice to our boys. Maybe this is a topic for another thread!
Where in the Constitution does it say that every American has a good paying job?
I believe they stopped short of that -- on the other hand, you get a bunch of 21st century citizens who have a sense of entitlement and begin taking things away from them slowly, eventually you are going to have a lot of very angry people. Take a typical guy who worked his whole life, he's barely holding on to his house because of property taxes, etc. and his 24 year old son is delivering pizza between tokes on the wacky weed. He's apt to look around for someone to blame...
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