Posted on 07/14/2009 9:45:26 PM PDT by Steelfish
Part-Time Workers Mask Unemployment Woes
DAVID LEONHARDT July 14, 2009
In California and a handful of other states, one out of every five people who would like to be working full time is not now doing so.
Chris Keane.
After Richard Smith, 58, was laid off from jobs at two carmakers, he moved to Charlotte, N.C., and found only part-time work. He makes $9.50 an hour repairing clubs at a Golf Galaxy store.
It is a startling sign of the pain that the Great Recession is inflicting, and it is largely missed by the official, oft-repeated statistics on unemployment. The national unemployment rate has risen to 9.5 percent, the highest level in more than a quarter-century.
Yet it still excludes all those who have given up looking for a job and those part-time workers who want to be working full time.
Include them — as the Labor Department does when calculating its broadest measure of the job market — and the rate reached 23.5 percent in Oregon this spring, according to a New York Times analysis of state-by-state data.
It was 21.5 percent in both Michigan and Rhode Island and 20.3 percent in California.
In Tennessee, Nevada and several other states that have relied heavily on manufacturing or housing, the rate was just under 20 percent this spring and may have since surpassed it.
Almost nobody believes that unemployment has finished rising, either. On Tuesday, President Obama said he expected it to “tick up for several months.”
It’s fair to say, then, that the downturn is moving into a new stage. It has already been through three: the prologue, when credit markets began to quiver in 2007; the big shock, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers, in September 2008, led into almost six months of terrible economic news...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
PT workers who want to be FT should be counted as unemployed and given 83 weeks of benefits to boot
One can only imagine what unemployment numbers will look like when "amnesty" is adopted and all our new "citizens" flood the employment market on top of ever-increasing job losses.
Cap and Trade is, IMHO, like giving voters and citizens a profane gesture while politicians who have personal investments that will "warm" their bank accounts, Al Gore and GE smirk as they enrich themselves phenomenally at taxpayer expense.
YUP.
This is a huge tax on the middle class, lowering our standards of living.
Why? This is probably a bad time to pay down debt. Among the most likely response we’re going to see to a deepening of the crisis are massive inflation and/or some kind of debt write-down scheme.
Won’t inflation help homeowners in the long run?
It is shockingly easy to be denied unemployment insurance.
In that situation, suddenly, terrible employment alternatives look pretty good compared to homelessness.
I’ve encounted lots of overqualified people in jobs I never would have expected.
Probably.
That’s what I’m saying. Frankly, if I was anticipating a Depression-level crisis here, I’d recommend hoarding cash, in one way or another. Perhaps even Gold - as an alternative to paying down debt.
I’d actually recommend the safest possible stocks - because those will inflate automatically as well, as a hedge against inflation.
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