Posted on 02/06/2003 12:22:16 PM PST by RCW2001
February 7 2003
The US economy has fallen into its worst hiring slump in almost 20 years, and many business executives say they remain unsure when it will end.
The job decline is even worse than it was at a comparable point in the so-called jobless recovery of the early 1990s, according to recently revised statistics from the Labor Department. The economy has lost more than 2 million jobs, a drop of 1.5 per cent, since March 2001, as the layoffs continued despite resumption of economic growth more than a year ago.
About 1 million people appear to have dropped out of the labor force since last northern summer, neither working nor looking for a job.
The surge in discouraged workers, the most significant since immediately after the recession's start, suggests the pain has worsened even though the official unemployment rate, which counts only people looking for work, held steady at 6 per cent in December.
"Last year," said Tom Koehn, 50, who lost his job at a machinery maker in South Bend, Indiana, in May, "I heard a lot of people say, 'Come back after the first of the year; if the economy picks up, we might hire some people'. But so far, I haven't found anybody who's hiring
The shortage of jobs has also slowed wage growth so that only workers in the most affluent groups are still gaining ground on inflation, ending a six-year streak of broad increases in buying power.
Manufacturers of durable goods like computers, furniture and steel have made the deepest cuts, with one of every nine jobs in these industries eliminated since early 2001. Airlines, brokerage firms and makers of clothing and textiles have also each cut at least a tenth of their work forces.
Executives say they have been disappointed too many times by the halting growth of the last year to begin hiring workers in significant numbers, though the government is likely to report today that the economy added some jobs in January.
New York research group the Conference Board said December help-wanted advertisements in newspapers across the country fell to the lowest level in almost 40 years.
The New York Times
I remember the hard times of the early 1980's. Not a pretty economic picture. But then we got a big tax cut, and seriously opposed our enemies overseas. I forget ... what happened to the economy after that?
It's not just discouraged workers. Anyone who was "self employed" or a contract worker is not part of the unemployment system. When the private learning center I worked at until September, I got no warning, no unemployment benefits...heck, I didn't even get my August paycheck. Any one in these categories isn't tallied as unemployed.
Well, anyway, I collect a pension that (just barely) pays the bills, but I really need to make some money. I'm (I'll brag) an extremely qualified, experienced, and highly regarded Math remediator-tutor-test prepper-teacher. Well, I'm tutoring some (usually just catching kids up) and (barf warning) substituting.
Anyway, my point. My area of expertise is just cluttered with absolutely unqualified people who are hanging on to their jobs for dear life, and just plain not teaching the kids the curriculum. Is it like that in other fields? Qualified people pound pavement because there is just no movement of ill-suited workers. (But they really are great for not making ripples)
You know what I'd like to see? Any non-citizen has a job and a qualified citizen comes along, that non-citizen should be sent to their homeland and the citizen should be able to claim that job. The employer doesn't like the citizen employee...fine, fire them, just hire another US citizen.
In stores, if a company can produce a product in the US that's competitive, that company should be able to demand shelf space.
This isn't as nutty as it sounds. Citizens really have to take back the country, the future, the economy, and secure lives. This is just not a time where these workers are needed or desirable, unless you're a CFO looking for the government to subsidize labor costs with programs for the poor immigrant workers.
And, by the way, anyone in Southeastern Massachusetts who knows of a private or public high school that needs an excellent long-term Math substitute, please let me know by private mail.
Is it in FR? Can you post it? If that's true, it's hammerin' time.
All of the article's other tales of woe are basically BS. The level of "discouraged workers" is always trotted out when a journalist wants to make things sound worse. They go up and down with the unemployment rate, and are no more real now than at any other such time. As the article states: "The surge in discouraged workers [is] the most significant since immediately after the recession's start." Oh my god! That's the worst in almost two whole years!
Further, if the average length of unemployment is longer than some other time when the unemployment rate was 6.0%, then that means, to the same extent, that fewer people were laid off. The unemployment rate is proportional to the number of layoffs multiplied by the average time of unemplyment. Yet the article makes the absurd claim that our 6% unemployment rate doesn't tell us the full story, that both layoffs and length of unemployment are unusually bad. Bogus!
'Klinton' got elected, and started lying about how well the economy was really doing.
I'm beginning to wish George would do the same thing.
I assume that is a cumulative of Federal, State and Military combined?
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