----- Original Message -----
From: John A Imani
To: [email protected] ; [email protected] ;
[email protected]
Sent: Friday, December 31, 2010 2:22 PM
Subject: [rac] Biz Week: The unemployment rate gives only a partial snapshot
(JAI: Why are there people who want to work unemployed? All it takes for
people to be able work are our own humanpower, machines, materials, housing and
sustenance 'til the crop come in' (i.e. til a cycle of production has been
accomplished and the goods and services have issued out and thus sustaining the
wherewithal for the next crop to be planted and to come in, etc.) The article
below is about the first of these. As for machinery--only 75% of US industrial
capacity is now being used. That means that--all things equal--there is enough
machinery (and, by extension, materials) to increase the size of the workforce
by
@ 33% swamping even more real estimates of un- and under-employment than the
numbers given in the article below. Sustenance is readily available, there are
no shortages of this or that that prevent the entire able population from
toiling and making even more that it took for them to make it. Did I lose you?
Before I wrote: "There is a secret about work. A secret that is uncovered
every time someone is hired. The secret is that that the worker brings more to
the table than he takes from it. Every person who labors adds more than she is
paid." So sustenance ain't no problem. As for housing...Put us in tents, FEMA
trailers whatever while we build our own and others' housing. But let us work!
Who are we kidding? They won't let it go down like this cause there's
something left out of the above. What's left out is the M-O-N-E-Y. They can't
and won't let us do it like that cause like that we would be working to create
things that people need but not things that people would have to buy. That's
the only way it would work.
How to finance this? Assuming a transitional stage between the capitalism that
is dying and the socialism we will be creating, you do it the same way that
they financed a new bubble in banks and Wall Street to replace the bubble blown
up by banks and Wall Street: you print money. But with the Federal Reserve it
is:
"Trillions for Billionaires but not One
Red Cent for the Red-blooded Workingman and -woman"
Commentary December 16, 2010, 5:00PM EST text size: TT
Behind the Jobs Number: A Messy Reality
Why the unemployment rate gives only a partial snapshot of the tough labor
markets-and why economists worry that the flow of people in and out of the
labor force has become stagnant
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_52/b4209031495106.htm
SData: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Foxconn Technology Group, News Reports
Among the many statistics that economic policymakers look to, none matters more
than the "jobs number," and 2010 was the year it refused to drop. Today the
national unemployment rate hovers near where it began the year, just shy of 10
percent.
For all its totemic power, the jobs number masks a messier reality. It is only
an estimate, like a poll or a Nielsen rating, the product of a complex process
of research and calculation. Without understanding the assumptions built into
the figure, we can't fully understand what it can and cannot tell us.
The poor have always been with us, but the notion of unemployment is more
recent. Through the 19th century in Europe and the U.S., there was no need
conceptually to separate unemployment and poverty-for everyone except the
landed gentry, not working basically meant being poor. English "poor laws" had
a distinctly moralistic cast: They required individual parishes to set up
almshouses for the "impotent poor" and workhouses for the "able-bodied" poor;
beggars and vagrants were thrown in jail and even executed.
It was the Great Depression that changed public attitudes-the ubiquity of
joblessness and the way it reached up into the middle class turned what had
been seen as an individual moral failing into something else: a symptom of a
sick economy. For the first time, governments tried to count the unemployed.
The U.S. released its first numbers in 1940. Appropriately enough, the survey
that provided the numbers was a Work Projects Administration initiative meant
to employ some of the Depression's jobless millions.
Central to this calculation is the notion that to count as unemployed one not
only has to want work but to be actively searching for it. The Bureau of Labor
Statistics household survey from which the rate is derived defines someone as
unemployed only if he or she has searched for a job in the past four weeks: by
sending out a résumé, for example, or placing an ad. This makes sense-those not
even trying are unlikely to get hired. As the BLS sees it, they are not even
part of the labor force. Still, that means the official stat leaves out a lot
of men and women who are not working because of the particularly grinding
nature of this economy.
The BLS does keep track of these nonemployed workers; it just doesn't
categorize them as unemployed. Instead, it describes them as "marginally
attached to the labor force." These are people who do not have a job, who would
like one, and who have looked in the past year, though not the past four weeks.
Many report that they had to stop searching for personal reasons-school or
illness or family responsibilities-while others say they are not looking
because, in essence, they have given up. That subset is called, aptly,
"discouraged workers." If the jobs number included all of these nonworkers, the
November 2010 rate of 9.8 percent would climb to 11.3 percent.
Now consider those who are officially counted as employed but who are only
working part-time because part-time work is all they can find. If these
not-by-choice part-timers are added in, the percentage-no longer an
unemployment rate, but something like a measure of the total labor
underutilization of the economy-climbs to 17 percent. It's a significantly
grimmer picture.
What even that bleak figure leaves out, though, is the dynamic nature of the
labor market. No matter what the unemployment rate, workers are constantly
moving into and out of the labor force. Even as one middle manager or mechanic
is being fired, another somewhere else is getting hired, and while a freshly
minted college graduate is just hitting the job circuit, his or her grandfather
is preparing to retire. There is a cyclical, often seasonal quality to labor
flows-retail companies hire to deal with the holiday rush, construction picks
up in the spring and slacks off in the fall, and the beginning of summer sees
the labor force expand when students start their school breaks. The official
unemployment number controls for these factors and many others.
What worries economists today is not just the size of the unemployment number
but how this flow has slowed and, for a large portion of the labor force,
become stagnant. Today, 6.3 million Americans have been unemployed for more
than 27 weeks. In December 2007, when the recession started, only 1.3 million
were stuck in that category. These are workers who are not giving up, who are
still answering ads and attending networking events and contacting employment
agencies. For more than six months they've been unable to find a job, yet
haven't quit the fight and dropped into the ranks of the discouraged and
marginally attached. They've remained determinedly, even defiantly, part of the
"jobs number."
Bennett is a reporter for Bloomberg News.
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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