Jobs

There is a lot of discussion about jobs and the economy lately. This week the Labor Department announced that jobs growth had increased.

The American economy added 290,000 jobs in April — the most in four years or so. At the same time, the jobless rate grew to 9.9 percent, after hanging at 9.7 percent for three consecutive months.

The latter figure was explained as discouraged workers returning to the job market. Maybe so. A lot of those jobs were temporary census jobs.

There is also a theory that the lost jobs may never come back.

More on that here.

Three industries, in particular, where many jobs may not be coming back are retailing, manufacturing and advertising.

Retailers have lost 1.2 million, or 7.5 percent, of jobs that existed before the recession, according to Labor Department data. Circuit City and Linens & Things have collapsed. Starbucks closed nearly 800 U.S. stores. Robert Yerex, an economist at Kronos, a work force management company, estimates 20 percent of those jobs are never coming back.

Manufacturing has shed 2.1 million jobs, or 16 percent of its total, since the recession began. Goodyear Tire & Rubber and Boeing Co. laid off a combined 15,700 people during the recession. General Motors eliminated 65,000 through buyouts and layoffs. And as Americans buy fewer cars and homes, more than 1 million jobs in the auto, steel, furniture and other manufacturing industries won’t return, according to estimates by Moody’s Analytics.

Advertising and PR agencies have lost 65,000 jobs, or about 14 percent of the pre-recession total. Moody’s Analytics estimates those industries will lose even more within five years.changed the Railway Labor Act to encourage unions to organize Delta Airlines.

Under an interpretation of the Railway Labor Act dating to 1934, aviation and rail workers who don’t vote on whether to form a union have been counted as “no” votes. That means a union could not be approved without a full majority of employees voting yes.

Under the National Labor Relations Act governing the vast majority of private-sector workers, a union can be created if a majority of the votes cast are in favor of collective bargaining. In such elections, nonvotes don’t count.

The rule change by the NMB mandates that unionization votes for air and rail workers be tallied in the same manner as in other industries.

Now, if 5% of employees vote in a union election, the rest may be forced to join or pay dues to the union. That should help jobs !

It’s hard to exaggerate how bad the job market is. Here’s one arresting fact: One of every five men 25 to 54 isn’t working.

Even more alarming, the jobs that many of these men, or those like them, once had in construction, factories and offices aren’t coming back. “A good guess…is that when the economy recovers five years from now, one in six men who are 25 to 54 will not be working,” Lawrence Summers, the president’s economic adviser, said the other day.

Is this true ? Are poorly educated men facing permanent unemployment ? The jobs picture had some dark spots as the overall unemployment rate climbed.

Reflecting the modest nature of this recovery, the report included some negative notes. The overall jobless rate, including people who have stopped looking, jumped to 17.1%, which is the highest rate this year. More disturbing, the share of those out of work for 27 weeks or more reached another record of 45.9%. This means that some 6.7 million Americans have spent more than half a year without maintaining the skills and contacts they’ll need to compete across a lifetime.

This is a worry. Government employees have not seen layoffs yet although they will be coming in California soon. The private sector is reeling.

Demand for workers who haven’t much education—which includes many men, particularly minority-group men—is waning. A shrinking fraction of them are working. Some are looking for work; some have given up. Some are collecting disability benefits or an early-retirement pension. Some are just idle. On average, surveys find, the unemployed in the U.S. spend 40 minutes a day looking for work and 3 hours and 20 minutes a day watching TV.

One of every five men between ages 25 and 54 isn’t working, and jobs once available for men in construction and factories continue to dry up in the U.S.

For 50 years, the fraction of men with jobs in what once were prime earning years has been trending down. Over the same decades, the share of women who work has been rising, a significant social change that lately has cushioned the blow of Dad’s unemployment for many couples.

Women have suffered less in this recession. They were more likely to be in health care and other jobs that weren’t hit as hard as construction and manufacturing. They are increasingly likely to have the education so often required to get or keep a good job these days.

I think this is too pessimistic and I also think the value of a college education has drastically declined in the past 30 years. I have talked to small businessmen and small business is the source of most jobs for men since heavy industry, like the auto companies, has contracted. Many of these small businesses are busy and their employees are working full time. What is the difference ? A lot of the men I know who are working have skills with tools. A lot of the long term unemployed have limited skills other than the work they were doing, like residential loan processing, that isn’t coming back.

My neighbor runs a flooring business out of his home. That is technically against some city code or other but he is a good guy and I don’t care. I run a small (very small) consulting business out of my home. He has a big truck loaded with carpet in front of his house most days. He does a lot of theater work so they work at night a lot. He has a bunch of young men working for him, all US natives, and they work hard. The hardest thing a small business employee says about new hires is seeing them arrive on time Monday morning. A lot of American kids have not learned a work ethic. The illegal aliens often work harder.

I had my house painted two months ago. The guys who own the painting business are Asian but their employees are Hispanic. They did a good job and worked quickly. Some of the painters spoke good English and some didn’t. I also had some guys from a pest control company check my home for termites and they found a number of areas of dry rot. There are also termites in my attic and I will have the house tented when it is sold, as it is for sale. The fixed the dry rot, including replacing a window, and did a great job at a reasonable price. The guys told me they were all construction workers who had gone to work for the pest control company and they did good work; very good work.

The one thing that Obama and his administration can do to help jobs is to aid small business. Since they appear to be doing the opposite, I don’t expect much but I do see people working. Maybe they aren’t making the money that the Ford assembly line workers make but there are a lot fewer jobs like that. I deal with plumbers, like Joe the Plumber, and with electricians. They are working. Restaurants are in trouble but I was in one last night for a Mother’s Day dinner with the family and it was very busy. Maybe weeknights are slow. I see retail stores going out of business and I fear a lot of them won’t come back in my lifetime. Those, however, are not men’s jobs. My college student daughter got a restaurant job a couple of months ago but the business is slow and she is only getting three days a week work. She is looking for another job and can work her class schedule around if given enough lead time.

There’s an amusing piece on the Daily Beast on “Prostitute Moms”. Now there’s a job men can’t do. Of course there is a male equivalent.

After getting a women’s studies degree, Isabel entered the sex industry as a 24-year-old high-end escort, three years after her mother had died. Before she passed away, she told Isabel, “You own the means of production, you can be anything.” It’s unclear how she would have reacted had she lived to see Isabel working as an escort.
“When I got burned out from doing sex work, I drove a city bus for three years,” Isabel says. “They took my picture—I was the young female driver with a red streak in her hair—and made me the poster child for the union.” Isabel is also a trained clown (“I studied the Pachenko method”), a health practitioner, and an organic farmer.

Now, is there any doubt about the value of a college degree ?

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