The job market is even worse than the 9.1 percent unemployment rate suggests.
America’s 14 million unemployed aren’t competing just with each other. They must also contend with 8.8 million other people not counted as unemployed ”” part-timers who want full-time work.
When consumer demand picks up, companies will likely boost the hours of their part-timers before they add jobs, economists say. It means they have room to expand without hiring.
This article is on the front page of the local paper today, but I was unable to find it (*&^%^%$%%) on their website.
Yes, I read this article online the other day and the impact needs to be contemplated. Thankfully, my son is employed but when he finally got enough weekly hours long enough to qualify for benefits, the company had to make the decision to either cut benefits or lay off employees. The benefits are gone. If/when things turn around, I would imagine that employers will give more hours, maybe some small raises, and a few benefits to their existing workers rather than taking on new employees.
So what the unemployed need to do is to take something, anything, even if it’s just for 10-20 hours per week initially in hopes that they will eventually get close to full-time hours. That’s what my son did and it’s paid off. BUT, he’s young, single, and has that luxury. It’s probably impossible for a lot of people to do that, especially those who’ve been unemployed for a while and have exhausted their savings and resources.
That’s why this “chicken and egg” cycle is so worrisome. If the public doesn’t have money to spend for goods and services, then companies can’t grow and hire. But how can people spend when the job situation is so dire?
Oddly, upper-scale retailers have done better in the past year so the affluent are spending. But the real strength comes from larger middle-class spending power, which has greatly declined and will leave an indelible mark of frugality for a long time (which isn’t a bad thing, IMO, but will necessitate change in the economic landscape).
Teatime, what do you do when so many employers won’t even give first-time job applicants the time of day? What do you do when, time after time, employers say they prefer only applicants with experience, rather than take a chance and hire applicants and train them? Those employers need to be reminded that even [i]they[/i] had to start somewhere, and some one gave [i]them[/i] a chance once. They have very short memories, it seems.
Cennydd, One thing that I impressed upon my son was not to be single-minded and narrow in his scope of work and study. LOL, they roll their eyes when you start with the “when I was your age …” stories but history does repeat itself. He’s seeing that now. His business studies are helpful but he’s actually employed right now based almost entirely on his hobbies! Since high school, he loved to record and mix music on his computer, build websites, etc. He saw an ad for a part-time radio program producer and had the skills to get the job. Once in, he was able to show them what else he can do and fill some gaps to get more hours.
He had to sign on for few hours and minimum wage at first and then prove himself to be valuable. That seems to be what it’s taking. When I was his age, I also was preparing to graduate from college in the middle of a recession and volunteered to work for free the summer before my senior year. One newspaper took me up on it and, as luck would have it, needed me and my skills shortly after I started so I did end up being paid. They even offered me a full-time copy-editing job if I was willing to stay and not return to school. (I didn’t do that, though.)
The “haves,” with the money and connections, always seem to land on their feet. The “have nots” have always had a tougher time of it. Unfortunately, though, the “haves” seem to be tightening their grip and closing ranks even more stridently than ever and the “have nots” are having to be even more persistent, creative, and resourceful. But this system isn’t sustainable. There is too much power and influence vested in an increasingly shrinking few.
But if the elites aren’t careful, they are going to buttrsss themselves into stagnation and potential irrelevance. When the masses are shut out of a system, new systems are created that fly under the radar and it takes a while for the mainstream to catch up. The masses may increasingly turn to a cash, barter and trade economy to help make ends meet. It’s already going on. The elites and other system cheerleaders may not realize and address the fallout until it’s too late for them to adjust. Oh well!
People are simplifying madly. Self-sustainability is the talk everywhere. There is a thriving under-the-radar economy of trading goods for services, organic farming cooperatives, and interest in energy independence. Those clinging to the status quo may be in for a big surprise if they are expecting people to forget and revert once the worst of this is over.
I’m really starting to believe that this period is not just an economic cycle or blip but the beginning of a very different emerging structure. Not a “new” structure at all but one based more on local communities, cottage industries, and self-determination.
Business consultants paid for by an extended family’s law firm are telling the firm to expect the current economic situation to be the new normal. No recovery greater than what we see now is coming, they say.
Which amounts to [b]ZERO[/b] recovery here where I live, but we at least have agribusiness to fall back on, and we can use it as a tool if we have to; the elites have to eat, too!
What we need is “A Marshall Plan to Rebuild American Manufacturing.”
During World War Two, the physical manufacturing capability of continental western Europe was systematically destroyed by an intensive Allied bombing campaign waged to constrain Germany’s ability to wage war.
During the last twenty years or so, the USA’s manufacturing base was dismantled (effectively destroyed) by industrial money managers seeking the cheapest possible labor in the world market place.
The end result has been a flood of inexpensively priced imported manufactured goods which an increasingly underemployed/unemployed American public has less and less money to purchase.
The answer is to bring manufacturing back to the USA. This will provide employment for Americans which will provide wages for the purchase of American-made goods.
However, there is a catch. In order to be competitive with imported goods and still make a ‘living-wage’ that will give them real purchasing power, Americans must become much individually much more productive than they were when we started shipping American jobs overseas.
This is where the ‘Marshal Plan for America’ comes into play. Since we have dismantled our factories and shipped them overseas, we will have to build new factories. These factories must designed and built to make the most of the American labor input. Each worker must become 3 to 10 times more productive than he was twenty years ago. This can be done by redesigning the products that we make and by introducing an extremely high level of ‘automation’ into our manufacturing plants.
Finally, the American worker must be content with a fair level of compensation for his labor and he must avoid the demagogic unionization such as that that debilitated our auto industry.
A “fair day’s pay” does not mean that a worker should be paid unreasonably high wages that will drive down the marketability of the products that he manufactures or which provide dis-incentives for entrepreneuring individuals or corporations to build a new manufacturing facilities.
If a worker has a just a high school education or less, then he should expect to be paid less than a worker who has prepared himself to become more highly productive through study and self-discipline.
Or to put it another way. If your afterwork pastimes are just pleasure-seeking and hanging out at the local bar rather than going to technical school, junior college or college to acquire useful skills, then you deserve less pay and should expect to be paid less.
In the end, a worker’s pay has to be based upon a fair compensation ajudicated a labor market place where there is competition for jobs and promotion.
Fair enough, but first, you’d have to sell it to the President, Congress, and American businessmen. In the present political climate, this would be a tough sell, in my opinion.
I have to disagree with your Marshall Plan, after all this is 2011 not 1911. We have gone beyond manufacturing as we know it. It only takes a team of 5 or less to run and SMT electronic assembly line and large scale integration has decrease the need for large assembly lines.
The path to growth should include we are moving from a manafactring base to a service and knowledge base. Sandly the ignorant who opposed charge has misaligned the service industry as “hamburger flipper “jobs. The truth is the serve industry is more about designing, transportation, servicing, selling the goods; rather than just manafacturing them.