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U.S. Jobs Boom for Whom?
by
Seth Sandronsky
Dissident
Voice
November 10, 2003
“Hey,
did you see that the economy is improving?” my neighbor asked me. He was, sarcastically, referring to the
White House and American media spin on the Oct. jobs report.
Case
in point is “Bloom Is on the Economy,” the headline of a NY Times article on
Nov. 8. Readers learned the U.S.
economy last month experienced a “surge in employment.“
The
nation’s payrolls added a total of 126,000 new jobs in Oct., bringing the work
force to 130.1 million, according to the Labor Dept. Overall, 286,000 new jobs were created in Aug.-Oct., a sharp
contrast to the previous six months of job losses.
Is
this the end of the “jobless recovery?”
That happens when the economy grows without creating new employment.
On
Nov. 7, President Bush said he will not rest "until everybody who wants to
work can find a job." The previous
week, the president had backed the creation of “jobs aplenty for those looking
for work.''
Presumably,
Bush’s three tax cuts are finally spurring new job creation.
That,
in turn can fuel consumption and economic growth.
The
U.S. economy did grow at a 7.2 percent annual rate during Aug.-Sept.
Yet
consumer debt, seasonally adjusted for the same period, rose by $15.1 billion,
a 9.7 percent annual rate, according to the Federal Reserve Board.
Credit
is the unmentioned force driving consumers’ buying power. Why?
Part
of the answer is workers’ real wages.
They have been flat for the past year, unlike living costs.
As
a result, workers are going deeper into debt to pay their bills. For example, employers are increasingly
forcing employees to pay a greater share of their health care.
In
Oct., most of the new employment was in the low-wage service sector. Job losses for factory workers slowed, but
the decline in manufacturing employment continued as it has month after month
on Bush’s watch.
At
one point in the NYT article, reporter Floyd Norris noted “The unemployment
rate fell to 6 percent in October, down from a peak of 6.4 percent in June but
still far above the low of 3.9 percent reached in December 2000. The rate would
have gone higher save for the fact that some people dropped out of the labor
market, and therefore were not counted as unemployed.”
“Some
people?” What is being covered and
covered up here?
Officially,
a total of 1.6 million Americans were “marginally attached” to the job market
in Oct., having searched in vain for paid work during the past year. However,
these folks are not counted as jobless due to their not seeking employment in
the 28 days before the Labor Dept.’s Oct. survey.
“Of
the 1.6 million, 462,000 were discouraged workers--persons who were not
currently looking for work specifically because they believed no jobs were
available for them. The number of
discouraged workers was up by 103,000 from October 2002.”
“Some
people,” indeed. If that is not
patronizing, we need a new definition of the term.
“In
October, 2.0 million unemployed persons had been looking for work for 27 weeks
or longer, about the same level as in September,” Labor Dept. data found. “They represented 23.0 percent of the total
unemployed.”
Meanwhile,
America’s color line is alive and well in the job market. In Oct., the jobless rate for blacks, 11.5
percent, was more than twice that for whites, 5.1 percent, unmentioned in
Norris’ article.
This
skin-color trend in hiring is no fluke.
You will not learn much about that by reading the daily newspaper of
record in America, the NYT.
For
more on this racialized trend in the U.S. job market, we turn to Richard D.
Vogel. He details some of this
disparity in the Sept. 2003 edition of Monthly Review.
“The
unemployment rate for black males is consistently twice that of white males, a
consistency which represents a basic fact about the economic life of national minorities
compared to the white male population” http://www.monthlyreview.org/0903vogel.htm.
Such
a rate of joblessness means many things.
One is that being a poor black adult male in America increases the
likelihood of being imprisoned, since employers have little need for these
members of society.
Vogel
continues: “The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) developed a statistical
model to predict the chances of Americans going to prison during their
lifetime. Their model predicted that a young black man age sixteen in 1991 had
a 28.5 percent chance of spending time in prison during his life. This
prediction counts only felony convictions and does not include time spent in
local or county jails. When social class differences within the black
population are factored in, the prospect of poor black males being incarcerated
is probably double this figure—closer to 60 percent. And, if we add the
differential jail incarceration rates for blacks, a 75 percent likelihood of
going to prison is not an unreasonable estimate.”
Concerning
the past three months of jobs growth, incarcerated Americans have been and will
continue to be uncounted in the official government jobless report. They now account for 2.1 million people, the
highest number in the nation’s history.
Away
from the big lockup, my neighbor is probably typical of the general public. He
and countless other Americans have yet to see evidence of the improving
economy.
“Unless
the pace of job growth picks up dramatically, President Bush will be the first
president since Herbert Hoover to face re-election with a net loss of jobs,”
wrote Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy
Research. Expect the Bush White House
in the next year to sidestep that link to Hoover (1929-1933).
* Temporary
Work Grows in Bush’s America
* 9/11
And America’s Criminal Justice Crackdown
* No
Skateboards For The American Empire
* Arnold’s
California Dreaming
* Under
Bush, U.S. Economy Recovers, Unlike Workers
* Risky
Business: U.S. Borrowing And Foreign Lending
* In
California, The Ballot Box And The Market
* Globalize
That: Capital Flight to China
* In
US, A Job-loss Economy Emerges
* For
Black Teens, Jobs Crisis Worsens
* A
New Day for Affirmative Action?
* In
California, A Racial Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
* In
U.S., Slow Growth, Excess Inventory and Mounting Debt