I usually avoid posting about the economy, because I find it terrifically confusing and can't expect myself to be able to make it intelligible. However, reader PietB sent along a story that discusses in depth something I've referred to a couple of times here, which is the shift in the economy from one that benefits workers to one that benefits investors:
Three weeks ago, Dawn Zimmer became a statistic. Laid off from her job assembling trucks at Freightliner's plant in Portland, Ore., she and 800 of her colleagues joined a long line of U.S. manufacturing workers who have lost jobs in recent years. A total of 3.2 million — one in six factory jobs — have disappeared since the start of 2000. . . .
Even though manufacturing jobs have been declining, the country is enjoying the lowest average unemployment rates of the past four decades. The reason: the growth in the service industries — everything from hotel chambermaids to skilled heart surgeons.
One question I have had that no one seems to address is, "Do the unemployment figures reflect an accurate picture of real unemployment?" Actually, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, yes, as accurate as they can make it. It's worth taking a little while to read about how people are classed as "employed" or "unemployed." It corrected my idea of the monthly figures and how they are generated. (It's worth it to have some trust in government restored, even a little.) It also lays to rest charges that I have heard that some unemployed workers are being undercounted. They're not.
Under-employed, however, is another story.
We are also periodically presented with a figure of about 47 million people who are uninsured, as though that had no relationship to jobless figures. Take it as a reflection of our propensity to take things apart before we can understand them. It's not that that's an invalid way of working, but you have to remember to put the parts back together.
However:
Some economists say the United States is experiencing a normal economic evolution from farms to factories and now to service jobs.
"Every advanced economy has seen its employment in agriculture and manufacturing decline relative to services and America is no exception," said Daniel Griswold, an economist at the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank.
One can, like the Cato Institute, just look at this from a libertarian, "that's the way the cookie crumbles" point of view. (Which is one reason I consider libertarianism a morally impoverished political philosophy.) Every other government in the world protects its jobs from foreign competition -- we ship ours out to our competitors. This benefits those who own everything, but not the rest of us. (I really should have twigged to the idea that when George W. Bush spoke of "an ownership economy," he meant he and his friends would own it all. This is not reflexive Bush-bashing. Look at the state of the economy and who has benefitted.)
What it means in real terms for real people is that we have a problem in this country. It goes beyond the "mere" human dimension, although that is more than appalling enough. It means a real cost to our economic health.
This is one of those times when I feel like encouraging eveyone to go back and read Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants: the country is run by major corporations without even the pretense left of citizens having a voice. On its surface it's an engaging techno-corporate thriller, but the implications are scary.
And they're coming true.
2 comments:
I'm glad you found the BLS information. Two things to note about their definitions of employed and unemployed. If you work in a family business more than 15 hours, even without pay, you're employed -- you can be 14 and getting an allowance but you're counted as an employed adult. And if you don't actually apply for a job, you're not unemployed. That means that if you're 16 and working weekends in your family's store for no money, you're employed; and if you're reading want ads but don't apply for anything because there are no jobs you could successfully fill then you're not unemployed. My sense is that this skews the statistics somewhat in favor of the government without benefiting the working class.
In my neighborhood, there are a number of people who are out of work because all they've ever done was factory assembly and they're at an age where no one wants to re-train them -- age discrimination laws notwithstanding. And there are also quite a few people who can't get jobs because their education didn't equip them to understand and fill out applications, much less learn what's required to do more than wash dishes or scrub floors, and I'm not thinking of immigrants -- I'm thinking of young American-born high school "graduates" who can barely read and have no reasoning or memory skills. (Dish washing is mandated to be by mechanical dishwashers in our health code if a restaurant has more than four tables; and janitors are unionized in Northern California.) Just examples, of course, but they point to certain problems with the government's definitions.
Sigh. I knew it was too good to be true. I glad you bring this up, because, while the BJS does admit that the sampling can't give comletely accurate results, I was still uneasy about certain categories being left out of the mix.
One thing that does puzzle me is the claim that we've lost 3.2 million jobs. We had lost 3 million by 2003 (?), and I don't think job creation has been keeping up even with new entries into the market since then. Add in the mass layoffs every once in a while, and I just have an intuitive sense something not being said.
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