The horror show underlining the nation's lingering employment crisis
By Bob Herbert
Syndicated columnist
The employment situation in the United States is much worse than even the dismal numbers from last week's jobless report would indicate. The nation is facing a full-blown employment crisis and policymakers are not responding with anything like the sense of urgency that is needed.
The employment data for July, released by the government Friday, showed that private employers added just 71,000 jobs during the month and that the unemployment rate remained flat at 9.5 percent. But as bad as those numbers were, if you look beyond them you'll see a horror show.
Government workers were walking the plank from coast to coast. About 143,000 temporary census workers were let go, and another 48,000 government employees at the budget-strapped state and local levels lost their jobs. But the worst news, with the most ominous long-term implications, was that the reason the unemployment rate was not higher was because 181,000 workers left the labor force.
With many of them beaten down by the worst jobs situation since the Great Depression, they just stopped looking for work. And given the Alice-in-Wonderland way in which we compile our official jobless statistics, they are no longer counted as unemployed.
Charles McMillion, the president and chief economist of MBG Information Services, is an expert on employment and has been looking closely for years at the issue of labor force participation.
"Over the past three months," he said, "1,155,000 unemployed people dropped out of the active labor force and were not counted as unemployed. Even ignoring population growth, if these unemployed had not dropped out of the labor force, simple arithmetic shows that the official unemployment rate would have risen from 9.9 percent in April to 10.2 percent in July, rather than — as it has — fallen to 9.5 percent."
Because of normal growth in the working-age population, the labor force increases by roughly 150,000 to 200,000 people per month. If those folks were factored in, said McMillion, "unemployment now would be even higher than 10.2 percent."
We are not even beginning to cope with this crisis, which began long before the onset of the so-called Great Recession. The economy is showing absolutely no sign of countering the nation's staggering jobs deficit.
"We have a large number of people who have just given up hope of finding a job," said McMillion. He pointed out that there are record numbers — "I mean lights-out record numbers" — of long-term unemployed people who are still looking for jobs. Of the 14.6 million men and women officially counted as unemployed, nearly 45 percent have been out of work for six months or longer.
The New York Times' Michael Luo wrote a moving article last week about the people who have started calling themselves the "99ers," meaning they have been out of work for more than 99 weeks and thus have exhausted the maximum in unemployment benefits. Nearly a million-and-a-half people have been out of work for at least 99 weeks — and not all qualified for jobless benefits.
Said McMillion: When you combine the long-term unemployed with those who are dropping out and those who are working part-time because they can't find anything else, it is just far beyond anything we've seen in the job market since the 1930s.
They may be thinking about this in Washington, but they sure aren't doing much about it. The politicians' approach to the jobs crisis has been like passing out umbrellas in a hurricane. Millions are suffering and the entire economy is being undermined, and what are they doing? They're appropriating more and more money for warfare while schizophrenically babbling about balancing the budget.
At some point we're going to have to claw our way out of this denial. With 14.6 million people officially jobless, and 5.9 million who have stopped looking but say they want a job, and 8.5 million who are working part time but would like to work full time, you end up with nearly 30 million who cannot find the work they want and desperately need.
We've got more and more people in our working-age population and fewer and fewer jobs to go around. McMillion says there are now 3.4 million fewer private-sector jobs in the U.S. than there were a decade ago. In the past 10 years, we've seen the worst job-creation record since 1928 to 1938.
We're not heading toward the danger zone. We're there. The U.S. will not remain a stable society if this great employment crisis is not addressed head-on — and soon. You cannot allow joblessness on this scale to fester. It's wrong, and the blowback will be as destructive and intolerable as it is inevitable.
Bob Herbert is a regular columnist for The New York Times.
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“We could cut unemployment in half simply by reclaiming the jobs taken by illegal workers,” said Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, co-chairman of the Reclaim American Jobs Caucus. “President Obama is on the wrong side of the American people on immigration. The president should support policies that help citizens and legal immigrants find the jobs they need and deserve rather than fail to enforce immigration laws.”
LA RAZA HARRY REID’S STATE IS NOW 25% ILLEGAL!
The president’s attention is a favor to Senator Harry M. Reid, the Democratic majority leader, who faces a tough re-election battle in Nevada and promised to pursue immigration legislation in an appeal to his state’s growing Hispanic population.
MOST OF THE FORTUNE 500 ARE GENEROUS DONORS TO LA RAZA – THE MEXICAN FASCIST POLITICAL PARTY. THESE FIGURES ARE DATED. CNN CALCULATES THAT WAGES ARE DEPRESSED $300 - $400 BILLION PER YEAR!
“The principal beneficiaries of our current immigration policy are affluent Americans who hire immigrants at substandard wages for low-end work. Harvard economist George Borjas estimates that American workers lose $190 billion annually in depressed wages caused by the constant flooding of the labor market at the low-wage end.” Christian Science Monitor
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