The Jobs Crunch

randall_burns writes "Neither major party is accurately describing or combatting the Jobs Crunch that Americans are facing. Bad immigration policy-and bad trade deals are combining to decimate the middle class in America."

Comments

low unemployment compared to europe

[vijayiyer]

Since it's so fashionable to compare our policy to the European powers, let's look at some of the numbers. In France, unemployment was 9.3% as of last year. Germany's unemployment rate was 9.7% as of 2 years ago. We had a bubble during the 90s, and it's only expected to pay the price now. The economy moves in cycles and is an extremely complex nonlinear system. To conclusively blame immigration and trade policy as the cause for an increase in unemployment is easy, but unfortunately also meaningless.

Immigration policy

[Tim C]

Yeah, it's always the fault of those pesky foreigners...

Xenophobic Bullshit

[billstewart]

"Bad Immigration Policy"? My ancestors let your ancestors move to North America, so don't bitch if we let other people move here too. Meanwhile, when I moved to California from New Jersey, I came twice as far as a typical Mexican immigrant, and I only speak one of the four or five main languages used here in SF, but nobody made me ask permission from some bureaucrat to move here.

Yes, we've got a job crunch in this country, and we had a severe job crunch in the dot-bomb technology industry, with an estimated 49% of San Francisco's high-tech jobs disappearing, so my friends were affected much more strongly than the average American, and there's a non-trivial chance I'll get laid off next week.

• One reason we're having trouble is that technological change created a lot of temporary opportunities for jobs until the market figured out what the web business was really worth and the VC money all dried up.
• Another reason has to do with rapidly rising interest rates in Y2K, which _is_ something politicians had a lot of influence on, which happened as the Y2K-conversion software boom jobs dried up and the dogfood-on-line.com companies were running out of their early funding rounds.
• Another reason is that Bush's protectionism raised the price of steel, hurting any American manufacturers who used steel, harming a lot more business than it saved.
• Moore's Law really zapped the telecommunications industry, by suddenly giving us near-infinite fiber bandwidth when everybody's construction funding had depended on selling it at slowly declining prices, and the "Internet capacity demand doubling every 15 minutes" phenomenon only slowed down the crash a bit.
• Information wants to be free and the Internet lets anybody work from anywhere in the world. That seemed like a good reason for everybody to move to San Francisco, but in fact anybody in the world who's reasonably educated can compete with us, even if the xenophobes don't let them move here. That's not just the software business - almost any white-collar job is really about either manipulating information or talking to people face to face; the cost of phone calls dropped to near-zero once government monopolies in most of the world realized that white-collar jobs were more important than ripoff telephone prices.
• Container shipping means that not only can information go anywhere in the world, physical stuff can be transported cheaply too, so manufacturing jobs can easily be done around the world.
• The American Education System has been declining over the last 30 years, just in case you thought this was a purely Libertarian rant. School systems aren't putting out the quality of education they used to, which means that students aren't prepared for high-value jobs, but schools also aren't teaching mechanical skills that laborers would use.

Thank god for that article

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank god for that article. I was beginning to wonder if *I* might be the one responsible for my unemployment due to my choice of remaining in a one factory town, with my limited skill-set, narrow education, zero-ambition and unwillingness to take any job that was far beneath my abilities that can apparently be replicated by someone who grew-up in a third world country without indoor plumbing while educated in a classroom with a dirt floor. I'm so glad I can blame them foreigners and people in Washington. I was almost thinking that I was some kind of loser slacker who spent all my time on message boards downloading music (cause it was meant to be free!) and not trying to make myself into someone with valuable assets. Not my responsibility. There's no way you can convince me otherwise now. Forget the "data", this economy sucks because all my loser friends are out of work too.

Re:All I know is...

[dlelash]

...and a recovery is when George Bush is out of work.

Re:Outsourcing

[Iffy Bonzoolie]

I was gonna mod you up, but I decided to post a response instead. Lucky you! I don't entirely agree with your post, so I wanted to blab on about my silly ideas.

I take serious issue with anyone who wants to try and suppress outsourcing or "globalization" in any way. Not because I think it's good for me personally - it's bad for me personally, as a software engineer in the Silicon Valley... at least in the short term. But this attitude is similar to the attitude of the RIAA who wants to fight the inevitable. The world is changing, national economies are becoming one global economy. You can try and fight it, but we will just be damaging our position in this new global economy. It's going to happen, whether we like it or not. The ubiquity of the Internet that gave us such prosperity in the late 90's has also helped to ensure the inexorable approach of globalization.

The question we has to ask ourselves is not "How do we stop outsourcing/globalization?" The question is "How do we make sure we have a strong position in the new global economy?"

Unfortunately, I don't have any firm answer I can beat people around the head with. It's a hard problem. I have some ideas, though (of course). I think what will keep us fiscally healthy as certain types of jobs become more efficient to export is innovation, pure and simple. We need to encourage innovation and entrepreneurialism, which will not only create new jobs, but new TYPES of jobs, new fields, and new skills that we will have a distinct advantage in possessing.

Assuming you buy that idea at all, the question then becomes, how do we promote that? We already have a culture that encourages individualism, creativity, and risk-taking. I think that's a good start. But we need to focus more heavily on education. We should be more aggressive about the expectations of our children. Perhaps have some government subsidy of pre-schooling. More education about education - make sure kids know what their options are. Anyone that can finish high school can go to a university or a vocational school and get some basic knowledge about a field where there is a chance they will innovate. There's all sorts of loans or scholarships available for people who don't have the money. There are some exceptional people that will be revolutionary no matter what schooling or environment they come from, but innovation will be more common given more rigorous and effective education. I think the government should aggressively fund and incentivize education at all levels.

The other thing that's REALLY important is making it EASY to start and run a small company. Small business is extremely important in innovation, and local job creation. Joe (or Jane) Upper-Middle-Class-with-a-Bachelor's-degree-and-an -idea is not going to offshore anything. He is going to find someone local. The easier it is for him to stay in business, the longer that someone local has a job. And, the more people who can start small businesses are more people who can try their ideas out and perhaps start the next industry people will be scrambling towards.

I think the US government, in order to protect its country's position of economic dominance over the next 20 years, must take an active role in shaping America into as Educated and Creative a country as it can. Big business leads to monopolies leads to a lack of innovation, competition, and freedom leads to mediocrity and the death of Capitalism. Why does our government encourage big business over small business, other than simply corruption?

Ok, I've started ranting. I'll stop now.

-If

Re:All I know is...

[mankey wanker]

Check the date on that one. IIRC Bush changed how the government collects it's data by purposefully underfunding and cutting certain unemployment tracking programs.

Let's face it - the gang in power is just a bunch of "Cheap Labor Republicans." They are gunning for your job because it can be done cheaper somewhere else. These guys make money by keeping labor costs down, not by a a booming economy that benefits you or yours. Catch a clue.

Political Reality Redacted

Several months ago I watched Joe Hough, President of the Faculty and William E. Dodge Professor of Social Ethics at the Union Theological Seminary, speak on Bill Moyers "Now" and I was immediately impressed by both his passion as well as the following statement that he made:

HOUGH: The growing gap between the rich and the poor which has become almost obscene by anybody's standards, and the stated intentional policy of bankrupting the government so that in the future there'll be no money for anything the federal government would decide to do. http://www.pbs.org/now/printable/transc...print.ht ml

Now some of you may be thinking that the above statement is somewhat extreme, and I used to wonder about that myself. But the statement haunted me. The reality is that some of what our current government is doing only makes sense if you consider "bankrupting the government" their actual goal. Have they not reduced taxes for the top 1%? Have they not also run a record deficit? When is a tax cut not a tax cut? When you run a deficit.

The bottom line is that it seems to be okay to run a deficit paying off federal war contracts to Halliburton, but god forbid they should run a deficit supporting job creation programs. And you'll forgive me if I don't consider the expansion of our military "true" job creation.

So what are they really doing? Why are they doing it? You have to ask those questions because it would be a mistake to assume that anyone, esp. an apparent imbecile like Bush, acts without purpose. The appearance of the dolt just might be the mask of a sly con man.

So who has the answers? There's this one guy that has it completely nailed. His stuff is so savvy, so on point that it is frankly scary in it's simplicity and clarity. So don't hesitate - go read it. If you can't handle it all at once, pace yourself - but read it, all of it. It's just four pages: two long, two short. And the rest of the site is excellent too if you still need more.

"CHEAP-LABOR CONSERVATIVE" ISSUES GUIDE
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/blurbs.htm

CATALOGUE OF BOGUS CONSERVATIVE IDEAS
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/bogusideas.htm

"PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY" AND WAGES
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/wages...bility.h tm

THE WRATH OF THE MILLIONAIRE WANNABE'S
http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/milli...nnabes.h tm

What's all this about in a few short sentences?

Labor is the true engine of any economy, wealth is not (it is the mere distribution of the results of labor). A boom economy benefits anyone that works for a living because labor is then scarce and labor is valued more highly. Those at the top require cheap labor to maximize their profits - so they hate boom economies. Everything our government is doing right now is intended to devalue labor. The unequal distribution of vast amounts of wealth into the hands of non-laborers makes democracy almost impossible (which is why the founders favored limits on almost everything that concentrated wealth into too few hands).

Let it sit with you a while and you will begin to realize that it explains everything from bad schools, pri

Tariffs make things BETTER, not worse

[Cryofan]

We Americans have a right to protect our jobs. And we have the means to do so.
This economic treason by the elites all started decades ago when they shipped out our advanced manufacturing jobs to Japan. Advanced manufacturing jobs are not assembly jobs, but more like fabrication jobs. See this article for more info.

Now they are doing the same thing to office work (like software, financial etc) that they did to advanced manufacturing. But we office workers are more able to stop them this time, mainly because we have some access to the media via the internet and boards like Slashdot.

Tariffs do make things worse, but only for the upper income group. For the average working person, tariffs are good.

Let me ask you something: if free trade is so good for lowering prices, then why is an average car costing more of the average salary now than it did 25 years ago? For more details on this check out Marshall Brain's Concentration of Wealth blog.

We WANT high labor costs! It's a Good Thing!

[Cryofan]

Labor costs are the PROFITS of the worker. You don't hear business owners complaining when their profits get too high, do you?

Look, the highest standards of living in the world are in the social demcracies of Europe, and they have HIGH labor costs--they have minimum wages levels of like $12/hour. High lahor costs are a GOOD THING...IF, and ONLY if you are a WORKER. Now, if you are an investor or business owner, that is a Bad Thing.

Fortunately, over 90% of Americans are WORKERS. Your problem is that you have been tricked by investor/corporate propaganda into thinking that YOU are an INVESTOR. Well, you AIN'T an investor. YOu are a WORKER. Deal with it. Accept it, and then help organize your country to HELP THE WORKER, like they do in Scandanavia.

The reason the 3rd world IS the 3rd world is that they have LOW LABOR COSTS. That is the DEFINTION of being 3rd world.

The reason many of the countries in NW Europe have the highest quality of life is because they have the HIGHEST COST OF LABOR. And it aint no accident. The two concepts are DIRECTLY RELATED.

Nice flamebait re: FDR

[quarkscat]

FDR tried to alleviate the suffering caused by
the depression's very high unemployment rate by
instituting SS, and work programs like CCC and WPA
that provided a public benefit. He did not make
lies, half-truths, and political doublespeak
an Executive Branch SOP. He did not slash
corporate taxes, and the tax rate of the very
wealthiest Americans, and then shift the tax
burdeon onto the backs of the shrinking
middle class. FDR did not encourage the flight
of American jobs overseas because "what's good
for General Motors is good for America". FDR
did not open the floodgates of illegal
immigration into this country to force wages
lower.

George W. Bush has done all these things, and
more. It is pretty sad when the only decent
paying jobs available to unemployed Americans
is to drive a truck through Iraqi free fire
zones. The high point of Bush's "job creation"
record was 135,000 new jobs in a month -- which
unfortunately doesn't even cover students from
high school or college entering the job market,
let alone those unemployed. Bush has embraced
"corporate national socialism", and abandoned
the working class. From all reliable accounts,
one of the Bush administration's top policy
goals was the invasion of Iraq, from before his
inauguration. All the lies and doublespeak that
was employed (WMD, terror links, and "imminent
threat" were cobbled together and used after
9/11/2001 as cover for this war. Each have
proved to be false. The Bush "war plank" was
an agenda hidden from the voters in 2000 by
such promises as "no foreign wars", "no nation-
building", etcetera, all while planning for
Saddam's ouster. Bush mismanagement of the
war in Iraq, and of domestic policy decisions,
have been equally disasterous to this country,
with the sole exception of the GOP-aligned
multinational corporations. George W. Bush
spoke the truth (finally) at a Washington,DC
fundraiser when he said "the HAVE's and the
HAVE MORE's are my base (constituency)".

If this country should be cursed with yet another
George W. Bush term of office, do not expect that
there will be any improvements in job growth,
health care, international relations, or the
war in Iraq. Do expect more tax cuts for the
corporations and wealthiest 2% of taxpayers.
Do expect SS and Medicare to be gutted, as Bush
finds new ways to drive the country deeper into
debt. Do expect greater loss of personal freedom
in this country, as "Patriot Act" extensions
are subverted to crush political opposition.
Do expect Bush to continue promoting religious
organizations as the only source of welfare
and social assistance. Do expect America's
open borders to continue to encourage illegal
immigration, because America's businesses
want ever cheaper labor.

Re:All I know is...

[Mouse42]

All right! Really? So by Tuesday I'll have a nice profitable business?

Oh wait. First I need money to pay for an office to hold my new employees. Plus, I'll need money to pay for the employees. And I'll need money for whatever supplies are needed for these employees to do their jobs (computers, products, etc).

Oh, and then I'll need time finding the place to rent, supplies and employees. In addition, I'll need time to plan out what business I'm going into, as well as strategy to make it profitable.

Hm. Yeah, that ain't happening in 2 business days even given my full weekend head start. I might be able to muster up enough grocery money in 2 days, not enough money to start a business.

Did you really think about this comment before you posted it? I think you meant it takes two days for a rich person to set up a profitable business, with the previous months spent in planning.

Re:All I know is...

[xigxag]

Why go to snopes when you can go to the source?

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_faq.htm#Ques5

Who is counted as unemployed?

Persons are classified as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior 4 weeks, and are currently available for work.

Now, if you look at the qualifications for collecting unemployment, you'll see that unemployment eligible people are a proper subset of "unemployed" people. If you're unemployment benefits ineligible, you're not considered "unemployed." So the poster you were disagreeing with was exactly right in saying that the figures "don't count people who're no longer collecting unemployment and have simply given up.."