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America's Second-largest Employer Is a Temp Agency
cold fjord writes "From the Examiner: '...the second-largest employer in America is Kelly Services, a temporary work provider. ... part-time jobs are at an all-time high, with 28 million Americans now working part-time. ... There are now a record number of Americans with temporary jobs. Approximately 2.7 million, in fact. And the trend has been growing. ... Temp jobs made up about 10 percent of the jobs lost during the Great Recession, but now make up a tenth of the jobs in the United States. In fact, nearly one-fifth of all jobs gained since the recession ended have been temporary.' The NYT has a chart detailing the problem."
and some places make you an 1099 but boss and work you like an W2 one.
It takes at least ten CIA agents to create and maintain a false-front job for me.
at least under the new bill part timers and temps can get real health insurance with out pre existing conditions or mini med planes that don't cover much.
Fire one full time employee and hire three temps at half the salary. This is a real money saver untill Obamacare makes you pay for benefits for anyone over 30 hours.
...in with the sharks.
A shall-remain-unnamed agency pulled a fast one. They said, "We lost the contract" AFTER I started working; redrew it... several times during my employment... and got away with making more than 2x what I was earning. Suffice to say, I would never want to work as a temp / contracted employee for such-a-business that shall remain unnamed.
Oh, yeah; and the bozo who "lost" my contract, quit the same day he lost it, which was the day AFTER I started working.
Anyway. Don't be fooled by numbers like these. I seriously doubt an organization as large as Kelly, with it's horrible reputation, could actively employ -- and handle -- ALL of these employees. And, temp can mean anything; from one month, two weeks, a few days, six months, or a year or two. It's not steady work, and frankly, organizations like these don't really care about the employee.
If you can, ALWAYS work directly with the employer.
If ever there was a term that marks you as someone who lives on their couch and consumes carefully constructed media messages..
"Great Recession" leaves the impression the only way you can interpret current events is by franchising them out to old historic dramas.
Employers are afraid to commit and invest in their employees any more. I worked at a call center that was a "temp-to-hire" once - they had around 50 full time employees, including the 20-odd folks in management. Another 100 were temp workers who were brought in, worked to the bone until they burned out, then let go. The highest performers (read: the people who didn't screw up) were offered full time positions with the company, or promotions. The need for this could have been alleviated with better training, but training employees is expensive. Better to hire a lot of them short term through a temp agency, see which ones fit in, and just let the others go, in a constant pattern of churn.
I quit that place despite being one of the rare full timers, because I decided I'd much rather work on computers directly than just talk to people about them.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
Executive bonuses are at an all time high, we Have It Under Control.
Le'ts face it, corporations are killing the economy by moving all of their work to foreign sweat shops and leaving no jobs.
But, as long as executives still get their huge payouts and stock prices continue to rise in the short term, Everything is OK. Never mind the fact that long term things are headed for the shitter.
And now Roman Mir will tell us another bed time story about how trickle down economics works and the Republi-fucks will save the economy by cutting all those regulations that keep them from making even more money by not polluting or making products which are dangerous.
You know, the political school of thought which says government should only protect the wealthy's interests, enforce contracts and leave the rest of us to fend for ourselves.
Here is our opportunity to lessen our average work week to be less than 40 hours. Now we just need our safety nets to keep up with the fact that a large percentage of the population will probably be working less than 40 hours per week in the future. In my opinion either the percentage of part time workers will continue to rise or the number of unemployed will start to rise. Hopefully we decide to fix the social problems caused by this with welfare programs instead of higher minimum wage laws this time (since small minded regulations create these problems in the first place).
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
My main interaction (that I know of) with Kelly Services was with Microsoft Recruiting. I can't say they did a good job, though I don't know who's fault the issues were.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/temp-hides-fun-fulfilling-life-from-rest-of-office,49/?ref=auto
Seems like everyone will be working for a temp agency or 1099.
The economy and government is looking more crooked and rigged if you could even believe that possible.
If those workers had good jobs and stable income they'd use their disposable income to wreck the environment with new cars and houses. Better that they subsist in a rental somewhere and keep voting for benefits.
We no longer need 40-hour work-weeks in the US. The productivity of the average worker is really damn high. But we've decided that cutting back hours to what's needed justifies a massive pay-loss.
This manifests in temp-jobs, migrant workers, bored salaried office workers dragged into offices for 40 hours a week. The net result is a less stable society, with a high GDP, and awful wages.
Please note this post represents an observational opinion that doesn't not necessarily represent a rigorously studied position, but rather an intuited one.
get rid of salary no overtime pay or make it 100K mini pay to have it like that.
also have a double OT pay kick it at 50-60 hour weeks
Maybe even make 35 the new full time with ot starting at hour 36.
Temp jobs are mainly an issue because being unemployed here sucks. If we gave everyone what we give the 1% of people in jail (food, medical coverage, shelter), being a temp employee wouldn't suck so much. If you didn't like it, you could quit without fear. That would solve the whole problem with shitty jobs (employers would have to pay you extra to be willing to do a shitty job). It would also put an end to the minimum wage issue: if they don't pay enough, you don't have to bother working.
Yes, having the 2nd largest employer in the country be a temp service speaks volumes about the alleged recovery and job market.
The first-largest is Wal Mart, which is pretty much the same, and horrible.
(2.2 million employees, 1.3 mill in the USA)
Yet curiously omitted from the figures?
Total number of US government employees? 2.8 million.
Total local/state employees? 19-some million.
So ~20 million people in this country get their paycheck from the government....that's what, about 7% of the entire electorate owes their income to the gubbermint? One might argue that due to a clear conflict of interest, they perhaps shouldn't get votes.
Some people would say that's even MORE revealing about the US (so called), not to mention the tendentiousness of the reporting on the story that it's NOT EVEN MENTIONED.
-Styopa
ObamaCare requires companies to cover insurance for full-time employees or pay a fine.
Result? Companies hire part-time workers and temps, avoid the onerous mandate.
Why else do you think Obama is desperate to push out the mandate deadline beyond the 2014 election, even though there's no basis for the executive branch to perform such a pushout in the text of the law itself?
Maybe this is a good thing. Or at least, could be a good thing.
Imagine, for a metaphor, that workers are computer servers. This would be like virtualization - since the amount of work needed is often variable, being able to quickly "provision" workers could be a benefit. And having an agency that employs these people could provide more stability for the workers, in the way that Amazon and other cloud providers get more heavily-utilized servers. And, as with the computer cloud vs. dedicated server debate, employees they *need* to have, or who provide some function that interchangeable employees cannot, can be hired full-time as they currently are.
In an ideal world, these workers would get all the benefits of permanent employment (medical coverage, unemployment benefits, even regular promotions and wage increases) via the temp agency. However, in the "anything that reduces corporate profits by one iota is COMMUNISM" economy we have, something tells me this isn't the case.
To avoid paying health & other insurances 2 create "Mo' Munny" profits 4 the 1%'ers (Yoodz) who don't work for their money (lol, you stupid fools do though), their monies work for them.
If you have more than say 50 employees, any employee that walks in the door, works more than 5 hours a week, must get full benefits.
More than 100 employees, if they work more than 1 hour a week, they get full benefits (including health care, paid vacation, etc)
Even wal-mart wouldn't be able to manage the number of employees it would require to fill 24 slots a day for 1 job slot...
Decades of worker productivity increases have come to head. Worker productivity is too high right now, there is not enough consumption to match this. As a result we are left with companies reducing the workforce as fewer workers now do the job of many. This in turn lowers consumption, and a downward spiral is created.
To alleviate this we need to move to a 30-hour work week as standard of full time and our employment problems will disappear overnight. Yes you can still make your worker work 40 hours, but now pay him time and a half. It will be better to hire an extra body to cover the extra hours. The wages plummeting are a result of oversupply of labor will stop. More people hired means more consumption. We can get this pony going again, until robots and 3d printers make labor obsolete.
Sure you can poke holes in Swiss Cheese solution, but I spent quite a while thinking about this, and it seems like the only viable solution.
In fact, nearly one-fifth of all jobs gained since the recession ended have been temporary.'
What in the what? I'd REALLY like to see a source on that, given that it's directly contradicted by the BLS.
http://www.bls.gov/webapps/legacy/cpsatab9.htm
Since the job market bottomed, we've created 5.4 million full-time jobs and 600,000 part-time jobs. How is that "nearly one-fifth"?
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Got a temp job at Deep 13. Never again!
Agreed.
Single-payer health care would definitely be a way to fix this.
Those are the same....hopefully thats just a typo....
People have been predicting the wealth economy for some time, but have no clear plan on how to transition to that model.
Here's an opportunity: redefine "full time" to be less than 40 hours. Our productivity is now so high that fewer people need to work, but at the same time we need to employ everyone in order to prevent unrest and revolt.
Productivity is high, so we should have more leisure time. GDP per capita has skyrocketed, it's doubled since about 1990, and the average citizen would get $40,000 per year if output was distributed evenly. That's every man, woman and child - employed or not, and every year.
Corporations have to start spending money on the people instead of cutting people out of production. Better educated workers, happier workers, healthier workers make your business stronger and give better return on investment than rehiring. Much better return than "cost accounting", which aims to make the cheapest product people can tolerate.
Government has to start rerouting wealth from businesses to the people, by way of infrastructure benefits. Free health care and free education, as well as infrastructure projects (national system of renewable power generation, universal internet service, &c) enrich the population without coddling to the lazy.
Production is met by an ever-dwindling need for human interaction. We should embrace this trend in a way that doesn't require armed revolt.
FTA:
Temp jobs made up about 10 percent of the jobs lost during the Great Recession, but now make up a tenth of the jobs in the United States.
Oh noes!
Electronic Plantation...
If you follow the links in TFA the data quoted is from 2010.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Doesn't double OT already kick in at 50-60? I worked at a shoe factor one summer and I thought it was hours over X or on Sundays that triggered double-OT for us.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
‘Bingo’: Iowahawk sums up the jobs report in one tweet about Taco Bell
David Burge @iowahawkblog
Unemployment report in a nutshell: the Taco Bell that had 30 40 hour workers now has 40 30 hour workers.
Behind the Dismal Jobs Numbers: The ‘New’ Economy Takes Shape
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Posting AC due to mod points.
In my limited experience, too many people my age (33) are still being funded by their parents. They work temp jobs, live at home, and keep saying they're going to do something but never do. I have to believe that there are many more of them out there who are being funded by all this baby boomer wealth. Again, it's anecdotal, but I do wonder how large this demographic really is.
Also, I agree that having some sort of minimum income safety net makes a LOT of sense, but we'd need to figure out some controls on who can get it and how to avoid fraud. Things like increased education and medical care probably would need to be put in place as well.
I don't see it ever happening, though, too much of this insane drive for profit plus the puritanical madness of work ethic. I just want to save as much as possible and retire early, live a simple lifestyle, and not look back. This working til you die thing is not what technology is supposed to enable us to do.
an IT hiring hall in needed like the other trades have. at least then the temp agency can have more of clue about IT stuff.
I thought the US Government was the largest employer in the US.
From this source:
This is called "Permatemping".
The Premise here, is that if you are marginally replaceable (Not in a union, doing something common or marginally skilled, usually in non-essential services, and there's a lot of potential candidates in the market), they can "pitch a bitch" at moments notice. Skill, Determination, Accreditation, Work History, none of these things matter. What matters is price and being able to convince a hiring manager if you have the stamp of approval from one of these places, you must be hire-able. And that's the respectable places. Permanent positions become "temporary positions", I've seen this go on for quite literally decades as the company circles the drain because nobody gives a damn about waste, afterall they are temporary.
The less than respectable places are set up by groups of Directors or Executives; the scam is they outsource positions through that company, skim off the top of employee's paychecks by not paying them benefits or proper wages, then put the money in their own back pocket either through bonuses and raises for themselves or by "managing" the outsourcing company as a "shareholder" (e.g. Oh mr Judge I had NO IDEA they were fulfilling positions DIRECTLY BELOW ME IN MY COMPANY). So long as the employee's are hired under W2 the government apparently does not care that they are not being offered health insurance, PTO, et-cetra. In some situations such as the one I just got out of this can be 3 or 4 layers deep, meaning you're sub-sub-sub-sub contracted and each company takes a bite out of your paycheck.
This is all a direct consequence of money-printing induced cheap credit, failure to prosecute wrongdoing, and bad financial policys enforced by our government all of which is obvious fascism on it's face and no amount of CIA\IRA\NSA\DHS\FBI induced spying and per-emptive arresting of dissident organizers will fix the inevitable change that will take place. Something to keep in mind; Obama-care says if you do not provide your employee's with health insurance you get to pay a $3,000 per empolyee "Fine". Insurance is a waste of money; you go bankrupt either way if something major happens. Fact is starting next year anyone can take out insurance next with a pre-existing condition and have it covered which is causing a doubling to quadrupling of price. Small businesses are being put out of business or are hiring through temporary agencies designed to avoid the scam. The best way is to convert your newly laid off work force to temp workers one by one as "positions open" because you need to hire new people.
I just got through one of those scams: I made 1% of market working with a fortune 500 companies IT Department in a non too small energy company making less than a third of what I should be making. I had unfettered local admin on well over 20k PC's to give you an idea of the kind of systems access. The company has serious IT Security issues but the scam will go on and on as it always does as the place burns up. I put up with it because I was going to school, now that I'm nearly out I'm not going to fudge around with that ever again.
The way you fight this is by making people aware of the scam, Also:
-You're temporary, so keep job searching and don't be shy about leaving on a moments notice.
-Unless you need to get your feet wet or are in a bad way, don't go for one.
-Always ask for High pay and benefits because the really good positions do not like underpaying and the good headhunters know the areas hourly rate. Managers often engague these companies to see if they can find cheap staff.
-Save your energy, don't put in the extra effort because, like overpaying for something, this is wasteful.
-Telling them what you were making has no affect on anything; If they say "well you were making XYZ therefor I should be able to place you at" tell them "Buearo of Labor statistics data says something otherwise fool".
-6 Month contract to hire from some Podunk place is fine so long as it says contract to hire on the
Now we just need our safety nets to keep up with the fact that a large percentage of the population will probably be working less than 40 hours per week in the future.
Welfare programs have to be paid for by taking money from somebody.
I know, we can take some of gains from improved productivity and automation over the last 40 years and use that to shore up social safety nets while still reducing the average work week to 30 hours!
Oh, wait, somehow every last bit of that got snorked up by capital, there's nothing left over for labor. How about "FUCK YOU" instead?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Don't believe the BLS. According to them less than 5% of all people in my field in my area makes less than 50k, yet I have not seen nor heard of one open position for more than 32k since 2008.
So how are these folks supposed to buy all the crap these companies are trying to sell? Or have they turned their back on the US market?
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
Bring in the idea of competing with more secure forms of employment and that can be made to change - where it cannot be a condition of employment to accept anything less than full-time/full-benefit work. To prevent a European-style response of stalled hiring, have the unemployed and new entrants become a protected hiring class as long as they've got less than 10 years of contiguous direct-hire (read: not with anyone like Kelly's staffing services) employment - which restarts on loss of employment.
If it's really about flexibility, then one's business model should not depend on desperate people or the circumvention of benefits - but of advantages that can compete with secure employment at any skill level. Otherwise it is about the control of desperate, disposable people - and nothing more.
Otherwise, this concept of less-secure and disposable employment needs to be killed from orbit with fire, just to be sure.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
America's second largest employer is Walmart, 2.2m worldwide, not all of them work in the US. For example 180,000 of them work for their Asda subsidiary in the UK. The largest employer, and indeed the largest employer in the world is the US Department of Defense[sic] which has 3.2m employees. They will be mostly Americans even if they don't work in the USA.
In most countries the number of birth/1000 is decreasing and it appears to be tightly coupled with the economic state of each country. In addition, there is nothing new about humans being replaced by machines (Farmers, phone operations, lumber cutting...). It has been happening since before the 1800 yet we live hundreds of times better than they did in the 1800. Human kind has a way of making it work out. As long as we keep working on world issues we will make it.
Unfortunately for you, the Buckeye State managed to defeat a stricter-than-Walker bill and the state is still doing fine. It also helps that the Republicans here know well enough to leave labor relations issues alone lest they incur a third 1958-level event.
If you want an example of how labor and business can cooperate, Ohio would be one of the better examples. Certain must-pass bills that are considered business-friendly in other states (the ALEC-written, multiply deployed Walker bill as well as the Ohio-defeat-by-referendum-inspired RTW bill) are not necessarily considered business friendly. That, and against the trend for transplants to opt for worker-hostile states (read: the entire South), Honda chose to locate itself in Marysville.
Certainly there's plenty of pressure against the state to harmonize itself with the South, but I don't expect it to be a law-violating lockstep action.
(Before you start citing the departure of NCR as evidence of business hostility, they were already on their way out in the 1990's)
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
they did jack the price up by $1 and still cut hours
Are you kidding? "Job Creators" will be the first people to whine about the corresponding tax increases to cover that kind of scheme.
People like to think money for this kind of stuff just comes from some magical pocket universe somewhere. That's not the case. Spain and Greece are great examples of this.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Apple phone support uses Kelly and they work 40+/week
There is no "decline in manufacturing"; manufacturing in the US is bigger than ever before, it's just that other sectors have grown even faster.
As for temp workers, what do you expect? The more difficult the government makes it to hire and fire workers and the more paperwork and cost is associated with hiring/firing, the more employers will simply hand off the risk of hiring to other companies. Obamacare and e-Verify will cause even more employers to rely on temp agencies.
Say "thank you" to Obama and progressivism.
You arguement is BS. Canada is having the same trend. They should just make all employees the same under the law and the issue goes away.
The article says it is a problem, but for many part-time work is preferred. For example, it solves the age old problem of working and having to look after children. In The Netherlands this is very common, especially among working tourists, giving them enough money to live and enough time to see the sights.
Fuck the "job creators". They've had tax cuts for 10+ years now, so where are the goddamn jobs? According to conservative orthodoxy, low taxes on the rich somehow create jobs, but it sure looks like they lied to us.
Which is actually a trend that I could get behind, if it didn't come with a complete loss of health insurance, vacation, and benefits as the worker leaves the realm of "full time". If there's less work to go around, it may be ok if we all work less. That's better than raising a generation of unemployed wards of the state who know no profession but crime.
Not happy with having already removed most of your rights as workers...
America's 2nd largest employer (after Wal-mart) is UPS, but we do hire through Kelly Services. I got my job there through Manpower, but I understand they rely on Kelly exclusively to pre-screen their employment candidates. I don't see a problem with temp-work. You get lot's of useful experience (better than an internship), you get paid for it, and if the company likes your work, they may well hire you on permanently. If you were brought in for a truly temporary job, when this one finishes, you for on to the next one and see if maybe THAT one's a good fit...
No, it's not. Unions are an especially antiquated and abhorrent notion to 99.999% of all IT workers. As someone who has been in the industry for almost 20 years, I can say quite confidently that no IT worker worth his or her salt needs a union fat-cat middleman creating an embedded adversarial relationship with his or her employer. We can negotiate salaries and benefits completely independent of anyone else and work hard with great ambition to create the kind of future and acquire the kind of salary we want based on the value we provide to the marketplace - you know, like how the vast majority of the world works.
Unions suck, period. I haven't taken positions with public entities specifically because I would have been forced to pay union dues whether I was in the union or not - and also because the salary sucked. Who actually wants a job when the hiring manager actually says "I have had guys here 10 years that don't make the salary you want?" Seriously? Let me NOT accept that job offer, thanks.
Temp jobs made up about 10 percent of the jobs lost during the Great Recession, but now make up a tenth of the jobs in the United States.
10% = .1 = 1/10 = a tenth....
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
I've heard of places with a 3-month trial period written into the contract. If it doesn't work out at that point, either party can cancel the arrangement with no penalties.
I got a TV tech support job at one place for a couple months through a temp agency. I eventually found out that the agency was taking a >20% cut of what the company was paying.
On the plus side, I got all the complicated (and thus interesting) equipment setup calls, because nobody cared how long my average call was but they came down hard if the actual employees took too long with the calls.
So long as the focus is on "jobs" and not "living-wage paying jobs" we will see this happen. Unemployment is an unavoidable evil and seeking to do away with it is just fighting a long lost battle.
Eventually (very soon in fact) machines will produce everything and all manufacturing jobs will go away, eventually (a few decades perhaps) machines will repair and maintain everything and all maintenance jobs will cease, and already machines are replacing service providers.
Frankly, there is zero reason for McDonalds to need a single employee right now. Every single job at McDonalds could be automated with mostly off the shelf technology available today. Case in point, all the product that McDonalds sells is already processed entirely by machines prior to shipment to the restaurant.
You would have a point if employers had to offer the choice of working directly for the same job and level of skill. Otherwise they act as employer-protecting unions that insulate from the worker.
That, and your lines look like they came straight from the ASA trade group.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Given that it lives and thrives off of desperate workers in the United States - as opposed to the ASA/pro-staffing agency talking points - it is a problem.
Once you've had good, secure employment - you wouldn't want anything less until you could afford to refuse it.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
And I hate to say it but being in the trenches i can say its true, the reason is Obamacare which i said before it passed was gonna be a disaster, and wadda ya know? it is.
What we NEEDED was a single payer option and caps on the crazy drug and insurance prices, what we GOT is practically a love letter to those same drug and insurance companies so all the businesses are just making everybody short timers. in the past few months i don't think I've had a single customer under 40 that is getting full time anymore, they ALL have been cut to less than 30. this is really hurting a lot of families and i expect to see disability and food stamp rolls explode as folks scrabble to get on the dole just to survive.
So don't buy the bullshit they are selling on the coasts folks, here in the heartland I can tell you things are pretty fucking bad. I have a feeling we are gonna be seeing a "dead kid and old folk" summer as the weaker kids drop and the old folks cook because their families can no longer pay the bill for the AC thanks to being put on short time, everything from construction to services are either letting folks go and replacing with short timers or are just making sure no employee gets above 30 but in both cases its really hurting the working poor folks, its really getting bad here in the flyover states.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
than pay a handful CEOs.
Some parts of the health care mandate like the penalty for not covering employees has been suspended until 2015 for all businesses, but, not the individual penalty(unconstitutional, regardless of judge dickhead Roberts pinhead judgement) for not having health insurance while earning something like $30k+ income. Yeah, that's where all our life savings is going towards the fucking monopolized(thanks to government) healthcare industry where hospitals,doctors, pharmaceuticals charge you whatever the fuck they want to until they clean you out.
Agreed. So would single-payer housing and groceries. With reasonable rates set by the government, of course.
With the planned immigration amnesty, you'll soon be competing against another 30 million people, who will displace enough people from their jobs that they'll be aiming for yours.
Enjoy your future as perpetual serfs of the corporate-media-globalist machine!
Futurist Traditionalism
Taxes should drop under such a scheme. 20% off the top of all bills if you have no malpractice and no insurance middleman overhead. Add in price bargaining, and you'll cut cost per person by less than half. Countries with socialized medicine pay less for a single-payer system than the US pays for medicare alone (not counting anything under the new obamacare). They pay less and cover more with better. Oh God no, make sure we don't get that. I'd rather have a for-profit death panel denying me treatment that results in my death than a non-profit death panel allowing my treatments, that's UnAmerican!
Learn to love Alaska
I understand your attraction to the single payer model. It is true, they could have tried to go that way, but I don't think there was enough political support to do it. There are other ways they could have gone as well that might have been better than what they got. Instead Congress passed a bill on a pretty much party line vote that was whatever they could scrape off the wall in the hopes of just passing anything and then patching it up after it passed. I guess we'll find out what the consequences are.
PRUDEN: Obamacare called ‘The fiasco for the ages’
You might find some irony in this:
Richard Nixon -- the last great liberal
Nixon was not only a fervent supporter of the Clean Air Act, the first federal law designed to control air pollution on the national level; he also gave us the Environmental Protection Agency. The creation of the EPA represented an expansion of government that would face fierce opposition were it being debated today. The EPA is also one of the agencies on Capitol Hill that the business community most detests—along with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which polices working conditions. OSHA is another Nixon creation.
Herbert Stein, chief economic adviser during the administrations of Nixon and Gerald Ford, once remarked: “Probably more new regulation was imposed on the economy during the Nixon administration than in any other presidency since the New Deal.”
How many remember that Nixon was a champion of affirmative action? “Incredible but true”, as Fortune magazine put it in 1994 when Nixon died, “It was the Nixonites that gave us employment quotas.” Though many credit John F. Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson with initiating affirmative action, it was rather Richard Nixon who first sanctioned formal goals and time frames to break barriers to minority employment.
Social Security benefits, a cornerstone of the Democratic Party platform, were also crucial to Nixon’s policies. He ushered in a minimum tax on the wealthy and supported a guaranteed income for all Americans, a move that would rile today’s Republicans to unprecedented heights.
And finally, consider health care: Nixon’s proposed reform would have required employers to buy health insurance for their employees and subsidize those who couldn’t afford it. Nixon’s version of national health care was a far more liberal concept than Bill Clinton’s or Barack Obama’s—and it failed because of Democratic opposition, not lack of support from Nixon’s own party. (Ted Kennedy later said that opposing Nixon’s health-care plan was one of his biggest political regrets.)
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
subtract-out the 4.2 million jobs lost during his term, the jobs picture looks less rosy.
Sure, he says he's not responsible for anything that happened in his first term other than his healthcare bill and his stimulus bill (all the bad stuff is Bush's fault of course) but Obama was no country bumpkin who got elected and then came to Washington for the first time just in time to be inaugurated.... Obama and Biden were both Democrat Senators before and during the 2008 meltdown and the Democrats at that time controlled the Senate. No matter how you cut it, he bears at least some responsibility. The BLS table you cite is fine, but it's always easier to see a graph like this one
Furthermore, Ronald Reagan actually did come to Washington from the outside when he inherited a far worse economic situation from Jimmy Carter (I'm old enough to remember it quite well) and Reagan was faced with a congress dominated by the other party (the Democrats ran the House and Senate whereas Obama had an overwhelming 2-to-1 majority control of both the House and Senate) yet Democrats blamed Reagan for the Recession AND all the related job losses. For consistency sake, Obama gets the blame for all the job losses of his terms of office... or else all Democrats must now loudly proclaim that Reagan was a FAR BETTER president than they have been willing to admit.... you don't get to have it both ways.
ONE place that suggested such a mandate (not the only source of the idea) was a think tank called "The Heritage Foundation" which is usually conservative and generally considered pro-Republican. Every think tank, however, produces policy papers from time to time that people on their own side reject. This idea that the mandate was something that only traces its heritage to the supposedly Republican Heritage Foundation was a political talking point Hillary Clinton tried to first use while pushing "Hillary Care" (the talking point was meant to say that Republicans opposing her plans were being inconsistent because somebody else somewhere else once supported one idea in it...) Obamacare supporters are just trying the same irrational talking point. It's like saying "Obama should support the Republican budget because some Democrats in a Democrat think tank once complained about deficits...
As for "corporate welfare"... actually it was Obama who bailed-out the car companies, doled-out billions of "stimulus" dollars to "green" companies, and stuffed his administration full of federal reserve and wall st banker guys while refusing to prosecute any of them for the meltdown... TEA Partiers (who many lefties consider the "worst" of the Republican camp) detest corporate welfare and all the crony capitalist corruption that goes with it
Oh, and Who Cares if liberals wanted an unconstitutional socialist scheme? If they want that they can always go to a country that has it (there are, by your assertion, plenty to choose from that are clearly better than the USA); it's a nasty business to try to deprive the rest of us of one of the last places on Earth where we still had freedom just so you could have another obnoxious socialist paradise...
It's just so screamingly stupid to put this on employers and say you want to create jobs. We would have been better off leaving it alone until there was the possibility go single payer. Now Obamacare will make a huge mess, and the republicans will point to it and use the failure to prevent anything useful from getting done.
I thought the democrats were supposed to be the smart ones this time around.
Link
You're not a person. You're not an employee. You're not even worthy of respect.
Are you kidding? "Job Creators" will be the first people to whine about the corresponding tax increases to cover that kind of scheme.
People like to think money for this kind of stuff just comes from some magical pocket universe somewhere. That's not the case. Spain and Greece are great examples of this.
People need to get over this idea that the idle rich are "job creators".
It's the people who make products and provide services who create jobs and support the economy. For the most part, these people are not rich enough to be paying the top tax bracket.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
This is what the racist Democrats want. Slaves. They need slaves to do the menial labor because they're too good for it.
I know this will not be a popular opinion here - and I will likely be moderated into oblivion for even daring to suggest it on this right-leaning site - but seriously a single-payer healthcare system could do a lot to resolve this problem. There are a large number of people in this country who seek out full-time work not because they want to work 40 hours or because they even want to live the lifestyle of a full-timer, but because it is the only way to get health care (and don't try to claim that the health insurance bailout act called "obamacare" changes this in a meaningful way, because it really doesn't). There are plenty of people who would take a 25% pay cut to work 30 hours if they could still get health care, but the vast majority of employers in this country won't allow it. There are others who would work fewer hours and then take the time difference to pursue an education or vocational training (and are hence instead stuck in a dead end position because they have lost that flexibility). There are even some who would take two part-time jobs to accommodate their scheduling needs, but again can't do it because of health care.
These people won't be served by the current system, or any system that has been proposed in the past two decades. These people would also make jobs available by leaving full time positions, which would help those who seek full-time employment currently.
But instead our "main stream media" has told us such things are "un-American" and "communist". Why will we never get single-payer health care in the US? The same reason we'll never get solar power or a manned mission to Mars; people make more money on the current system than changing it to anything else.
I've already put on my fucking asbestos. Flame away.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
you don't want the slaves being told they have rights, do you?
Advantage to the employer of offering only part time/temporary employment through an agency:
No unions to deal with (there is no temp union anywhere)
No pensions to contribute to (part timers don't get an employer-provided pension)
No liability (for things like temps breaking their wrists - been there, worn the t-shirt, had to foot the fucking medical bill myself!)
No employers rates (things like tax/NI which is a bloody headache if you're dealing with hundreds of employees all of whim pay tax/NI and since most of them will be on PAYE, it's all on your books which means that for every employee you have to garnish their pay by 20someodd% and send it to the Treasury, on top of which a recent additional tax which is scaled according to how many *full time* employees you have)
No contracts (except with the agency, where it's pretty much a case of "I have this many spaces, I accept your rates, send me bodies.")
No medical insurance (you're not employing the slave, you're employing the agency, *the agency* employs the slave and their employment contract more often than not has a specific medical disclaimer. See above)
No employment tribunals (you're contracting with the agency, not the slave)
Minimal wage bill (they may pay a premium for being able to hire through an agency, but it's still cheaper than employing someone full time who's not up to the task and not being able to fire them because they've technically done nothing wrong)
Maximum profit per unit labour
Advantage to the employee:
None. I don't count being able to work to pay your rent an advantage, that is a basic need along with food, clothing and medical intervention when necessary.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Your dumb analogy has convinced me that I am wrong.
No irony, it's just depressing but not entirely unexpected in a land where simple Christian charity is now seen as Communism.
And I hate to say it but being in the trenches i can say its true, the reason is Obamacare which i said before it passed was gonna be a disaster, and wadda ya know? it is.
It's an excuse, but I've worked for Kelly before, though that was in 1998. I got paid $12/hr. They charged $45/hr. They were making $70k per year off me (pro-rated, I only needed temp work for a few weeks). For that price, you could easily afford health care. How many insurance plans have you seen at $6000 per month?
Learn to love Alaska
Funny you should mention that because my oldest, which is as "true believer" as you can get now refuses to step into ANY church because he sat there in shock as they basically proclaimed their love for Supply Side Jesus and spoke of their disdain for the poor. In one church they asked him when he was walking out why he was leaving and he said "I know this place, its the same kind of place Jesus took a whip to, you can't worship money and God in the same breath". Man what I wouldn't have given to see that!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
eventually (a few decades perhaps) machines will repair and maintain everything and all maintenance jobs will cease
And once such machines escape the control of their clueless human minders, we'll have the makings of a great Hollywood post-apocalyptic thriller. For example, what happens when a machine designed to fix and maintain a factory decides instead to fix and maintain a housing complex in the same manner?
Even in the case where humans have nothing to contribute, humans have to continue to occupy critical bottlenecks of control or risk getting obsoleted and perhaps deleted. it's a standard parasite problem.
"It's not like these workers can somehow vote in a way that impacts their compensation or that they are all that well paid compared to the private sector in the first place"
REALLY? you actually BELIEVE this drivel?
In the era of Obama, unionized government workers actually get more pay and benefits than the private sector workers doing similar work (to be fair, the situation has been getting worse for many years and was nearly there under Bush43), but under Obama this line has finally been crossed and Mr. Obama (unlike Democrat demigod FDR) has embraced this. Your sentence, here quoted, is wrong on every single point
1. Unionized government workers do indeed vote in the same elections as everybody else, plus they vote for their union reps
2. Their votes elect politicians, their union dues fund those politicians, and their union election activity (in places like Chicago, the Democrats who run the place give union people paid time off to do political work at taxpayer expense on behalf of Democrats) also helps select the politicians.
3. Politicians (often funded by and elected with the help of government worker unions) are the ones who sit across the bargaining table from the union reps when it's time to negotiate union contracts. This is how California has become such an economic basket case; we have retired state prison guards bringing home $300,000+ per year and retired unionized police, firefighters, teachers, transportation workers etc getting even higher annual retirement pay (at a time when the average non-government TAXPAYER in California has no pension at all). Worse is the FACT that none of these retired people is doing anything for the current taxpayer (zero value for the tax dollar) so we must pay MORE taxes to have minimal services. It would be less annoying if these unionized jerks had not spent their entire active careers whining about substandard pay (that claim was ALWAYS a LIE, as they knew their unions owned the politicians and had negotiated insane retirement benefits)
The largest funders of campaigns in California are the government employee unions and the indian tribes (protecting their casino interests). The fastest growing union in the US is the SEIU, which is the big union that covers many government workers... and it was the "purple-shirts" of the SEIU who were some of the most-active on-the-ground campaign workers for Obama; these are NOT isolated, unrelated matters.
An awful lot of problems occur because this is a hackish attempt at socialised medicine designed to piss off the least amount of big business. Just go full socialised medicine already. This problem would not exist. Work only 10 hours a week? No problem, your National Health Service will still admit you. A heart condition discovered before your poor parents could get you health insurance? The National Health Service will still admit you.
There is lots of arguments about the quality of the National Health Services in various European countries. There is, for instance, a long-standing argument about privatisation of hospital services (in the sense that the government, not the patient, would be the customer), but as of yet, I haven't seen any major political party (right or left) advocating we get rid of it. It would be political suicide.
The "every man for himself" mindset is completely alien to us on this point. Especially since we know that even having medical insurance is not a guarantee that a for-profit company will actually pay out when you need to. And it most definitely would be too late to "take your money elsewhere" at that stage.
Your radical leftist "progressive" propaganda site "think progress" backed by its actual Hitler-serving NAZI paymaster renders you inhuman and invalid
You appeal to reality and then link to a sci-fi-fantasy website... good job, dolt
That's not the case. Spain and Greece are great examples of this.
No. Spain and Greece are great examples of a typical boom and bust where too much is attempted in a short amount of time using borrowed money in a country with large amounts of corruption and tax evasion both from greedy big shots and "Average Joe [tm]". The same is the case for Ireland and the other countries struggling the worst in Europe. Ireland had a Taoiseach (Prime Minister) who didn't have a bank account for years, but kept cash in his office safe and received "gifts" from influential businessmen. This is a milder version of the same problem that exists in most African countries.
You never mentioned Sweden, Finland, Germany, etc. who all have socialised medicine and whos main economic problem at the moment are paying for the mess of southern Europe (and Ireland).
Something does not add up here. There are only a bit over 130 million people working in non-farm jobs (so we're not counting the 2.7 million people working in agriculture or the 9+ million non-incorporated self-employed). If 28 million people are working part time, this tots up to more than 20% of the people working part time. Because part-time workers are more likely to have more than one job, the number of part time jobs then has to exceed 20%, not 10%. Some definitions are being misinterpreted, or the situation is a lot more dire than the article says.
Incidentally, the vast majority of people working part-time (more than two thirds), do so because of non-economic reasons (cfr. BLS reports). Some of the reasons the BLS cites for these people working part time: childcare problems, family or personal obligations, school or training and retirement or Social Security limits on earnings. Fixing the economy won't necessarily fix these problems, although of course low wages limit childcare and eldercare options, forcing more part-time work.
All jobs are temporary. At some point you quit, are fired, are laid off, retire, or die.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Shhhh...don't tell anybody - but all those people are already working. Except, of course, that they know they're not supposed to be so they'll work on the side for half of what they would get if they were legal and they don't complain about getting any benefits. It's businesses that employ this shadow workforce that are afraid of amnesty - their costs will go up dramatically once these illegals are brought out into daylight. That's why the right is against it - increased labor costs.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
‘Bingo’: Iowahawk sums up the jobs report in one tweet about Taco Bell
David Burge @iowahawkblog
Unemployment report in a nutshell: the Taco Bell that had 30 40 hour workers now has 40 30 hour workers.
Behind the Dismal Jobs Numbers: The ‘New’ Economy Takes Shape
Another way to look at this is that corporations will cut costs wherever possible, including not offering benefits at all if they're not forced (one way or another) to do so.
Part time workers need health care too and this is just one more example of how companies really don't give a shit about their employees.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
WalMart is a large employer of temp workers too. The permanent full-time job with salary is going the way of the dodo bird. This life sucks.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
No irony, it's just depressing but not entirely unexpected in a land where simple Christian charity is now seen as Communism.
Forced charity is communism. If the government takes more from me under the pretext of using it to help others, it doesn't make me charitable because I didn't give anything, and it doesn't make the government charitable because the current leaders are just redistributing wealth to improve their chances of reelection and maximize their own power.
Require temporary agencies like Kelly to provide health insurance!
Worst case: it necessitates that they raise their prices to the companies that use their slaves and that this in turn makes hiring full-time employees more attractive.
If only a handful of humans are employed to manage bottlenecks to prevent the robot uprising, 99.9% of all humans will be out of work.
The robot uprising angle, while humorous, has already happened. I just toured a vehicle factory recently, an entire quadrant of the plant was welding robots and conveyor belts with not a human in sight. Thousands of robots working away, and each one representing at least 1 job per shift lost to progress. They work 3 shifts at this plant, and these particular robots offset about 5,000 welding jobs. Welding is a very high skilled and expensive job if you want someone that can do it well. Those 5,000 skilled welders are mostly retired now, but with no one replacing them there are 5,000 fewer excellent paying jobs in the region. That's a huge detriment to all other businesses where those 5,000 offset people would have shopped had they gotten jobs as welders instead of flipping frozen cow parts.
Unemployment report in a nutshell: the Taco Bell that had 30 40 hour workers now has 40 30 hour workers.
You realize that, in a world with increasing automation, our only choices are that, or we keep everyone employed at 40 hours with constantly rising unemployment. As the amount of labor that needs to be done decreases, our only choices are to either employ fewer people, or employ the same number of people for fewer hours.
The only thing that really needs to change is for the laws to get up to date, declaring a 32-hour work week to be the new "full time" so that these people aren't going without benefits. As for the loss of income from working fewer hours; if everyone now has an extra day off each week, how about we use that time to put the free market to work by using it to look for an employer willing to pay us our fair share of the profits, rather than funnel them to the pockets of the 1%? The only reason employers can get away with paying so little is because, by demanding everyone work 40+ hours a week, the unemployment rate remains high, guaranteeing that there are no other jobs anywhere for anyone to look for, and so they can't just go work somewhere else for better pay and more time off.
Essentially, the government can regulate the unemployment rate simply by adjusting the number of hours considered to be a full work week, and it should be doing that in order to keep unemployment rates reasonable. It could even drive unemployment rates negative, which would render labor unions unnecessary since anyone unhappy with their job could easily find another anywhere else, and so poor work conditions would only lead to having no employees.
Dont know about you but my Doctor gives me a 50% discount if I pay in cash. Turns out to be less than the cost my insurance bills me as my "co-pay". He saves the money because he does not have to have 3 people dedicated to validating the insurance, billing the different insurance agencies, and a collection person whos job it is to get the insurance companies to pay him.
Does this seem sad to anyone else? I mean, I kinda see how it's part of American business culture right now and only worried about the bottom line. If that bottom line needs to be 'lined' per say with the cost savings of temp workers so be it according to corp group-think. Too bad we can't go back to thinking that if you pay a decent wage maybe your employees will be able to afford your product...
And I've been hospitalized. The cash price was listed as $1000, and "insurance discount" was more than 50%. Cash price was well above what the insurance company pays. Maybe it's different for a small independent doctor. All two of them left. The only time I've seen an independent doctor was for a flight medical, which no insurance covers anyway. Every other doctor I've seen was affiliated with a hospital or national clinic chain. There aren't that many options that aren't.
Learn to love Alaska
Yup, but for the intractability of Congress and insufficient push by Obama, single-payer is the way. What the House gets is what we get or vice versa; the People's house, doncha know.
See the post below viz. Nixon. For all the crazy things ol' Tricky Dick got up to, he had a good head on his shoulders otherwise. Also worth mentioning, his wage and price freeze took the wind from the sails of a shitty situation and allowed time for some other stuff to work. Worst part was when Congress over his objections voted to borrow against OASDI revenues to apply to the general fund - and they've never paid and revoked those instruments - we're still paying for that bit of aggrandizement.
The robot uprising angle, while humorous, has already happened.
I note that you don't actually give an example of this alleged uprising.
It's worth remembering here that most jobs done by robots and other machines would not in their absence be done by people. We wouldn't have an internet powered by people in the absence of sophisticated machines (many much more sophisticated than the robots in your hypothetical factory). We wouldn't have a zillion people with buckets in the absence of our considerably automated public sanitation systems. We wouldn't have an army of mentats performing vast mind numbing calculations in the absence of computers to do the same.
We wouldn't have remotely operated robotics to perform such hazardous and onerous duties as swapping nuclear fuel rods, deep sea construction, and Solar System exploration.
Those 5,000 skilled welders are mostly retired now, but with no one replacing them there are 5,000 fewer excellent paying jobs in the region.
There are more of other excellent paying jobs. For example, the technicians who maintain this equipment. Or the people who are employed because the car company produces cheaper, higher quality cars.
An awful lot of problems occur because this is a hackish attempt at socialised medicine designed to piss off the least amount of big business. Just go full socialised medicine already.
But that's communism! Do you want Stalin to rule America?
But that's taking my hard-earned money (I get from my capital gains)! Do you want to kill jobs?
But that's giving a free ride (to people who are doomed by the country's education and employment structure to be forever un- or under-employed)! Do you want brown people to have the same chance of surviving till retirement as real people like me?!?!
*attempts to dislodge his tongue from his cheek, which takes some time*
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Why do we have to rely on employers to have healthcare in the first place? This is the reason that prices are so high to begin with.
I don't get my car, home, or life insurance through my employer, why should I expect them to provide healthcare?
It all started when paid health insurance was used as a bargaining chip to either placate a union, or recruit top employees. The insurance companies realized they could charge a whole lot to companies, and by extension anyone who tried to get insurance.
Hospitals raised rates to "make up" for those who can't pay, and doctors raise rates to cover expensive malpractice insurance.
The only people winning in any of the scenarios are the insurance companies, who could have been put in their place by reasonable health insurance and tort reform, but instead we got a bill that basically only benefits the insurance companies... again.
Everyone is a temporary employee some just have longer tenure than others. Follow the four corners doctrine: if it ain't in the four corners of your contract it ain't!
We are all 1 meeting away (a meeting you will not attend either) from losing our jobs. Welcome to a kinder gentler America.
I've been meaning to reply to this for two reasons. In certain respects I find it one of the more intriguing posts I recall you making. I also wanted to thank you for providing the correct period for the discovery of mineral deposits in Afghanistan some weeks ago. I normally try to be correct and I should have looked it up.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell