Real Unemployment

[Drachen]

I haven't seen the data where a minimum wage increase increase wage participation. If someone has that I would like to see it. As far as labor, the divide between the haves and have not continues to grow and it's simply from a lack of education, and I don't mean traditional schooling. As a society we are in a television trance that we need to snap out of. We need to start at the basics and work our way up. Here's an outline of what should be done.

1. Focus on educating the masses on the value of nutrition. The burden on our health care system and lost productivity at work can be directly attributed to the bad decisions most make in the kitchen. Liberals trying to dictate isn't the answer, but a huge public service campaign on the ill effects of refined sugars and processed foods is a huge start. We would save trillions if we would just lose some weight (68% of Americans are obese or overweight)

2. Start a "Redemption" campaign for people with criminal records. For instance, I know a very intelligent college educated person who was arrested for stealing goggles when he was 17. He is now in his 30s and is still ineligible for state licensing in certain fields. In his case it was a Mortgage Broker's license. How does lifetime employment discrimination make moral sense, especially since many minorities are raised in tough situations and make bad decisions when they are younger? However, I think everyone is en led to a second chance. When it comes to employment, it's one strike and you're out in many cases. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTCRRFGr-IA

3. We need a Small Business Revival. 80% of new jobs are created in small to mid-size businesses. We need more! I'm open to whatever ideas on this front.

4. A basic college education should not cost more than $10,000. Universities need to make this happen.


just my 2cents

Jesus Christ you won't get one iota of an argument from me on this one.

[boutons_deux]

Are they correlated?

sure they are.

The United Corporations of America, UCA's, hard push for "globalization" aka "free international trade", NAFTA ("giant sucking sound"), etc pitted US workers and their much higher standard of living against poor, sweat shop foreign workers in countries with the VRWC/Repug dream of no EPA, OSHA, regulations.

Coupled with the VRWC's union busting (St Ronnie busting the air traffic controllers after a 2 day strike told corps to bust all employees)/war on employees, US household income has basically stagnated since 1980 (St Ronnie started the VRWC ball rolling).

(btw, you ignorant racist boomer-haters should note that salary stagnation through the boomer's main earning decades of the last 45 years means they were paying less into SS, etc. Do you really think they did that intentionally? It's not boomers vs you ingnorant s, it's the 1% vs 99%, Class Warfare)

the "comparative advantage" (where every country exploits its specific advantages) of free trade is that foreign workers under non-regulating govts are much cheaper than US workers.

result: US mfrs subcontracted/bought from overseas (eg, Apple, Walmart) rather than make in USA, or they build factories overseas and import. Those jobs aren't EVER coming back freely.

[CosmicCowboy]

CC there are universities that have 10k programs now

I don't disagree at all that education should be cheaper. I know when I went to school my major required 146 hours and at least a third of it was crap that had nothing to do with my career choice. I really resented that . I remember one class that I was required to take was "Philosophy for Engineers". It was taught by some Luddite Moonbat from the Philosophy department that hated technology and industry. I hated that class so much that I made that suckers life miserable just to get my moneys worth ( I was putting myself through school). He would make some stupid flat statement like "By the year 2000 mass transit will have replaced the automobile". I would respond with "You are out of your ing mind. Mass transit can't possibly replace all forms of personal transportation". Then we would argue one on one till the class was over. He hated me but he took the bait every time. The rest of the class loved it. His tests were all essay. I would answer every question twice so he couldn't flunk me. I would say "this is the answer you are looking for" then I would perfectly regurgitate the crap he was spewing. Then I would say "this is the REAL answer" and I would point/counterpoint and destroy his argument. It was quite fun and he didn't dare flunk me because I was giving him the "correct" answers to his questions.

[RandomGuy]

I'm not quite sure how social services are going to deliver motivated, involved parents who talk to their kids and provide them experiences other than television.

If we're thinking out of the box, could we do something like a New Janissary Corps? That was proven to work for a few hundred years when the Turks tried it, at least until corruption and nepotism ruined it. One change I would make this time around is to eliminate the pederasty.

Mentors would be a good way to go, if you are looking for someone other than an overworked parent with two jobs. I find it hard to find the time myself.

[Wild Cobra]

Return to having more apprenticeship programs.

[boutons_deux]

educate teachers better, tougher entry/degree standards, and pay teachers a LOT more.

[RandomGuy]

I haven't seen the data where a minimum wage increase increase wage participation. If someone has that I would like to see it. As far as labor, the divide between the haves and have not continues to grow and it's simply from a lack of education, and I don't mean traditional schooling. As a society we are in a television trance that we need to snap out of. We need to start at the basics and work our way up. Here's an outline of what should be done.

1. Focus on educating the masses on the value of nutrition. The burden on our health care system and lost productivity at work can be directly attributed to the bad decisions most make in the kitchen. Liberals trying to dictate isn't the answer, but a huge public service campaign on the ill effects of refined sugars and processed foods is a huge start. We would save trillions if we would just lose some weight (68% of Americans are obese or overweight)

2. Start a "Redemption" campaign for people with criminal records. For instance, I know a very intelligent college educated person who was arrested for stealing goggles when he was 17. He is now in his 30s and is still ineligible for state licensing in certain fields. In his case it was a Mortgage Broker's license. How does lifetime employment discrimination make moral sense, especially since many minorities are raised in tough situations and make bad decisions when they are younger? However, I think everyone is en led to a second chance. When it comes to employment, it's one strike and you're out in many cases. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTCRRFGr-IA

3. We need a Small Business Revival. 80% of new jobs are created in small to mid-size businesses. We need more! I'm open to whatever ideas on this front.

4. A basic college education should not cost more than $10,000. Universities need to make this happen.


just my 2cents

Agreed.

As for nutrition:

Simply tax the kinds of foods that contribute to the health problem, and use the funds to pay for the added health costs.


This is a very sound economic policy, because as it stands now the health problems are a negative externality of those kidns of foods. The true cost is shifted to society in the form of unhealthy people's medical bills and the people who make hte foods get to profit from that cost transfer.

Tax the foods, and let the free market do its magic. Make vegatables cheaper than cheeseburgers.

[RandomGuy]

educate teachers better, tougher entry/degree standards, and pay teachers a LOT more.

Agreed.

The big bad socialists in Finland have this model, and unastonishingly one of the best educational systems in the world.

Pay enough to attract the talent and motivated people.

Not a difficult thing to wrap ones head around.

At the same time lefties need to give up some union power so that administrators can get rid of the non-performers. , we have them even in non-union states like Texas. Wife had to do a short semeter intern with a science teacher who was... um... not overly topically knowledgeable to put it mildly.

[RandomGuy]

I don't disagree at all that education should be cheaper. I know when I went to school my major required 146 hours and at least a third of it was crap that had nothing to do with my career choice. I really resented that . I remember one class that I was required to take was "Philosophy for Engineers". It was taught by some Luddite Moonbat from the Philosophy department that hated technology and industry. I hated that class so much that I made that suckers life miserable just to get my moneys worth ( I was putting myself through school). He would make some stupid flat statement like "By the year 2000 mass transit will have replaced the automobile". I would respond with "You are out of your ing mind. Mass transit can't possibly replace all forms of personal transportation". Then we would argue one on one till the class was over. He hated me but he took the bait every time. The rest of the class loved it. His tests were all essay. I would answer every question twice so he couldn't flunk me. I would say "this is the answer you are looking for" then I would perfectly regurgitate the crap he was spewing. Then I would say "this is the REAL answer" and I would point/counterpoint and destroy his argument. It was quite fun and he didn't dare flunk me because I was giving him the "correct" answers to his questions.

Strangely enough business in the US is seeing liberal arts classes as encouraging the kinds of critical thinking that is needed in the modern workplace.

http://www.las.illinois.edu/students/career/business/
http://insidebiz.com/news/today-ther...arts-education

[boutons_deux]

neoliberalim (aka VRWC taking over universities as businesses and vocational schools and marginalizing tenured faculty)


The Neoliberal Assault on Academia

The New York Times, Slate and Al Jazeera have recently drawn attention to the adjunctification of the professoriate in the US. Only 24 per cent of university and college faculty are now tenured or tenure-track.

Much of the coverage has focused on the sub-poverty wages of adjunct faculty, their lack of job security and the growing legions of unemployed and under-employed PhDs. Elsewhere, the focus has been on web-based learning and the massive open online courses (MOOCs), with some commentators celebrating and others lamenting their arrival.

The two developments are not unrelated. Harvard recently asked its alumni to volunteer their time as "online mentors" and "discussion group managers" for an online course. Fewer professors and fewer qualified - or even paid - teaching assistants will be required in higher education's New Order.

Lost amid the fetishisation of information technology and the pathos of the struggle over proper working conditions for adjunct faculty is the deeper crisis of the academic profession occasioned by neoliberalism. This crisis is connected to the economics of higher education but it is not primarily about that.

The neoliberal sacking of the universities runs much deeper than tuition fee hikes and budget cuts.


http://www.alternet.org/education/ne...mia?paging=off

Combined with the VRWC's push to dumb down (segregate) K-12 with for-profit/indoctrinating charter schools, the future of America is looking worse without end.

[Nbadan]

Agreed.

The big bad socialists in Finland have this model, and unastonishingly one of the best educational systems in the world.

Pay enough to attract the talent and motivated people.

Not a difficult thing to wrap ones head around.

At the same time lefties need to give up some union power so that administrators can get rid of the non-performers. , we have them even in non-union states like Texas. Wife had to do a short semeter intern with a science teacher who was... um... not overly topically knowledgeable to put it mildly.

A good teacher can get an equal paying job with far less hours and more pay and benefits and...with a lot less stress. So consequently, there are a lot of inexperienced teachers out there...we need to find a way to thin the horrible teachers, that's true, but we also need a way to keep the good teachers in the classroom...TX has an army of good certified teachers who don't teach anymore....

[Nbadan]

CC there are universities that have 10k programs now

No doubt..the TEXAS A&M campus in San Antonio....

[Nbadan]

educate teachers better, tougher entry/degree standards, and pay teachers a LOT more.

Unless you have about 25 kids at home at any time, you have no idea what teachers have to deal with....

[boutons_deux]

25 is too many

check the students/teacher here in best TX HSs (not that it's super accurate)

http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/texas

[boutons_deux]

The BLS Jobs Report Covering April 2013: Lowest Labor Force Participation since 1978/9, weekly hours and wages down



Short Form: In seasonally adjusted terms, 165,000 jobs and unemployment dropping to 7.5% are OK, but not great results. At that job creation rate and taking population growth into account, it would take about 2 years to reduce by one million those currently unemployed. The BLS estimates current unemployment at 11.815 million. I calculate it at 20.542 million. So perhaps I should not say OK but rather next to nothing is being done to address the jobs situation.

In unadjusted terms, April was a good month, but then it should be. It is in the heart of the spring hiring season. Employment grew by 1,026,000, and 878,000 of that was full time employment. Even so, 2013 is shaping up to be worse than 2012 for employment and similar to the first half of 2012 for jobs.

In general, workers are not doing well. The jobs being created are mostly of poor quality. 19.5% of them are part time. Weekly hours and wages declined last month. And the BLS continues to underestimate the number of those without jobs by between 9 to 9.5 million.

So an OK month, but one which will do little to resolve the jobs crisis which is both a crisis of numbers and quality.

The labor force participation rate, that is the ratio between the labor force as measured by the BLS and the potential labor force (NIP) remained unchanged from March both adjusted and unadjusted. Seasonally unadjusted, it was 63.3%. This is the lowest participation rate since May 1979, that is 34 years ago. Unadjusted, it was 63.1%, the lowest participation rate since May 1978 (35 years ago). There are 3 major factors weighing on these numbers: 1) the bad economy reducing the number of employed, 2) baby boomers beginning to retire out of the labor force also depressing employment, and 3) the BLS undercount of those it does not count as unemployed although they do not have a job but would work if a job was available.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2013/...ed+capitalism)

[boutons_deux]

The Old vs. the Young

The Great Recession has been a disaster for the employment prospects of the young. Almost one in four teenagers looking for a job still can’t find one.
Americans 16 to 24 years old suffered the sharpest drop in employment between 2008 and 2010, and jobs for young workers have barely ticked up since then.






http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/20...rssnyt&emc=rss

[boutons_deux]

The Idled Young Americans







HE idle young European, stranded without work by the Continent’s dysfunction, is one of the global economy’s stock characters. Yet it might be time to add another, even more common protagonist: the idle young American.

For all of Europe’s troubles — a left-right combination of sclerotic labor markets and austerity — the United States has quietly surpassed much of Europe in the percentage of young adults without jobs. It’s not just Europe, either. Over the last 12 years, the United States has gone from having the highest share of employed 25- to 34-year-olds among large, wealthy economies to having among the lowest.

The grim shift — “a historic turnaround,” says Robert A. Moffitt, a Johns Hopkins University economist — stems from two underappreciated aspects of our long economic slump. First, it has exacted the harshest toll on the young — even harsher than on people in their 50s and 60s, who have also suffered. And while the American economy has come back more robustly than some of its global rivals in terms of overall production, the recovery has been strangely light on new jobs, even after Friday’s better-than-expected unemployment report. American companies are doing more with less.

“This still is a very big puzzle,” said Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard professor who was chief economist at the Labor Department during the Clinton administration. He called the severe downturn in jobs “the million-dollar question” for the economy.

Employers are particularly reluctant to add new workers — and have been for much of the last 12 years. Layoffs have been subdued, with the exception of the worst months of the financial crisis, but so has the creation of jobs, and no
one depends on new jobs as much as younger workers do.

For them, the Great Recession grinds on.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/sunday-review/the-idled-young-americans.html?_r=0

[RandomGuy]

Australia's minimum wage is $15.00 an hour and their unemployment rate is around 5%. No idea what their labor participation rate is, but I'd bet it's much higher than the participation rate here.

Australia's current economic climate has more to do with China's rapid growth than anything else.

[RandomGuy]

The Idled Young Americans







HE idle young European, stranded without work by the Continent’s dysfunction, is one of the global economy’s stock characters. Yet it might be time to add another, even more common protagonist: the idle young American.

For all of Europe’s troubles — a left-right combination of sclerotic labor markets and austerity — the United States has quietly surpassed much of Europe in the percentage of young adults without jobs. It’s not just Europe, either. Over the last 12 years, the United States has gone from having the highest share of employed 25- to 34-year-olds among large, wealthy economies to having among the lowest.

The grim shift — “a historic turnaround,” says Robert A. Moffitt, a Johns Hopkins University economist — stems from two underappreciated aspects of our long economic slump. First, it has exacted the harshest toll on the young — even harsher than on people in their 50s and 60s, who have also suffered. And while the American economy has come back more robustly than some of its global rivals in terms of overall production, the recovery has been strangely light on new jobs, even after Friday’s better-than-expected unemployment report. American companies are doing more with less.

“This still is a very big puzzle,” said Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard professor who was chief economist at the Labor Department during the Clinton administration. He called the severe downturn in jobs “the million-dollar question” for the economy.

Employers are particularly reluctant to add new workers — and have been for much of the last 12 years. Layoffs have been subdued, with the exception of the worst months of the financial crisis, but so has the creation of jobs, and no
one depends on new jobs as much as younger workers do.

For them, the Great Recession grinds on.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/05/sunday-review/the-idled-young-americans.html?_r=0

I am hoping this will solve itself as the boomers retire. They pull every body else up the chain as they do. The senior people retire, and 40+ers like me move into the positions they had as junior level managers, and we get replaced by the 20+ who have been out of college a few years, and they get replacedy by the people a tad younger.

Can't quantify this, but this is what I would guess is happening as the labor participation % drops.

This may deserve a thread of its own. FIgure out something to do about it.

[boutons_deux]

"as the boomers retire"

a LOT boomers, say age 50+, have been forcibly retired for 5 years, make up a huge portion of the long-term unemployed, are working part time and/or for wages way under what they used to make, and have seen a huge increase in male suicides. Youth unemployment can't be laid on boomers.

anybody, any age, who is long-term unemployed is having a much harder time finding employment.

[Winehole23]

http://www.newgeography.com/content/...mployed-nation

[boutons_deux]

[boutons_deux]

First Quarter Of 2013 Saw Largest Wage Drop Ever

The first three months of 2013 saw wages fall 3.8 percent – the largest drop in hourly pay in the 65-year history of that statistic – despite an increase in worker productivity. With high unemployment freeing employers from fears that their employees will turn elsewhere, the U.S. recovery has been marked by a decoupling of rising productivity from stagnant wages.

The gloomy milestone partly reflects the predominance of low-wage service jobs in the slow, steady streak of job growth since the recession. Increasing the minimum wage, as progressives in Congress hope to do, could help counter downward wage pressures at the bottom of the earnings ladder.


The recovery has been far more pleasant at the other end of the income spectrum. CEO pay is up to record highs for the second year in a row, at $9.7 million per year on average in 2012. In fact, 121 percent of total income gains from 2009-2011 went to the top one percent of earners – meaning everyone else lost ground.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/201...age-drop-ever/

The 1%'s Class War continues to mop the battlefield with the scalps of workers.

[FuzzyLumpkins]

Australia's current economic climate has more to do with China's rapid growth than anything else.

Australia has had positive growth for the majority of the last 50 years. This GDP growth from au.gov.



Australia does it better.

[Winehole23]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...into-question/