Despite November’s unemployment statistic of 7%, the lowest since President Obama took office, the U.S. jobs picture remains bleak. There are still 1.9 million less jobs now than there were over a half decade ago, and the jobs that have been created are in too many cases inferior to those that have been lost.
By the end of December, 1.3 million unemployed workers are scheduled to lose jobless benefits. A cruelly distinctive characteristic of the current unemployment dilemma is that it is long term unemployment that makes up the most unrelenting percentage of those without jobs.
At first glance, the November report showing a gain of 196,000 private sector jobs and an increase of 7,000 government jobs, seems promising. These include 17,000 jobs in construction, and 27,000 in manufacturing.
But according to the Economic Policy Institute,”Millions of potential workers remain sidelined. There are nearly 5.7 million workers who are neither employed nor actively seeking a job. These are people who would be working or looking for work if job opportunities were significantly stronger.”
Another U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics jobless measure, known as the “U-6,” (which includes those marginally attached to the labor force) pegs the November unemployment figure at 13.2.
Economist John Williams, who publishes Shadow Government Statistics,questions the official unemployment numbers. In an analysis performed on the July unemployment rate of 7.4% reported by the U.S. Department of Labor, he found that the actual rate was 23.3%.
Williams takes into account vital information that the Bureau ignores. His review includes those that have simply given up looking, have managed to get on disability, or have replaced lost career-level positions with part time work at a small fraction of their former pay. When those factors are included, a more thorough picture of the actual unemployment rate emerges.
According to an August Associated Press Report “Low-paying industries have provided 61 percent of the nation’s job growth, even though these industries represent just 39 percent of overall U.S. jobs, according to Labor Department numbers… Part-time work has made up 77 percent of the job growth so far this year. The government defines part-time work as being less than 35 hours a week…Analysts say some employers are offering part-time over full-time work to sidestep the new health care law’s rule that they provide medical coverage for permanent workers. (The Obama administration has delayed that provision for a year and into 2015.)”
Skepticism over the accuracy of unemployment statistics has significantly increased since the revelations in November that an unemployment number released during the 2012 campaign was inaccurate, apparently in an attempt to influence voters to re-elect the current administration.
This is, according to all statistics, the worst jobs recovery period since the end of WWII, marked by rising part-time employment over full time jobs, declining wages, and increased workforce dropouts.
Mort Zuckerman, the chair and editor in chief of U.S. News & World Report, writing in the Wall Street Journal online,believes that the “jobless nature of the recovery is particularly unsettling…Americans by the millions are in part time work because there are no other employment opportunities…What’s going on? The fundamentals surely reflect the feebleness of the macroeconomic recovery that began roughly four years ago, as seen in an average gross domestic product growth rate annualized over the past 15 quarters at a miserable 2%. That’s the weakest GDP growth since World War II. Over a similar period in previous recessions, growth averaged 4.1%. During the fourth quarter of 2012 and the first quarter of 2013, the GDP growth rate dropped below 2%. This anemic growth is all we have to show for the greatest fiscal and monetary stimuli in 75 years, with fiscal deficits of over 10% of GDP for four consecutive years. The misery is not going to end soon…the country needs a real recovery, not a phony one.”
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According to Pew Research, “From the late 1940s until the early 1990s, the U.S. economy never took more than a year to regain all the jobs lost during downturns. The 1990-91 recession was fairly mild – only 1.6 million jobs lost, or 1.5% of peak payroll employment – but it took 21 months to recover them all. That was the first, though not the last, ‘jobless recovery’: In the aftermath of the dot-com bubble, 2.7 million jobs evaporated; it took 18 months after payrolls bottomed out for them all to come back. But even that performance would look strong compared to the current pace of job creation.”
According to the U.S. House of Representative’s Ways & Means Committee,even many of those fortunate few who have found work and are counted as employed are actually working only part-time. A committee report notes that the population of new part-time workers is approximately equal to that of Philadelphia, PA, at 1.5 million the nation’s most populous city, while the number of new full-time workers resembles that of Henderson, Nevada, the nation’s 71st most populous city.
Rep. David Camp, (R-MI) who has dug far deeper into U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data than most, notes that “Seven out of eight new employees under President Obama have been part-time employees.”
The Committee is concerned that “this phenomenon has accelerated rapidly as Obamacare implementation has progressed with the share of new employment in part-time positions surging in 2013 as compared to prior years.”
The Committee points to five characteristics of the current economic climate:
1. Worst recovery from recession;
2. Rising part-time employment;
3. Declining Wages;
4. Growing workforce dropouts; and
5. Rapid rise in adult children living with parents.
Since January of 2009, when the current Administration took office, to July 2013, there has been a 7.14% increase in part time jobs, compared to an almost nonexistent 0.23% increase in full-time jobs, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The problem with part-time work isn’t only reduced pay. These employees generally don’t receive medical coverage, retirement benefits, and other perks available to their full-time counterparts.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, “High unemployment continues to plague all demographic and occupational groups… A key message … is that the unemployment rate is between 1.3 and 1.8 times as high now as it was six years ago for all groups. Today’s sustained high unemployment relative to 2007 across all age, education, occupation, gender, and racial and ethnic groups underscores that the jobs crisis stems from a broad-based lack of demand. In particular, unemployment is not high because workers lack adequate education or skills; rather, a lack of demand for goods and services makes it unnecessary for employers to significantly ramp up hiring.”
By the President’s own standards, this represents a failure of his economic plan. Mr. Obama stated that “A well designed recovery plan will not only create numerous jobs, but also many jobs paying good wages and providing full-time employment.”