By Wes Pedersen
The employment/unemployment figures for the past year are out and they are at once encouraging and devastating. As measured by the economists in the Labor Department, unemployment is down to 8.3 percent, a three-year low.
No one is more surprised than the economists. Their tracking gave no clue that the country was doing that well. (Sound familiar somehow?
These are essentially the same experts who failed to see any signs of the then oncoming Great Recession.)
The president, of course, is taking credit for the new figures. They are virtually made to order for him. He cites them as signals of recovery. He’s told Republicans in Congress “Don’t muck it up.” They say any improvement is despite him.
Mitt Romney insists that business is responsible for much of the
uptick. He is right. Enough companies have decided that they can no longer afford to sit still and stagnate. They are restocking and innovating despite being hamstrung by government inaction.
Headlines focus on the positive: More jobs created! The reality,
however, is too often negative.
In December, for example, 243,000 new jobs were created. That seems high, but at that monthly rate it will take seven years and an estimated 10 million jobs for the U.S. to return to full employment.
Meanwhile, up to 18 million people remain jobless. The figure includes the workers who, after months and years of looking, have given up the search for jobs.
Robert Reich, Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor, sees this lack of jobs as “the jobs deficit.” He says it is more important than the “budget deficit.”
The report offers evidence that will further distress many in
business. America, for example, is indeed shifting from a manufacturing economy to a service economy.
Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist, says it is clear that long-term jobs will come from the service sector. He’s not sure, though, what those positions will look like. Will we have a minimum wage-paying economy that does not utilize peoples’ potentials, or one in which highly educated workers provide many customized services?
Against this background, remember that joblessness has created a true great divide between the social classes. It is no longer lower class vs. middle class, it is lower class and much of middle class against the rest.
Because of the bleak jobs situation, an estimated 40 million Americans exist at or below the poverty level. They include active employment seekers, the hard-core jobless who have given up the search for work, and the men and women who once thought of themselves at least halfway to security for themselves and their families.
Reich is right: the jobs issue, despite a tad of encouraging news, is the country’s most important problem.
Don’t let the politicians and the media forget it.
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Wes Pedersen is a retired Foreign Service Officer and principal at Wes Pedersen Communications and Public Relations Washington, D.C.
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