Jobless Recovery

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The latest official Federal job statistics get released on Friday. A story reported today on the radio program "Marketplace" addressed what those numbers might look like. Specifically, they were mulling over the latest unemployment numbers released the payroll-contracting company ADP.

ADP, the company that does a whole lot of payroll paperwork for American companies, reported this morning that the economy only lost 20,000 jobs last month -- better than expected.

Both the host and the guest -- invited to comment on why losing another 20,000 jobs wasn't so bad -- used the term "jobless recovery."

Jobless recovery.

Wow. That's an oxymoron if I ever heard one.

The guest, Don Peck of "The Atlantic" then went on to explain just how drastic the unemployment situation really is.

It's quite deep. It's about 10 million jobs deep.*

In fact that's the number that would be required to get us back to the 5 percent unemployment rate that we had before this recession began. That's a huge hole.

Even if you assume very robust growth, you still need about two years to get back to the level we had before the recession.

Some "recovery."

Of course, when Wall Street insiders talk about recovery, they don't mean those guys who have real jobs. They mean the Dow Jones average or the S&P 500...
... you know, stuff that makes them money.

Frankly, they couldn't care less about a 48-year-old blue collar construction worker who may never get a real job again in his working lifetime.

I wanted to start screaming at my radio, but that's not why.
Here's what I wanted to rant about:

Instead of calling this the Bush Depression -- which it is -- journalistic wits have taken to calling this the "mancession;" the recession of men losing their jobs.

... it's an awfully tough time. I mean there are six unemployed people for every job opening in the U.S. right now.

And over time, this has been called the mancession, but that's really just an acceleration of a long-term trend.

Men in their prime working age have their lowest participation in the labor market today since 1948.
Marketplace Radio 3 March 2010

In case you didn't catch that, let me remind you of that middle sentence.
The "mancession" is really just an acceleration of a long-term trend.

Yes indeedie.
A long-term trend that started in 1980 and accelerated like some Toyota with a faulty gas pedal under Bush/Clinton.

When Ronald Reagan decided that the economy needed a boost, he went with a host of neocon economists (many of whom hung around to serve later under Bush and Clinton and Bush) who advocated a policy of "trickle down."

Trickle down economics is just a clever way of saying "give money to the rich guys and some table scraps might fall to those peons who aren't at the table." The rich got tax breaks and union guys got busted.

In a true case of irony, though, the real whammer of jobs leaving the country came when Clinton came along and pushed "free trade." Free trade is another of those clever euphemisms for a policy of "anything goes" in the hopes that sending a furniture-making job in North Carolina to Indonesia or an electronics fabrication plant in Ohio to China would trigger worldwide prosperity and we'd all be swimming in money.

Well, except for those bastards in North Carolina and Ohio.

Before the Reagan era, men had plenty of job opportunities and they didn't need MBA's or PhD's to do them.

Men worked on farms and as fishermen, the built bridges and skyscrapers made of steel made in plants other men worked at.
Men ran railroads, built cars and televisions and Lazy-Boy recliners, produced free-range cattle and chickens and milk products one small farm at a time.
Men constructed homes and hotels and industrial parks, built airliners and buses and bulldozers...

... there were lots of jobs for men who didn't have advanced degrees and could make a decent living doing it.

Not now.
Those steel jobs are now in China, the electronics fabrication jobs in Malaysia, furniture in Indonesia and, well, if a job could be exported it was.

One by one, those jobs that men did were exported, leaving mostly "women" jobs behind: cleaning motel rooms, keeping the books, answering phones, waitressing.

About the only jobs left for men were construction and some transportation.
Men were still driving trucks and flying planes and building homes, but that's about it.

Then came the "mancession" and those construction jobs evaporated faster than a snowball in a Tucson heatwave.

Ask me if I'm surprised that the unemployment rate is well over 18%.
Ask me if I'm surprised the lion's share of the unemployed are men.
Don't ask because I said this day was coming and I wasn't happy about it then and I'm even unhappier about it now.

Jobless recovery indeed.

This is no recovery.
This is no mancession.
This is the consequence of allowing "trickle down" and "free trade" neocon economic thinking to strip my country of jobs men do.

Those fatcats on Wall Street may be back to wheeling and dealing in a cloud of speculative vapor, but without an economic base even that won't last.

No, this is not a recovery.
This is a jobless depression created by those who have already taken their bonuses and left the rest of us hanging out to dry.

How anybody could vote for another neocon nitwit again is beyond me.... but they will. They'll use issues like gay marriage and abortion rights to get people to vote against their own self-interest yet again....
... and those poor bastards who vote for them will be left to fight over table scraps awhile longer.

And they'll make us feel better about it because they'll call it a "jobless recovery."

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