Text If You Find Work

For John, BLUF:  Overall employment situation is not improving.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Over at Fortuna's Corner we have a discussion of unemployment.  It is noted that on Friday, 2 August, the July Non-Farm Payroll number will be out.  Then the Blogger notes a 16 July OpEd in The Wall Street Journal.  The author is the Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of U.S. News and World Report, Mr Mort Zuckerman.  Mr notes “there are jobs, and there are jobs.”

The article summarizes the situation by noting that since 1 January the number of jobs has increased by 753 thousand, but 557 thousand of these jobs were part-time.  This is according to the U.S. Government’s own Household Survey.  The IRS notwithstanding, Federal Bureaucrats tend to be about getting the numbers correct, so we can expect the Household Survey is on the mark.

Again according to the survey, last month the number of full time jobs dropped by 240 thousand, while the number of part time jobs grew by 360 thousand.  Total part-time jobs is 28,059,000, up three million from 2008.  From the blog post:

Mr. Zuckerman argues persuasively that “the 7.6% unemployment figure, so common in today’s headlines is utterly misleading”.  An estimated 22M Americans are unemployed or underemployed.  Of the 195K net new jobs created in June, 75K were in restaurants and bars, where the average weekly paycheck is about $351 less than half the average for all private employers.  The measure of those adults who can work and have jobs — known as the civilian workforce participation rate — is 63.5% — a drop of 2.2% since the recession ended — something Mr. Zuckerman notes, “never happened after previous recessions.” More people are leaving the workforce than those finding work by a factor of three.  The number of Americans on welfare and public assistance is approaching the number of those working, a frightening prospect for entitlements.

We have to wait until Friday to see how July went.

In the mean time, the Fortuna's Corner has introduced the term "the 49ers" to characterize those who have less than 50 employees.

Regards  —  Cliff