I keep hearing that things are getting better, but the reality is that things are not — at least not for workers. The Labor Department issued another bleak jobs report today, announcing 263,000 lost jobs in September and an unemployment rate of 9.8 percent, the highest in 26 years.
As The New York Times reports,
the report offered little good news for the 15.1 million unemployed people in the United States. The number of hours worked stagnated. Overtime hours slipped in many industries. And temporary help companies — typically, among the first to rebound after a recession — shed 1,700 jobs.
“People have been celebrating that we’re through the financial crisis, but the underlying issues are all still there,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “We’ve lost trillions of dollars in housing wealth, and consumption’s going to be weak. It’s not the ’30s, but there’s really nothing to boost the economy.”
The reality is that, while things appear better on some fronts than they were a year ago (thanks to a federal stimulus package that pumped some money back into the economy, though it could have been more robust), most of us have no reason to be optimistic.
The economy has been bleeding jobs every month, without interruption, for nearly two years. More than 15 million people in the United States are now unemployed, and more are working part-time jobs for less pay, or have given up looking for work altogether.
“This is still severe,” said Andrew Stettner, deputy director of the National Employment Law Project. “It’s not going to be turning around as fast as people want.”
At the same time, other economic measures are beginning to waver, signaling that the initial phase of the recovery — a sharp rebound from a deep bottom — may be giving way to a long grind higher, marked by uncertainty and pain for many.
With every jobs report comes the sense among workers that they could be next. That makes them unwilling to spend on the kind of discretionary items — high-tech toys, for instance — that are now sitting on shelves. If no one is buying them, then there is no reason to manufacture them — which leaves the people doing the work without jobs.
Hence, the sense of pessimism that greets even the most optimistic pronouncements.
Hank Kalet 