As the government on Friday released its latest official snapshot of the American labor market -- finding that the economy in June added a paltry 80,000 net new jobs, while the unemployment rate held steady at 8.2 percent -- most commentators seized on the data as generic fodder for the unceasing campaign story.
How will Republican nominee Mitt Romney exploit these fresh indications of distress for his own political benefit? Can President Barack Obama survive a weak economy to claim reelection? These are predictable questions, the sorts of reactions we can play for ourselves in our heads without bothering to turn on the television. Their ubiquity testifies to the degree to which too many professional observers are inured to the real human experiences behind the data.
The horrendous job market is not a political story. It is a national emergency playing out in slow motion, a catastrophe that has come to dominate life in millions of American homes. The persistent shortage of paychecks has seeped into our aspirations and made them smaller. It has eroded the basic American understanding about the supposed rewards of trying hard, getting educated and looking for work -- a formula too many people have been following only to wind up destitute, discouraged and dispossessed.
Will the president survive the most punishing job market since the Depression? That's backwards. The real question is whether people like Yvonne Smith can survive the job market.
Out of work, out of money and running out of improvised solutions to the problems of not being able to afford rent, Smith and her 14-year-old son have been sleeping on the floor of a storage locker in northern Georgia, where they stashed their belongings after being evicted from their rented townhouse in February.
"Where else were we going to?" she told me by way of explanation when I met her last month at a food bank in Chattanooga. "I try not to think about it, but that's our space, and we sleep there."
Smith, 51, has grown accustomed to working with what's available, following the collapse of more ambitious plans. A decade ago, she moved to Atlanta from New York City, where she had been earning $57,000 a year as a document processor at a law firm, in what amounted to a classic American reach for upward mobility.
"In New York, everything was fine, but I wanted better," she told me. "I was tired of the weather, and I wanted my son to have his own yard."
In Atlanta, she rented a house for what she had been paying to rent a cramped apartment in the Bronx. She got another legal job, and settled into what felt like a better life. Then came the Great Recession.
In 2008, she was laid off along with her entire department, she says. She looked for work, but Atlanta's job market was bleak even by the standards of the downturn already gripping the nation. As the months passed without a paycheck, and as she lowered her sights from legal work to office temp jobs to cashier's positions at grocery stores, she and her son subsisted on food stamps and her $320-a- week unemployment check.
When that check ran out in June 2010, they piled their belongings into their aging Chevy Trailblazer and moved to northern Georgia, where they could rent a modest apartment with the last of their savings, and she could try to find a job. She found a position in a local warehouse, but it was only temporary. She secured another temp job at an Amazon distribution center in Chattanooga, some 20 miles away.
Then, one Saturday morning last November, the repo man came knocking at their door. She was more than $1,800 behind on the payments for her vehicle, and he drove it away, eliminating her means of getting to work.
For a time, a friend who also worked at the Amazon plant gave her a lift. But when the friend lost her job just before Christmas, Smith was out of options, and again jobless.
When her eviction came in February, Smith and her son took refuge in a van that belonged to a Baptist church, and then at a homeless shelter where they spent two months before reaching the limit, prompting them to camp out in their storage locker. They lie down there, alongside their dinette set, their couches, their family photos, their kitchenware, their clothes - all the accouterments of a life that is no longer operative. In the morning, before anyone comes to work there, they sneak out and she rides a bus to the dollar store where she has a part-time job as a cashier for minimum wage -- enough to survive, but not enough to contemplate a home.
Smith's story may be extreme, but it is hardly unique. You can easily meet people confronting such circumstances at food banks, homeless shelters, and in welfare offices. It used to be that those who landed in such straits tended to present a complex assortment of problems, from substance abuse to mental illness. More and more, people have been sliding into such states because of one dominant problem: They can't find work.
Buried in the latest jobs report is a brutal data point that clever analysts have tired of bothering to mention, because it has become a permanent feature of our times: 5.4 million people have been officially out of work for six months or longer.
This number stands in for a group of actual people - the so-called long-term unemployed - whose material circumstances have been remade, along with their fundamental expectations about their lives.
Four years have passed since Monica Ross-Williams, 42, lost her job overseeing a retail store for a major cell phone carrier in Michigan. In that time, she has tried her hand as an entrepreneur, launching an ill-fated janitorial services company. She worked part-time as a merchandising representative for prominent brands, training staff at big box retailers on how to sell the product. College-educated, she used to make $50,000 a year. Now, she is happy to line up part time work that pays $10 an hour. Her credit has been tarnished. Her husband is still working, but lean years have taken a toll, chopping their household income roughly in half.
"It has put a strain on our marriage," she says. "When you have financial issues, every discussion leads to people being depressed. 'How are you going to be able to pay this?' 'How are going to be able to pay that?'"
Ross-Williams has become a frequent blogger whose contributions center on creative solutions to joblessness, such as credit to help those out of work launch their own businesses.
"It's definitely not paying my bills, but it's my passion," she says. "I feel like I have finally found my voice. I want to, if nothing else, be a voice for people in my situation and not let others think that unemployed people just want to sit around collecting unemployment checks."
Yet even as she demonstrates resourcefulness and an irrepressible spirit, her faith in the opportunities that once seemed so abundant has taken a hit.
"I really honestly believed - I'm not going to lie in corp America - that basically if you worked very hard, you were rewarded with good pay," she says. "That has been shaken."
This sort of downward adjustment is now part and parcel of the American story -- a story that will not be altered so long as the economy merely stands in as a prop for two candidates proffering dueling narratives about where we are and how we got here.
It will not be addressed so long as the pundit class is content to tease out the data points of another awful jobs report for insights into electoral fortunes.
The campaign ought to be an opportunity for sustained debate about what we can do to fix the economy, rather than a platform for talk about how the economy can be used to wage the campaign. We need an active, serious focus on large-scale job creation. Everything else is just noise.
Follow Peter S. Goodman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/petersgoodman
David Paul: Is Romney Playing Rope-a-Dope or Is There Really No There There?
 |
 |
|
| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Electoral Votes (270 to win) |
332 | 206 |
| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Total | 65,899,660 | 60,932,152 |
| Percent | 51.1% | 47.2% |
| Democrats* | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Current Senate | 53 | 47 |
| Seats gained or lost | +2 | -2 |
| New Total | 55 | 45 |
| Democrats | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Seats won | 201 | 234 |
What will the USA do - if increasing numbers of Citizens become & remain Jobless?
Is this an elaborate Corp/Politico ploy to ensure the USA can compete with the Chinese & their 'slave-labor' work force?
INDEED: "We need an active, serious focus on large-scale job creation". WHY hasn't this been THE # 1 Priority for the LAST 4 YEARS???????
Have you been hiding under a rock? Do you know how many of the President's initiatives have been dedicated to improving the job situation? And why do you not think that 4,373,000 private sector jobs while fighting a Repub headwind is nothing? And have you written your Congressman and urged him/her to support the President's jobs bill? The one that's just been sitting around for months because the Repubs refuse to deal with it?
STOP BLAMING OBAMA! Good heavens, open your eyes!
Have YOU looked around, Molly? are YOU UNAWARE of the errosion that continues in jobs, wages & benefits? Coupled with the meteoric rise in the cost of BASIC SURVIVAL??
Are these 4 mil+ 'Private Sector' jobs inclusive of the work done by various TEMP WORKERS - now replacing (pesky/costly) 'traditional employees' - who are not accustomed to the role of 'day laborer'? Molly - are you a closet Republican?
Do you know how many incentives to hire the unemployed have been included in various bills? And there are more incentives to hire the unemployed in the President's jobs bill which the Republicans are ignoring. Do you know how many training programs there are out there in community colleges?
The number of jobs lost in the 80's was nothing like what we experienced in this recession. In the 80's, Reagan, who inherited job growth from Carter, lost 3 million jobs after implementing his 1981 tax cuts. 4.4 million jobs were lost before Obama took one foot into the Oval Office, and another 4.3 were lost after he took office and passed the stimulus, most of those jobs were lost in the first three months of his administration.
As the 1981 recession was a man-made recession caused by the Fed raising interest rates, it was easily reversed, particularly when Reagan's own budget director worked with the Dems in Congress to reverse many of the draconian 1981 tax cuts. The tax increases of 1982 caused the economy to rebound.
But this mess, more like the Great Depression than the 80's, is not easy to reverse.
Also, in the 70's and 80's, many companies ran their own training programs and SPENT MONEY to train people in new technologies for new jobs. They didn't turn to corporate welfare to get the workers they needed.
Tax cuts and interest increases weren't the only causes of the 1981 recession. Life in the U.S. was dramatically different then than what it is today. Other factors included gasoline at 85 cents a gallon in the 80s verses $3.65 a gallon today. An average middle class home was less than $40,000.00 in the 80s while today it is over $100,000.00, give or take some.
our top employment or the bottom ????
there are STILL 1 million FEWER people working now than at the start of his admin.............and thats being generous
Consider their Campaign Budgets!!!!! 100's of $$$$$$MILLIONS!!!! Why not let the Politicos (at ALL various levels simply draw STRAWS to see who gets the jobs (PREZ & other Gov jobs). Take the $200+ MIL, & DIVIDE the $200+ MIL, distribute the funds equally/evenly to each US Citizen. Then just send the Pols/Government back to their buildings - where they pretend to work.
look up "Basic Income Model" ... or the venus project.... gotta do one or the other.
peace
I have a feeling they will one day be the only ones employed with PLENTY of work to go around.
All branches meet military recruiting goals - News - Stripe
"Published: January 14, 2011
Each of the U.S. military’s service branches met its active-duty recruitment and retention goals for the first quarter of fiscal 2011, the Department of Defense said.
“We are very proud that our all-volunteer force can still be successful in a wartime environment,” Douglas Smith, a spokesman for the Army’s
Recruiting Command at Fort Knox, Ky., said Thursday.
Through December the Army surpassed its first quarter goal of 14,100 by 433 recruits, with the Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force all meeting their recruiting goals or exceeding them. The Marine Corps Reserve surpassed its goal by the largest percentage with 116 percent, pulling in 2,637 recruits, 71 more than its goal..."
I spoke with a recruiter last year who said the services are still recruiting, but are very selective.
I agree...Now what?
Alternatively, offer permanent tax releif (i.e., lower taxes) to those corporations that invest 50% of their profits back into creating new jobs in THIS COUNTRY and for those that don't, inflict the pre-Regan era tax rates on corporations (i.e., 70%)!
This quote from the article sums it up good. All we are hearing is noise.