U.S. Jobs Picture Shows Some Promise, but Many in 'Very Long Struggle' for Work

[alp227]

Run time: 11:54 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc7TdcpiLDs   Posted on YouTube: December 03, 2011 By YouTube Member: PBSNewsHour Views on YouTube: 21   Posted on DU: December 03, 2011 By DU Member: alp227 Views on DU: 957

 
The November unemployment report came out Friday, and it showed new job creation and a surprising drop in unemployment. However, the outlook remains bleak for many job seekers. Jeffrey Brown discusses the latest numbers with Diane Swonk of Mesirow Financial and Carl Van Horn of the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development (Rutgers University). (Transcript)

Excerpts:

SWONK: we did see a lot of hiring, of course, as you already mentioned, in the retail and hospitality sectors.

Unfortunately, that meant the composition of hiring we saw pushed down average hourly wages, because we didn't see hiring in the high-wage manufacturing, very much of it, and in the construction sectors. Also, we continue to lose jobs in the public sector out there.

It does look like we're also starting to get new some business formation from some other indicators that we're seeing and that household survey that shows the unemployment rate. That's good news.

But, again, you said there was good news and bad news. We lost -- a lot of people gave up entirely. And the percent in particular and number of people that are unemployed more than six months remain unchanged. And we held more than 40 percent of those unemployed still are unemployed for more than six months.

There's a real sort of -- there's real hard time for out there anyone who has been unemployed for a very long time. It tends to be people who have been unemployed for a short time that get re-employed, not those that have been unemployed for six months that need it the most.

SWONK: Manufacturing activity is picking up, particularly in the auto sector, although hiring has not picked up very much. It was almost flat. I think 2,000 jobs were created in the month of November.

And that's despite a major rebound in manufacturing activity in the auto industry. And one of the problems they're finding is not that there is a shortage of engineers, although that is one of the places there are shortages, but there's a shortage of skilled workers, people who were machinists, engineers.

VAN HORN: ...what we found was that only about 27 percent of them -- this is a national survey -- had recovered, had gotten a job, a full-time job, when we interviewed them again in September of this year. And of those, about half of them took a pay cut at least of 10 percent, and some of them took a very significant pay cut. Another third of them told us that they had to change their careers entirely in order to get another job.

VAN HORN: Yes, there's a very large number of applicants for every job. Obviously, there are some, like Diane mentioned, that are highly skilled jobs that go unfilled.

But, by and large, that's not the case, where we find people telling us that they just can't find work, despite their best efforts to continue to look and try hard to find another job.

I think the other point to make is that they told us only about one in -- 14 percent had actually gotten a skills training program to help them change careers. So what that means is most of them either weren't able to find such a program or couldn't afford it.

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[izquierdista]

2. There is no 'labor market'.

Twit needs to go back to first-semester Econ 1 and review the definition of a market. If there are few consumers of labor (employers) and many, many consumers of labor (the unemployed), then that market axiom fails.

But I guess if you've got only one carrot in the vegetable bin to wax, that carrot is going to get polished all day, every day.