The New Poor: In Job Market Shift, Some Workers Are Left Behind, © The New York Times, May 12, 2010, by Catherine Rampell, excerpt quoted verbatim:

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Many of the jobs lost during the recession are not coming back.

Period.

For the last two years, the weak economy has provided an opportunity for employers to do what they would have done anyway: dismiss millions of people — like file clerks, ticket agents and autoworkers — who were displaced by technological advances and international trade.

The phasing out of these positions might have been accomplished through less painful means like attrition, buyouts or more incremental layoffs. But because of the recession, winter came early.

The tough environment has been especially disorienting for older and more experienced workers like Cynthia Norton, 52, an unemployed administrative assistant in Jacksonville.

“I know I’m good at this,” says Ms. Norton. “So how the hell did I end up here?”

Administrative work has always been Ms. Norton’s “calling,” she says, ever since she started work as an assistant for her aunt at 16, back when the uniform was a light blue polyester suit and a neckerchief. In the ensuing decades she has filed, typed and answered phones for just about every breed of business, from a law firm to a strip club. As a secretary at the RAND Corporation, she once even had the honor of escorting Henry Kissinger around the building.

But since she was laid off from an insurance company two years ago, no one seems to need her well-honed office know-how.

Ms. Norton is one of 1.7 million Americans who were employed in clerical and administrative positions when the recession began, but were no longer working in that occupation by the end of last year. There have also been outsize job losses in other occupation categories that seem unlikely to be revived during the economic recovery. The number of printing machine operators, for example, was nearly halved from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2009. The number of people employed as travel agents fell by 40 percent.

Part-Time Workers Mask Unemployment Woes

Part-Time Workers Mask Unemployment Woes, The New York Times, May 14, 2010, by David Leonhardt, excerpt quoted verbatim:

In California and a handful of other states, one out of every five people who would like to be working full time is not now doing so.

It is a startling sign of the pain that the Great Recession is inflicting, and it is largely missed by the official, oft-repeated statistics on unemployment. The national unemployment rate has risen to 9.5 percent, the highest level in more than a quarter-century. Yet it still excludes all those who have given up looking for a job and those part-time workers who want to be working full time.

Include them — as the Labor Department does when calculating its broadest measure of the job market — and the rate reached 23.5 percent in Oregon this spring, according to a New York Times analysis of state-by-state data. It was 21.5 percent in both Michigan and Rhode Island and 20.3 percent in California. In Tennessee, Nevada and several other states that have relied heavily on manufacturing or housing, the rate was just under 20 percent this spring and may have since surpassed it.

Almost nobody believes that unemployment has finished rising, either. On Tuesday, President Obama said he expected it to “tick up for several months.”

It’s fair to say, then, that the downturn is moving into a new stage. It has already been through three: the prologue, when credit markets began to quiver in 2007; the big shock, when the collapse of Lehman Brothers, in September 2008, led into almost six months of terrible economic news; and the stabilization, when the news became more mixed.

Now comes Stage 4: the slog.

“It’s not going to be an overnight turnaround,” as Bernard Smith, an unemployed engineer in Greenville, S.C. (a state where the broader jobless rate was 20.5 percent this spring), who has been looking for work since May, told me. “It’s going to take time.

Comment by Paul Evans: The fact of the recovery, however, is born out in data such as reflected in the graph presented, from New Jobs Data, with Handy Graph for your Blogging Use, Daily Kos, May 7, 2010, by SanatFeMarie. 290,000 new jobs won’t really “fix things” but it’s a start. However, the Obama administration should make JOBS, and not such matters as winning in Afghanistan or even the vaunted Wall Street reform or climate bill, the number one priority. See Message to Obama, Karzai and Congress: Americans and Afghans Need Jobs, Not War, Evans Liberal Politics, May 13, 2010, by Code Pink. Robert Reich highlighted this in the following article:

Why the President’s Next Big Thing Should Be Jobs

Why the President’s Next Big Thing Should Be Jobs, RobertReich.org, March 25, 2010, by Robert Reich, excerpt quoted verbatim:

Few presidents get a second honeymoon of their own making. (George W. got one when terrorists attacked the United States.) Barack Obama’s victory on health care reform has breathed new life into his administration, recharged the Democratic base, and given the rest of America a sense of someone who fights for average working people.

The question now is: What does he do with his second honeymoon?

Some say it should be used to enact financial reform. Most Americans despise Wall Street and want to be assured there’s no repeat of the grotesque sequence of river-boat gambling with the economy followed by a taxpayer bailout followed by seven-and eight-figure bonuses. Democratic strategists would love to let Republicans hoist themselves on their own petard by defending Wall Street.

Financial reform surely needs bucking up. The bill passed by the House last year was riddled with loopholes, delays, and cop-outs for the Street. The one that’s emerging from the Senate Banking Committee is only slightly better. It still allows a world of unregulated derivative trading and hands the ball over to the same regulators that punted last time. It doesn’t even include Paul Volcker’s watered-down remake of the Glass-Steagall Act. And the Senate bill is likely to get even worse as Harry Reid and Chris Dodd troll for Republican support. In an election year when Wall Street money is flowing freely to both parties, watch your wallets.

Notwithstanding all this, the biggest Next Big Thing ought to be jobs.

Including all those who have entered the job market since the bottom fell out, the nation is about 11 million jobs short. The President ought to use his second honeymoon to get a jobs bill that will make a difference.

Although the official rate of unemployment for the third of Americans with college degrees – the kind of people who inhabit executive suites, the media, and Washington – is now down to 5 percent, most Americas inhabit a different job planet. The unemployment rate is 15.6 percent among Americans with less than a high school diploma and 10.5 percent for those with only a high school degree.

Even these rates understate the problem. Add in people working part time who’d rather it be full time, those too discouraged even to look for work, those working in a full-time job at fewer hours, and those who lost their jobs and have settled on new ones paying far less, and more than one in four of those without high school degrees are unemployed or underemployed; 22 percent of people with only high school degrees.

See, It’s The JOBS, Stupid! Why DC Elites Don’t See This, Daily Kos, May 11, 2010, by davej, excerpt quoted verbatim:

People care about jobs. They still care about jobs. And politicians who don’t care about jobs will lose their jobs, because that is what motivates voters.

Polling at Pollingreport.com proves that people are much more concerned about jobs than deficits. (Note there are some polls that show equal concern, no polls that show deficit with a higher concern)

* FOX News/Opinion Dynamics Poll. May 4-5 Economy and jobs 47% Deficit, spending %15
* BS News/New York Times Poll. April 5-12 Economy/Jobs 49% Budget deficit/National debt 5%
* CNN/Opinion Research Corporation Poll. March 19-21 The economy 43% The federal budget deficit 8%

See Long-Term Unemployment an Ongoing Issue, Daily Kos, May 10, 2010, by Mcjoan, excerpt quoted verbatim:

While the economy created 290,000 new jobs in April, unemployment jumped to 9.9 percent as 805,000 people rejoined the labor force to renew their job search. Sadly though, 6.7 million Americans, nearly 46 percent of the nation’s unemployed, have been jobless for 27 weeks or more. Another 1.2 million are still discouraged and no longer looking….

See Despite Signs of Recovery, Chronic Joblessness Rises, The New York Times, February 20, 2010, by Peter S. Goodman.

See The “Real” Unemployment Rate Jumps To 17.1%, Prison Planet, May 7, 2010, by Joe Weisenthal.

The unemployment rate for the working poor (those making under $20,000 a year) is now 31 percent. Shameful. The unemployment rate for those making over $100,000 a year is quite livable at 4 percent (3.2 percent for those making at least $150,000 a year). OF COURSE the people in power are not so concerned. THEY have nothing to be concerned about, right?

I Need A Job. Any Ideas?

Comment by Evans Liberal Politics owner Paul Evans: Hey Democratic National Committee, concerned about the 45 percent tie reported for a national vote if the fall elections were held today? Do those Tea Party guys have you sweating a little bit?

You should be sweating. There has been well over $2 trillion — some say an unbelievable total of $13.2 trillion — for the fat cats on Wall Street, but precious little for main street. If you want to win this fall, I suggest you get off your ass and do something to create jobs for ordinary Americans. Do this only if you want to win the elections. If you want to muddle through this fall with the status quo, I suggest that you don’t deserve to hold the House. Yes, of course, the GOP has all the wrong ideas about job creation — the Laissez Faire, pure free market, root hog or die mentality drives me nuts — but if the Democratic Party doesn’t do something pretty spectacular to make things better for ordinary Americans, I say you deserve to lose this fall. In spades.

The Obama administration has done nothing but continue to follow Bush administration policy on financial matters, led by a team of financial advisers who CAUSED the mess and institutionalized the greed that got us where we are. If the President is ACTUALLY a populist, if he is a progressive and for the little guy, I have yet to see all that much evidence of it. I KNOW there has been some good legislation, but what has been passed was just about ruined by the lobbyists and Blue Dog Democrats in Congress. It’s all very well to lay the blame on them, President Obama, but the American people need RESULTS and have been counting on you to come through. So far it’s been largely a disappointment. And I don’t see how it could be otherwise given the economic team you have in place…. These people — Geithner, Summers and Bernanke — are the same people who didn’t just CAUSE the problem, they ARE the problem. The Obama administration lacks credence as long as these people are at the helm. Fewer and fewer ordinary Americans can be fooled about this now.

Not to trivialize the unemployment/jobs situation at all, but perhaps you might enjoy watching Monty Python, Silly Job Interview (video). There are more Monty Python Videos on my Really Funny Videos page. Wonderful existential absurdity. If you’re tired of the news you might want to have a look. Or if sitcoms are more your thing, consider watching some clips from Two and a Half Men, one of my favorites. If you want to listen to some really good electronic, rock and pop music while you surf the web, there are hours of really good music on my #1 rated Electronic Rock Playslist. We’ve go some decent Rock Music Videos, too. At Evans Liberal Politics we’re proud to not just inform you, but entertain you, too.

If you can’t get a decent job in this economy, at least you can have a little fun. Have you been sucked into the online survey taking ripoff yet? I have to admit, I’m spending a lot of time at it, but mainly in the process of filling out these surveys, you end up getting screwed by mandatory offers. The worst was the free Dell XPS laptop scam. They start you out with just two offers out of about 12 that you need to accept, and then when you are heaving a sigh of relief and hit the NEXT button, you’re faced with NINE mandatory offers. (I quit at that point.) What a ripoff! Guess I’ll be fine with my current laptop for a while, right? Caveat emptor!!! If anyone has a decent idea about how to ACTUALLY make some legitimate money from home, please do email me. And thanks for stopping by Evans Liberal Politics.

Watch Homelessness and Poverty in the U.S., with stark images of poverty in our affluent society.

Watch U.S. Families Struggle To Eat, CBS News – 3:30.

Watch Poverty in America — 4:44.

These will give you “the idea” of what it is like to be poor in America. Can you take it? Do you have enough caring in your heart?

Living on the Edge: Poverty in America

*****

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