Excellent WSJ Article
The Wall Street Journal has an excellent – if longish – article discussing why our economy is still in the toilet despite a falling unemployment rate. It specifically addresses the issue of our current low labor participation rate.
Highly recommended. Grabbing a cup of coffee and taking a few minutes (well, 15-20, maybe) to read and think about it is IMO worth your while.
Category: Economy
Good article Hondo. One of the reasons I believe we saw higher participation in the work force in decades prior to the 60s was the lack of welfare and higher rate unemployment programs. I remember a saying my grandfolks had when someone would leave to even go home. They would say, “write if you find work”. Laughingly. I asked once what it meant. They told me of the great depression and how men would leave hearth and home to find work wherever they could. If they found a place hiring they would write home so others could come. Near where I live is the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. It is where the material for the atomic bombs dropped on Japan was produced. At its height it was the largest General Delivery Post Office in the nation. Men from all over the country came by the thousands for good paying jobs building the plants, infrastructure and facilities. Many are still alive here today.
But my point is they had a work ethic which I believe is gone today. They did whatever it took to work and work hard to feed themselves and their families. It happened at Oak Ridge and other places as well.
Even today in my field of telecommunications. Before I retired I began to see younger workers with a different attitude about their job and a different ethic towards work in general.
In summation I think in my one opinion that the loss of the American work ethic is a great disaster looming. America’s can-do spirit seems a thing of the past. I hope not. I further hope it does not take a drastic event like a WWII to draw it out of Americans again.
But again, I could be…all wrong.
Sparks,
Preach it. I work in a facility where 65-70 hour weeks are the norm, but for SC the pay is quite good and we have a pretty decent crew in charge of the place. But I would say – conservatively – that nine out of every ten new hires last less than thirty days, and the majority of those last less than two weeks. They seem incapable – or worse, unwilling – to follow the simplest of rules, and the concept of working more than eight hours a day is utterly abhorrent to most of them. The only ones we can rely on are the folks who have come from Mexico to support their families…and we lose them on a regular basis when its found their papers aren’t in order. Really starting to wonder what the future of employment in this country is.
Mike
Let’s start with school. High school is where kids learned job skills, such as typing, shorthand, bookkeeping, woodworking, auto mechanics – that sort of thing. Even home ec was considered a job skill. If you knew how to cook, you might actually be able to get a job at a greasy spoon diner flipping burgers.
None of the skills classes that are needed for jobs are being offered in high school, where they should be in place. There is no preparation for the work world. The children in adult bodies going into the work force are functionally illiterate and have no work ethic because they have no incentive to work – i.e., no need to EARN the money they’re given.
Instead of kids asking you if you want fries with that at McD’s, for example, it is now adults, usually Latinos, in fact, working two to three different jobs, and they don’t view it as demeaning to be expected to show up to work on time.
On the other hand, when I was putting in a 60-hour week in A/R at a small company and begged for a temp to do filing, the very nice young lady sent to me was funciontally illiterate and couldn’t understand a simple alphanumeric account number filing system. She was a product of our sloppy, slovenly education system.
In regard to that, Indiana has abandoned the crappy Core Curriculum that has been so popular because Indiana students are proving to be functionally illiterate and unable to qualify for college-level classes. Other states are beginning to do the same thing.
That’s a good article, and it makes soem very good points, especially about eliminating the 50% penalty on older workers drawing SocSec and earning more than the $15,000 maximum. There should NOT be a penalty for being willing to work.
IMO you’re spot-on, Sparks. The fear of being hungry is an excellent motivation to find and keep a job – rightfully so, also IMO.
That said, unemployment rate is at best a poor measure of how fully employed the nation actually is at a given time. A far better measure is the participation rate – e.g., the fraction of those of working age actually working.
Prior to the 1960s, that rate was historically between about 58% and 60%. The structural changes in the US economy and society due to the “women’s lib” movements of the early/mid 1960s caused that rate to rise dramatically over the next 2 decades; by 1986, the new norm of 65+% had been reached. For the next two decades plus, the US labor participation rate stayed between 65% and 67.5%.
The US labor participation rate was 65.8% in Feb 2009. It then dropped, virtually linearly, to 62.8% in Oct 2013. We’re at 63.2% today. It hasn’t been that low since July 1978 – during the Carter administration.
http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000?years_option=specific_years&include_graphs=true&to_year=2014&from_year=1948
To put things into perspective: a 1% change in the US labor participation rate represents a net gain or loss of more than 2 million jobs. So yeah: the fact that the labor participation rate today is 2.6% lower than in Feb 2009 is significant as hell. That means that after 5+ years of this Administration – and nearly 5 years after the recession ended in June 2009 – the US is more than 5 million jobs short of what’s needed to get back to where the economy was when the current Administration took charge.
When the US labor participation rate shows a sustained increase for long enough to again climb above 64.5%, the economy will have actually more-or-less recovered. Until then IMO we’re still drifting in the wind while waiting for adult leadership, economically speaking.
Great info, your last sentence is spot on.
Well, you are never, ever going to convince the left minded that this makes any sense. Last week, after people were posting shit on my FB page, I went to the ‘Teabonics’ site and ‘Stop The World Teabaggers want Off’ to call them out for the lies and hysteria. I was polite, never called anyone names and asked questions. I was promptly called a cunt, Fox news whore. I still did not get belligerent and open up my COW. I just kept pounding them with the truth. Let the effing echo chamber ensue and voila! I get banned because someone else called me a cunt and pretty much for trying to create debate or discussion. I actually posted the link in the article from Forbes. Because of my work, we have seen exactly that- if you can make 50k in gov’t welfare programs, why work? People do not understand this. They also don’t seem to remember that unemployment benefits used to be for 6-10 weeks…or that the states have to borrow money from the fed to pay extended benefits (at least NC did). If the economy is so much better why are 50% of Americans on Food Stamps? If the economy is so much better why are there only 116 million Americans working? Why have part-time jobs out-paced full-time employment? Why do unemployment benefits need to be extended, five years later? Why do we “need” to print money? And lastly but not totally unrelated–If the employer is the one who, according to the Fair Labor Standards Act, (FLSA) defines what full or part time employment means, does anyone else understand the calculation being used for employers and the designation for the new “you must offer health care” to these people? This is UFB to me. They take part time, who usually don’t get benefits and add up the hours of all of them. When it reaches the number of hours of a full-time employee, the employer now has more “full-time” employees on paper…and must pay them benefits even though none of them produce what the full-time does. How the hell… Read more »