The unemployment rate was released today and it's bad news. The number of jobs lost was 263,000 and the official unemployment rate is now at 9.8%.
We're all disposable workers now.
Among the unemployed, the number of job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs rose by 603,000 to 10.4 million in September.
Gets worse. People out of work for over 27 weeks, is now at 10.4 million and is also now 35.6% of the official unemployed tally.
Think the news gets any better? Ha ha. The labor participation rate, or those who are in the workforce, looking, dropped too. Remember population is increasing, so these people are just dropping out of the count entirely. No they did not move to their Swiss villa, they are no longer being counted.
The civilian labor force participation rate declined by 0.3 percentage point in September to 65.2 percent. The employment-population ratio, at 58.8 percent, also declined over the month and has decreased by 3.9 percentage points since the recession began in December 2007.
2.2 million people are in the marginally attached category, which means they are wanting a job but haven't looked in the last month. Then we have 706,000 discouraged workers who have given up but want a job.
September occupational job losses:
- Construction - 64,000
- Manufacturing - 51,000
- Retail - 39,000
- Government - 53,000
The average hours also dropped to 33. So you have a job, but hey, you can't get 40 hours of wages in.
U6, the broader unemployment rate measure is 17%.
U6 is defined as total unemployed, plus all marginally attached
workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers.
"Washington Doesn't Get It: We Need More Jobs"
From Dan Froomkin:
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
Hey Obama shout out weekend
I think writing up a series of posts on what policies, very specific, very exact, do we need right this moment to create good paying American jobs.
I'm going to try to write up a post this weekend on it, but maybe others want to do that.
This is the bottom line for me is Congress/Administration has ignored a lot of policies that are needed because it's not what corporate lobbyists and other nations want them to do....but to me, it's our country damn it and obviously from today, yes folks, you cannot have a strong economy with these levels of unemployment, as much as you wish it were not so!
I was trying to find this report that showed
how these senators, with a lot of power, from less populated states are getting huge amounts of corporate $$$$. The report said that there was no way that these senators could raise that type of money from their small states.
I think it is a good idea to start policy discussion.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
feel free
I'll try to put together a policy change type post.
Not the exact report, but still good
While this isn't the exact report, Sold_Out at wallstreetwtach.org has an excellent breakdown of the financial contributions from Wall Street to congress.
What would a modern version of the WPA look like?
Any ideas?
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
well, first
an analysis of the structure, dispersion of funds that happened in the 1930's should be examined and then adopted.
One thing for sure is they must require U.S. citizenship, perm residency at minimum.
Obviously just using the current nobid contract award as well as the states is leading to corruption, waste, money being offshore outsourced....so all of that needs to be cleaned up, else it's just throwing more good money after bad.
But why use contractors like we do now?
Sure need contractors for design and project management function for infrastructure projects but all labor could come from a government sponsored entity meaning anyone who wanted job would be an employee of this GSE.
Job training would be part of program. School teachers and other who want to teach to elevate the horrible student teacher ratio in public schools.
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RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
because it's all corrupt
and to execute on any project takes an already formed business structure, at least to do it quickly. Now one can "bring in" under the government, from private contractors a lot of these jobs. Bush was busy outsourcing the government as I recall.
How did WPA work?
Were the workers employees of the WPA? Who did the design, planning & project management?
Part of the hold up now is that some of the money is being funneled to the states - many of them have very slow procurement processes.
Just thinking out loud.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
RebelCapitalist.com - Financial Information for the Rest of Us.
Whatever happened to "shovel ready"?
Under ARRA, this was supposed to lead to a minimal delay in implementation. Contracts (such as road building/ improvement) already competed (or no-bid to the governor's brother-in-law) could then be funded. Stimulus funds to the states were believed to be fast-track -- but really means why should we use state funds if the feds are writing us a check?
Frank T.
Frank T.
EP Homework assignments
I'm noticing comments asking a lot of questions I'm asking too. I seriously do not know, it seems funds went off to the states where they then disappeared into some sort of no-bid, crony contract award whatever system that I for one haven't been able to track on.
Each answer is at least a little reading research.
So.....EPers, how about this. When you have these great questions, how about digging around for the answers to them and see if there is some organization, group or some sort of data you can find...that is credible (always a difficult assessment here!) that is tracking on in the real world projects and who really got what and how many U.S. worker hires really happened? It's about $50B supposedly deployed...but dispersed now among the states....so what each state did with this I'm not sure.
WPA worked
I believe they managed the entire thing. In other words, the management, the staff, the projects.
I believe a lot of contracts were awarded to private companies, extensively, for things like infrastructure but I think the WPA itself has it's own labor pool, direct.
Be nice to find out the details of how that was all managed back then, but that's the little bit I can figure out.