A lot has been said today over the fact that the United States economy lost over half a million jobs in November, the job “creation” numbers since 1974. This brings the 2008 job loss figures to 1,900,000 and counting, almost 2/3 of that in the last 3 months. As alarming as these figures are, they don’t tell the whole story. First, as Dave Johnson points out, all those people who were classified as “contractors” didn’t count when the work went away. A couple more very sobering figures are pointed out by Robert Reich: the typical workweek has shrunk to 33.5 hours, the shortest since all those baby boomers got part time after school jobs; and the economy still needs 125,000 new jobs every month just to keep up with newcomers. Economists disagree on this exact figure — some say 150,000 and some even insist it’s more like 200,000.
So the actual unemployment number is a lot worse than will be reported. Not only are more people working fewer hours than since the Johnson Administration, more people are [not] working as “independent contractors”, and people who didn’t have a job won’t be getting one.
When you add the people who never were employed (125,000 x 11 = 1,375,000, I’ll use Mr. Reich’s conservative number) to the people whose jobs evaporated (1,900,000), our economy is short a minimum of 3.27 million jobs. This year alone. Not including December. Not counting the contractors. Not accounting for the people who are working part time who would like to be working full time.
No wonder 10% of homeowners are behind on the mortgage.
Here’s some bonus automotive items: the unions will give up the 85% pay they currently get while laid off (wouldn’t that be nice); Firedoglake on subsidies; maybe they can fix too big to fail by merging and being even bigger (aw gee, 3 failing companies made into one big failing company? How can it lose?); Carrie on modern electric cars; BradBlog asks about the EV-1; and I really wish I could find online yesterday’s interview of Mr. Nardelli by Maria Bartiromo. She verbally eviscerates him and his company.
In closing: maybe it’s a good idea to find out what real people want out of health care [insurance] reform; and In-laws in the [White] House!
Thanks for the link to David Johnson’s post. Not too many people talk about contractors. Just one minor clarification, which I realize I should be leaving on Johnson’s blog.
Sometimes “contractors” are entitled to unemployment benefits if they are W-4 employees with a contract shop. (Perhaps they would be more correctly called contract employees rather than contractors?) However, if they don’t work long enough to meet stringent state requirements, or if they are self-employed contractors, they don’t get unemployment benefits. I think it’s just a matter of semantics on who is considered a contractor.