Report: The Employed Are Hurting, Too. Meanwhile, Heritage Foundation Blames Unemployment Checks for Unemployment.
By Susie Madrak Friday Jun 12, 2009 6:00pmHOURS DECLINE FOR EMPLOYED
"The humanitarian benefit of unemployment insurance also causes people to look with less intensity for a new job." - James Sherk, labor economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Don't you love it? Record layoffs, hiring contractions everywhere, and the wingnuts blame people who can't find the non-existent jobs. Or, even worse, the people who can't afford to work for $5 an hour. Geeze, they're all about economic self-interest: "What should I do - keep the unemployment checks that at least cover the bills, or take a minimum wage job that puts me in the red?" Wouldn't you think they'd get that simple equation?
These people are either nuts, or just plain amoral. What do you think?
People who still have jobs are faring worse than at any time since the Great Depression, a USA TODAY analysis of employment data found. Furloughs, pay cuts and reduced hours are taking a toll on workers who so far have escaped job cuts.
The employed worked fewer hours in May — an average of just 33.1 hours a week — than at any time since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began counting in 1964. Part-time work is at a record high. Overtime is at a record low.
The magnitude of job losses — 6 million jobs gone, a 9.4% unemployment rate — has overshadowed the groundbreaking nature of the nation's employment troubles, especially the financial decline of those still working.
"You can rip a whole chapter out of your Economics 101 textbook because the job market isn't behaving the way we were taught," says David Rosenberg, chief economist at money manager Gluskin Sheff and Associates.
Even working people have less to spend.
Businesses cut total wages at a 6.2% annual rate in the first quarter. Federal, state and local governments increased spending on wages by 6.1%, offsetting some of the decline.
The use of pay cuts — the last choice at most companies after hiring freezes, salary freezes and layoffs — shows how the recession is unlike any since the Depression, says Laura Sejen of compensation consultant Watson Wyatt.
"The recession has been broad, deep and long. No one has been immune," she says.
Baby boomers— 79 million people born from 1946 to 1964 — have been hit particularly hard.
Unemployment rates for workers 45 and older have soared to their highest level since at least 1948, when the government started tracking it.
Job losses for baby boomers come at a difficult time: during the traditional peak earning years, as retirement nears.
"It's hard for an older worker to compete in the job market with younger guys and women. The jobs may not pay what they were making," says Austin Sargent, an economist with Utah's Department of Workforce Services.
The average time a person has been out of work is at a post-Depression record of 22.5 weeks.
Congress' approval of higher and longer unemployment benefits may contribute to the extra time spent between jobs, says James Sherk, a labor economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation.
"The humanitarian benefit of unemployment insurance also causes people to look with less intensity for a new job," he says.
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And don't forget the massive outsourcing/offshoring and H1B/L1 visa fraud that is going on during an extremely difficult time for US workers.
What is the "Heritage Foundation"? Its a bunch of Republican assholes who have never done a day's honest labor. A bunch of corporate suck-ups in love with their own damned thoughts about the nation's peons and what's best for them. Kick these bastards out of their tax-free zones and watch them sink. Rotten-assed MFkrs. Too damned "important" for their own good.
!
You nailed it.
If there is a bigger bunch of assholes in this country, I don't know who they are.
These dickheads would be the first ones to the guilotine if this was 1792 France.
Too painless.
They would have gotten worse.
"They could have gotten worse."
How about this, then? Take away their trust funds and inheritances. Make them go out into the real world, find a real job, and put up with the corporate bullshit that THEY created. Let THEM have to work two jobs just to almost make ends meet. Then take away THEIR lift savings because they became ill and their crappy insurance wouldn't cover it.
After all that, they might have a slightly different viewpoint.
... pass legislation that every 3 months for 4 weeks straight freezes their assets, credit cards, debit cards whilst forcing them into bathing and wiping asses at group homes, waiting tables, or flipping the burgers at a McDonalds in the most violent, seediest, high crime area of a city chosen entirely at random. Damn near all the wonks and apparatchiks at the Heritage Foundation are often soooooo gung ho about conscription and community service for other people ... but not for themselves. Oh noes! They beez special and unique -- evidenced by their flags, magnets, good wholesome traditional marriages, gainful employment, charity work, well behaved snotnosed brats destined for fame on an episode of "Intervention" on A&E, extra shiny automobiles, and sprawling houses with good ol' Rosa their live-in Latino that cooks, cleans, babysits, gardens, and the sooner as she finds a nice guy to marry, the sooner she'll never set foot on a golf course again.
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Well said Torn Q . How I wish that one fine day all of these high and mighty A holes will come crashing down hard from their pedastals . As for human beings these are on the very bottom , the worst , the kind that this world would be so much better off without . I'm not into violence but if I were the great decider I do believe there would be a purge .
Frgn' Heritage Foundation. Bunch of conservative, republigan pukes.
Last week, I received a piece of mail from "Sean Hannity" at the Heritage Foundation. Insannity was asking for a contribution, and there was also a survey to be filled out.
So, I filled out the survey, giving answers just the opposite of what Insannity probably expects to see! I also left comments on many of the questions. One question was, "do you think that Democrats are pushing to reinstate the fairness doctrine?" I marked "no," and also wrote that only paranoid conservatives think that Democrats are pushing for the fairness doctrine.
The envelope also asks you to put a stamp on it in order to defray costs for the Heritage Foundation. Needless to say, I did not put a stamp on the envelope!
Frgn' Heritage Foundation.
a few months ago.
I hope they are not paying $5 an hour minimum wage, it is my understanding it is currently $6.55 and set to go $7.25 in July.
That is still not nearly enough.
However Davie Neumark in the Wall Street Journal, surprise, thinks the $7.25 raise should be delayed. here
Also there is good interview with Nader on Bloomberg about the swindle that is the GM bankruptcy, health care and the new tobacco law. Here
GM will be making cars in China with serf labor and importing them here.
Good piece by Joseph Stiglitz in Vanity Fair: Wall Street’s Toxic Message here
Michael Klare, Goodbye to Cheap Oil, here - we are soooooo screwed
Frankly, I don't give a shit if a company is in business if they don't employ people at a liveable wage.
Freakin' Wal Mart, I wish they would go out of business.
You know, these American auto companies did great for a century - until they fired all of their employees. Now they are all bankrupt.
Maybe they should have kept all those 100's of thousands of former employees who use to buy a new vehicle or two every year (plus their families). The CEO's wouldn't have made $100's of millions, but they would probably still be in business and getting bye.
When some asshole says a company needs to go global to be competitive, I tell them they are fools. All that means is that corporations should screw their workers and the country by exploiting people in third world countries who already are in a world of shit.
The only thing that needs to go global, is a 1790's French style revolution.
generated by SUVs? Isn't business responsible for saving for a rainy day?
I refuse to set foot in walmart. I'd rather pay more at another local store.
$7.25/hr @ 40 hrs/week is enough to live on in significant parts of the country... just not any place a decent person would want to live.
What happens when wages go up (minimum or otherwise)?
People can actually afford to:
* pay their bills
* buy the products that are produced by the companies they work for
* save money for retirement
* work one job instead of two (or more)
* educate their children
* educate themselves and become involved politically
* leave crappy jobs that they detest, but keep because health insurance
Why doesn't the corporate world want wages to go up? See the list above. When we, the working class have enough to get by, and just a little more, corporations lose power. They can no longer force us to work for squat, stay in jobs we hate, and they can no longer control us.
When people don't have to spend every waking hour either working or worrying, we begin to have free time. We no longer have to rely on the corporate media for our information. We can do our own research, and disprove the lies they've been feeding us for decades.
A happy, healthy middle class is anathema to the Republicans and other corporate shills.
"What should I do - keep the unemployment checks that at least cover the bills, or take a minimum wage job that puts me in the red?"
Unfortunately, very few states actually have unemployment benefits high enough to cover the bills, and there is a HUGE disparity in benefit amounts. (Massachusetts — $628 vs. Mississippi — $230)
I understand that cost-of-living should be taken into account, but there is no way people are paying all their bills on $989 a month.
Federal minimum wage is currently $6.55 per hour until July 24, 2009 when it goes to $7.25 per hour. 40 hours @ 6.55= $262 gross, so in Mississippi at least, its just about a wash.
There are places in this country where you can pay all your bills on $1k/mon... and the difference in cost of living between Mississipi & MA is more than a factor of three.
Yeah, I kept hearing about how the cost of living is so much lower in Florida, and then I moved here. It's a crock. Some things, like housing, are slightly lower, but the wages are so low that any benefit is lost. As for unemployment, Florida's program has been privatized, so guess what, it's in their best interest to find a reason not to pay.
Using an online COL comparison site:
$25K-living in Boston, you would need to earn about $14.9K to maintain the same lifestyle in Jackson, Mississippi.
Large disparity, yes; threefold, not so much.
The maximum benefit here in New York is an unsustainable $405/week, but many of us are forced to live on even less.
Because I wasn't able to find work for all of the previous 3 quarters, my unemployment 'benefit' was knocked down to $254, plus a $25 emergency supplemental (which runs out after 6 months). This is the first time in my 30+ years of working I've ever been involuntarily unemployed and the first time I've received unemployment. It's shockingly inadequate and, as intended, is degrading.
There is no work out there. Not full-time, not part-time, not temporary. Nothing. But what keeps me lying awake at night and unable to get out of bed in the morning is the profound fear that this isn't ending any time soon; the financial crisis will assuredly get worse and the new paradigm for cheap and exploited labor will become permanent.
But as frightened as I am, I know my situation is not as desperate as so many others. We need to keep spreading the word about what's going on and hold Obama and the democrats accountable for:
-- their giveaways to Wall Street while keeping Main Street on life support
-- their lack of Wall Street oversight and regulation
-- their capitulation to the insurance industry and complete lack of support for single-payer.
Let me restate their conclusion in a more accurate, or at least more worker-friendly manner:
Unemployment insurance increases the bargaining power of workers.
Absolutely. And it's called insurance for a reason: workers pay for the benefit. The whole point of having it is so that skilled workers have the opportunity to find jobs that take advantage of their abilities and pays them for the years of training that they've put in. Without it, nobody would feel confident about spending 4+ years of their life and thousands of dollars to obtain higher education. What's the point if you have to work at McDonalds because a bunch of wealthy bankers and stock brokers destroyed the economy?
I've got more in savings now than I ever have had, but I'm not about to spend anything in this environment - who knows if I'll have a job next month (I know I'll at least get one month's notice - more than most get).
I guess it's because I'm a federal employee.
Their process is to just build the mission with the same staffing so everyone works more.
Then they say that you cannot work late with pre-approved permission. SO, you have to predict when a crisis will occur or work extra hours that will be compensated later.
However, when you take comp days off, you DON'T use vacation days and at the end of the year, if you have what the govt. considers excess (240 hours), BLAMMO, you lost your vacation time.
Happens to me yearly.
Are any of the people who work at the Heritage Foundation unemployed? Wait. That's a really dumb question...
These people are either nuts, or just plain amoral. What do you think?
I think the word immoral fits them best. I don't buy that they don't know that what they're saying and doing is morally wrong. They may not care, but they do know - or at least they know that other people will think it's morally deplorable.
I could continue . .
Well, at least I was pretty close to average at something. I was unemployed 10/27/08 - 3/24/09 . . around 20 weeks.
I took the 1st job that paid as much as my unemployment benefit. Unemployment in CA works out to about 60% of my former paychecks. So, I took a 40% paycut and, instead of a 10 minute commute one way, I'm up to 90 minutes. Blessedly, most of that is on light rail and the new employer pays for the monthly pass.
and, uh, yeah, those 20 weeks were one heckuva vacation. All that time to surf the 'net . . for work. No such thing as "hitting the bricks" to look for work 40 hours a week - can only find work by internet and visiting the occasional job fair .. .. for even lower paying work than what I got on unemployment.
Oh, and I've thought of a few more words, but I'll keep this comment clean :-)
“These people are either nuts, or just plain amoral. What do you think?”
It's all about the agenda. Corporations good... people bad. It's the same with Fox News. Force fit the story around the agenda. It's not very complicated.
Not that unemployment needs any defense, but, after 17 years of employment, I was happy to collect unemployment which gave me the time to get a good job, rather than having to work at minimum wage, and being too tired to look for better employment. I was told, by the unemployment office that by age, no one would want to hire me.
I wasn't offended, because I don't need lies. I needed solutions, and unemployment insurance bridged me to that solution. Unemployment office was also very helpful.
I know it wasn't on the list, but it's really the only answer that makes sense.
These people expect everyone that isn't a corporation or conservative rich person to live by a meek Christian moral code.
The rich and corporations however can do anything they want.
"The humanitarian benefit of unemployment insurance also causes people to look with less intensity for a new job," he says.
Yeah, God forbid - being compassionate and humanitarian to anybody. Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps(even if you don't have shoes to begin with), you lazy pussies and vote Republican, goddammit.
that the only way to reach the "good life" is to bend to their will.
"The humanitarian benefit of unemployment insurance also causes people to look with less intensity for a new job," he says.
Sure, because who wouldn't want to try to support a family, pay rent/mortgage on half of what you were making when you were working. Oh, and since you've lost your job - no medical coverage for you or your family (and dont tell me there's COBRA - cobra's a fucking joke when you're unemployed). I'm really sick of these over-paid, pampered, think-tank freaks who've never held a real job in their lives. Fucking useless wingnut welfare recipients who get paid to jerkoff and write the occasional position paper, yet think they can lecture working people about life in the real world. Fuck them! Fuck them all!
As much as bush/chenny have done to destroy America.
We have to go back in time and thank clinton for helping push nafta thru and helping create that giant sucking sound we have been hearing since.
I don't mean to be putting down dems because clinton was the best republican president we ever had.
On the opposite end bush was the worse.
We have allowed these people to get bought off by corporate America.
They have taken us in a steady spiral toward the bottom as corporate profits have gone up at our expense.
We have let these greedy bastards move the manufacturing jobs to places that have no workers rights no benefits, no enviromental controls, all for more corporate profits while ruining the economy and polluting the atmosphere. Some of us saw it comming while others chose to ignore it.
Now everyone except those who made the huge profits see what has happened.
I worry about my brother a truck driver that is only getting about half the miles he was getting a year ago.
Half the miles means half the money.
It's not been good for me either I have had jobs and at the moment I have one good job going with tweleve men working on it. I have a couple of small jobs lined up but they will only require about three people for each one. What will my men do after that?
I don't know.
We need to stop the free trade bullshit. Free trade only helps the ones at the top of the heap.
We need fair trade. Fair trade means fairness and honesty for everyone involved, not just the CEO's and the managers.
Greed put us in the position we are in today.
Honesty can get us out.
The people that take the risk should be rewarded but making a profit at everyone elses expense is not the way to do it.
The lowest paid man a laborer that works for me makes $12.00 an hour. All my people do a good job.
It shows in the quality of our product.
People that have let us do their project have told me that they can see by looking at our job site and the finished product that they spent their money wisely.
I know that when I tell my men what I want done that they will do their best to make the job look good and be structurally sound.
My local building inspector knows that I will not cut corners when it comes to safety, and my men know that if something looks to dangerous to stop and come to me and together we will find a way to take some of the risk out of the situation.
My employees make me look good and I will do all I can for them.
Yesterday was pay day. When I handed out the checks, I looked at them all together and said guy's we got a lot done this week. You did a good job. Enjoy your weekend, have a good time and lets start again monday. Thanks!
republicanism is a mental illness!
These FAKE Preachers and haters don't care about Americans.
...has wasted for the past 40 years now, couldn't we? Some people say the total might be a trillion dollars. Would certainly help assuage a lot of misery being felt by the unemployed to have the anti-drug budget for this year, some 40 Billion, shifted to unemployment, now, wouldn't it?
Let's say you've just gotten a pink slip. You've been forced to live paycheck-to-paycheck for the past 8 years, for as the rich got richer, you got poorer. You've got next to no savings because of that. You've got all kinds of bills, through no fault of your own, and you've been paying them as best you can. Now, your kids are facing a future where they may be homeless and hungry. You're going to be a lot more worried about taking care of them than worrying about some boogeyman of a drug dealer that the Gub'mint says it needs money to 'fight'. You need money. But the money you need, the money that could go to unemployment insurance is being wasted. Money that fat-cat bureaucrats say they need in order to protect your kids from drugs (and pay his salary and his retirement, when it's likely you'll have to work 'til you die because some white collar criminal sucked your pension fund dry)
It's time for some debate in this country as to whether we can afford to continue paying for an ineffective DrugWar when kids in this country may be facing homelessness and malnutrition.
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