The struggle that workers face at the NFI warehouses in Chino, Calif.

A growing industry of temp agencies supplies -- and exploits -- workers that move the products sold by big box stores like Walmart. In sprawling warehouse areas in places like California and Illinois, a new wave of so-called 'logistics' companies hire temp workers to run warehouse distribution facilities that get products from manufacturers -- mostly overseas -- to stores like Walmart. The logistics companies hire large workforces on a daily basis, paying them low wages, giving them no benefits and putting them in grueling working conditions that lead many of the best workers to suffer from debilitating injuries that end their careers. The jobs are frequently given to African Americans and immigrants from Latin America.

Companies like Walmart hire logistics companies who then subcontract out to smaller companies who directly employ the warehouse workers, adding layers of bureaucracy that prevent the big box companies from suffering any negative blowback if the workers exploited or treated illegally.

Walmart may have been the end beneficiary of Dickerson's sweat, but the big-box retailer wasn't directly responsible for her low pay or her aching body. That's one of the many benefits to an employment arrangement based on outsourcing and subcontracting: The corporation at the top indemnifies itself from any unpleasantness at the bottom, thanks to the smaller corporate players in the middle. Many American companies have woken up to this fact, with broad implications for the future of blue-collar work.

"It seems to be spreading like wildfire," Nelson Lichtenstein, a professor of American labor history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says of such outsourcing, particularly as it relates to temp workers like Dickerson. "All of these companies, wherever they possibly can, they want to create a workforce that doesn't work for them. The question is, Why? What is the incentive?"

"They're smart," he says. "They run the numbers."

...

Such subcontracting enables corporations to essentially take workers off their books, foisting the traditional responsibilities that go with being an employer -- paying a reasonable wage, offering health benefits, providing a pension or retirement plan, chipping into workers' compensation coverage -- conveniently onto someone else. Workers like Dickerson, of course, aren't accounted for when Walmart touts that more than half of its workforce receives health coverage.

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Some politicians are saying that the latest unemployment report is good news, but it's not. It shows us that this country is still in crisis. It shows us that the government needs to act quickly and aggressively to create jobs, and to restore the lost earning power of the average American who has a job.

Most of all it shows us that millions of struggling people are still invisible in the Nation's Capitol.

This week the Occupy movement is holding a series of "Take Back the Capitol" events in Washington. Let's hope it shines some light on the country's unemployed, under-employed, and under-earning millions. Until now, they've been pretty much invisible in that town.

The Invisible Americans are all around you. They're in your state, in your community, maybe in your family. Maybe they're your kids, just out of college. Maybe they're your fifty-something uncles and aunts, your grandparents, your grandchildren. They're right there in the jobs report, for anyone with the eyes - and the willingness - to find them.

Invisible: Millions of the long-term unemployed.

While some celebrated an unemployment rate of "only" 8.6 percent, half that change was explained by the fact that 315,000 people dropped out of the labor force. Job creation barely kept pace with the entry of new people into the workforce.

Those 315,000 people join the 5.7 million people officially classified as long-term unemployed. That number is at historically high levels, representing nearly half (43 percent) of all the jobless people in this country.

It's not that they don't want jobs. Most of them have fallen into despair. Even worse, what they may have fallen into is realism. Unless we use the power of government to do something, some of them will never work again. They're falling out of the "normal" economy and into a new reality of persistent joblessness and, for some, eventual poverty.

Invisible: Segregation on the unemployment line.

The official jobless rate for white people is 7.6 percent, versus 15.5 percent for African Americans and 11.4 percent for Hispanics.

And those are only the official numbers. The figures are much higher if you count the long-term unemployed, the under-employed, and "discouraged" workers.

In a nation that prides itself on being the land of opportunity, we're denying entire groups of people the chance for a better life.

Invisible: The jobless generation.

There's a silent epidemic of youth unemployment. Official teenaged unemployment is 23.7 percent, and the real rate is much higher. Recent college graduates face historically high jobless rates - along with historically high student debt.

Studies show that young people who begin their work lives un- or under-employed face an entire lifetime of lower income. By failing to act, we're betraying our own children and throwing away an entire generation of young people.

Invisible: The under-employed.

There's a silent epidemic of under-employment. There are 8.5 million people who want to work full-time but can only get part time work. in that category. That figure dropped slightly, but we don't know how much of the drop was due to people finding full-time work or being laid off altogether.

And remember, underemployed people aren't just making less money. In most cases they're also going without health insurance or other benefits. They're struggling on the margins of working America, barely surviving and never knowing how much money the'll earn from one week to the next.

Invisible: The vanishing public servant.

While Washington politicians drone on about "budget cuts," there's not much discussion of the fact that many of those cuts increase unemployment - at the Federal, state, and local levels. Government jobs have been dwindling since 2008, and the shrinkage is continuing a time when we need more of them.

Teachers, police officers, highway toll takers, postal workers - you name it, they're losing their jobs. And the only debate in Washington seems to be, How many more of them can we make unemployed?

Invisible: The drowning middle class.

Average hourly earnings for all nonfarm employees decreased last month by 1 percent. Average hourly earnings increased by only 1.8 percen over the last year, while the cost of living (measured by the Consumer Price Index) increased 3.5 percent.

Once again average Americans have fallen behind in earnings and has seen their standard of living decline. Meanwhile, incomes continue to skyrocket for the wealthiest Americans. Income inequality is the worst it's been since the Great Depression.

Welcome to the New Gilded Age.

Political Blindness

This week we heard almost nothing in Washington about direct action to address these crises. The Democrats' "payroll tax holiday" would provide urgently needed ongoing relief for the battered middle class, and would also have a mild job-creating effect. But it would do so in an inefficient way, and also needlessly and recklessly endangers Social Security.

Republicans have no solution at all - just more of the same policies that caused these problems in the first place.

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Bank of America has made it official: They plan to lay off 30,000 employees to bolster their bottom line and keep stock prices high.

Via Wall Street Journal:

We knew the Bank of America ax was going to fall, but we didn’t quite know the number. Today — after BofA CEO Brian Moynihan made no direct mention of job cuts during an investor presentation — the bank said it will cut about 30,000 jobs over the next few years.

The job cuts are part of the first phase of a sweeping Bank of America efficiency drive. BofA said in a statement that attrition and leaving vacant jobs unfilled with be a “significant part” of the expected headcount cuts.

That's a whole lot of attrition. As Laura Clawson over at Daily Kos points out:

Dealbook offers some insight into the lack of detail about 30,000 jobs and the emphasis on stock prices: Bank of America just isn't talking about it. When the bank's CEO described cost-cutting measures, he didn't even mention job cuts; that came later, in a statement that offered no specifics. Because to the big banks, jobs just aren't important. And financial reporters overwhelmingly go along with that.

While I agree with that analysis, there's something else people aren't talking about here that jumped out at me from this Reuter's article:

The Moynihan speech "was pretty underwhelming. They need to address the bigger issues the bank faces," said Jason Ware, equity analyst at Salt Lake City-based Albion Financial Group.

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• The Fed says we're going to experience more crappy growth and

  Top Federal Reserve officials expect the unemployment rate to remain around nine percent at the end of next year and eight percent at the end of 2012, according to internal forecasts that drove the central bank to take new efforts to boost the economy three weeks ago.

  The 18 top leaders of the central bank expect the U.S. economy to grow at a 3 to 3.6 percent pace next year, which by their calculations will be enough to bring joblessness, currently at 9.6 percent, down to the 8.9 to 9.1 percent range in late 2011. In projections made in June, the same officials had been more optimistic, forecasting 3.5 to 4.2 percent growth in 2011 and an unemployment rate that would decline to the 8.3 to 8.7 percent range.

  Sadly, my experience with watching forecasts is that they're rarely gloomy enough. So based on that I'd actually expect unemployment to remain close to double digits well into 2012.

  How does Obama think he's going to get reelected with that sort of record on jobs again? One of the most baffling aspects of this administration has been its seeming total obliviousness to the economic fundamentals that drive people to vote in different ways. As in, "When there's 10% unemployment and a quarter of mortgages are underwater, voters are very likely to vote our sorry butts out of power." It's not too hard to understand.

• Top o' the mornin' to ye! Ireland is still an unholy mess! And the International Monetary Fund, which has traditionally done bang-up work in places like Argentina, are urging the Irish to slash its social safety net even more to pay for massive bank bailouts:

  Ireland should gradually lower unemployment benefits and cut the level of its minimum wage in order to boost employment, the International Monetary Fund said in a paper released on Monday.

  The paper, approved by Ajai Chopra, the IMF's mission chief negotiating terms of a joint rescue package with the EU in Dublin, said Ireland should introduce stricter job search requirements, give more resources to unemployment agencies to promote job search assistance, and review the level of minimum wage to make it consistent with a general fall in wages.

  This sort of report makes me wish that The Leprechaun really existed so he could jump out of the shadows and bite the IMF economists in their faces while saying, "You'll never give me pot o' gold to Deutsche Bank, ye scumbag!"

• Nouriel "Dr. Doom" Roubini is probably right that Greece, Ireland, Portugal and maybe even Spain and Italy might have to leave the Eurozone after they restructure (i.e., default on) their debts:

  "We started with private debt, we socialized it and it became public debt. Now we have sovereigns in trouble being bailed out by essentially super sovereigns, IMF, euro zone, EU," Roubini told Reuters Insider. "But there's not going to be anybody coming from Mars or the moon to bail out the IMF or the euro zone." [...]

  Asked if the 16-nation euro zone would eventually disintegrate, with some of the more debt-ridden members dropping out, Roubini, head of RGE Global Economics, said:

  "Eventually that's likely, but before some of the weaker members exit the monetary union, the more likely scenario that's going to affect the markets is a corrosive but orderly restructuring of their public debts."

  He said that process would not be painless.

  "The risk is that you start with one and it unravels," he warned.

  The reason the bond vigilantes have been circling Greece, Ireland and the other PIIGS countries is because of the Eurozone's poorly-designed currency regime. If you can issue your own debt but not your own currency, well, that makes it very tough to devalue your currency to increase your exports' competitiveness during a brutal recession. It also makes it impossible to monetize your debt (i.e., print a bunch of money and shovel it to your creditors) while implementing austerity measures.

• Turning back to the States, Greg Sargent reports that some recently-elected Tea Party candidates might actually be working on something useful by eliminating some of the government's truly wasteful farm subsidies for Ethanol:

  DeMint and Coburn, two leading conservatives, are calling on fellow Republicans to support letting the subidies expire as a way to prove the GOP is serious about reining in government spending. Just as the battle over earmarks did, ethanol subsidies could put GOP Senators who have supported them in the past -- such as Grassley and Orrin Hatch -- in an awkward spot, driving a wedge between them and conservatives who want a harder line on spending.

  Now Grassley has responded to our story, firing off an angry Tweet at DeMint and Coburn, asking them rhetorically if they're also willing to back the expiration of tax subsidies for the oil and gas industry. [...]

  Coburn, however, appears ready to accept Grassley's challenge. [...]

  With Coburn throwing down the gauntlet and saying not even subsidies for the oil and gas industries should be off the table, it seems like there's a clear opening here for an unorthodox alliance between conservatives like DeMint and Coburn and green groups who also condemn such subsidies. It's unclear as of yet how hard DeMint and Coburn will push this crusade, but Coburn in particular does seem pretty serious.

  Can I just say that if Coburn and DeMint are really, truly serious about this that they deserve a round of applause? One of the hallmarks of the Banana Republicanism that ran our country into the ground over the past decade was the horrifying way the GOP let Corporate America use the federal government as its personal ATM machine. I'll be watching closely to see if they stick to their promises, but if they follow through they deserve a thumbs-up.

• Media Matters has a pretty hilarious rundown of various Fox News personalities attacking Warren Buffett for daring to suggest that the richest people in America should pay more in taxes. My favorite reaction was Greta's:

  I always thought it was sort of appalling when they said to the rich, 'the rich need to pay their fair share,' as though they weren't paying their fair share -- although maybe Warren Buffett isn't paying his fair share -- that it was designed to create class warfare.

  I do love this sort of construction. "Class warfare," you'll notice, is always seemingly waged by the poor and middle class against the wealthy. Rich people would never, ever dream of waging class warfare themselves by, say, clamoring for more tax cuts while demanding cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

• And finally, your Daily Doom Index:

  -Ten-year treasury yields closed up by 1.46%

  -Gold futures finished up 1.5% on the day and closed at $1,377.60. You gold bugs are going to feel really, really foolish paying that much for gold if the world doesn't end. Unfortunately, I'm somewhat reluctant to take the other side of the bet you're making...

  -Bonus doom metric: The North Koreans are acting like a-holes yet again. That makes the world feel a little more doom-ier than most days.

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Do you suppose it's people like this who are at the end of their rope and see no realistic help on the way?

A new analysis released by the National Employment Law Project today reveals that 1.2 million workers will be cut off of federal jobless benefits by year’s end if Congress fails to renew the federal emergency extensions that expire on November 30th.
...
Of the 1.2 million workers at risk of losing federal benefits, 387,000 are workers who were recently laid-off and are now receiving the six months (26 weeks) of regular state benefits. After exhausting state benefits, these workers would be left to fend for themselves in a job market with just one job opening for every five unemployed workers and an unemployment rate that has exceeded nine percent for 17 months in a row—with no federal unemployment assistance whatsoever.

This doesn't include the '99ers - the workers who have exhausted all available unemployment benefits.

Cross-posted from Mouse Musings

Since the Bush administration’s legacy left the country suffering the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the number of unemployed has increased by 7.6 million to 15.1, and the official unemployment rate is just under 10%, For so many, just having a job – any crappy, horrible, badly-paid job – is better than no job at all. So few people are paying much attention to what is happening, and has been happening for quite some time, to those who are employed in what should be ‘good’ jobs; the increasing pressure on workers to work longer and harder, for less and less. Or else.

But sometimes the ‘or else’ isn’t just about losing your job. Let’s face it; there are some jobs where chronic fatigue and burnout are more hazardous than others. Flying for an airline for one. A few days ago, Northwest Flight 188 from San Diego to Minneapolis overflew the airport by more than 150 miles, out of radio contact with air traffic controllers for 80 minutes. Something sure as hell went very wrong 37,000 feet in the air with 147 unsuspecting passengers sitting in the back seats, and speculation is running rife about how two experienced and highly qualified pilots could possibly fly past their destination without either noticing. The chatter on just about every airline pilot forum is the same – suspicion falling on the most likely reason – the pilots simply… fell asleep. Luckily, no one died, except possibly two pilots’ careers.

Would be nice to think this was a one-off aberration. It’s not. A couple weeks ago, a Delta 767 with 195 passengers and crew landed in Atlanta on a taxiway instead of the runway, and investigators suspect fatigue as a factor; the crew had flown 10 hours and was landing at night. The third pilot, doing a checkride, had become ill during the flight, and was being cared for in the cabin as the other two pilots, distracted and tired, landed the jet on the wrong strip of asphalt. Not exactly the checkride they were hoping for.

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A few years ago, after another period of unemployment, I'd interviewed for a good job and done very well. They were very enthusiastic and told me they'd call me back for yet another interview but instead, I got a letter telling me I'd been eliminated from consideration for bad credit - which, you know, was the main reason I needed the job.

This legislation proposes to change that, and naturally I agree. But I think we're going to see a major rewrite on any laws having to do with credit ratings, at least when it comes to things like this:

Amid skyrocketing layoffs and mortgage foreclosures, several states and the federal government are pushing new rules to stop employers from unfairly screening out job applicants who can't pass a credit check.

Five states are considering laws that would restrict credit checks by employers. Stuart Ishimaru, President Obama's acting chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), is a vocal critic of the checks and has called for the agency to begin issuing guidelines on how such checks should be carried out.

About 43% of U.S. employers check job applicants for overdue payments on anything from mortgages and rent to credit cards and student loans, according to the Society for Human Resource Management and security consultant Kroll. That's up from 36% in 2004, a Kroll survey found.

But the checks are under fire from some lawmakers who say needy and trustworthy people are being shut out of jobs — at a time when the economy is bad and hiring is severely cut back.

"It's almost like being forever sentenced to debtors' prison," said Hawaii state Rep. Marcus Oshiro, a Democrat.

Said Democratic state Rep. Matthew Lesser of Connecticut, "There's an awareness that a lot of people have bad credit for reasons that have nothing to do with their worth as an employee."

Bills by Lesser and Oshiro aim to eliminate many credit checks by requiring employers to prove they are vital to hiring. "Employers do the checks routinely without showing there's any connection to the job," said state lawmaker Michael Benjamin, a New York Democrat, whose bill would restrict credit checks.

Conservatives like Malkin will go to the ends of the earth to blame brown people for all the problems in the world.

It's no coincidence that most of the areas hardest hit by the foreclosure wave - Loudoun County, Va., California's Inland Empire, Stockton and San Joaquin Valley, and Las Vegas and Phoenix, for starters - also happen to be some of the nation's largest illegal-alien sanctuaries. Half of the mortgages to Hispanics are subprime (the accursed species of loan to borrowers with the shadiest credit histories). A quarter of all those subprime loans are in default and foreclosure.

Regional reports across the country have decried the subprime meltdown's impact on illegal-immigrant "victims." A July report showed that in seven of the ten metro areas with the highest foreclosure rates, Hispanics represented at least one third of the population; in two of those areas - Merced and Salinas-Monterey, Calif. - Hispanics comprised half the population. The amnesty-promoting National Council of La Raza and its Development Fund have received millions in federal funds to "counsel" their constituents on obtaining mortgages with little to no money down; the group almost succeeded in attaching a $10-million earmark for itself in one of the housing bills past this spring...read on

The National Review should be ashamed to print this garbage, but we all know their history on racial issues. This is why Latino voters need to turn out in huge numbers this November.

I'd say more, but Digby spells it out for Michelle.

I guess Malkin has never heard of something called "No Doc" loans which mean No Income, No Asset, No employment Verification. It's got nothing to do with immigration.

And, like most racists, she forgets herself from time to time and forgets to distinguish between illegal immigrants and Mexican Americans. It makes no difference to her, of course, but they are usually a bit more scrupulous in their obfuscation.

The idea that the trillion dollar credit crunch was caused by illegal immigrants is so ludicrous that I can't stop laughing.....This meme is absurd, but it's the only way the conservatives can explain things within their world view. And there's nothing new here. The historical American resistance to government action is historically tied to a reluctance give money to people of color...

Here's some good news: an uptick in the number of construction workers employed, the biggest gain since 2006:

The nation's construction industry added 14,000 jobs nationwide in April, according to the Labor Department, marking the first back-to-back monthly gains in that sector since 2006.

In all, 29 states gained construction jobs that month, according to data released Friday by the Associated General Contractors of America. The U.S. industry has been bolstered in part by federal stimulus funds for infrastructure and the slow but steady improvement in the housing market.

Although building jobs have not yet begun to pick up in California, the industry here is showing improvement. The value of permits in California's private building industry totaled $2.2 billion in March 2010, up 8.1% from the same period last year and 29% from February, according to the Construction Industry Research Board. The number of residential building permits issued in the first three months of the year was up 29% from the same period last year.

When asked how many lobbyists work at the McCain campaign, Rick Davis told Katie Couric: "we don't make it a litmus test for employment at the McCain campaign." But in May, after a series of reports about McCain's campaign being run by lobbyists, Davis wrote a memo outlining a new campaign policy that said: "No person working for the Campaign may be a registered lobbyist or foreign agent, or receive compensation for any such activity." (h/t Sam)

Confused yet?

TPM has more....