This appeared in the Wall Street Journal, so the article's very sympathetic to employers who say they can't fill job openings. First, let me wipe the tears from my eyes, and then let me suggest a couple of free-market solutions.

As one company mentioned in the article did, employers should set up their own job-training programs. Hire some good people, and teach them. I know you're used to us paying to train ourselves, but hey, that's the way the cookie crumbles these days.

The other free market solution? You're pissing and moaning that you can't fill jobs, but you're obviously not offering enough money for people to live on. In other words, you don't want to pay what the market will bear. Right?

In Bloomington, Ill., machine shop Mechanical Devices can't find the workers it needs to handle a sharp jump in business. Job fairs run by airline Emirates attract fewer applicants in the U.S. than in other countries. Truck-stop operator Pilot Flying J says job postings don't elicit many more applicants than they did when the unemployment rate was below 5%.

With a 9.5% jobless rate and some 15 million Americans looking for work, many employers are inundated with applicants. But a surprising number say they are getting an underwhelming response, and many are having trouble filling open positions.

"This is as bad now as at the height of business back in the 1990s," says Dan Cunningham, chief executive of the Long-Stanton Manufacturing Co., a maker of stamped-metal parts in West Chester, Ohio, that has been struggling to hire a few toolmakers. "It's bizarre. We are just not getting applicants."

Employers and economists point to several explanations. Extending jobless benefits to 99 weeks gives the unemployed less incentive to search out new work. Millions of homeowners are unable to move for a job because the real-estate collapse leaves them owing more on their homes than they are worth.

The job market itself also has changed. During the crisis, companies slashed millions of middle-skill, middle-wage jobs. That has created a glut of people who can't qualify for highly skilled jobs but have a hard time adjusting to low-pay, unskilled work like the food servers that Pilot Flying J seeks for its truck stops.

Don't you just love the way they put this? Jobless benefits give the unemployed "less incentive to search out new work." New work that pays so little, it won't even give them enough to cover their rent and food in the same month. (Isn't America great?)

The difficulty finding workers limits the economy's ability to grow. It is particularly troubling at a time when 4.3% of the labor force has been out of work for more than six months—a level much higher than after any other recession since 1948.

Some economists fear the U.S. could end up with a permanent caste of long-term unemployed, like those that weigh on government budgets in some European countries. "It is a very worrisome development," says Steven Davis, an economist at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. "It leads over a long period of time to social alienation as well as economic hardship."

[...] Of course, many jobs remain easy to fill. Companies offering middle-skilled jobs can be flooded with applicants. Laquita Stribling, a senior area vice president in Nashville for staffing firm Randstad, says she received several hundred applications for a branch manager job that might have attracted a few dozen candidates before the recession.

"The talent pool has swollen to the point where it's almost overwhelming," says Ms. Stribling.

But other employers with lots of applicants say the pool of qualified workers is small for specialized jobs. Carolyn Henn, head of hiring at environmental consultancy Apex Companies, says she recently received about 150 applications for an industrial hygienist job paying as much as $47,000 a year, which requires special certifications and expertise to oversee projects such as asbestos cleanups. That is about three times the amount she received for similar jobs before the recession. But she says the number of qualified applicants—about five—is less than she got before.

As I said, Carolyn: Hire people and train them. That's what they did back in the old days, and this is turning out to be an awful lot like them.

So we'll never really know why she left, because you'd think that Larry Summers would indeed be the one taking the fall (what with him being the person who didn't even present her stimulus proposal to Obama):

Christina Romer, chairwoman of Pres. Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, has decided to resign, according to a source familiar with her plans.

Romer, an economics professor at the University of California (Berkeley) before taking the key admin post, did not respond to repeated calls to her office.

"She has been frustrated," a source with insight into the WH economics team said. "She doesn't feel that she has a direct line to the president. She would be giving different advice than Larry Summers [director of the National Economic Council], who does have a direct line to the president."

"She is ostensibly the chief economic adviser, but she doesn't seem to be playing that role," the source said. The WH has been pounded for its faulty forecast that unemployment would not top 8% after its economic stimulus proposal passed.

Instead, the jobless rate is 9.5%, after exceeding 10% last year. It was "a horribly inaccurate forecast," said Bert Ely, a banking consultant. "You have to wonder why Summers isn't the one that should be taking the fall. But Larry is a pretty good bureaucratic infighter."

This version, of course, is contradicted on several points by the Wall Street Journal story:

"I never anticipated the amount of the contact I'd have with the president," she added. "If anyone had told me that I'd meet the president of the free world every day, I never would have believed it."

Among her challenges was explaining why her prediction that the Obama-backed fiscal stimulus would keep the unemployment rate below 8% proved overly optimistic. The unemployment rate is now at 9.5%.

"I certainly hoped it would be lower," she said. "The world deteriorated between November 2008 when I started" and the initial estimates were made "and when we took office January 21. Do I wake up every morning and wish it were 8% instead of 9.5%? You bet."

In internal White House circles, Ms. Romer occasionally clashed with Lawrence Summers, the Obama adviser and former Harvard University president and Treasury secretary. But on Thursday, she said, "If anyone had told me that I'd come to view Larry Summers as one of my dearest friends, I never would have believed it. But I do."

I thought this part was pretty interesting:

One thing she says she hadn't realized previously: "The degree to which you often only get one shot at something like the Recovery Act."

"An economist's natural instant is to do things in stages. You take one action, see what it does and see if you need more," she explained. But with the Bush administration Troubled Asset Relief Program to shore up the banks or the Obama fiscal stimulus, that proved wrong. "I didn't realize the degree to which you have only one shot."

Despite the fact that Paul Krugman, Jamie Galbraith and Joe Stiglitz were trying to get the word out? Either she's not too swift, or she's taking the fall for Summers.

Hey, this oughta cheer everyone up -- we set a new record! We're in the history books!

June 4 (Bloomberg) -- Unemployed Americans are facing the longest wait on record to find work, a sign faster economic growth is needed to reduce the jobless rate from close to a 26- year high.

Hey, I have an idea! Why don't we stop paying unemployment, cut jobless programs by 50%, and start slashing social programs to cut the deficit? That'll fix the economy!

The average duration of unemployment jumped to 34.4 weeks in May from 33 weeks the prior month and 16.5 weeks in December 2007, when the recession began, a Labor Department report showed today in Washington. The number of unemployed has almost doubled to 15 million since the start of worst slump since the 1930s.

“We need faster growth, because without it, we won’t get the jobs,” said Henry Mo, an economist at Credit Suisse in New York. “We are working in that direction, but it’ll take a very long time to resolve the long-term unemployment problem. The Federal Reserve acknowledges that the labor market will take time to fully recover.”

How, exactly, are we "working in that direction" when Wall Street is pressing for deficit reduction?

Private payrolls rose by 41,000 in May, today’s Labor Department report showed, trailing the 180,000 gain forecast by economists. Including government workers, employment rose by 431,000, boosted by a jump in hiring of temporary census workers. The jobless rate fell to 9.7 percent from 9.9 percent as Americans discouraged by the lack of available jobs dropped out of the labor force.

“If that level of private job creation continues, it will not make a substantial dent in the unemployment rate,” Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Dennis Lockhart told reporters today after a speech in Braselton, Georgia. “It is my view we will make progress on unemployment. Perhaps by the end of 2011, we will be below 9 percent.”

And really, it might even be 8 percent, if enough of us die from hunger -- or suicide. Isn't this a great country?

This is something that's always stuck in my craw. When the economy is bad (you know, bad for us, not the rich), the politicians love to tell us it's simply a matter of retraining and why, before you know it, we'll all be employed again!

I think we all know that's a load of horse manure. The fact is, for most of us, the global economy is a tide that just keeps going out. Major corporations continue to play "find the cheapest country" and move their manufacturing facilities. So where, exactly, are the jobs for which we're supposed to retrain?

Enrollment in job-training initiatives across the USA has swelled since the recession began as dislocated workers in shrunken industries such as manufacturing, construction and real estate retool for growing fields such as health care, renewable energy and computers. But a diploma is not necessarily a ticket to a job or higher earnings, especially with the jobless rate still hovering near 10%.

"Training doesn't create jobs," particularly as a nation emerges from recession, says Anthony Carnevale, head of Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce. "It's jobs that create the demand for training."

Many enrollees do land positions weeks after graduating, and experts say retraining is often the best option for a laid-off worker in a battered industry. But others hunt for months, or even years, with some using federal dollars to retrain multiple times for different occupations. Part of the problem: Though economists say the recession ended last summer, high unemployment pits graduates against both experienced workers who were laid off in the slump and newly trained colleagues. Sometimes job centers funnel too many workers into the same field.

Officials "in my system walk a tightrope every day," says Jane Oates, an assistant secretary for the Labor Department. "It's very difficult to do 100% foolproof projections anytime, but during a recession it's really complicated."

Job forecasts can be undercut by unforeseen events such as a plant closing. The promise of some categories projected to be plentiful, such as green jobs, has yet to be fulfilled. And the training system itself is beset by poor communication.

Participation in worker retraining funded by the federal Workforce Investment Act (WIA) jumped 70% to 672,000 in the year ended last June, Labor says. But the portion of those in jobs related to their training one year after graduating fell to 67.6% from 83.2% in 2006.

Wyman got $16,500 in federal funding to attend the Hobart Institute of Welding Technology after his employer, a Delphi auto plant, closed. The Huber Heights, Ohio, resident was always good with his hands; at Delphi, he operated a drill and stamping press. And welders' wages start as high as $19 an hour, a nice bump from the $16 he'd been earning.

Asked about Wyman's job search, Heath MacAlpine of Montgomery County's Department of Job and Family Services, says the region's manufacturing and construction were pounded by the recession. But he says funding Wyman's training wasn't a mistake: "We're not investing for this recession. If we don't have the stockpile of trained talent, we're not going to have the fuel to drive this recovery."

As employers ramp up hiring, he says, they'll run out of laid-off welders and Wyman "will suddenly find himself in demand."

Wyman isn't sure how long he can wait. He and his wife, Jessica, borrow from her parents to pay the rent, and the couple and their two children are relying on food stamps. He frets if he doesn't find work soon, he'll get rusty and "lose the ability to weld."

Continue reading »

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Nearly 40 million Americans received food stamps -- the latest in an ever-higher string of record enrollment that dates from December 2008 and the U.S. recession, according to a government update.

Food stamps are the primary federal anti-hunger program, helping poor people buy food. Enrollment is highest during times of economic distress. The jobless rate was 9.9 percent, the government said on Friday.

The Agriculture Department said 39.68 million people, or 1 in 8 Americans, were enrolled for food stamps during February, an increase of 260,000 from January. USDA updated its figures on Wednesday.

"This is the highest share of the U.S. population on SNAP/food stamps," said the anti-hunger group Food Research and Action Center, using the new name for food stamps, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). "Research suggests that one in three eligible people are not receiving ... benefits."

Enrollment has set a record each month since reaching 31.78 million in December 2008. USDA estimates enrollment will average 40.5 million people this fiscal year, which ends Sept 30, at a cost of up to $59 billion. For fiscal 2011, average enrollment is forecast for 43.3 million people.

I continue to worry that at some point, Wall Street will convince the administration that it would be a great psychological ploy to cut off unemployment compensation to convince the market there's a recovery.

And if they do that, all hell will break loose:

March 16 (Bloomberg) -- U.S. employers won’t hire enough workers this year to lower the jobless rate much below the level of 9.7 percent reached in February, three Obama administration economic officials said today.

The proportion of Americans who can’t find work is likely to “remain elevated for an extended period,” Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner, White House budget director Peter Orszag and Christina Romer, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said in a joint statement. The officials said unemployment may even rise “slightly” over the next few months as discouraged workers start job-hunting again.

“We do not expect further declines in unemployment this year,” the officials said in testimony prepared for the House Appropriations Committee. They predicted the economy would add about 100,000 jobs a month on average -- not enough to bring the jobless rate down substantially.

Today’s projections are in line with the 10 percent average unemployment forecast for this year in last month’s budget plan. Christopher Rupkey, chief financial economist at Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ Ltd. in New York, said the administration’s language risks damping expectations for a recovery.

“They need to work on the message, and right now the message is that there is not a lot to be hopeful about,” Rupkey said. “Warning about a slow jobless recovery can help make it a reality.”

And the Democrats are doing what, exactly, about this? Do the Republicans want the economy to get worse, hoping it means they'll sweep the mid-terms? (As if we needed any further proof of their sociopathic mindset.)

While this piece is about California, it will apply to other states as well:

Few, if any, unemployed people will be able to get the full 20-week extension in jobless benefits because Congress delayed so long and failed to change a sunset provision, says a California Employment Development Department official.

As a result, most Californians — an estimated 285,000 long-term unemployed — will be able to qualify for only an additional 14 weeks of benefits, says Loree Levy, an EDD spokeswoman.

The legislation, which was approved by the House today, provides 14 weeks of additional benefits to all states. Those states with a jobless rate over 8.5% — California's is 12.2% — get up to 20 more weeks.

But instead of simply tacking on the additional weeks in one new extension, the bill sets up a Byzantine plan that adds two new extensions to the two previous ones before the last extension, referred to as FedEd, kicks in.

Congress previously extended FedEd from 13 weeks to 20 weeks, but included a sunset provision for the end of the year. If Congress doesn't change that provision, FedEd will revert to 13 weeks on Jan. 1.

So even if a person could start collecting on the latest extension today, the calendar will run out before that person can get all 20 weeks of benefits. As currently written, they will get one additional week for the second extension and, because their unemployment will carry into next year, 13 weeks of FedEd, for a maximum of 14 weeks.

From the AFL-CIO NOW blog, news that now Orin Hatch has joined in preventing a vote on extending unemployment benefits. Shame on every member of the media that doesn't hammer them on preventing the unemployed from getting this much-needed help:

Because of the actions of two Republican senators, every day this month 7,000 jobless workers have lost their unemployment insurance (UI) coverage. Each day these two Republicans continue to stand in the way of Senate passage of a UI extension, 7,000 more workers will run out of benefits.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has tried twice to bring the UI measure to a vote on the Senate floor. First Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), then Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) blocked action.

Christine Owens, executive director for the National Employment Law Project (NELP), says workers are “devastated” by the Republican roadblock. Unemployed workers across the country are devastated and dismayed by the failure of the U.S. Senate to extend their lifeline. Every day, 7,000 additional workers are facing the total loss of benefits, in many cases after struggling to find work for more than a year and a half.

The official unemployment rate now is 9.8 percent, while the number of those who have given up looking for work or are underemployed stands at an appalling 26 million workers.

Click here to tell the Senate it’s time to pass an extension of UI benefits.

In September, the House overwhelmingly passed a UI extension that called for an additional 13 weeks of (UI) for jobless workers in high unemployment states (more than 8.5 percent) who have exhausted their benefits without finding new work.

Last week, the AFL-CIO urged the Senate to approve legislation that provides 14 weeks of benefits to all jobless workers who can’t find new work and an additional six weeks for those in high unemployment states.

Says AFL-CIO Government Affairs Director William Samuel: Failure to extend benefits would pull the safety net out from under laid-off workers who are struggling to find jobs that have become increasingly scarce…a record 5 million workers have been unemployed for six months or more and there are now six unemployed workers for every available job in the United States.

NELP estimates 400,000 workers exhausted their benefits in September and without any extension, another 1.3 million will run out of benefits by year’s end.

Says Owens: "It’s shameful and callous. Because the Senate has not acted, hundreds of thousands of workers are languishing without any means to support their families in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. It’s time for the Senate to do right by the families hardest hit by the recession—the Senate needs to do whatever it takes, working weekends included, to make this happen."

Those of us out here already know how bad it is. When are the economists going to catch up with reality?

Oct. 2 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. economic slump earlier this year was so severe it short-circuited the government’s model for calculating payrolls, raising the risk that today’s jobs report may be too optimistic.

About 824,000 more jobs may be subtracted from the payroll count for the 12 months through last March when the figures are officially revised early next year, a Labor Department report showed today. The revision would be the biggest since at least 1991.

The bulk of the miss occurred in the calculations for the first quarter of this year, the Labor Department said. The economy shrank at a 6.4 percent annual pace in the first three months of 2009, the worst performance since 1982.

The figures raise the possibility that the government’s calculations continue to miss the mark.

“We are probably still underestimating job losses,” said John Silvia, chief economist at Wells Fargo Securities LLC in Charlotte, North Carolina. “There could be another 30,000 to 40,000” that the data isn’t picking up, he said.

That would mean the loss of jobs for September could turn out to be as high as 300,000, rather than the 263,000 reported today by the Labor Department. Today’s report also showed the jobless rate climbed to 9.8 percent last month, a 26-year high.

The potential revision for the year through last March would mean that the economy lost 5.6 million jobs for the period instead of the 4.8 million now on the books.

First, the bad news:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Employers cut a larger-than-expected 467,000 jobs in June, driving the unemployment rate up to a 26-year high of 9.5 percent, suggesting that the economy's road to recovery will be bumpy.

The Labor Department report, released Thursday, showed that even as the recession flashes signs of easing, companies likely will want to keep a lid on costs and be wary of hiring until they feel certain the economy is on a solid ground.

June's payroll reductions were deeper than the 363,000 that economists expected.

However, the rise in the unemployment rate from 9.4 percent in May wasn't as sharp as the expected 9.6 percent. Still, many economists predict the jobless rate will hit 10 percent this year, and keep rising into next year, before falling back.

All told, 14.7 million people were unemployed in June.

If laid-off workers who have given up looking for new jobs or have settled for part-time work are included, the unemployment rate would have been 16.5 percent in June, the highest on records dating to 1994.

Since the recession began in December 2007, the economy has lost a net total of 6.5 million jobs.

As the downturn bites into sales and profits, companies have turned to layoffs and other cost-cutting measures to survive. Those include holding down workers' hours and freezing or cutting pay.

The average work week in June fell to 33 hours, the lowest on records dating to 1964.

The worse news: as some economists predicted, the stimulus package was too small to affect the "real" economy - you know, the one you and I live in? - in any significant way. Sounds like those who urged Obama to think large and visionary (a la FDR's Public Works Administration) really did have the right idea:

Reporting from Washington -- Even as the nation's economy begins clawing its way out of the worst recession in 60 years, there are growing signs that this recovery could come with an unsettling twist: The wheels of commerce may begin to turn again without any substantial boost in jobs.

Not only is the national unemployment rate, now 9.4%, likely to climb into double digits later this year, but it is also expected to remain there well into 2010, economists say. That would prolong the misery of the unemployed, squeeze retailers and other businesses, and add millions of dollars in government costs and lost productivity. It could even threaten the recovery itself.

Though it's common for the jobless rate to keep climbing for a time after economic output turns positive, the aftermath of the last two downturns, in 1990-91 and 2001, introduced the idea of a "jobless recovery." Even though the economy improved, many unemployed workers discovered that jobs as good as the ones they'd lost were almost impossible to find.

This time, many economists say, there are new factors that could make the problem worse. Many more layoffs in this recession have been permanent, not temporary.