And so US unemployment has dipped down to its lowest rate in nearly two years. Good news right? Not really, a closer examination of the numbers suggests the US economy is still in deep trouble.
In his blog, political economist amd Bill Clinton's secretary of labour Robert Reich says that while the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 192,000 new jobs in February, America would have to create 300,000 new jobs every month to get the unemployment rate down to 6%.
But the real issue, he says, is the drop in wages. Most of the new jobs created were at significantly lower wages than the jobs that were lost.
"While the biggest losses were higher-wage jobs paying an average of $19.05 to $31.40 an hour, the biggest gains have been lower-wage jobs paying an average of $9.03 to $12.91 an hour,'' Reich says. "In other words, the big news isn't jobs. It's wages …. Employers have demanded wage and benefit concessions from their unionized workers and often got them. Detroit is creating auto jobs again – but new hires are getting about half the pay that auto workers were getting before. Airline workers are taking home 30 to 50 percent less than they did years ago. And so on."
Now put that in the context of the battle in Wisconsin where they are on a union-busting exercise and the conservatives are saying that public sector workers like teachers and janitors are leaching off the public, taking home more generous pay than their private sector colleagues. Something that is exposed by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show.
The real story isn't about jobs, it's about the decline of living standards in the world's richest country. And with people earning less, demand for goods and services will be low which means the US economy will continue to struggle.
Interesting article. Sometimes you realize more when you actually see the numbers. Thank You
192,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy… I completely agree with your idea, it is important to take a closer look at what kind of new jobs are being created to get a better understanding of what is really going on. For an ordinary person those statistics might be quite misleading.