Herbert: A Scary Reality

[John Case]

via portside


A Scary Reality

By Bob Herbert

New York Times - August 10, 2009

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/opinion/11herbert.html

Last week was a pretty good one for President Obama.
Bill Clinton helped out big time when he returned from
North Korea with the American journalists Laura Ling and
Euna Lee. Sonia Sotomayor was elevated to the Supreme
Court. And Friday's unemployment report registered a
tiny downward tick in the jobless rate.

But for American workers peering anxiously through their
family portholes, the economic ship is still sinking.
You can put whatever kind of gloss you want on last
week's jobs numbers, but the truth is that while they
may have been a bit better than most economists were
expecting, they were still bad, bad, bad.

Some 247,000 jobs were lost in July, a number that under
ordinary circumstances would send a shudder through the
country. It was the smallest monthly loss of jobs since
last summer. And for that reason, it was seen as a
hopeful sign. The official monthly unemployment rate
ticked down from 9.5 percent to 9.4 percent.

But behind the official numbers is a scary story that
illustrates the single biggest challenge facing the
United States today. The American economy does not seem
able to provide enough jobs - and nowhere near enough
good jobs - to maintain the standard of living that most
Americans have come to expect.

The country has lost a crippling 6.7 million jobs since
the Great Recession began in December 2007. No one is
predicting a recovery in the foreseeable future powerful
enough to replace the millions of jobs that have
vanished in this historic downturn.

Analysts at the Economic Policy Institute noted that the
economy has fewer jobs now than it had in 2000, "even
though the labor force has grown by around 12 million
workers since then."

Two issues that absolutely undermine any rosy assessment
of last week's employment report are the swelling ranks
of the long-term unemployed and the crushing levels of
joblessness among young Americans. More than five
million workers - about a third of the unemployed - have
been jobless for more than six months. That's the
highest number recorded since accurate records have been
kept.

For those concerned with the economic viability of the
American family going forward, the plight of young
workers, especially young men, is particularly
frightening. The percentage of young American men who
are actually working is the lowest it has been in the 61
years of record-keeping, according to the Center for
Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in
Boston.

Only 65 of every 100 men aged 20 through 24 years old
were working on any given day in the first six months of
this year. In the age group 25 through 34 years old,
traditionally a prime age range for getting married and
starting a family, just 81 of 100 men were employed.

For male teenagers, the numbers were disastrous: only 28
of every 100 males were employed in the 16- through 19-
year-old age group. For minority teenagers, forget about
it. The numbers are beyond scary; they're catastrophic.

This should be the biggest story in the United States.
When joblessness reaches these kinds of extremes, it
doesn't just damage individual families; it corrodes
entire communities, fosters a sense of hopelessness and
leads to disorder.

The unemployment that has wrought such devastation in
black communities for decades is now being experienced
by a much wider swath of the population. We've been in
deep denial about this. Way back in March 2007, when the
official unemployment rate was a wildly deceptive 4.5
percent and the Bush crowd was crowing about the alleged
strength of the economy, I wrote:

"People can howl all they want about how well the
economy is doing. The simple truth is that millions of
ordinary American workers are in an employment bind.
Steady jobs with good benefits are going the way of
Ozzie and Harriet. Young workers, especially, are
hurting, which diminishes the prospects for the American
family. And blacks, particularly black males, are in a
deep danger zone."

The official jobless rate is now more than twice as high
- 9.4 percent - and even more wildly deceptive. It
ticked down by 0.1 percent last month not because more
people found jobs, but because 450,000 people withdrew
from the labor market. They stopped looking, so they
weren't counted as unemployed.

A truer picture of the employment crisis emerges when
you combine the number of people who are officially
counted as jobless with those who are working part time
because they can't find full-time work and those in the
so-called labor market reserve - people who are not
actively looking for work (because they have become
discouraged, for example) but would take a job if one
became available.

The tally from those three categories is a mind-boggling
30 million Americans - 19 percent of the overall work
force.

This is, by far, the nation's biggest problem and should
be its No. 1 priority.