Is the economy really doing this well?

[Joel Wendland]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsxYH_69jR8

Mark Zandi’s, chief economist of Moody's Analytics and former McCain
adviser, reaction on MSNBC’s The Daily Rundown to the latest jobs
report finding that 244,000 total jobs were added in April, which
marked 14 months of private sector job gains totaling more than 2
million American jobs – transcript:

Zandi: It's great news. I’m surprised at the strength. It’s also good
that the job gains are evident across lots of industries. In fact, the
only major sector of the economy that laid off was government, state
and local government. Outside of that, we saw good, solid job gains
and there were revisions to the job gains in previous months. So you
take it all together, it's really excellent news and better than I
expected, yes.

MSNBC’s Savannah Guthrie: It just bears repeating because I think when
people see the unemployment rate ticking up, they think ‘Well wait a
minute, how is this good?’ Explain how it is that you have that
paradox often when it comes to these unemployment numbers.

Zandi: Yeah. Good question. So there are a lot of people who stepped
out of the workforce when times were tough, thinking that there were
no job opportunities, or at least there was no job out there that
would suit them. Now as the economy improves, as job openings begin to
appear, people feel like, “Oh, this is a great time to go find a job,”
so they step back into the workforce, start looking for work and
they're counted as unemployed until they find a job. So it's not
unusual when the economy starts getting going that we see a brief
period of rising unemployment. I think that's what we're seeing right
here. It's not bad news. In fact, I think it's a sign of strength.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsxYH_69jR8

[John Case]

Its uneven. As Krugman notes today: "Employment has risen from its low point, but it has grown no faster than the adult population. And the plight of the unemployed continues to worsen: more than six million Americans have been out of work for six months or longer, and more than four million have been jobless for more than a year."

Further, there will be some downsides in a weakening dollar, offsetting the improved exports  from a shift of global purchasing power eastward and southward.: higher prices at Wal Mart, and at the gas pump, and an even greater entanglement in a global economy where the dollar is no longer the reserve, or only reserve, currency. 

Globalization is compelling a vast world-wide re-division of labor markets From this global reallocation of global labor resources we see the payoffs in emerging nations' investments in their human and public capital -- often in defiance of IMF-"Washington Consensus" biases prevailing in the Bush administration. Nonetheless, the re-divisions are driven by objective technological and social and reproductive forces from whose often chaotic and destructive effects few protections are immune. 

I am increasingly convinced the survival of labor organizations as evolved from the last century will be determined by their ability to internationalize. 

--
John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV