Labor & Employment Law

Jobs, Anyone?

By Tula Connell

When will the lawmakers in Washington, D.C., figure out that putting America’s unemployed workers back to work means there actually needs to be jobs available? And that means creating them. The AFL-CIO’s five-point jobs plan includes job-creating measures, such as rebuilding the nation’s roads, schools and infrastructure, and lending Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) funds directly to small and medium-sized businesses via community banks. If small businesses can get credit, they will create jobs. The U.S. House passed a good jobs bill last month, but, as usual, the Senate is sitting back in its privileged chambers and doing nothing. Time to act. Now.

• There are now 6.4 unemployed workers for every ONE job in the United States. New data out today by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show there were 12.9 million more unemployed workers than job openings in November, an increase from 6.1 percent in October.

• Since the start of the recession in December 2007, an estimated 8.1 million jobs have been lost. This includes both the 7.24 million jobs lost in the payroll data as currently published and the preliminary annual benchmark revision (released Oct. 2 , 2009), which showed an additional 824,000 jobs lost from April 2008 to March 2009.
   
• As the Nation’s John Nichols points out, analysts had predicted that December layoffs would number around 8,000. Instead, the figure was more than 10 times higher: 85,000. Unemployment held steady at 10 percent?not because the job market is stabilizing but because tens of thousands of Americans gave up looking for work and are no longer counted among the unemployed.
   
• Workers’ lost wages from 2008-2012, as a result of the recession, will top $1 trillion?more than the estimated 10-year cost of health care reform. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates unemployment at more than 7 percent in 2012.

Hello? Senate? Time to act. Now.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on January 12, 2010 (boomark / email).