Labor & Employment Law

Jobless Rate Worsens to 9.6% in August, Congress Needs to Act

By Tula Connell

The U.S. jobless rate worsened to 9.6 percent in August from 9.5 percent in July, with 54,000 jobs lost, according to Bureau of Labor Dept. data out today. The private sector created only 67,000 jobs in August, far below the 150,000 jobs a month needed to keep up with the population and extremely far below the hundreds of thousands of new jobs needed each month to return to pre-recession employment levels. Government employment fell by 121,000, largely reflecting the loss of 114,000 temporary workers hired for Census 2010.

The number of people who are underemployed, which includes those who are too discouraged to look for work or are working part time out of economic necessity, worsened to 16.7 percent from 16.5 percent in July. More than 26 million U.S. workers are without jobs or full-time work. The long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks and over) declined by 323,000 over the month to 6.2 million. In August, 42.0 percent of unemployed persons had been jobless for 27 weeks or more.

Jobs increased in health care (28,000); mining (8,000) and construction (19,000). Manufacturing employment declined by 27,000 in August.

Maybe when Congress gets back in town lawmakers?especially those Republicans who repeatedly have blocked extending unemployment insurance and funding for jobs programs?can finally figure it out: The private sector is not creating jobs.

Discussing the ?Be nice to us or we?ll quit investing,? threats by Big Business to Congress and the White House if they pass regulations to rein in corporate greed, Yves Smith writes:

Guess what? As we?ve indicated, big businesses were net disinvesting even during the corporate-friendly Bush Administration.

And it’s getting worse. Big Business isn’t creating jobs and yet corporate mouthpieces have the gall to attack unemployed workers. In one such screed this week, the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed slamming unemployment insurance. As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote in rebuttal:

A majority of the jobless typically have moved from job to job before they failed to find a new one, or have held a number of part-time jobs.

So it?s hard to make the case that many of the unemployed have chosen to remain jobless and collect unemployment benefits rather than work.

And then there’s the not-so-small fact that there are more than five workers for every one job in this country.

As Reich writes, extending unemployment insurance is a basic action of a civil society. In addition, lawmakers need to move federal funding to create more jobs.

Mark Weisbrot at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), is among many economists calling for more immediate federal aid to address the nation’s jobs crisis.

Republicans have successfully promoted the idea that we already tried a stimulus and it didn’t help. There are few, if any, economists who would agree. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that between 1.4 and 3.3 million more people were employed by mid-2010, because of the stimulus.

The American public knows how such job creation can be funded: A clear majority of those polled favors federal spending to create jobs, and letting the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire.

Today’s jobs data, combined with a new study showing that four of the five fastest growing occupations between 2006 and 2009 pay below the median wage ($15.95 an hour in May 2009) and a report that an appalling one in six Americans now is enrolled in an anti-poverty program, it’s long past time for Congress to act.

The last word goes to Reich:

A record number of Americans is unemployed for a record length of time. This is a national tragedy.

Full post as published by AFL-CIO NOW BLOG on September 03, 2010 (boomark / email).