Wow, that's a brutal figure. Plenty of people are saying that we have hit the bottom and as great as that would be, I don't see it.
457,000. That’s the number of construction jobs that have been lost since the sector peaked in September of 2006.
What’s interesting to me about this number is that at the beginning of the downturn in housing we didn’t see a huge drop in construction jobs, primarily because workers moved from residential into commercial.
Now that commercial is slowing as well, construction workers are falling out of jobs like flies. And they’re not the only ones. Big surprise furniture manufacturing jobs are falling as well.
It is definitely good news that the US only lost 20,000 jobs last month. It's not quite celebration material but in this market, Wall Street will take anything. If only they reacted so positively when Americans had real extra cash in their pockets from jobs and not temporary (gimmick) incentives but then again, when is the last time we saw such growth in the middle class?
Many have been predicting the worst recession in decades and now Warren Buffet, the world's richest person, is moving to this camp.
"This is not a field of specialty for me, but my general feeling is that the recession will be longer and deeper than most people think," Buffett said. "This will not be short and shallow.
"I think consumers are feeling gas and food prices," he added, "and not feeling they've got a lot of money for other things."
The Arizona Republican and presumptive presidential nominee today urged Congress to institute a “gas-tax holiday” by suspending the 18.4 cent federal gas tax and 24.4 cent diesel tax from Memorial Day to Labor Day....
Relief — or fewer jobs? According to a white paper circulated on Capitol Hill last week by the U.S. Transportation Department, every $1 billion of federal highway investment supports 34,779 jobs.
Many economists have also questioned the wisdom of suspending or cutting gas taxes; doing so, they say, simply stimulates more consumption of gasoline.
Besides their overinflated claims of fair trade products, courts just ruled that they were paying shift supervisors by tapping in to the tip jar of low wage baristas instead of paying them their selves. What slime, but then again, I always thought their coffee tasted burnt and not very good anyway. While Starbucks has enjoyed stunning profits (at least until recently) it seems part of this came as a result of them just being stingy with the lowest paid employees.
More of what happens when we let business self regulate and decide what's best for America. Unfortunately, there's going to a lot more of this coming soon enough.
A nice article about farmers who participate in the Fairtrade program and what it means to them. When it's possible I try to buy Fairtrade products. A few years back I visited some coffee plantations around the old US base at Khe Sanh and heard that coffee workers there made roughly $1/day, which at the time was the mandated minimum wage in Vietnam. Not long after I visited a coffee plantation along the Guatemala-Honduras border where workers received about $2/day but they were unable to compete so jobs were bleeding. The business was struggling to survive due to competition from Vietnam. The Honduran coffee workers had such a limited future and of course, other possible jobs such as garment factories were also disappearing due to overseas competition as well. Once the hotspot for US factories, that too had been abandoned for riches in China.
When local opportunity disappears in places like this, these workers head north to America or Europe, just as many of our forefathers did in the past. Many of these workers would not be leaving their home countries where they have friends and family if they had opportunities. Fairtrade is about helping build opportunity for people to live. If the people who complain the most about illegal workers did something to help people earn a decent wage (we are not talking about striking gold, but just a livable wage) we would have much less of a problem. Read on and hear from a few Fairtrade participants.
Thankfully they have plenty of enablers in Congress who help them go down the drain. Instead of pushing Detroit to offer products of the future, they helped GM stay locked in the past, becoming less and less competitive. In addition to the massive financial loss, GM is also announcing 74,000 hourly jobs are disappearing.
Despite his recent campaign talk, Romney chose profit over people. That may be life in the fast lane at an investment firm such as Bain Capital, but he's the one attacking others on the subject of protecting every single job. Glass houses, Mitt, glass houses.
In early 1995, as the Ampad paper plant in Marion, Ind., neared its shutdown following a bitter strike, Randy Johnson, a worker and union official, scrawled a personal letter to Mitt Romney, pouring out his disappointment that Romney, then chief executive of the investment firm that controlled Ampad, had not done enough to settle the strike and save some 200 jobs.
"We really thought you might help," Johnson said in the handwritten note, "but instead we heard excuses that were unacceptable from a man of your prominent position."
Romney, who had recently lost a Senate race in which the strike became a flashpoint, responded that he had "privately" urged a settlement, but was advised by lawyers not to intervene directly. His political interests, he explained, conflicted with his business responsibilities.
The new report says only 18,000 new jobs last month. Holy cow, that's incredibly bad. Worse still, unemployment jumped from 4.7% to 5%. Yesterday estimates for new jobs were already low, with many thinking it would be between 40,000 - 70,000 with unemployment moving up slightly to 4.8% Take the keys away from Bush and don't let him damage the economy any more. We need urgent action, but we do not need Bush and Paulson to put out the fire that they created.
Issues related to the baby boomers have become a really hot topic amongst many I know so this story really jumped out for me. Increasingly I hear so much grumbling about the baby boomers and their "it's all about me" attitudes. Part of this reaction is fatigue over a generation that ran the show for years and part is perhaps related to the steady stream of bashing of the younger generation. Another part is no doubt related to the apparent disregard of young kids who are coming in to the work force.
For years we all heard about the staggering retirement costs related to the Boomers but in the last year we hear much more about the work attitudes of the Boomers compared to the younger workers. The UK, probably like the US, is facing a problem with a substantial percentage of school principals heading into retirement. That alone is not necessarily a problem, but the younger generations are showing little interest in taking on the stresses/risks of management. They would just assume make a little bit less money and enjoy time with friends and family.
All of this is connected and surely is a reaction to what many of us saw growing up. How many kids under 30 (and younger than the Boomers) saw parents lose all job security? How many saw parents/family pursue higher positions only to be tossed aside with the first sign of trouble. As much as Boomers like to argue that young kids are just lazy, I simply don't buy it. It's obvious to me that we are in a testing period where employers and employees are trying to figure out the dynamics of the future.
Maybe young workers will have to give a little (leaving home, for example) but I also think that they are forcing employers to update and adjust. More young workers want a clearer division between work and life and they are not going to be intertwined as we saw with the Boomers. This is a healthy change, in my opinion. It's a different world today and that means adjustments are necessary. If the best employers can offer is job insecurity, fewer benefits and pushing workers upwards to their own level of self-incompetence, something needs to give. More power to the youth who are forcing change. Just because the Boomers don't like it or it doesn't fit with their model of life, doesn't mean it's wrong.
It's about time. The strike has only delayed the inevitable fairness in retirement programs that voters - not street marchers - have concluded they want. Over the past few decades opinions have changed. People who rely on public transport to get to and from work have been punished during this strike, forced to walk or pay expensive taxi fees if they want to hold their own jobs. Some people who are on the outside looking in seem to think that France is some sort of a workers paradise, with guaranteed job security. It's different but not necessarily better or even good, for that matter.
Despite generally hating rules and regulations, when it comes to the work environment, they rule the day. In recent years organizations have increasingly used short term contracts to employ workers which means these people have employment, but it's similar to what we have in the US. Few benefits and no guarantees. People take these jobs because unemployment for youth is well into double digits. Even among the general population the rate is over 8%.
People in the workforce certainly have more security than in the US though this also cuts both ways. Organizations take months to hire someone new because they know it's expensive to get rid of that person if it's the wrong person. For job seekers, this translates to six months or more to find new work. There are no shortages of qualified people who can be looking for work for a year, even two or more. Compare that to the US where perhaps you can be fired easily enough, but it is dramatically easier to find new employment compared to France.
So as the strike dies down and transport workers go back it appears as though France is moving in the direction of modernizing its employment environment. Will this mean France will become like the US with employment laws? There is only so much change the French will accept so nothing will change overnight. Like many issues, finding a middle ground that works will be important. France isn't the only country that has trouble finding a middle ground though after years of watching neighboring Britain move forward while France is stuck in neutral, I suspect France is ready enough to try.
