Reply With QuoteI hope I will never have to see myself there!
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The New Unemployment: No More Permanent Employment
One of the ways we kid ourselves is calling our unemployment rate 10 percent. In government-speak that's the "U-3" number, which counts just current job seekers. What it doesn't count are "discouraged" workers, who have given up looking, and the "involuntarily part-time" or underemployed workers, who also can't find full-time work.
That's the "U-6" number, a more recent U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics metric. Today it's more than 17 percent, which means real unemployment is approaching one in five Americans. And, yes, that's a (post-Depression) record.
Growing evidence suggests that something far more fundamental than just another economic cycle may be going on. The modern office/factory-model job as we know it actually could be headed for extinction. Goodbye, permanent employment. Hello, contingent work, contractual employment and "composite" careers.
Many of us know people like my relative (by marriage) who's a part-time associate pastor who also delivers newspapers, does home remodeling and sells Melaleuca. It's a living -- in fact, he's been doing it for years by choice. We're also seeing more and more six-month and one-year contract jobs with employers who don't want to commit to workers beyond that. This may well be the shape of things to come.
William Bridges, the visionary executive development consultant and author who named this phenomenon "dejobbing," foresaw this years ago: "What is disappearing is not just a certain number of jobs -- or jobs in certain industries or jobs in some part of the country or even jobs in America as a whole. What is disappearing is the very thing itself, the job."
Try this experiment: If you've worked long enough to have had multiple jobs, tally up that total number. Then subtract however many of those positions no longer exist. Unless you're in health care, education or some other recession-resistant field, the number you have left may surprise you by its tininess.
In my own case, I've had (not counting freelance writing stints) six full-time jobs. Of those, only two still exist. And of the four that went bye-bye, three of those employers no longer exist (two newspapers and a public relations firm).
LINK HERE
Got this tidbit from:
http://www.thecomingdepression.blogspot.com/
I think CH post this link originally.
Re: The New Unemployment: No More Permanent Employment
I hope I will never have to see myself there!
Re: The New Unemployment: No More Permanent Employment
Hey there Hillbilly Princess.
Meanwhile all the propaganda artists in the commie left camp and fascist right camp are telling us everything is happy-go-lucky. Of course the average Amerikan is so retarded that if CNN or Rush Limbaugh told them that it snows every day in Miami they would believe it. Probably even those in Miami itself.
Jason the Fed
Jason the Fed
Re: The New Unemployment: No More Permanent Employment
I agree completely. Particularly about Limbaugh.
Re: The New Unemployment: No More Permanent Employment
WV-Girl,
Like your thoughts, but it is a bit confusing to change metrics in the middle of the game.
By that, I mean that if we measured unemployment for decades using the U-3 than we should measure current unemployment using the same metric. That allows comparison. There are also magic numbers in the U-3 to seasonally adjust the numbers. Oh, well...
Lookin' up at the 'G Fund'!!!
Re: The New Unemployment: No More Permanent Employment
It's not a liberal press thing, I get it for trade data from both conservatives and liberals. What's the latest number? No they don't want last quarter's final. They want the latest month. We tell them it's preliminary, they don't care.
DoL has the same problem. Latest number! Now! And it doesn't matter who's in power and whether it's conservative or liberal press. And they don't care if it's preliminary. What they care about is if their number looks more like old news than someone else's. And unfortunately the U-6 is usually a month more stale than the U-3, and no one wants to explain it's unemployment and underemployment.
Plus, the U-3 and its equivalent are how unemploment has been announced and calculated for years, as in before the 60's and the "liberal press" stuff. If we use the equivalent of the U-6 for the Depression, from what I heard it's around 25% Underemployed/Unemployed, and that doesn't count farming (Dust Bowl). And we can get the equivalent of unemployment from the developed countries (and numbers from the developing countries - not as reliable but at least something), so we can do comparisons. Good luck getting other countries to gather "underemployment" figures - we'd be arguing what that means so long we'd never get any data.
Last edited by Silverbird; 01-29-2010 at 09:19 AM.
"All the prophets of Doom, Can always find room, In a world full of worry and fear..." - Protest Song, Monty Python
Re: The New Unemployment: No More Permanent Employment
Just wait. Come this month the first of the 99'ers (unemployment for 99 weeks) will begin to lose benefits. Think places like Target and Best Buy know this? Of course they do. That's why they are engaging in price drops. By April 2011, many 99'ers will be out of benefits.
Ahh, why worry. The fed has our back and will save all of humanity.
Re: The New Unemployment: No More Permanent Employment
Take me back to 26 weeks - see if I care.
Re: The New Unemployment: No More Permanent Employment
Originally Posted by Silverbird
The current U-6 rate is 17.0%, down from 17.1% last month, and down from 17.4% a year ago.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm
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