Jobs recovery at least 6 months away

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Source: Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A surprisingly large jump in the U.S. unemployment rate during May sparked a sell-off in shares of staffing and employment services stocks on Friday, signaling that the length and depth of the current labor market downturn may well be worse than anticipated.

The Standard & Poor's HR Employment Services index was down 3.4 percent in morning trading.

Another several months of job losses are likely, analysts and staffing executives said, as evidence mounts that employers are more reluctant to hire.

But many also cautioned that some bright spots remain, and job losses remain relatively modest when compared with the millions of jobs added during the economic upturn.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN0643581820080606

---

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

1. But won't all the teenagers be back in school before then?

After all, Bush said in his speech that the jump in unemployment came from all those teenagers looking for summer jobs.....

[nbcouch]

11. Either W is too stupid

to understand that the unemployment rate is always adjusted for seasonal effects like that, or he thinks we are. Either way, it's fucking pathetic that we have a president who says such idiotic shit.

[KatyaR]

14. That makes no freakin' sense--

they'll count teenagers who weren't in the job force a month ago, but they won't count people who have been trying to find work for years? What's the difference?

Six months my a**--probably more like 18 to 24 months. Aren't things always "more" worse in the real world than the White House claims them to be?

:grr:

[gateley]

2. "...evidence mounts that employers are more reluctant to hire."

That's been obvious to those looking for work for a LONG time.

[DollyM]

3. 9 months and counting for us . . .

My husband lost his job 9 months ago and has only found part time work as a greeter at wal-mart. (He has a Master's degree . . .) Trying to find decent work anymore is impossible. Any advertised job will get at least 50 applicants and he is competing with "kids" half his age.

[Amerigo Vespucci]

4. I'm self-employed, and...

...the secret to that is you keep looking, consistently and unrelentingly, until you find work. That's it...not shortcuts, no lack of days in which you put in your ten, twelve, fourteen hours and come up with nothing more that experience in prospecting.

I am currently in what I hope are the final stages of negotiation with a client that will pay $15,000 for a revamped eCommerce Web Site. I was referred by a colleague in early February. Other parties are involved. But it has taken four months of regular and rigorous negotiations for me to be at the point where I can say "I'm almost there."

I get referrals from friends and existing clients. The work is there. It is tough, and some people are afraid and sitting on their wallets until the media tells them some happy news and they feel happy hearing it.

BUT...the work is there.

:patriot:

[Avalon Sparks]

15. I think it's about where you live too...

Some locations are hit much harder than others.

[gateley]

7. America.

:grr:

:hug:

[Amerigo Vespucci]

5. It's the whole "productivity" thing, too.

I've never actually tried to squeeze blood from a turnip, but there are those who believe it can be done.

I was one of the 8500+ laid off at Cisco in 2001. I kept in touch with a few friends for a while after I left, and my responsibilities basically got dumped in the lap of the guy who sat next to me...lather, rinse, repeat.

Companies like Cisco use the "whip the pony" principle. You want the horse to run fast, whip its ass. Want it to run faster? Hit it harder. When the horse runs so fast that its heart explodes and it drops dead, you get a new horse.

That's why I laugh my ass off when I see that McCain has been snuggling with the Leona Helmsley of high tech, Carly Fiorina, for "business advice." She killed HP's culture and failed in every way imaginable, and yet McCain cannot resist her sweet siren call.

:eyes:

[boomerbust]

6. BLACK FRIDAY

Dow down 411 points

[dysfunctional press]

23. hardly "black" friday...411 points is 3% -wake me when there's a double-digit percentile loss.

but- it will be fun to watch what the asian markets do (during our) sunday night in response to today, and in anticipation of monday's open on wall st.

[Skittles]

8. there will be no job recovery

until American CEOs stop pimping off jobs to the lowest bidder overseas

[MisterP]

18. and that won't happen without legislation: we need a Marxist Party or sumpin' n/t

[Javaman]

9. The world 6 months from now will look nothing like the world of today. nt

[cufford]

10. Yeah...right.

Our economy, as we are now seeing it, is the result of some 15 plus years of NAFTA, GATT and subsequent trade deals that resulted in the loss of millions of good paying middle class jobs. Those jobs used to bring home paychecks that were spent in local communities, supporting millions more downstream jobs. In short, millions and millions of good jobs lost as a direct and indirect result of shutting down the manufacturing base in this country.

It was manufacturing that built this country into the economic superpower it once was. It was the economic foundation of this country, and it's been systematically destroyed for the purpose of increasing short term profits for big corporations, at the expense of our country's workforce.

By the way, Ross Perot quite accurately predicted and publicly preached this would happen, back when Al Gore was debating him on national T.V. about how great NAFTA would be for this country. Yes, that Al Gore that nobody seems to remember these days, working on behalf of the same big corporations that Bill Clinton was by shoving these destructive trade deals down our throats.

It's the loss of this manufacturing base, more than anything else, that is now destroying our middle class.

It's taken some 15 plus years for this change to really yield the results for the country that we are only now just beginning to see. People can't pay their mortgages, rents, utility and food bills, etc., etc., etc. More and more are loosing what they once had.

The so-called "mortgage crisis", and other straw men, are a consequence of this larger problem, not the causes of it.

It's the lack of good paying, middle class jobs that is to blame for the economic crisis we are only just beginning to see the leading tip of. It's been slowly heading this direction for over 15 years, and it's not going to turn around in any less time, and that's assuming we make major changes to bring manufacturing back to this country. I see nobody working in that direction.

We ain't seen nothing yet, folks. It's taken decades to get us to this point and it would take decades to reverse it.

It takes a good base of working class jobs to support our country and supply prosperity to the masses, like we once had. NAFTA, et al, were truly traitorous policies written and supported by big business so they could fire high paid American's and instead exploit dirt cheap foriegn labor and lack of costly regulations. With tariffs removed, they were able to close up shop in this country and move our once great manufacturing base off shore. These corporations have pocketed zillions by doing so, and millions of Americans lost their jobs. Now we've got little more than a few high tech and professional jobs, while the vast majority of us, the so-called "working class" no longer have our jobs.

Tried to support your family working at McDonalds lately?

Believing that this is nothing more than a normal cycle that will right itself, is to be very naive and ignorant of the most obvious reality. We've lost millions of working class jobs in this country, replacing them with what exactly? McDonalds type jobs?

We have, in fact, lost a "critical mass" of working class jobs and the domino effect has been far reaching into every corner of our economy. It's a decades long wave that we're only just beginning to realize the catastrophic damage from. It's going to get much, much worse in this country before it ever gets better. And that's assuming our government would actually move to undo the damage they did with these deals. Again, I see few talking about it and none doing it.

It's the lack of good paying jobs, stupid!

[nbcouch]

13. I'll keep banging this drum until it breaks

You are absolutely correct in your assessment. The next step in this analysis is to ask why this is happening. Who gains from the decline of the US economy? We know who it's hurting, but who stands to benefit, and why are they doing this to us?

Obviously it's the ultra-elite capitalists/corporatists who benefit and are driving the process. They are doing it to us because they can. No entity within BushCo will stop them. They will continue to exploit cheap labor wherever they can find it, in Asia and Eastern Europe and Russia and South America, and someday they will turn back to us, once US wages fall low enough.

But isn't the USA their primary market, and won't the decline in the US economy eventually kill that market? Yes and yes, but consider the vastly LARGER markets emerging now in Asia that are poised to take our place. Globalism makes it possible for the 1.4 billion people in China, for example, to become an exploitable middle class market, one that is three or four times our size. It isn't absolutely necessary to kill the US middle class to make this happen, but it does help speed along the process if our wealth can be redistributed overseas.

This kind of change is not going to take place overnight, but it is well under way as I write this. The evidence of it is everywhere you look. Is there anything we can do about it? Probably not, but it wouldn't hurt to elect a government that doesn't facilitate and encourage the advance of global corporatism.

[cufford]

16. Simple answers to simple questions

The problem is driven by rapacious capitalism, which in concept has no social conscience. It's all about the next quarter profits. It's a short term focus on making money with no regard to the long term at all, especially not the consequences of these short term actions. It's bean counting. How to make the most money in the shortest amount of time.

This can be no more clearly seen than in the current debate about climate change. The biggest resistors in the debate, and to taking action, are big polluting corporations and their proxies in our federal government. They care more about next years bottom line than the future of the human race as we know it. Their own descendent's for heaven's sake.

Rapacious capitalism. It's the reason we're in the Middle East, and will be into the next century as oil supply continues to decrease forcing prices (and profits) upward as a result.

War itself is a financial racket. Our middle east military adventures are a fucking gold mine. People get rich, while others die, families devastated, destroyed, eliminated, and with no conscience about doing so.

It's a sad commentary on the state of us humans. The quest for greater wealth and power always comes at the cost of others. It's class warfare. And while a theoretic model of capitalism, with ethical standards and practices and social awareness in place, could be viewed as a viable economic model, clearly that depends on humans being compassionate, considerate, selfless and incorruptible. Instead, real world capitalism brings out the worse in humans. The selfish and greedy rise to the top, without conscience or regard for the greater consequences of their actions, or the well-being of the masses. It's every man for himself. Take whatever you can get, and at any cost.

Once they've finished milking the U.S. economy for every last dollar they can, leaving it in a heap of post-apocalyptic, economically devastated cluster fuck of a race between all to survive and sustain a most impoverished lifestyle, they'll have moved on to the next economy for milking.

Rapacious capitalism - greed - is the cause of the problem. And it's driven and woven it's roots deeply throughout our system of government. Few laws are enacted on a federal level which don't mostly, if not exclusively, benefit some private capitalistic entity, industry or group of investors, and at the expense of the common people of our lands. Big business buys the laws that will increase their profits. It's legalized bribery. Just as with NAFTA, laws that are written with higher profits in mind.

As the saying goes, we have the best politicians money can buy, and buy them it does.

They don't care about the next generation - what kind of economy, or planet we leave them to face. The insane national debt won't have to be paid by them, but rather future generations long after they have died. And besides, they're the upper class who can afford to live the best of lives while the common people suffer the plagues of economic hardships, lack of health care, polluted air and water, poisoned food.

This is simply history repeating itself. The great American Empire, like all those before it, driven by greed for wealth and power, will eventually unbalance the scales so much that it will collapse like those before it. It's beginning to happen already with our current day economy. The writing is on the wall. The days of an economically prosperous middle class in the U.S. are over. Skyrocketing trade deficits means money is bleeding out of the country at ever greater rates. The country is drying up economically as money and wealth continue to leave our shores. What remaining profits being generated domestically being moved off shore to avoid taxation. Fewer and fewer people can afford to purchase the many luxuries we've long considered essentials in our lives as consumers. The greatest consumer market on the planet is no more. And when nobody can afford to buy hardly anything anymore in this country, they'll simple sell it elsewhere wherever the next swell in economic growth develops. That "next" empire that will once again grow, becoming the next feeding ground for greed and the ongoing class warfare that is part of the human existence.

It's a pessimistic view, to be sure. But I submit that history is full of examples, and that it's not a stretch to see that history repeats itself once again.

A few hundred years from now, if we're still here, students of the future will be in history classes studying "The Rise and Fall of the American Empire".

The quest for greater wealth and power corrupts. Unchecked, it grows like a cancer to the point where it eventually gets unbalanced and collapses upon itself.

That's all were seeing here. The results of unfettered, rapacious capitalism.

[Arctic Dave]

17. cufford, eloquent and well thought out.

Welcome.

[Phred42]

12. The Operative words here are "AT LEAST"

[4dsc]

19. 2009 depression coming...

The heck with a recession. I'll go out on a limb here and say 2009 is going to be the worse year anyone has seen since 1929..

[TheWatcher]

20. "But many also cautioned that some bright spots remain, and job losses remain relatively modest when

compared with the millions of jobs added during the economic upturn."

1. There WAS No Economic upturn to begin with. A Housing Bubble and a bit of a fake boom? Yes.

2. Millions of jobs added WHERE? Through bogus economic numbers and massaged data?

[cufford]

22. ...and...

...and while millions of good-paying blue collar jobs were terminated.

Oh, and by the way, those same lost jobs used to bring a paycheck home into the community every week, to be spent at local businesses, employing millions more workers. So millions of factory jobs lost equals many more million additional downstream jobs in our economy lost.

This is all bullshit. Our economy is just beginning the early stages of complete collapse, brought on by a couple of decade's worth of traitorous economic policies, not the least of which was NAFTA and other so-called "free trade agreements".

Our manufacturing base is gone. That's what made the U.S. into the economic superpower it once was.

Net result: millions and millions of good, or at least decent, paying jobs cut out of our country over the past decade or two. The ripples effects are only just beginning to be seen. Mortgages unpaid. Credit card bills unpaid. Foreclosures, losses, out of control inflation. No end in sight. Indeed, it's just only beginning. The tip of the iceberg.

We've got a long ways down yet to go. It took years and years to get us to this point of impending collapse, and it would take just as long to reverse the effect. If only anyone wanted to actually try and do that.

Unfortunately, I see nobody talking about the obvious here, or what needs to be done to turn it around. You can thank all of our whore politicians for legislating in favor of big business, while all the rest of us loose our jobs. And for continuing to not do anything to change this.

It's all bullshit.

[rocktivity]

21. Just in time for the election, you mean?

:eyes:
rocknation