Herbert: The Young and the Jobless (Good column - Great Stats)

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/12/opinion/12herbert.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

There were high fives at the White House last week when the latest monthly employment report showed that 274,000 jobs had been created in April, substantially more than experts had predicted.

The employment bar has been set so low for the Bush administration that even a modest gain is cause for celebration. But we shouldn't be blinded by the flash of last Saturday's headlines. American workers, especially younger workers, remain stuck in a gloomy employment landscape.

For example, a recent report from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston tells us that the employment rate for the nation's teenagers in the first 11 months of 2004 - just 36.3 percent - was the lowest it has ever been since the federal government began tracking teenage employment in 1948.

Those 20 to 24 years old are also faring poorly. In 2000, 72.2 percent were employed during a typical month. By last year that percentage had dropped to 67.9 percent.

Even the recent modest surge in jobs has essentially bypassed young American workers. Gains among recently arrived immigrants seem to have accounted for the entire net increase in jobs from 2000 through 2004.

[KissMyAsscroft]

1. Until you get your Masters Degree you are eating Top Ramen.

And that's only if you are top of your class, and going into a hard science and have done everything right. You have to have skill. You have to be better than everyone and be mercilessly motivated with the desire to crush anyone in your path. Other than that, you might be in sales or be in construction which may make you some money but probably not.

Nursing is actually a pretty good option right now.

The days of going to college and getting your degree and trotting off to your new job are long gone. Your BA is now considered training wheels.

[Carolab]

3. You'd better be selling pharmaceuticals.

The housing/construction market is on a downward slide.

[KissMyAsscroft]

4. Pharmaceuticals are going through a downturn as well...

nt

[hedda_foil]

2. OMG! Any gains in the past four years have been at the very bottom

Gains among recently arrived immigrants seem to have accounted for the entire net increase in jobs from 2000 through 2004.

Recently arrived immigrants take any job they can find. So we have a boom in busboys, hotel maids and dishwashers.

[ixion]

5. if the CMC put the bar any lower for these clowns, it would be underground

n/t

[Demeter]

6. It's Worse Than 1975

Engineers were taking jobs as fire inspectors for insurance companies BECAUSE THERE WERE NO JOBS.

Between the military cutbacks and the end of the Apollo program, there was no engineering or science work.

But now, we have a larger, many headed, more impossible problem:

1. Morons and criminals in office (they come in only two flavors: idiots or sadist/psychopaths) sucking all the resources into their pockets, while trashing anything and anyone they can't actually own.

2. No 4th Estate (propaganda doesn't count in a democracy)

3. The well-earned contempt of the rest of the world (they WILL bury us, with great pleasure)

4. A level of ignorance and prejudice against science that this country has never known before. (In colonial times, ignorance was death. We are fast approaching that point again.)

5. Animal Farm is beginning to look like an attractive alternative.