The jobs crisis: private-sector wages = less than half of total US personal income.

[Hannah Bell]

While May saw a net increase of 431,000 jobs, 411,000 represent hiring by the federal government to provide temporary help in conducting the 2010 Census. The Bureau of the Census is expected to scale back hiring from now on, and these temporary jobs will be largely gone by the end of summer.

Job creation in the private sector was only 41,000, while state and local governments, hit by an intensifying budget crisis, cut 22,000 jobs. The number of workers considered long-term unemployed—out of work for 27 weeks or more—rose to the highest level since the Labor Department began keeping such records in the 1940s. The anemic level of private-sector hiring is not merely an “aspect” of the economic crisis, but its essential feature. According to the Labor Department, there were 8 million fewer workers on private payrolls in May 2010 than when the recession began in December 2007.

The private sector employs roughly the same number of American workers today as in 2001. In other words, net job creation by the private sector, the supposed engine of economic progress according to both the Democrats and the Republicans, has been zero for a full decade...

A separate report, published late last month by the newspaper USA Today, found that private-sector pay had shrunk to the smallest share of personal income in American history during the first quarter of 2010. Private-sector wages represented only 41.9 percent of total US personal income, down from 44.6 percent when the recession began in December 2007. This decline in wages was partly offset by an increase in government benefits, which rose from 14.2 percent of total income to 17.9 percent over the same period...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/pers-j07.shtml

[Cali_Democrat]

1. The private sector has been squeezing productivity out of US workers

That's why wages have stagnated for about a decade now. Productivity has gone up, but there has been no compensation. US businesses are pocketing it.

[branders seine]

11. Marx was right.

He didn't say it this way, but Capitalism = death.

[dipsydoodle]

2. Does it follow by implication

that the other half is public sector wages ?

[WCGreen]

4. You also have capital gains, interest, dividends, income from

rental property, income from S-Corps,income from partnerships, and self-employed income...

[dipsydoodle]

5. How come

self-employed income isn't included ? Surely it creates wealth in the same way as private sector wages.

[Hannah Bell]

8. self-employed is included in private sector wages. if the self-employed pays himself a wage.

[Hannah Bell]

7. public sector jobs, social security, transfer payments, & CAPITAL income.

[boppers]

3. Where's the problem?

What biases suppose a problem?

[dipsydoodle]

6. Its the private sector

which creates wealth as opposed to the public sector which doesn't. Its such an imbalance in European countries that has contributed to the current problems there.

[Hannah Bell]

9. The bias that presumes that private sector jobs provide most US income.

[branders seine]

10. this is the bottom line of the bottom line for the US economy

private sector employment FLAT for a decade? Fuck!

private sector wages barely half of personal income? Double Fuck!