What do you think?
From OP’s link:
Might Andrew Yang have been on to something?
Yang, no. Getting money for nothing isn’t going to help - a lot of people already get money for nothing or worse, for doing something harmful.
Imagine all the rooms full of well paid workers whose jobs could disappear and the world would be better.
Health insurance, advertising, financial speculation.
The point should be to make work worthwhile so that people know they are doing something useful.
And how exactly do we do that? And since when has that been The matter? The US has been inevitably gliding down the post WWII economy in which the (mostly white) majority of a very large (mostly white) middle-class could expect to have a “good job” regardless of it being “worthwhile.” The woman in the article once had one of those kinds of jobs that organizations everywhere could afford to offer–a “good job” that is stable, full-time and with benefits–even though the position wasn’t really critical to the organization’s operation. Over the decades, organizations have been cutting out these positions, or making them more contingent, or outsourcing, contracting, or otherwise reducing them so that such jobs are fewer and fewer now–often taking advantage of technology to do so. The result is that the organization itself survives, (and a small number of people at the top continue to have really well-paid positions), while the proportion of these unstable, part-time, non-benefit jobs rises.
All this time our society has been ignoring this, and continuing to think that just by getting a four-year degree someone would still be guaranteed one of these “good jobs” that are getting to be fewer and fewer. The institutions of higher education made things worse by just raising tuition and emphasizing the four year degrees (over two-year degrees and certification).
The “booming economy” is just another form of denial. Employment rates are technically up, but that’s predicated upon a much lower quality of life–a vanishing middle-class of the type people once took for granted. So while things have improved somewhat for non-whites and women, many of the white majority is starting to live like the others have always lived. Overall, it’s mostly only the people at the top who have it better, and on average things are worse for everyone else.
You’ll always find some jobless in a hot economy, and some doing very well in a recession.
So I continuously hear this narrative that people aren’t able to find jobs or the ones they can find don’t enable them to afford to raise a family. Except that I don’t actually see this. Over the past 40+ years, everyone I know pretty much has a job. Some are just ok. Some are great jobs. Most are kind of in the middle. So maybe this is taking place in regions of the country where I don’t frequent?
That said, “work” feels very different than it did 30 years ago when I was in college studying for a career. In the old days, people just took a job and went to “work” for decades. Kind of like The Office, Office Space or any other workplace comedy. Basically, the company could hire any shmuck, tell them what their job is and as long as they made some effort grinding away at it, they would have a paycheck.
These days, every company is looking for “rock stars”. Every place I work seems to wildly vacillate between “explosive growth” and “one lost deal away from missing their numbers”. No one (including myself) actually seems to know how anything actually works as all the actual working on stuff is outsourced to Indian dudes.
Been there done that.
Between the ages of 18 and 34 I was virtually unemployable (or whatever the adjective that would mean “can’t get a fucking job and keep it no matter what”). Amazing what a set of educational and professional credentials can do for a person. Got a whole lot better when I hit 39 and began working in the tech field (amazing what the combo of tech skills & experience plus owning a prick can do for a person). But with just a HS diploma and a willingness to show up on time and work hard and conscientiously didn’t get me jack shit. (A whole lot of the invisible criteria for getting employed has to do with matching up with the employer’s preconceived notions of what you ought to be like. I totally didn’t mesh until I got a professional degree and then all of a sudden my vocabulary and nuances of behavior fit in a whole lot better with their expectations).
Anyone who says or thinks that anybody who is willing to work can get a job is full of shit.
I’ll go on full Social Security in June. Paywise that will leave me teetering on the edge of “enough,” so I want a job. Sure, a fulltime job doing what left me most satisfied and paid might be nice, but I’m a bit handicapped now and way too old for that shit. Instead, my daughter found an ad (probably under her windshield wiper) for work at home cold calling. I’ve done that for a reputable company just like downtown, and I look at any company that does that sort of gorilla marketing with a tin eye, but it shows a possible path.
My point is that a person who is fairly with-it can usually find a job if they set their sights lower. And remember that there is no one on the SDMB too far to the left of mean on the intelligence bell curve. You are not competing with the best and the brightest.
And the next time I hear some biddy croak, “But I’m on a limited income,” I will scream, " Yours may be limited, but just try irregular sometime. "
:dubious: What do you think?
I think it’s heavy on feels and light on facts. Best of times, worst of times, there will always be people who struggle to find the sort of job they’d like, or any job at all. For a variety of reasons. Pick any year, and we could tell Laura Ward’s story. So it’s not particularly informative.
Yes, millions of people are “part time for economic reasons.” The percentage of the labor force that this describes is usually about 3.5%. Right now it’s 2.6%, down from nearly 6%. It’s never been below 2% for as long as BLS has measured it. And it’s been steadily decreasing over the past decade.
No, “the unemployment rate” (U-3) doesn’t tell the full picture. The U-6 rate, “Unemployed, Plus All Persons Marginally Attached to the Labor Force, Plus Total Employed Part Time for Economic Reasons, as a Percent of the Civilian Labor Force Plus All Persons Marginally Attached to the Labor Force” tells more, and it stood at 7% last month. That metric too is unusually low and has been steadily decreasing over the past decade.
Core-age workforce participation has been increasing for the last 5 years. So not only are more people joining the workforce, but they’re finding jobs too.
So while the overall numbers are good, the trends are good too. We’re moving in the right direction. I don’t credit the president with this. But even if things get wildly better, we will still have Laura Wards. And how to craft policy that addresses them is always relevant.
The article invokes “good jobs” without giving us good numbers to work with. They mention erratic schedules, but while an erratic schedule can make for a bad job, it can also be a well-compensated part of a good job. I have an erratic schedule but my clients pay good money for it. Same with my physician friends. But a 20 h/w MW “just-in-time” retail job that basically keeps you on call so you can’t get a second job? Probably not a “good job”. But to have a serious discussion, it helps to have numbers and trends. Which are scant in the article.
One number to hone in on if you want to be concerned might be the percentage of unemployed who have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more. That’s around 20%. 20% used to be the peak after a recession. Now it seems to be the baseline. We could talk about why.
Trouble being, the very bottom tier of employment is human chewing gum, they chew you up, then spit you out. I get very few cold calls, but enough to notice a shift: nearly impenetrable foreign accents. Which is to say, they have outsourced even that!
I am not a macro-economist, but it looks to my gimlet eye that the American economy is far too deep into debt as an asset. Credit card debt, student loan debt, the public fiscal face of our corporadoes is debt. Like the housing bubble of yore, it is based on a mutually reinforced myth, the story that most if not all of that debt will be paid. Me, I don’t believe it, but I’m just some guy on a message board.
A lot of people are going to miss a lot of work if the sewer tea leaves are accurate. And a huge number of us are solvent, but just barely. Can they repackage that debt and sell it to somebody else? Somebody who is not affected by the grim specter of virus economics? Mind you, this is not about people dying, its about people not going to work!
So, yeah, there will be a lot of opportunity in the debt collection sector. But even more of us poor dumb shmucks getting those calls even as we make them. And even more of us treating splinters in our fingernails from scraping the bottom of the barrel.
Bit of a pessimist when it comes to late stage capitalism. Sometimes wrong, just not often enough.
I think that life sucks for some people. And, some people can’t get out of their own way.
Sorry, but I just never work up any reaction over these types of stories.
And even then people complained. Take Office Space. It came out in 1999 when the economy was booming and everyone was in good paying tech jobs. The main character in Office Space had a good paying gig, he had the freedom for him and his co-workers to go eat breakfast for an hour or so, had friends at work, etc. yet the whole theme of the movie was the soulless, boring, corporate world of the late 90s.
*spoilers (if necessary for that movie). He hates his job so much, he is willing to commit a felony to steal a lot of money so he doesn’t have to work there anymore, even though his “new” attitude has put him on the promotion track. He ends up working construction because that is a job in which he doesn’t have to put up with the corporate crap. Sure, I know that’s just a movie, but they don’t make movies unless a story appeals to people.
Closer to real life: That time after WWII when everyone had good jobs? Those everyone saved up money so that they could send their Boomer kids to college so that there kids would have it better than them.
Shorter version: At no time have people as a whole sat down and said that we really have it good and we just hope things stay the same forever.
IF you were a white man. Anyone else? Not so much.
I have a degree that is useless in its field, which I don’t want to work in anyway, and effectively prevents me from getting a job doing anything else, and that’s why I started my home-based business. (I did apply to work for the Census a few months ago, but haven’t heard anything from them yet.) I really think that, besides my age and degree, the fact that I am not covered in tattoos from head to toe is a hiring impediment.
What I think is that linking to a story in the NY Times, when that eats up one free story in March, without summing it up was uncool.
But your comeback goes basically in the same direction as the post you’re responding to. ‘White men’ were not completely satisfied with the economy and job market in the 50’s, at the time. Even besides later nostalgia, plus or minus racial backbiting.
The point in terms of ‘politics and elections’ is that the electorate as a whole is never economically satisfied to the point of rewarding one party or the other out of gratitude. They might indeed though vote for the incumbent person/party based on the trend being positive and/or unease about the opposition possibly overturning the apple cart. Which I think would be a serious issue for a Bernie Sanders nomination in this economy, but that’s getting toward being a moot point. A Biden candidacy doesn’t pose that issue nearly as much, in perception anyway.
IOW the good news if you’re a Democrat like the great majority of posters here, you don’t actually have to relentlessly talk down the economy and job market, for example find examples of SOL people in the job market, there always are some. You can admit the employment picture in the US is good (which it obviously is, and it can help to be at least somewhat willing to admit the obvious). Or not emphasize that (I doubt Biden will be relentlessly flogging how people can’t find work) but tell the voters how you’d make myriad other things better, or less bad, without upsetting that situation. It’s an altogether workable election strategy, though obviously depending on filling in the details right. Because people’s expectations are high and move up along with progress, current reality never fulfills them.
Not to criticize you, but how many of “everyone you know” stopped school after graduating HS? Or dropped out of HS?
I think there are a couple of different “classes” of workers who might perceive difficulty. One is the college grad who is working pretty low level retail or such. Especially if they have amassed debt.
A different class is the unskilled unedecuated, who faces a lifetime of minimum - or near-min - wage jobs. Neither such group has the prospects of buying a home and raising a family as comfortably as the former union-member blue collar worker.
Of course, I have long said, why ought we presume that an economy would create as many "good: jobs as there are prospective workers? What do we do w/ more workers than are needed - given increases in efficiency/mechanization?
Yeah if you’re starting anything with “everyone I know” that’s a good prompt to just stop writing. Especially when there’s basic-ass government data available on the topic. No fancy analysis required. Here’s BLS on workforce participation and unemployment by educational attainment: Table A-4. Employment status of the civilian population 25 years and over by educational attainment - 2023 M01 Results
I realize that my observations tend to skew towards educated, employed people. Still, it’s a larger sample than a newspaper article about one person who can’t seem to find a job in the NJ/NY metro area for three years.
My point is that for all the hand-wringing over “people struggling to support their families”, it does seem to me that most people ultimately do figure out how to support their family. Maybe not a Google or Goldman Sach worker’s salary, but then again, most people also don’t live in Palo Alto or Manhattan either.
I tell you want I would be interested in seeing. Some kind of stats that compares income relative to the cost of living available within reasonable commuting distance. That would normalize between someone struggling to raise a family in San Francisco on $200k a year and a school teacher in upstate New York able to do so comfortable on $60k year.
So…unemployment is low. Good?
Depends. We have built a consumer economy. If all the consumers have jobs, that’s probably good. But if they have jobs that leave them with no “spending money”, well, no.
What other economy is there?