One of my original points in the OP is that many people have found alternative ways to work for money outside the typical W-2 and 1099 earnings path.
Others have argued that extended unemployment insurance (UI) benefits are to blame for this, still continuing (and possibly worsening?) crisis.
And, as much as I hate it, given that this negatively impacts hundreds of thousands, millions of people… when the GOP governors decided, en masse, to impoverish their citizens as to force them to go to work, we were given an opportunity to see which theory is correct.
Are people finding alternative means of funding their lifestyles, or did they just need to be kicked off the dole, forcing them to return to W-2 and 1099 jobs?
I found this graphic which easily breaks down the measure of assistance given via the various programs (regular unemployment insurance, extended, COVID supplements, etc):
(The Y-axis is # of people, in thousands.)
As we can see, the number of people receiving extended benefits plummeted by 5,000,000 at the end of August. So what happened?
How many people rushed back to their jobs?
But… when you look at the details of the just-released September BLS jobs report, that is when it gets really weird:
So… private employment is fine. The actual unemployment rate dropped to 4.8%. There are an additional 710k people working in total. Labor force participation held steady, only dropping by 0.1%, (-184,000, almost a rounding error).
(I like Zerohedge’s analysis of the report, and some of this post is based upon numbers provided by ZH, just FYI.)
But…
Look at that last line. Government lost 132,000 jobs in the first full month of the school year. Also, note that 'Education and Health Services" lost 7,000 jobs in private-sector employment.
Now… this doesn’t necessarily mean that the jobs don’t exist. We are conditioned to thinking ‘If I hear employment went down by 10,000 in the auto industry, that means 10k people were fired, their jobs no longer existing’. But that’s not entirely accurate: You can have rising unemployment in a positive hiring environment if the jobs being offered are not appealing to the population capable of holding them and they are capable of earning money via means other than traditional employment.
And this is shown very starkly here - in the one sector in which you know September employment is going to hold steady, even rise… education… we are seeing that industry struggling to keep its people employed, and failing to such a significant degree it is impacting the overall jobs report.
To quote Zerohedge:
That is 676,000 jobs lost in the education sector, the majority of them government jobs. This doesn’t necessarily mean teachers, of course - anecdotally, the teachers I know say their schools are suffering from a shortage of staff and maintenance workers. And teachers, but mostly staff and maintenance.
These two items - (1) employment didn’t grow anywhere as expected given the 5,000,000 kicked off extended UI benefits, and (2) an industry which should be hitting its annual employment peak is struggling to find workers, to me, highlights that there are millions who are checked out of the full participation of American economic life, who have stopped chasing the American Dream and are working merely for maintenance, not advancement.
I’m not surprised that education is the first industry to crack: constantly belittled and underfunded by the conservative majorities in this country over the past forty years, since 2019 a fucking shitstorm has descended upon America education because of the MAGAts and Anti-Vaxxers - from paid protesters going to school board meetings in a purposeful campaign to keep ‘Critical Race Theory’ front and center in the mind of racist voters, to barbaric anti-vaxxers shouting at children their fervent desire to kill them, to their psychotic dedication to the second amendment even as more children die for their ideological insanity.
(I can write a damn-near similar post regarding the same peoples impact on the medical field. But I don’t need to. We are living it.)
I have dated a fair number of teachers in the past couple of years and there is not a one of them who loves their jobs. They love the kids, most definitely, but their jobs, the job conditions, and the pay? lolol. Not in America.
They’re just working for their 20 years, then typically take an internal temperature test to see if they can go 5 more, as to get a nicer pension.
And so the ‘nahployment’ crisis deepens. It is not getting better, and it is spreading to the professions, especially those in health and education, the industries where you, as a simple worker bee, are most likely to suffer from the current political climate, from being accosted to being shot.
Next post, when I get to it, I’ll talk about George. He’s someone I’m interviewing for the MDS project and his story neatly dovetails into the themes of this thread.