Dead Cat Labor Market
by ilene - June 3rd, 2010 12:09 am
Dead Cat Labor Market
Courtesy of Michael Panzner at Financial Armageddon
(Image: Source)
Rebound in the labor market? Looks more like a dead cat bounce, where a great many of the jobs being created are either temporary, part-time, low wage, or stripped down, like those detailed in the following CNNMoney.com report,"Say Goodbye to Full-Time Jobs with Benefits":
Jobs may be coming back, but they aren’t the same ones workers were used to.
Many of the jobs employers are adding are temporary or contract positions, rather than traditional full-time jobs with benefits. With unemployment remaining near 10%, employers have their pick of workers willing to accept less secure positions.
In 2005, the government estimated that 31% of U.S. workers were already so-called contingent workers. Experts say that number could increase to 40% or more in the next 10 years.
James Stoeckmann, senior practice leader at WorldatWork, a professional association of human resource executives, believes that full-time employees could become the minority of the nation’s workforce within 20 to 30 years, leaving employees without traditional benefits such as health coverage, paid vacations and retirement plans, that most workers take for granted today.
"The traditional job is not doomed. But it will increasingly have competition from other models, the most prominent is the independent contractor model," he said.
Doug Arms, senior vice president of Ajilon, a staffing firm, says about 90% of the positions his company is helping clients fill right now are on a contract basis.
"[Employers] are reluctant to bring on permanent employees too quickly," he said. "And the available candidate landscape is much different now. They’re a little more aggressive to take any position."
Cathy, who asked that her last name not be used, lost her job as a recruiter for a financial services firm in February 2009. She started working on a contract basis four months later. She believes that many employers are taking improper advantage of the weak labor market.
"I work in HR, I understand that sometimes you need to hire a contractor because you have a project and you won’t need the person when it’s done in three months," she said. "But that’s not what’s happening here."
Cathy said her co-workers who had permanent jobs didn’t treat her differently, but she still felt like a
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Welcome to the New Normal
by ilene - September 26th, 2009 4:04 pm
Welcome to the New Normal
September 25, 2009And What We Don’t See
The Statistical Recovery
A Double-Dip Recession?
Welcome to the New Normal
Birthdays, New Orleans, and then the Road Trip from Hell
Unemployment is high and rising. But if the recession is over, won’t employment start to rise? The quick answer is no. We look deeper into the Statistical Recovery and find yet more reasons to be concerned about near-term deflation. This week we consider all things unemployment and ponder the need to create at least 15 million jobs in the next five years to return to a full-employment economy – and the implications for both the US and world economies if we don’t. Economics is often about what we can clearly see, and yet it is understanding what we can’t see that gives us true insight. We start with a collection of facts that we can see and then begin a thought exercise to find the implications.
What We See
First, the unemployment rate is now officially at 9.7%. We are approaching the official high we last saw at the end of the double-dip1982 recession. In the chart below, notice that unemployment rose throughout 1980 and then began to decline, before rising rapidly as the economy entered the second recession within two years. Also notice the rapid drop in unemployment following that recession, as opposed to the recessions of 1991-92 and 2001-02, which have been characterized as jobless recoveries. Unemployment was as low as 3.8% in 2000 and saw a cycle low of 4.4% in early 2007.
(For the record, all this data is available on the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. There is a treasure trove of data. They are quite open about what they do and how they do it. When I call to ask a question, they are quite helpful. How people interpret the data is not their fault.)
This headline unemployment number (9.7%) is what we see when we read the paper. What we typically don’t see is the real number of unemployed. For instance, if you have not actively looked for
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How Many Rabbits Are Left In The Hat?
by ilene - September 6th, 2009 3:25 pm
How Many Rabbits Are Left In The Hat?
Courtesy of Mish
As amazing as it seems, inquiring minds are interested in hats and rabbit, more specifically, "How Many Rabbits Are Left In The Hat?"
Dave Rosenberg was rabbits and hats in Friday’s Lunch With Dave, NOT LABOUR’S DAY.
While the Obama economics team is pulling rabbits out of the hat to revive autos and housing, there is nothing they can really do about employment; barring legislation that would prevent companies from continuing to adjust their staffing requirements to the new world order of credit contraction. While nonfarm payrolls were basically in line with the consensus, declining 216,000 in August, there were downward revisions of 49,000 and the details were simply awful. The fact that 65% of companies are still in the process of cutting their staff loads is quite disturbing — even manufacturing employment fell 63,000 in August, to its lowest level since April 1941 (!), despite the inventory replenishment in the automotive sector and all the excitement over the recent 50+ print in the ballyhooed ISM index. The fact that temp agency employment is still declining, albeit at a slower pace, alongside the flat workweek and jobless claims stuck at 570,000, are all foreshadowing continued weakness in the labour market ahead. Until we see signs of a sustained turnaround in the jobs market all bets are off over the sustainability of any economic recovery.
What was really key were the details of the Household Survey, which provide a rather alarming picture of what is happening in the labour market.
First, employment in this survey showed a plunge of 392,000, but that number was flattered by a surge in self-employment (whether these newly minted consultants were making any money is another story) as wage & salary workers (the ones that work at companies, big and small) plunged 637,000 — the largest decline since March (when the stock market was testing its lows for the cycle). As an aside, the Bureau of Labor Statistics also publishes a number from the Household survey that is comparable to the nonfarm survey (dubbed the population and payroll-adjusted Household number), and on this basis, employment sank — brace yourself — by over 1 million, which is unprecedented. We shall see if the nattering nabobs of positivity discuss that particularly statistic in their post-payroll assessments; we are not exactly holding our
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Fed Official: Real US Unemployment Rate is 16%
by ilene - August 27th, 2009 10:40 am
Fed Official: Real US Unemployment Rate is 16%
Courtesy of Jesse’s Café Américain
Dennis Lockhart may be expressing his own views, but the figure of 16% he quotes is nothing more than the Bureau of Labor Statistics "U-6" measure of unemployment.
U-6 Total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time for economic reasons,economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all marginally attached workers.
Here is a chart showing the ‘official’ U3 measure of unemployment and the U6 alternate measure. The chart also includes the unofficial unemployment rate projection done by John Williams of Shadowstats.com.
It appears that Dennis wanted to take this occasion to say that things were SO bad that there is little use in applying any sort of stimulus to the public, although there is plenty of stimulus required for the banks.
Breitbart
Real US unemployment rate at 16 pct: Fed official
Aug 26 02:25 PM US/Eastern
The real US unemployment rate is 16 percent if persons who have dropped out of the labor pool and those working less than they would like are counted, a Federal Reserve official said Wednesday.
"If one considers the people who would like a job but have stopped looking — so-called discouraged workers — and those who are working fewer hours than they want, the unemployment rate would move from the official 9.4 percent to 16 percent, said Atlanta Fed chief Dennis Lockhart.
He underscored that he was expressing his own views, which did "do not necessarily reflect those of my colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee," the policy-setting body of the central bank.
Lockhart pointed out in a speech to a chamber of commerce in Chattanooga, Tennessee that those two categories of people are not taken into account in the Labor Department’s monthly report on the unemployment rate. The official July jobless rate was 9.4 percent.
Lockhart, who heads the Atlanta, Georgia, division of the Fed, is the first central bank official to acknowledge the depth of unemployment amid the worst US recession since the Great Depression.
Lockhart said the US economy was improving but "still fragile," and the beginning stages of a sluggish recovery were underway.
"My forecast for a slow recovery implies a protracted period of high unemployment," he said, adding that it would be difficult to stimulate…
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Philip R. Davis is a founder Phil's Stock World, a stock and options trading site that teaches the art of options trading to newcomers and devises advanced strategies for expert traders...
Ilene is editor and affiliate program
coordinator for PSW.
