...and who is more terrified than a man with no job and a family to feed?
From Forbes:
The Great American Job Machine Is Breaking Down
“The Great American Job Machine is breaking down, and roadside assistance is not on the horizon.” So says Mort Zuckerman, CEO of Boston Properties and Editor in Chief of U.S. News & World Report, in an editorial today. Zuckerman, #564 on Forbes’ list of the World’s Billionaires, says things are worse than they look and the positive job numbers reported in May are misleading. Part-time jobs outpace full-time additions to the workforce, and more Americans are unemployed than any time since the Great Depression.
The blame, says Zuckerman, falls on Congress and the White House, who have failed to work out solutions for the job shortage. Today’s editorial echoes his statements of a month ago, when he told Bloomberg, “they’re all playing politics with the issue – they’re playing short term politics – and they’re not operating in the long term interests of the country. The fact is, we have to do something about it.”
Digging into the numbers, Zuckerman looks beyond the headline unemployment rate to analyze the balance between hiring/firing.
“We have seemingly added jobs, but it is not because hiring has increased,” he writes. “In February 2009 there were 4.7 million separations – that is, jobs lost – but by March 2011 this had fallen to 3.8 million. In other words, the pace of layoffs has diminished, but that is not the same thing as more hiring. The employment numbers look better than they really are because of the aggressive layoffs in the early part of this recession and the reluctance of American business to rehire workers. In fact, the apparent improvement in job numbers has been made up of one part extra hiring and two parts reduced firing.”
Zuckerman also notes the productivity gains have shouldered the majority of the recovery’s load, representing a shift in traditional timelines.
“We are nowhere near the old normal. Throughout this fragile recovery, over 90 percent of the growth in output has come from productivity gains. But typically at this stage of the cycle, labor has already taken over from productivity as the major contributor of growth.”
When Zuckerman sat down with Steve Forbes late last year, he identified missed opportunities to save the floundering job market. “We needed investments into job-multipliers, not job-savers. Investment in infrastructure creates 1.5 to 1.7 jobs for every dollar invested, so to speak, relative to saving jobs, where it’s at best 1 for 1,” he told Forbes.
He went on to attribute the U.S. job struggles to a tenuous relationship between businesses and Washington. “You see how competitive we were, for example, with Europe back in the 1980s and 1990s. We did much better than them. We created vastly more jobs, and higher-paying jobs, when the business world, in a sense, could operate. Now I think everybody has lost confidence in where we’re going in terms of the relationship between government and business.”
If Zuckerman were in charge today? “I would have a major multiyear infrastructure program that would involve us investing, in one form or another, $100 billion to $200 billion a year,” Zuckerman told Forbes. “Because that would give confidence to the whole business community that this economy’s not going to collapse.”
Until then, Zuckerman writes today, “The Great Recession has now earned the dubious right of being compared to the Great Depression.”
