April Jobs Data: Treading Water, with AJSN Still Over 20 Million

In this morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics data, changes from March were relatively small.  The country added an adjusted 165,000 jobs, and official unemployment dropped fractionally to round to 7.5%.  Secondary BLS measures were split, with a 258,000 decrease in long-term unemployed but 278,000 more working part-time for economic reasons.  Probably the most telling number beyond the publicized unemployment rate, civilian labor force participation, held onto its March drop, staying at 63.3%.   The American Jobs Shortage Number, or AJSN, ended up just short of 20.1 million, as follows:

AJSN APRIL 2013	Total	Latent Demand %	Latent Demand Total
Unemployed	11,014,000	90	9,912,600
Discouraged	835,000	90	751,500
Family Responsibilities	243,000	30	72,900
In School or Training	341,000	50	170,500
Ill Health or Disability	163,000	10	16,300
Other	765,000	30	229,500
Did Not Search for Work In  Previous Year	3,196,000	80	2,556,800
Not Available to Work Now	786,000	30	235,800
Do Not Want a Job	84,107,000	5	4,205,350
Non-Civilian and Institutionalized, 15+	6,731,656	10	673,166
American Expatriates	6,320,000	20	1,264,000
TOTAL			20,088,416

 

Of the numbers above, by far the largest change was to the number of unemployed, which fell 801,000.  The unpublicized unadjusted employment rate, in fact, dropped to 7.1%.  The number of people reporting they did not search for work in the previous year decreased a surprising 221,000, and numbers of those in school or in training, along with non-civilians, had modest declines.  The largest increase above was of people reporting they were now not available to work, which gained 130,000, followed by those with family responsibilities preventing their employment , up 68,000.

The good news is that this report was hardly the devastating one feared by investors and others, some of whom predicted a net loss of American jobs.  The work situation in effect broke even, with an adjusted gain of positions in line with the increasing population.  Official unemployment, the only job statistic many people are aware of, once again dropped, so there will be no panic on the work front.

The bad news was that the worst area, labor force participation, did not improve.  Despite other numbers, particularly the count of people saying they did not want a job at all, increasing less than usual, Americans are more and more often opting for lifestyles without jobs.  To their credit, many commentators called that, not the slightly lower unemployment rate, the big story of the March data.  Labor force participation did not get worse, but did not rebound from the previous month’s fall either. 

Overall, the April employment report was business as usual.  The United States is still doing better than its most comparable countries; its joblessness does not even approach the Eurozone’s latest 12.1%, not to mention Spain’s depression-level 27.2%.  Yet what “green shoots” we have now are solidly offset by growing population and the numbers of people leaving the labor force altogether.  Once again, we are not in a recession now, or anything close, and the chance of one is much higher than that of any significant improvement.  Fewer people working mean fewer people able to spend, so cash and its equivalents will stay idle in the hands of the wealthiest individuals and the largest corporations.  The political climate seems to prohibit any large spending increases, and globalization, automation, and efficiency keep marching on.  If we are happy with the post-2010 status quo, the April work data was a winner; if not, the figures give us nothing to cheer us up.

No, Prospects are Not Golden for Science Graduates

A long-asserted position, that there are not enough American graduates in what has lately been referred to as STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math), got new press time this week.  This is not an old viewpoint, coming from the vocational versus mind-furnishing university debates of the late 1970s, the 1950s competition with the Soviets, and even before. 

It makes intuitive sense.  There is always intense work on science and engineering in companies and government agencies across the country, which require know-how most people, regardless of intelligence or even aptitude, simply don’t have.  From iPods to bridges, we can see the effects scientific work has on our lives, and we know lots of money is being spent and earned.  The liberal arts fields have little to match that, as Americans have known for a long time that jobs which directly use knowledge in the likes of sociology or foreign literature are much less common.  At the same time, when we learn the names of the highest STEM achievers, they are often Chinese, Indian, or Near Eastern, making it even more logical to think we don’t have enough qualified people here otherwise.  College undergraduates will consistently tell you that scientific coursework is usually more difficult than that in the humanities.  If we need yet another explanation, hard science graduates are often seen as being smarter, more diligent, and clearer at thinking than others. 

There is only one problem with that viewpoint.  It is false.  As I wrote in Choosing a Lasting Career: 

Another disagreement I have with other things you may read is on science-related opportunities. Some score high in the chapters to come, but the field is hardly the wide-open hiring area implied by those who say American universities do not produce enough science graduates.  Many want to work in academia, but as of 2009, only 14% of new degree holders in the life sciences were able to get university positions teaching or researching within five years, a share shrinking steadily since 1979, and reports published in 2010 and 2011 show that private industry has not hired enough science doctorates to make the degrees financially worthwhile.  For one example, between 2000 and 2012, American drug companies cut 300,000 jobs, many formerly providing work for Ph.D.’s in chemistry.  As a result of poor opportunities, many scientists with doctoral degrees in various disciplines have now been working as low-paid postdoctoral fellows, customarily one- to two-year apprenticeships of sorts, for as long as ten.

A new Economic Policy Institute study, mentioned Wednesday in Slate and The Washington Post, confirmed the true situation.  It said that although there were relatively few American STEM graduates, they often had poor career prospects, with about half not finding jobs anywhere in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics.  The findings implied that foreigners with these credentials were given temporary work visas because of this perceived shortage.  Such workers are paid an average of 20% less than native Americans, which could explain, even before considering real or imagined differences in their work, their popularity. 

Another long-standing issue with vocational scientific positions has been cyclical supply and demand.  For decades, engineering and information technology have gone through a predictable, easily understandable pattern.  To start it, news stories appear about worker shortages in one of these fields.  Next, high school and college career offices, along with the students themselves, spread the word, and more and more people major in these subjects.  As a result, years later, more graduates in these fields reach the job market than can be hired.  From there, word spreads that opportunities are poor, so fewer people start studying these subjects.  With the reduced number of new graduates, and technological progress marching on, there is a scarcity of qualified people again.  Then, back to the beginning.  Former students from years before who did not find work in their specialty do not help much, as they often have moved on to other fields, and their knowledge sets have suffered from disuse and obsolescence. 

Two facts are clear from this misunderstanding.  First, completing a scientific or technical major has never been a guarantee of top job prospects.  Second, such graduates are not rare.  So can we do away with the idea that Americans are somehow deficient for choosing less demanding fields of study?  We all choose the paths life makes available to us, and even if others “should” be better, we are entitled to know when they are not.

Americans Don’t Understand Each Other

Three issues have been in the press this week – American income inequality, a need for companies to raise wages, and the failure of gun control bills in the U.S. Senate.  What do they have in common?

Since long before the United States was a country, Americans have differed greatly in the amount of money they earn.  The national spirit of hard work, when combined with a wide variety of ethnic backgrounds, personal abilities and inclinations, and lifestyle choices, has fashioned an unusually heterogeneous society.  As I have commented many times, inequality only becomes perceived as an issue when large numbers of people cannot achieve what they see as a minimum acceptable prosperity level for themselves.  In the 1890s, a time of rail barons and urban poverty, there was much less concern, as there was plenty of work available.  In the early 1980s and early 2000s, when the Gates’s and Zuckerbergs were national news, likewise.  Yet yesterday in Salon.com there was a column by Robert Reich, who has shown himself to be outstandingly aware of the permanent nature of the jobs crisis, regretting that Americans have not been as unified in making incomes more equal as they were in confronting the Boston bombing. 

In the Washington Post, columnist Harold Meyerson wrote Tuesday on low-paying service jobs.  Wal-Mart was the villain, guilty not only of “crummy, low-wage jobs” but for “slashing their workforce.”  He also named a similar situation with McDonalds, and documented recent service and logistical problems, caused by a lack of employees, at both companies.  Yet businesses are fully able to decide when downsizing goes too far, as it did for many in the late 1990s, and they will judge accordingly. 

That brings us to gun control.  A set of seven bills restricting firearm ownership in some form were voted upon in the Senate, and all failed.  Newspaper editorials blasted that result, with even the Chicago Tribune, no stranger to expressing conservative views, calling it “shameful,” “a vote for violence” and saying that senators were choosing between “listening to the public or to the gun lobby.” 

So what is happening here?  Is income inequality, on the top as well as the bottom, in dire need of correction?  Is Wal-Mart immoral for not hiring more people and paying them more?  Is the result of a recent set of Senate votes “shameful?”

That depends on where you stand.  Tens of millions of good, reasonably-thinking Americans would take views opposite to the above.  Income inequality, they would say, is not a problem in itself, though poverty and a lack of jobs may be.  Wal-Mart and McDonalds have helped poorer Americans at least as much as government programs by providing food and other goods at ever-lower constant-dollar prices, and by creating over a million jobs popular enough that it would be a losing business decision for workers’ pay to be increased.  Gun control is not only a slippery-slope danger to personal freedom, but has the heaviest burden on the exact people who are no threat.

What do I think?  I happen to see more merit in the statements in the previous paragraph than in the items above them, but that is not the point.  The idea is that perspectives vary.  Political debate is an old tradition in this country, and political debate requires conflicting political views.  Having thoughts different from yours on gun control, the economy, immigration, foreign involvements, or any other issue does not make people crazy, ill-informed, thoughtless, or traitors;  most likely, they just see things another way.  Opposing opinions must be taken seriously. 

We have one thing in common – we are all Americans.  Make that two – we are dealing with crises for which we have no clear solutions, and whatever our politics, we consistently want the best for our country.  Only when we respect what others think, and at least partially try it on for size ourselves, will we accomplish that.

Work’s New Age Blog – One Year and Counting!

A year ago Tuesday I started this blog.  Thank you for reading it!

Here are 26 opinions and observations prompted by events of the past year.  I would be surprised if anyone else on the planet agrees, or for that matter disagrees, with all of them.   

First, the jobs crisis is as permanent as ever. 

Second, once again, our politicians have put the jobs crisis on the back burner.

Third, unemployment has improved slowly, but once we get another recession we will clearly understand that 2012 and early 2013 were relatively good times, not bad.

Fourth, Barack Obama has talked a moderate-to-conservative game on jobs, but has not emphasized them in his actions, at all.

Fifth, Congress is so polarized that almost any ideas from the other party will be resisted, even if they are ideologically fine otherwise.

Sixth, more and more people are leaving the work force, and that trend is just gathering steam. 

Seventh, inequality is not the problem – ordinary people not being able to sell their labor for a decent living, regardless of how much Joe Moneybags down the street has, is.

Eighth, Americans have more mutual problems than ever before, but keep being pulled apart by efforts, especially academic and journalistic, to get them to see their issues, and identities, in terms of race, sex, and sexual orientation.

Ninth, differing achievement levels do not in themselves constitute racism, sexism, or other discrimination.

Tenth, given that racism, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia in general are well-entrenched human behaviors, the progress made on them over the past 60 years is staggering – and it is continuing.

Eleventh, there are two types of feminism:  power feminism, or advocacy of equal rights; and victim feminism, or seeing women and what they do as needing special protection.  They are opposites.   

Twelfth, Americans in general do a poor job of comprehending why their countrymen with different political views think as they do.  

Thirteenth, almost all of the time, the opposite opinion has a lot of validity too.

Fourteenth, both sides are right about gun control – and both sides are wrong.

Fifteenth, on the issue of immigration policy, whatever your viewpoint is you can back it up with data, and good data at that.

Sixteenth, abortion is a philosophical issue, not a political one.

Seventeenth, if the true nature of consciousness is determined (is it from computation, from the brain and replicatible, from the brain and not replicatible, or from some other source?), it will have an almost unimaginably huge effect on where our lives will go.

Eighteenth, when looking at how businesses seem to behave, use Watergate logic: follow the money.  That’s ultimately all businesses want, and that, not malevolence, drives their decisions.

Nineteenth, unions protecting workers from private companies are fundamentally different from those protecting workers from government organizations without any profit motive.

Twentieth, non-career education after high school, which is also highly valuable, will continue to become prohibitively expensive for more and more.

Twenty-first, human diversity is vastly more than differences in skin pigmentation, genital type, and nature of sexual desires.

Twenty-second, you are entitled to personally recognize, or not recognize, any marriage you choose.  A government-issued marriage license is as sacred a covenant as a government-issued roofer’s license.

Twenty-third, straight white men are not the only group with at least some responsibility for their statistical shortcomings.

Twenty-fourth, other people do not always value the same things you do.  That does not always make them wrong, evil, uninformed, or in need of being set straight.

Twenty-fifth, if you think your religion is the only one that is right, a minimum of 80% of other people disagree with you.

Twenty-sixth, good people, which means most people, deal with their opportunities and circumstances as well as they can.  That explains almost all of the differences between generations.

Want more on any of these?  Let me know, and I will provide it.  If you agree with most of them, be sure to keep up with this blog, as they underpin what I write.

March AJSN – Under 21 Million, But Labor Force Shrinks More

This morning’s Bureau of Labor Statistics employment and unemployment data has arrived, and as usual there is good news and bad news.  The good news is that unemployment is down, with 685,000 more Americans working than in the month before.  The other categories of marginal labor attachment were consistently down as well, with those saying they did not search for work in the previous year, those claiming family responsibilities, and those simply discouraged dropping the most.  Though seasonal differences essentially accounted for the increase in jobs, the country’s labor situation did not get worse in March.

The bad news is contained in one number – those who say they do not want a job.  That increased 826,000 from February to March, and in turn caused a labor force drop of 496,000 and a labor force participation rate fall to a new multi-year low of 63.3%.  Here is the latest American Jobs Shortage Number data:

AJSN MARCH 2013	Total	Latent Demand %	Latent Demand Total
Unemployed	11,815,000	90	10,633,500
Discouraged	803,000	90	722,700
Family Responsibilities	175,000	30	52,500
In School or Training	381,000	50	190,500
Ill Health or Disability	148,000	10	14,800
Other	819,000	30	245,700
Did Not Search for Work In  Previous Year	3,417,000	80	2,733,600
Not Available to Work Now	656,000	30	196,800
Do Not Want a Job	84,084,000	5	4,204,200
Non-Civilian and Institutionalized, 15+	6,790,804	10	679,080
American Expatriates	6,320,000	20	1,264,000
TOTAL			20,937,380

 

In other BLS news, the number of unemployed 27 weeks or longer stayed much the same at 4.6 million, but the count of those working part-time for economic reasons improved greatly, dropping over 300,000 to 7.6 million.

So what can we infer from this data?   There are no tremendous changes here, and that is the point.  Though unemployment was not worse in March than in February, we continue to see more and more people deciding they are not going to be in the labor force at all.  Those saying they do not want a job gained over 800,000, and that is a lot.  Labor force participation, which peaked at about 67% in the late 1990s with nearly full employment of women, is returning to the territory from whence it came. 

In short, America is not going back to work.  The reported seasonally adjusted increase of 88,000 on United States payrolls was once again not enough to cover population increase.  We have seen worse, but the trends we have seen especially over the past five years are continuing, and that is not a good thing.  If employment were as easy for the rest of us as it is in western North Dakota, we would have over 20 million more Americans paying taxes and using less in social services.  That is our foremost national problem, and both parties need to address it.

Around the Horn on Jobs – End of March, 2013

It’s the last business day of the first quarter.  It’s finally starting to look like spring here in the Catskills, and there have been many different issues getting press.  Some, such as gay marriage, I can’t do much with from a jobs standpoint, but others bear on this ongoing crisis.  What have we had to read this week?

“Median Household Income Down 7.3% Since Start of Recession” – Catherine Rampell, Economix blog, The New York Times

No surprise.  One-third of new jobs created since 2008 pay $12 per hour or less, so naturally the median, as opposed to the mean, will get worse.  And we’re not in a recession – that ended two years ago.  When we have another one, we’re going down more than 7.3%.

“Jobless claims tick up for second straight week” – Don Lee, Los Angeles Times

This supposed bad news means almost nothing.  If people don’t have jobs, they can’t lose them.  One effect of companies being so cautious about hiring permanent workers is what looks superficially like a good outcome – few recent hires mean fewer recent job losses.    

“For federal workforce, the furlough terrain is uneven” – Lisa Rein, The Washington Post

Will people cut back to four days a week from five file for benefits?  They can, but will they?  The one-week waiting period some states have after a job loss, with no checks will be issued, will hurt them also. 

“Cheating Our Children,” Paul Krugman, The New York Times

The Nobel-winning polemicist takes on the issue of which rips off the younger generations more, raising the deficit or cutting spending on education and the infrastructure.  He concludes the latter is worse, of course, but makes good points.  If they have no work and can’t get across town anyway, Millennials and beyond, indeed, won’t care much how many trillions are on the right-hand side of the country’s balance sheet.

“Jobs Act falls short of grand promises” – Dina ElBoghdady, The Washington Post

Yes, it has, but not only Obama is to blame.  Both sides have continued stinking up Capitol Hill on infrastructure work, the lack of which is poised to do real damage to American pride as well as to American business competitiveness.  Not to mention that much of the act reads as if it were written by conservatives.  That lack of action is one of the worst outcomes from our current partisan-only climate.

“Energy security and American jobs” – The Chicago Tribune

This editorial says we’ve had “enough dawdling” and that Obama should approve the Keystone pipeline.  This editorial is correct.  We want those jobs in the United States, not to mention getting the geopolitical advantages of getting more energy from Canada, instead of from the likes of Venezuela.  The number of positions, especially permanent ones, the pipeline would actually create is uncertain, and may be disappointing, but the environmental concerns must be weighed against other advantages, which comfortably prevail over them.

“’Lean In’ author Sandberg:  It’s time for women to lead” – Cheryl V. Jackson, The Chicago Tribune

I have closely followed the Sheryl Sandberg controversy, but have not mentioned it in this blog, mainly because it has little effect on the number of jobs.  I will weigh in here, though.  Sandberg’s ideas are not sufficient to equalize the overall career outcomes of men and women, but they are necessary.  We need to get past the idea that protected groups are 0% responsible for their statistical shortcomings;  whether their share is more like 10% or more like 90% is, strangely, not the issue.

“Where Obama should hear Paul:  Legal pot” – Clarence Page, The Chicago Tribune; Colorado pot growers gear up for ‘green rush,’” The Washington Post

Now HERE’S a source of jobs!  With marriage equality clearly unstoppable, how about also moving forward quickly on marijuana legalization, which a majority of Americans now support?  Let’s tax it, and collect money instead of paying for enforcement of hopeless laws.  Keep it away from children.  Test for it roadside.  Collect income tax from both its workers and its businesses.  Discover, as we will, that the huge majority of people not smoking it now won’t do it when legal either.  We have better, and much more constructive, things to do as a country than banning what citizens do with a common domestic weed. 

In the meantime, prepare for our next recession.  When it happens, and we discover that today’s sub-8% unemployment was not so bad after all, tens of millions of Americans will need all the help they can get.

Americans: Deal with What Is, Together, or Be Conquered

Both conservatives and liberals are correct.  Higher income correlates strongly with more education, with more work, and with a variety of positive, self-developed attributes.  But more earnings also correlate with being white, being male, and being straight.

Yet both sides are also wrong.  Good life habits often go along with a positive and financially solid upbringing, which is hardly distributed equally among demographic groups.  Being black, Hispanic, female, or gay, though, is by no means a solid barrier to success.

So how do we sort this out?  Where do we go from here?

First, all groups are not identical culturally, psychologically, or in their views of life, as much as we would like that to be the case.  Equality of opportunity will never guarantee equality of results, even in our great-grandchildrens’ time.  What sense does it make that the set of people who grow up female, with different hormones and body structures from others, would without any discrimination have identical statistical distributions of the complex factors influencing career success?  Why should people from all cultures, some made up of those consistently prizing education and cooperation and some not, have the same rates of success, however you define it?  Failure to achieve equal outcomes does not make us, our culture, or, least of all, our discrimination-banning legal system racist, sexist, homophobic, or anything else.    

Second, we are all Americans.  Within that, we have many appearances, values, preferred lifestyles, ancestral ethnicities, and outlooks in general.  We differ not only in our abilities, but in our inclinations.  A high school friend, in the early 1970s, ran a 60-second 440-yard dash - in a gym class, without any preparation.  The teacher, who was also the school’s track coach, said to him afterwards, “Do you know what you just did?,” and told him his time.  The coach implored him to join the track team, where almost immediately he could be one of the school’s top sprinters.  My friend did not.  Track success meant little or nothing to him.  What we do, and do not do, is up to us, regardless of what is possible.  Our national identity, though, means more and more as other countries compete better and better with ours.

Third, if we do not unite, we will be divided and conquered.  Not by any great outside force, but by the realities we face.  The jobs crisis is permanent, and not only for blacks, women, or non-college-graduates.  Problems such as shockingly low employment (not unemployment), high crime rates, high incidences of illegal drug use and alcoholism, and very large amounts of TV watching, symptoms of an often justified attitude that people have little chance to support themselves, have moved far outside the inner cities and are still spreading.   

Fourth, we need to find our success from the abilities we have and can gain.  I excel at manipulating abstract ideas, so have done well as a computer programmer, project manager, professor, and author.  Yet, despite interest in making things with my hands, I would be a below average carpenter.  The same goes for advantages we have over others.  Some 1970s baseball fans thought it was unfair that Joe Morgan, a second baseman headed for the Hall of Fame, could crouch his 5’6” frame when batting to shrink his strike zone and get lots of walks, but they did not consider how many people of that height did not play in the major leagues, let alone get enshrined in Cooperstown.  If you look around your life at the people you have known, you will see plenty of other examples – both ways.                

Fifth, we need to focus on reality.  What “should” be true in life is frequently not the case.  That is often painful to realize, but when we do that we will be healthier in the long run.  It would be great if everyone who wanted to work could find a job, and those not successful could blame only personal shortcomings, as was essentially true 60 or 100 years ago.  It would be wonderful if everyone totally lost the possibly genetic Homo sapiens tendency to be initially wary of those different from themselves.  It would be nice if women working, or men for that matter, did not face “glass ceilings” where their career limits arrived before their personal ones.  Religious tolerance from everyone would be a grand idea.  It would be super for all of us to be judged only on our merits.  These, though, are not how the world is put together, and may never be. 

We are all different.  We have one thing in common, though – we are Americans.  If we put our efforts into dealing with the jobs situation as it is, together, we will justify our shared belief that the United States is the best country in the world.  If we stay divided, we will be conquered by it.