Economy

mahatmakanejeeves

(57,675 posts) Fri Jul 12, 2013, 11:14 AM Jul 2013

The American economy is eroding the American job

The American economy is eroding the American job
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-the-american-economy-is-eroding-the-american-job/2013/07/10/4758d3a8-e8b2-11e2-a301-ea5a8116d211_story.html

By Harold Meyerson, Published: July 10

Is the full-time American job going the way of the dodo? The signs aren’t exactly heartening. ... Consider the jobs report released Friday. The United States added 195,000 new jobs in June, it said, including 322,000 new part-time jobs — a number that comprises only part-timers who want full-time work but can’t find it. Assuming my grade-school arithmetic skills haven’t completely eroded, that suggests that the number of full-time jobs actually declined.
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Of the 195,000 jobs created in June, fully 75,000 came in “Leisure and Hospitality” — Labor Department-speak for hotels, restaurants, fast-food joints and bars. Workers in this sector averaged just 26.1 hours a week — a figure that hasn’t changed in the past 12 months, even as Obamacare’s deadlines drew nigh. Thirty-seven thousand retail jobs were added, and these workers put in, on average, 31.3 hours a week. Workers in manufacturing, by contrast, had full-time jobs, averaging 40.9 hours a week — but 6,000 manufacturing jobs were eliminated in June.

Worse yet, the jobs being created paid a lot less than the jobs that were lost. While the average hourly wage of non-supervisory employees in manufacturing was $19.26 in June, it was $13.96 for retail employees and $11.75 for hotel and restaurant workers. Indeed, the median hourly wages of all American workers declined 2.8 percent from 2009 to 2012, according to a study published this week by the National Employment Law Project.
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Of the new jobs created last month, 10,000 came through temp agencies. Their designation notwithstanding, many temp workers find they’re both full time and permanent. As the New York Times’ Catherine Rampell has pointed out, the average workweek of a temp surpassed that of non-temps in 2009, and it remains longer today. For the past decade, many warehouse workers who load and unload goods for Wal-Mart and other chains have worked steadily in the same job for a succession of temp agencies in places such as California’s Inland Empire — an arrangement that allows Wal-Mart and its ilk to disclaim any responsibility for the conditions in which these employees labor. A number of the foreign-owned auto factories that have sprung up in Southern states — among them, BMW and Nissan — are also staffed by temps, only a fraction of whom are hired by the manufacturers after their initial six months on the job.