> This morning's U.S. employment report sucked. The survey of employers
> showed a loss of 93,000 jobs, when flat to slightly up was a reasonable
> expectation. We've now had seven consecutive months of job loss,
> something we've never seen outside a recession. The workweek was short
> and almost every industrial sector shed jobs. The survey of households
> showed a shrinkage in the labor force - the entire reason for the
> decline in unemployment from 6.2% to 6.1%. The share of the adult
> population working was flat, and remains at a low for this cycle. People
> are buying stuff, but it's not with their paychecks - it's all tax
> refunds and mortgage refinancing. If the job market doesn't recover
> soon, we're in trouble.
>
> Doug
I spent part of my afternoon calming down a sister who is unemployed and was in hysterics about "giving up on everything." The trigger today was being rejected from a $200 ragweed guinea pig study for medical reasons. She was all stressed out about car payments, rent, car repairs, license tag fees and much more. Frankly, I don't see how an unmployed person can survive out here in the burbs. If you can't make car payments, they take away your car. There is no mass transit, so how do you look for work or even work the jobs that you manage to find? Then if you get behind for a few months, you get a bad credit report which makes life much tougher. I was thinking today that if Bush and Co. wanted to give working Americans a break, it shouldn't be a tax cut rather a Jubilee-style purging of everybody's credit reports. It's pretty unfair to punish people for years for bad economic times.
On the flip side, my 71-year-old father is trying to stay at his corporate job as long as possible before he retires or is forced out. He told me this afternoon that everybody at his company is being overworked, because the company is trying to cut costs without hiring people. The bad bosses compound the bad working atmosphere. My father works for a trucking company and he says that the situation is the same at many of the suppliers and contractors he works with.
To which I replied: "There's an old saying: Overtime is scabbing on the unemployed."
Chuck0