| by Paul Craig Roberts
( October 5, 2012 , Washington
DC, Sri Lanka Guardian) October 5. Today’s employment report from the Bureau of
Labor Statistics shows 114,000 new jobs in September and a drop in the rate of
unemployment from 8.1% to 7.8%. As 114,000 new jobs are not sufficient to stay
even with population growth, the drop in the unemployment rate is the result of
not counting discouraged workers who are defined away as “not in the labor
force.”
According to the BLS, “In
September, 2.5 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force.”
These individuals “wanted and were available for work,” but “they were not
counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks
preceding the survey.”
In other words, 2.5 million
unemployed Americans were not counted as unemployed.
The stock market rose on the
phony good news. Bloomberg’s headline: “U.S.
Stocks Rise as Unemployment Rate Unexpectedly Drops”.
A truer picture of the dire
employment situation is provided by the 600,000 rise over the previous month in
involuntary part-time workers. According to the BLS, “These individuals were
working part time because their hours had been cut back or because they were
unable to find a full-time job.”
Turning to the 114,000 new jobs,
once again the jobs are concentrated in lowly paid domestic service jobs that
cannot be offshored. Manufacturing jobs declined by 16,000.
As has been the case for a
decade, two categories–health care and social assistance (primarily ambulatory
health care services) and waitresses and bartenders account for 53% of the new
jobs. The BLS never ceases to find ever growing employment of people in
restaurants and bars despite the rising dependence of the US population on food
stamps. The elderly are rising as a percentage of the American population, but
I sometimes wonder if employment in ambulatory health care services is rising
faster than the elderly population. Whether these reported jobs are real, I do
not know.
The rest of the new jobs were
accounted for by retail trade, transportation and warehousing, financial
activities (primarily credit intermediation), professional and business
services (primarily administrative and waste services), and state government
education, where the 13,600 reported new jobs seem odd in light of the teacher
layoffs and rise in classroom size.
The high-tech jobs that
economists promised would be our reward for offshoring American manufacturing
jobs and tradeable professional services, such as software engineering and IT,
have never materialized. “The New Economy” was just another hoax, like “Iraqi
weapons of mass destruction” and “Iranian nukes.”
While employment falters, the
consumer price index (CPI-U) in August increased 0.6 percent, the largest since
June 2009. If the August rate is annualized, it means bad news on the inflation
front. Instead of bringing us high tech jobs, is “the New Economy” bringing
back the stagflation of the late 1970s? Time will tell.
 October 5. Today’s employment report from the Bureau...){kind=link}