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U.S. Economy, Employment in Crisis

Despite desperate efforts to portray the economy as stable, the latest economic reports and statistics outline an ongoing crisis.

The recent indicators from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveal that from January 2013 through December 2015, there were 3.2 million workers displaced from jobs they had held for at least 3 years. This follows the 4.3 million workers for the prior survey period covering January 2011 to December 2013. In January 2016, only 66 percent of workers displaced from 2013 to 2015 were reemployed, and only 61 percent were found to be reemployed in the prior survey in January 2014.

Thirty-seven percent of long-tenured displaced workers from the 2013-15 period cited that they lost their job because their plant or company closed down or moved; an additional 37 percent said that their position or shift was abolished and 26 percent cited insufficient work. Seventeen percent of long-tenured displaced workers lost a job in manufacturing. Among long-tenured workers who were displaced from full-time wage and salary jobs and were reemployed in such jobs in January 2016, only 53 percent had earnings that were as much or greater than those of their lost job, similar to the prior.

94,391,000 Americans are not in the labor force, as the labor participation rate is at a distressingly low 62.8%, the lowest figure since 1977. CNS notes that “The best the Labor Participation rate been since Barack Obama took office is 65.8 percent in February 2009, the month after he was sworn in.” CNS also found that government employees in the United States outnumber manufacturing employees by 9,932,000. Federal, state and local government employed 22,213,000 people in August, while the manufacturing sector employed 12,281,000.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics  also found that Nonfarm business sector labor productivity decreased at a 0.6-percent annual rate during the second quarter of 2016. From the second quarter of 2015 to the second quarter of 2016, productivity decreased 0.4 percent, the first four-quarter decline in the series since a 0.6-percent decline in the second quarter of 2013.

The Institute for Supply Management  reports that: “Manufacturing contracted in August as the PMI registered 49.4 percent, a decrease of 3.2 percentage points from the July reading of 52.6 percent, indicating contraction in manufacturing…”
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Bloomberg notes that “The August [employment] figure is consistent with a simmering-down of payrolls growth so far this year…The average work week for all workers decreased by 6 minutes to 34.3 hours in July, the lowest since 2014 and the first drop in six months.”

A CNBC review notes that the average work week declined 0.1 percent to 34.3 hours. That was largely because the biggest jobs gains came in bars and restaurants, which added 34,000 positions. Social assistance grew by 22,000, professional and business services added 22,000, and Wall Street-related positions grew by 15,000. Health care also contributed 14,000.

The Wall Street Journal reports that “America is now home to a vast army of jobless men who are no longer even looking for work—roughly seven million of them age 25 to 54, the traditional prime of working life.

This is arguably a crisis, but it is hardly ever discussed in the public square…In 2015 the work rate (the ratio of employment to population) for American males age 25 to 54 was 84.4%. That’s slightly lower than it had been in 1940, 86.4%, at the tail end of the Great Depression. Benchmarked against 1965, when American men were at genuine full employment, the “male jobs deficit” in 2015 would be nearly 10 million, even after taking into account an older population and more adults in college…look at the fraction of American men age 20 and older without paid work…Clearly big changes in the U.S. economy, including the decline of manufacturing and the Big Slowdown since the start of the century, have played a role. But something else is at work, too: the male flight from work has been practically linear over the past two generations, irrespective of economic conditions or recessions.  What we might call “sociological” factors are evident, not least the tremendous rise in unworking men who draw from government disability and means-tested benefit programs.

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, real gross domestic product increased at an annual rate of 1.1 percent in the second quarter of 2016, a near-recessionary figure.