The Recovery Isn’t A Recovery For the Working Poor

Wednesday, 16 February 2011 18:44 |

Written by Local307site |

By George Warner

January 27th, 2011

The economy ain’t lukewarm. Wall St. is boiling, but working America is still quite cold.

On Wednesday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average passed 12,000, before dipping down below the mark the end of the day. The New York Times says there are only “tentative signs of [an economic] pickup.” But, if we are to trust the stock market—and by golly, as Americans we always trust the market!—things in America are looking good. And the Dow hasn’t been this high since June 2008.

In June 2008, Lehman Brothers was still months from closing. Goldman Sachs was still an investment bank and AIG was still a privately run corporation. Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme would run for another 6 months. The markets were reacting to the largest uptick in unemployment in over 20 years—49,000 net jobs were lost (later adjusted to 60,000) that May and the unemployment rate had experienced a “steep jump,” from (wait for it…) 5 to 5.5 percent. When the jobless report came out, the angle was that high school students could not find summer jobs.

Two and a half years later, corporate profits are roaring once again. Big paydays are back. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being freely spent by the world’s plutocrats as they convene in Switzerland. And in the strange world that is American politics, Republicans are saying the recession was caused by government!

And, as a nation, we are above the 5.5 percent unemployment rate reported that June—by a lot. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate, 9.4 percent, underestimates the true extent of our employment problems by leaving out the many workers said to have ‘dropped out of the workforce.’ By Economic Policy Institute’s estimates, we are 11.5 million jobs short. 27 million Americans are unemployed or underemployed. (To see how little our labor market has bounced back, check out this Youtube visualization of the last 3 years…the only thing you can’t see is recovery.)

And according to a report released this Wednesday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, we can expect high unemploymentall the way until 2016. They expect the rate to stay above 9 percent for the rest of this year and stay above 8 percent in 2012.

In a disconcerting trend, the very few jobs that are coming back are overwhelmingly temporary jobs, or jobs in the retail or hospitality—basically low wage jobs that more often than not provide any benefits. They are not a career, but a stopgap. And they are not the type of job we want to see 27 million more of.

All this is to say that: the portrayal of a tepid, unsteady or lukewarm American economy is wrong. The corporate recovery has taken place and the rich are living easy. The recovery for working America, on the other hand, has not materialized.

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The Recovery Isn’t A Recovery For the Working Poor