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Monday, January 7, 2013

Economy One of the Bad Things About the Jobs Report

Posted by Charles Mudede on Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 7:34 AM

As WSWS points out, this fact has not been mentioned by the media: 11,000 teachers and school-related workers were laid off in December. Meaning, the government is still bleeding jobs four years after the crash. The net effect of this:

The Economix blog of the New York Times recently noted that while the private sector has added roughly 725,000 workers since 2008, the public sector has lost a near-equivalent number at 697,000. This means that a shifting has occurred within the workforce, sending workers out of the public sector and into less-secure, lower-paying private sector jobs, if they happen to be rehired at all. Over that period, 300,000 of those lost pubic sector jobs belonged to teachers.

Now that neoliberalism has no legitimacy (it lost that in the terrific crash of 2008), its only hope for survival is to directly expose more and more workers to the risks, turbulence, instabilities of the market. As a consequence, we are becoming not a society of citizens or even entrepreneurs (the neoliberal ideal) but simply hostages. Our jobs, our pensions, our small investments always have guns to their heads. We must meet all of the demands of the market, or else.

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"No" legitimacy? I'll believe it when I see it. The IMF is still in full operation, and people still talk about reducing "entitlements" in order to balance the budget here in the US. I have no illusions that it's in full swing still.

Posted by treacle on January 7, 2013 at 10:24 AM

We're still paying taxes to fund the IMF.

Us, as in the USA.

So, not dead yet. Even if austerity == evil.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on January 7, 2013 at 11:23 AM

As an enthusiastic fan of big government, I'm annoyed at both the lack of coverage of shrinking government and the continual shrieking of the right about "socialism." Government spending as a percentage of GDP is now below the long-term average since WWII; it was several points above for most of St. Ronald of Reagan's two terms.

Given the current state of affairs, Obama should either relentlessly publicize his war on government, or take advantage of the actual public perception and bolster agencies and regulations enough to have some beneficial effects.

Posted by rob!

on January 7, 2013 at 12:47 PM

December BLS jobs report Table B-1 tells me total state & local government ed employment, not seasonally adjusted, increased by 7,900 year over year (even as it decreased 102,200 month over month) ... which suggests that the alarming month to month seasonally adjusted decrease of 9,000 may be nothing more than an artifact of seasonal adjustment. At most, it disappears into the margin of error of the underlying surveys.

Posted by RonK, Seattle on January 7, 2013 at 1:14 PM

3

buwahahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.....

Posted by starve the fucking beast on January 7, 2013 at 1:35 PM

p.s., the "fact" Charles claims the WSWS points out has been ignored by "the media" is in fact not quite a fact ... and WSWS does not in fact claim it has been ignored by the media.

Posted by RonK, Seattle on January 7, 2013 at 2:07 PM

I, for one, think it's probably best that we aren't continuing to pay the salary of teachers who spend all their time in the pubic sector, but maybe I missed something?

Posted by Juris on January 7, 2013 at 3:01 PM