Via Calculated Risk - gee, what a great recovery:
The percentage of employee separations labeled permanent is at a recorded high.
Underneath the usual total unemployment numbers are the reasons an individual is unemployed: You are on temporary layoff; you quit your job; you have reentered the labor market and have yet to find a job; or you are entering the job market for the first time and have yet to find a job. Or, finally, you have been permanently separated from your previous employer, who has no expectation of hiring you back.
The last category is the dominant reason for unemployment at this time. That might not seem surprising, but it actually is. Never, in the six recessions preceding the latest one, did permanent separations account for more than 45 percent of the unemployed. The current percentage stands at 56 percent as of September and appears to be still climbing:
From his comments:
Every recession since 1990 has been followed by a jobless recovery, and the present one is unlikely to be any different. The mechanisms for robust and rapid growth in payrolls and wages just do not exist any more. Thanks to a lowering of international trade barriers, thanks to outsourcing and off-shoring, and thanks above all to Chinese labor’s entry into the global marketplace, workers in the first world have little or no bargaining power these days
If anything, this lack of bargaining power is even more pronounced during economic downturns. Corporations increasingly take advantage of recessions to make dramatic cuts to payrolls, cuts that they would find politically inexpedient to make in good times. When the recovery comes (as it eventually must), the replacement hires are, more often than not, made overseas.
Emphasis added. But you understand what’s being said here - and there was even a news story on this earlier in the week:
Higher joblessness is the new normal.
We now enter a period in our history when far larger numbers of people are going to be out of work.
This is a recipe for political upheaval.
I believe our political leaders know it, and it’s one reason that Obama is pushing so hard for health care reform now - he wants to expand the social safety net at a time when he (and virtually everyone else) knows we’re going to need it, because standards of living are going to fall, more people are going to be out of work, more people are going to be without health care on a permanent basis.
But notice what this is not. It’s not an attempt to restrict finance capitalism and boost the real economy; rather, it’s an acceptance that financial activity will continue to be the major/only source of “growth,” and the gains from that growth will be more narrowly distributed.
It’s an acceptance of the fact that the rich will get richer, and the rest will decay. This is the new normal! So buck up, citizens - your role is to merely accept this passively, as the natural order of things. Or - if you watch Fox News - to blame all of it on the government and demand even fewer regulations, thus permitting those at the very top to accumulate even more.
