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March 2, 2008

There Are No Jobs

The lead article in today's NYT Business Section is graph after graph of depressing news on the US labor market. US corporations have been making more money over the last ten years by squeezing more productivity out of a leaner and leaner workforce. We had a "jobless recovery" from the last recession, and now companies are plunging workers into even deeper spirals of unemployment because some screwed up economists convinced them that credit checks have an actual correlation to a person's character.

So now, if you lose your home in the mortgage meltdown, and maybe the bank repo's your car because you lost your job, it'll be even harder for you to find work to pull yourself out of the economic hell that is the US "middle class."

Intellectuals wonder why Americans focus so much on celebrity gossip and have such a poor grasp on foreign affairs. Perhaps they can't be bothered with politics because they're struggling to make ends meet and they focus on the lives of the rich and famous because that fantasy is the closest most Americans will ever come to the American dream.

"Is a Lean Economy Turning Mean?" by Peter Goodman

Posted by cj at March 2, 2008 2:58 PM

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