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June Job Loss Hit Most Industries |
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The 437,000 jobs lost in June were spread throughout most U.S. industries, according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
Manufacturing employment fell by 136,000 in June, while employment in construction decreased by 79,000. Job losses in professional and business services shot up in June, with the industry shedding 118,000 jobs. Retail trade employment was down by 21,000 in June.
Education and health care employment increased by 34,000, and employment in government dropped by 52,000 in June.
The overall unemployment rate increased to 9.5 percent in June, putting it at a 26-year high.
AFL-CIO President John Sweeney said today’s jobs data show that creating jobs is the key to a full economic recovery.
Congress and the Obama administration need to continue to remain focused on stimulus efforts to end the recession. Additionally, this is not just a problem in the United States, but at this stage, job loss is the vortex of the global economic crisis. To address this problem we believe that all governments should focus an extra 1 percent of GDP [gross domestic product] for stimulus focused on job creation.
The rate of job loss has been slowing, but even if that trend continues and the recession ends this year, the nation likely will confront a massive employment deficit of 10 million jobs and a long period of slow wage growth, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
In the early 1990s, it took 15 months from the official end of the recession before the unemployment rate stopped rising—and 19 months after the end of the recession in the early 1980s. But it’s not sufficient for the unemployment rate to fall to turn around the economy. The number of new jobs created must keep up with population growth—that means 127,000 news jobs must be created a month, EPI says.
In a June 30 conference call, EPI President Lawrence Mishel noted another trend that is slowing the recovery: stagnant wages. The BLS reported that wages continued to drop in June, with average weekly pay for nonmanagerial workers falling to $609.37, from $609.51.
If the current recession ends with a return to the way things were before it began, Mishel says, working families won’t have much to celebrate. “Even before the perfect storm hit Wall Street, housing, and the banks, the economy was already broken for workers.”
That means our challenge won’t end when the recession does. Unless we fix our broken economy so that it will start to provide fair value for work again, working families will keep losing ground.
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Let’s hurry and get immigration reform done.So we can have another 20 million people on the unemployment roles.Hell, let’s just make Mexico the 51st. state at least then they could legally have everything American citizens do and help pay for it too.
I am sure the AFL-CIO leadership is happy with the increased unemployment rate, since by supporting illegal aliens taking jobs from Americansthey are partly responsible for creating it .
I do believe that we need to crack down on illegal immigrants and those who employ them, but that would not make a big dent in overall unemployment. This recession is a direct result of reckless investments by a bunch of Wall Street prima donnas. Their enablers were part of the Bush/Cheney administration which didn’t believe in regulating the financial sector. The financiers collected huge salaries while they frittered away our savings, our 401Ks, and the money we put away to send our kids to college.
http://keepamericaatwork.com/?p=2415
That is what I think about the current unemployment situation.
Virgil
http://www.KeepAmericaAtWork.com
You and I think alike Dr. Unemployment keeps rising and is likely to continue to do so for awhile and yet Obama and others ‘in high olaces’ think we MUST have immigration reform. Hey, Obama, forget reform. Let’s just enforce the laws we already have and SECURE OUR BORDERS!
Stay on the subject. Let’s just remind everyone EVERYDAY that this recession is a direct result of GOP leadership. Trickle down economics (small business create jobs- latest spin), tax breaks (tax breaks will fix health care-latest spin) and turning the middle class against each other (it not Wall street that’s ruining this country, it’s illegal immigration- latest spin). YES, THIS TOO IS BUSH”S FAULT!
Yes ap, the recession and illegal immigration was Bush’s fault.
The DEPRESSION we are now in and CONTINUED illegal immigration is Obama’s fault.
What a load of logical fallicy crap - “It’s all Bush’s fault!” The big picture certainly includes the Democrats too. It’s more than myopic to not include them in the fair share of what’s gone wrong. For everything you bring up that the Republicans did supporting Big Biz resulting in problems, I can bring up Democrats furthering Big Gov programs that have caused problems. Having this exchange does little to nothing to move us forward!
The real issue is—what constitutes a job? Part time at WalMart? That’s a job. But what does it get the worker? A living wage, health care, a pension—any of those things? Nope. Not much for the present, nothing for the future—and no hope for anything better.
Underemployment exploits workers. Try to get another job while you’re marginally employed—which employer is going to get priority? When do you make time for family, how do you arrange (or afford) childcare, when do you sleep? Where is your overtime, when you work and eight hour day for employer #1 and then go directly to work for employer#2?
Illegal immigration is only a small part of this equation. It is an issue, but hey—if no one hires undocumented workers off the books, there’s no problem. Right?
Apwuman for nearly 40 years I felt like you and it finally dawned on me that the Democrats are as bad if not worse than the republicans.If you work for a living no politican is your friend.We need a strong Independent Party if the working man is ever going to get his due.The 2 party system does not and never will work for working people,we need term limits,let them serve 2 terms and then they must sit out one,see if you can get either side to discuss this with you.Big money owns them both democrat and republican.When you can’t get re-elected from the party you have belonged to for years just switch to the other one in mid stream.(aka Arlen Specter) Do anything to keep the job.
Immigrants already pay into US tax coffers. If they are issued paychecks, they have FICA, Medicaid, Social Security and State and Federal taxes withheld. They do not, in most places get anything back for this.
Immigration reform should include reform for companies that locate overseas to avoid taxes, and to exploit third-world labor. Companies that seek to evade US taxes and not pay import duties are the real illegal immigrants.
If capitol can cross international boundaries, why can’t labor? Simple. Profits.
The bottom line is full employment at living wages, how tough is that to figure out? You can’t chisel your employees and pay em’ eight bucks an hour and think everything is going to be just fine when you’re living in a thirty dollar an hour economy. The average new home is about $200,000.00 and the average new car is about $20,000.00. Groceries are about $500 a month if you’re frugal. Then there’s utilities, insurance premiums for life, home, auto, health, clothing, school, maintenance etc. and all of these are just basic living expenses without recreation, none are any fun.
The Employee Free Choice Act would create the extra income needed to buy new furniture, car or home and remove the liability of unemployment to the states like bankrupt Illinois and California. People want a pay check not a hand out or a food pantry. We can’t “lay off” our way out of this recession either.
Let’s keep it from getting worse …
“We very much want to work with others to make sure that we have … as pro-American a tax system for corporations as we possibly can …” Lawrence Summers
The Administration is struggling to fund its spending spree in ways that would nominally be consistent with the President’s campaign promises. The Obama budget proposed to inflict two substantial tax increases on U.S. corporations with global operations. One would make it more expensive to bring cash from those operations into the U.S. The other would make it expensive (on average 30% more expensive) to pay Americans, rather than citizens of any other country, to perform headquarters administrative jobs such as accounting, IT, or HR. These proposals were supposedly aimed at fulfilling the promise to “end tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas”. While they hurt companies with global operations, it is hard to see how they would do anything other than reduce U.S. jobs.
The President’s problem here, as in other areas, is that in his effort to produce campaign one-liners he misstated the underlying problem. America does not provide tax breaks for shipping jobs overseas. It provides a tax penalty for locating jobs here. That’s a different problem, and it has a different cure.
America is not the powerhouse it used to be, and we need to get used to that fact. Only 28% of the world’s largest 300 corporations are American. Our once formidable advantage in science and engineering has slipped. Now our companies must compete against potent rivals. The foreign operations of those rivals are not taxed at all by their home countries. When the U.S. tries to raise revenue by boosting the current tax on the foreign operations of our companies, we saddle them with a potentially fatal competitive burden. A foreign owned corporation can bring home up to 54% more earnings than its U.S. owned rival from a dollar earned by a factory in a tax favored location. That kind of disadvantage can break a company, destroying headquarters jobs and, in time, even U.S. manufacturing jobs. A company that can’t compete overseas cannot sustain the level of research and development needed to produce the new products it needs to compete here at home. We need to minimize the tax that our companies pay on their foreign factories.
But if tax rates on foreign operations are kept low, that puts U.S. operations at a disadvantage. America saddles its domestic corporate activities with the second highest tax rate in the developed world. Is there a way to reduce this without making corporations even more powerful than they are today, and without aggravating our government deficit or putting an even higher percentage of U.S. income into the hands of the wealthy? Yes there, is, and in fact it’s quite simple.
Corporations could be given a deduction for the dividends they pay to their shareholders. If the corporations didn’t pay out their cash, they would get no tax benefit, so the corporations would not end up with more cash. The revenue loss would be made up at the individual level by taxing the dividends and stock gains the individuals receive. Overall, the individuals would be no worse off than they are today. Why? Because the corporations would have higher earnings due to the deduction, and they would have to pay those earnings out to their shareholders. This increase would exactly match, overall, the tax imposed on the shareholders, so they would come out even. But now there would be no required corporate level tax on U.S. operations. The U.S. would be the best place in the world to put jobs, taxwise. Our companies would be in a position to trounce their foreign-owned rivals. That would eliminate the “tax benefit for shipping jobs overseas” in a way that would make us stronger rather than weaker, with higher employment and higher wages. And guess what – those workers pay taxes on those higher wages, reducing the deficit.
So let’s give the President a re-do on his campaign slogans. Mr. President, you may re-word your promise to “provide deficit reducing incentives to create jobs in America”. We’ll also politely avert our gaze while you retract your budget proposals and replace them with a tax policy that makes more sense. A new Administration is allowed to make mistakes. It just needs to recognize and correct them before permanent damage is done to our economy.