U.S. Unemployment Rate Jumps to a 14-Year High
November 7th, 2008Double the rate and you might have a more meaningful figure.
Via: AP:
The nation’s unemployment rate bolted to a 14-year high of 6.5 percent in October as another 240,000 jobs were cut, stark proof the economy is almost certainly in a recession.
The new snapshot, released Friday by the Labor Department, showed the crucial jobs market deteriorating at an alarmingly rapid pace.
The jobless rate zoomed to 6.5 percent in October from 6.1 percent in September, matching the rate in March 1994.
Unemployment has now surpassed the high seen after the last recession in 2001. The jobless rate peaked at 6.3 percent in June 2003.
October’s decline marked the 10th straight month of payroll reductions, and government revisions showed that job losses in August and September turned out to be much deeper. Employers cut 127,000 positions in August, compared with 73,000 previously reported. A whopping 284,000 jobs were axed in September, compared with the 159,000 jobs first reported.
So far this year, a staggering 1.2 million jobs have disappeared. Over half of the decrease occurred in the past three months alone.
Double the rate and you might have a more meaningful figure.
Yes. Part of the reason I’m working at the grocery store at the age of 41 is my own neglect towards planning for my future when I was a twenty-something, but part of it is also the fact that the pool of well-paying jobs out there has just been shrinking and shrinking and shrinking for the past thirty years compared to the thirty years before that. And I’m one of the lucky ones. There are the adults who are in the ignominious position of “living at home” with their aging parents because they can’t find a job that provides more than twelve to sixteen hours a week of sweeping floors or flipping burgers. It’s to hide the stories of these people that the employment data are sliced, diced, cooked, and slathered with a creamy honey-mustard sauce before being served to the public.
Not to be nosy, Loveandlight, but what did you not do in your twenties that led to your current predicament? I think you’ve mentioned before that you bothered to pick up a BA degree. Is your present situation in spite of – or because – of that?
I would say in spite of. What I didn’t do, according to my latter-day understanding of how the post-80’s world works, is pick out a career that I would have immediately begun pursuing upon graduating from college. At the time, I thought that because my demands on life weren’t great, I could just be a humble receptionist or file clerk or something along those lines. I educated myself in a bunch of lowly office-work stuff in the intermediate years only to find that the world of even entry-level office jobs appeared to be closed to people with naked and emaciated resumes who didn’t have personal contacts or some other kind of “in” to the system.
Oh, the tale of frustration I could relate in discussing in detail my travails in simply finding a means of economically supporting myself. But I tax Kevin’s patience too much as it is, and besides, the whole thing would necessitate my writing a Barbara-Ehrenreich-style book. (I can already imagine the title: Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired by Loveandlight.)
I probably shouldn’t sound so put-upon, but it’s weird and complicated and probably has a lot to do with whatever karma I’m working through in this incarnation; so it remains an issue (a complex of issues, really) about which I find myself having something of a chip on my shoulder that has grown into the bone underneath.
Recently I even did a mental exercize in which I wrote a letter from my present self to my lost and dysfunctional self at the age of 17. The gist of the letter was basically, “Here’s how you’re going to fuck up because you’re a big, stupid baby, and here’s how not to be big, stupid baby so that maybe you can have a better quality of life.” Not entirely healthy, perhaps, but an interesting endeavor nonetheless.
Saw a so called media piece the other day
fast food employee’s now highly over qualified,
but there’s a hidden + they get your order right!
Like that’s a good thing.
You will know our goose is cooked when hundred’s
show up to apply for a wahlmahrt greeter job and fight’s break out.
You are being nosy @tm.
Myself after I bought a new truck stupidly @21 and had to pay almost what it was worth in interest I made a decision to rent rooms and live
as cheaply as possible.
Taking only really crappy jobs.
Since any possibility of me buying a house
was taken from me during the usurious phase I had adopted the mantra of the less you make the less they can take.I don’t support our system if I don’t have to.
Loveandlight, my planning on the employment and financial front was probably about as poor as yours: I have a teaching degree, but I don’t seem to have the personal qualities you need to succeed as a teacher. I personally think the required qualities have a lot to do with owning several pair of jackboots, being related to or sleeping with the right person, being an accomplished hypocrite and toady, and a shrewd bullshitter and backstabber.
The truth is, I always expected I’d be able to get some kind of job that was neither at the highest nor the lowest rung of the employment ladder, that it would support me modestly, and that it would take a back seat to personal and family life. I think those are reasonable expectations: a decent livelihood balanced with a rich personal life.
Until recently, I’ve been able to do this through self-employment–which has sometimes been a rough ride, but has allowed me a lot of flexibility.
The weird thing is, my self-employment income has absolutely crashed, just in the past few days. Income has gone from very modest to nearly zero. I’ll have to make a change if things don’t pick up pretty soon–and–change to what?Prospects don’t look good.
Loveandlight and Sharon:
I can appreciate what both of you are saying. This is an absolutely brutal job market for people with liberal arts degrees. It has been getting progressively worse for years, but the career market for those so credentialed has totally cratered at this point.
And self-employment gigs are great when there is a *boom* going on because you can be a mercenary; thats why realtors, home appraisers, storefront mortgage brokers and other such usually “self-employed” people cleaned up so much during the recent housing bubble. But when the boom ends, it especially can suck to be self-employed, since you probably won’t have unemployment insurance. I know, my “independent service provider’s” contract is up at the end of this month, and its going to be a challenge trying to find other work in this economy.
Negotiating the world of survival jobs is also something of a minefield, even when the economy is good. For me personally, the worst things are knowing what an utter disappoinment I am to my immediate family (and myself, if I’m going to be entirely honest) and having no “real-life” (meaning in person and not online) friends at all. Being somebody such as myself in the world of the menial laborer is not conducive to cultivating social contacts. (And in fairness, my psychological history is also something of an impediment in that area.) The sheer number of irrational and unstable people you encounter and have to deal with as you are just trying to live your life really doesn’t make matters easier, either.
If I were to do an on-the-spot analysis of what makes US society this way, I would say extreme social atomization combined with a nearly exclusive focus on the pursuit of shallow self-interest. The result is a society that where everything is about money and not much else. And so a hell of a lot of individual people are going to be very screwed up, and the social fabric is going to be rather weak.
All this does make me worried if not a bit terrified how in the world such a society will process the conditions that characterize collapse. In my case, it has had the one good effect of making it much easier for me to decouple myself from mainstream ways of thinking about society and politics. After all, those ways of thinking are basically lies designed to make people think that the insane situation in which they are living is somehow normal and desirable.
Loveandlight, there seems to be very little in the way of employment that a person with integrity can pursue. There is almost nothing you can be employed in–except at the very lowest levels–without being forced to compromise yourself.
Working in real estate–which I have done–is a good example. (I won’t elaborate here.) Teaching is another good example. It should be unnecessary to elaborate on this one, assuming everyone here graduated from high school. Maybe it’s silly, but I would feel compromised to work at a gas station. I certainly wouldn’t want to work in the medical field or be connected with pharmaceuticals. Or work for the government.
I would consider working in a grocery store to be not TOO bad. Lord knows, the food in those places is a disgrace, but there’s still something elemental about handling food. (I try to grow my own as much as I can.)
People shouldn’t have to prostitute themselves to dirtball corporations to survive. Really, livelihood shouldn’t be a matter of begging anyone for a job. (I’m thinking Jeffersonian democracy is the antidote.)
You shouldn’t be ashamed to work in a grocery store. But you probably should be ashamed to engage in almost anything at the higher economic rungs.
@sharon:
Also, grocery stores are more or less a necessary thing in the sort of society we live, and if somebody weren’t out there getting those carts, you’d have a huge mess in the parking lot. I also bag groceries, and while it’s probably the most superfluous job in the store, customers with big orders who have to bag their own groceries feel mighty put-upon, that’s for sure. (And sometimes they do have to do so anyway because the Narcissistic Grocery Store likes to cut, cut, cut those employee-hours, customer-service standards be damned!)
And grocery store work is a vast improvement over wet, greasy, grimy, nasty restaurant work, which is essentially slave labor to the max in a largely superfluous sector of the economy.