The US economy continues to shed jobs, wreaking havoc on countless lives, even as government officials prepare to announce the official end of the recession that began in December 2007. Some 7.2 million jobs have been destroyed since the recession began, millions of which are not coming back. Since Barack Obama took office in January, 3.4 million workers have lost employment.
At present some 30 million Americans are officially unemployed, underemployed, or have given up looking for work, and the Obama administration has no plans to address this crisis, except to “let the market take its course.”
Every day, the media carries reports of new layoffs, job furloughs, and pay cuts... with no relief in sight. “There is no money” for health care, jobs programs, or social spending in general, the public is told, even as stocks have surged some 50 percent since their lows in March 2009, and “some large banks and Wall Street firms have roared back to profitability” (Associated Press, October 27, 2009).
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported October 22 that employers took 2,561 mass layoff actions (at least 50 workers each) in September, resulting in 248,000 job cuts, only fractionally down from the month before. Manufacturing jobs accounted for 33 percent of the mass layoff events. Within manufacturing, the number of initial jobless claimants was greatest in machinery (12,389) and transportation equipment (7,331).
A piece by Diane Stafford of McClatchy Newspapers posted October 27 points out that “Compensation so far in 2009 has been cut by the largest amount in nearly two decades, with a government index of real average weekly earnings down 1.9 percent since its high point last December. And the average workweek—now down to 33 hours—is the shortest on modern record.”
...since the start of the current recession, “total weekly pay for private production and non-supervisory workers has declined on a month-to-month basis in 16 out of 21 months. Total pay for that sector—-which accounts for about 8 in 10 members of the work force-—fell for an unbroken 10-month stretch, beginning in August 2008. “In 1981-1982, the most recent recession in which the job market tanked as badly as this one, the same index fell for only two consecutive months.”
Nearly 70 percent of US technology companies, according to AON Consulting, “have implemented salary freezes, 62 percent have had layoffs, 30 percent mandated time off, and 17 percent suspended 401(k) matches.”
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/oct2009/jobs-o28.shtml
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