As much as commentators are trying to put a happy face on recent data releases showing that job losses are slowing, it still means that fewer people are working. Moreover, one element of the poor jobs environment that it not getting enough play is the way wages are deteriorating. Some who have full-time work have been asked to take pay cuts to preserve jobs; those who work part time are seeing their hours cut.
A sign of how difficult things are for some: food stamps users are increasingly employed. From the Financial Times:
The number of working Americans turning to free government food stamps has surged as their hours and wages erode…
While the increase in take-up is often attributed to the sharp rise in unemployment – which on Friday hit 9.7 per cent – the Financial Times has learnt that some 40 per cent of the families now on food stamps have “earned income”, up from 25 per cent two years ago.
The agriculture department, which runs the programme, attributes this rise to workers having their hours cut back.
“I’m sort of stunned, it seems like a dire warning . . . that even the jobs people are retaining in this recession aren’t at the wage level and hours level that they need to provide for their families,” said Heidi Shierholz, economist at the Economic Policy Institute….
Less attention has been paid to those still in the workforce, whose incomes are also being squeezed. The average working week is now about 33 hours, the lowest on record, while the number forced to work part-time because they cannot find full-time work has risen more than 50 per cent in the past year to a record 8.8m. Wages and benefits have decelerated.
The food stamp data suggest that “the labour market problems are more significant than you would expect, given just the unemployment rate”, said John Silvia, chief economist at Wells Fargo. “For me it suggests the consumer is not going to rebound or contribute to economic growth for the next year, as the consumer would in a traditional economic recovery.”
Another implication is that when the economy recovers, employers will first return staff whose hours have ben cut back to full time before hiring new staff, so improvements in unemployment will be slow in coming.
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The destruction of the American job market was just like the destruction of American unions: by design.
It was a crime of corporate and financial elites carried out against the American people.
The means were union busting, outsourcing, ‘lean & mean’ corporate staffing, and moving supply chains overseas.
The destruction of the American job market was just like the destruction of American unions: by design.
It was a crime of corporate and financial elites carried out against the American people.
The means were union busting, outsourcing, ‘lean & mean’ corporate staffing, and moving supply chains overseas.
OH! You’re my new favorite blogger fyi
Nowadays you can pay for a restaurant meal with your EBT/Food Stamp debit card. Who says there’s no such thing as a free meal?
http://www.ebtproject.ca.gov/restaurantmeals.aspx
And yet… the further one goes down the socio-economic ladder the more obesity one finds.
One must also scratch one’s head when considering that our public schools provide free breakfast and lunch to the children of low income families. A hungry child could easily eat all their daily food requirements at these two meals given the amount of food that is thrown into school cafeteria garbage cans.
Come to think of it might we better served by ending the food stamp program and utilizing those under used school cafeterias to provide balanced, nutritious meals to those in need rather than set them loose with a government debit card in a supermarket.
Guys, clearly you have never dealt with food stamps. Frankly, I’ve never been on them either: but I have given a ride to the store to neighbors and friends who use them. I challenge you to walk through a grocery store with a woman on WIC or food stamps and put together a healthy diet. The foods covered by the food stamp program get on there based on lobbying, not nutritional content. It is frankly, completely unreal. Then you get to the check out and they belittle you and it takes forever for things to be rung up.
And so you know: the friend I used to take was a divorced mother of two. She worked as a receptionist, making $18,000 a year working full-time. She was a well-educated woman, some college, who worked hard to make decent meals out of what food stamps provide. If you don’t have a history with healthy foods, and enough education to know how to build a good diet, the situation is completely hopeless.
Furthermore, school meals are not balanced or nutritious. A typical breakfast is a “pancake on a stick” – which is a sausage link wrapped in pancake and stuck on a stick like a corn dog. It is served with a couple of dipping packs of syrup, which of course, is nothing but flavored, colored corn syrup.
If you are wondering why the poor are obese, it is because their diet consists entirely of corn syrup. That is what is cheap in this country, not fresh fruits and vegetables. Do you think that urban convenience stores stock quinoa?
Get a grip, folks. Obesity in this country is a mark of poverty, not plenty. We work menial jobs sitting on our butts, must make extra time for exercise, live (especially at the poverty line) under extreme stress, and can only afford to eat crap. Please do not blame the victim if you do not know what their lives are like.
The price of “free trade” and cheap labor. I wonder how many years it will take before we start marketing cardboard shacks to the poor?
Thank you InaPickle, for bringing some facts and human compassion to the conversation.
Thank you InaPickle.
that’s a righteous post, inapickle
Isn’t it ironic that most of the folks designing economic policy have never worked a day in their lives outside the library or classroom.
What a petri dish we all are for them. Those chemists.
It should be a mandatory part of the cirriculum for every PhD Economist to spend a year working the counter at a convenience store or gas station, trying to survive without a scholarship.
That would change the entire body of thought.
And it would produce a second salutary result — a lot less economists. LOL.
Ever-increasing healthcare costs that crush families, stagnant/declining wages, skyrocketing secondary education costs —- Is it any wonder why the middle class has been decimated? We now live in an oligarchy-controlled Latin-American style society where the elite 1% control 99% of the country’s wealth. They use America as their private plantation. And its captive citizens are treated as useless eaters.
http://www.chrismartenson.com/forum/wealth-gap-and-collapse-us/24520
More on what future awaits all of us if health care reform fails:
http://www.healthbeatblog.com/2009/09/if-you-think-health-care-reform-makes-you-nervous-consider-the-alternative.html
This is the starkest, plain English description I’ve read on the topic from a policy wonk. One can smell the level of frustration in his writing. The facts presented are difficult to ignore.
One decent reform where I hear there’s been some progress made is enabling the use of food stamps at farmers’ markets. But I guess there’s a lot of work to be done on that, and there’s still the issue of how people get to those locations.
(Though there are more and more urban-located farmers’ markets.)
Not sure why this reply from this morning isn’t appearing under other comments:
that’s a righteous post, inapickle
Isn’t it ironic that most of the folks designing economic policy have never worked a day in their lives outside the library or classroom.
What a petri dish we all are for them. Those chemists.
It should be a mandatory part of the cirriculum for every PhD Economist to spend a year working the counter at a convenience store or gas station, trying to survive without a scholarship.
That would change the entire body of thought.
And it would produce a second salutary result — a lot less economists. LOL.
It’s not the PhD’s faults, it’s their professors. Professors need to be stripped of their money, houses and their job and given a menial job starting from zero working on an assembly line for 2 solid years, coming home exhausted every night, turning on the TV and then eating a TV dinner. On the weekends they can do their laundry by carrying it to a laundromat. They can also use their free time to pay bills.
Then, if they survive, they can go back to teaching econ.
Sounds like the Cultural Revolution.
@craazyman…you big softy, try the streets and see how they go.
Ina Pickle…Too right, although personal experience is discounted in empirical studies due to its sample size, it never less is how we live our lives and makes this world real, visceral.
IMO the book by Elisabeth Wynhausen *Dirt Cheap* It is her account of the year she joined them, working as a factory hand, checkout chick, kitchen hand, cleaner and attempting to live on the earnings. She discovers that many so-called unskilled jobs actually require an incredible amount of skill.
For more see: JAMA website
Relationships Between Poverty and Psychopathology.
Conclusions: An income intervention that moved families out of poverty for reasons that cannot be ascribed to family characteristics had a major effect on some types of children’s psychiatric disorders, but not on others. Results support a social causation explanation for conduct and oppositional disorder, but not for anxiety or depression.
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/290/15/2023
Food Insecurity and the Risks of Depression and Anxiety in Mothers and Behavior Problems in their Preschool-Aged Children.
CONCLUSIONS. Mental health problems in mothers and children are more common when mothers are food insecure, a stressor that can potentially be addressed by social policy.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/118/3/e859
Etc, etc, etc feel free to browse JAMA site. Poverty is the precursor to many social ills, but in a winning culture such nuances are considered necessary “carrot and the stick”, funny how the bottom never makes the rules..eh…unless your French.
IMO also that for the poor every centavo is calculated by the markets be it rent 1/3 or more to transportation as they usually have to drive or access public transportation to travel long distances to get to work/s. By the time all considerations are taken into account, it truly is a trap.
I fear the great bulk of the middle class will share the *real* physiological, psychological, sociological effects that poverty, borderline or worse will incur upon them. Then we shall see its effect upon the American landscape, fools pride striped away reveling the ideological nakedness many adhered too re: Idealogical positioning only for the purpose of consolidating wealth, status and beliefs with out regards for the body hole (see society).
American society has now for a very long time been external (see wars) and has not had time to reflect on what its own internal arguments are, this over a long period has toxified the American ethos *we are one in the same with out exclusion. The consolidation of wealth and power has in effect silenced the debate out side what they will allow save for their purposes (see polarization of topics). This pressure building has had only intensified with increases in population and decreases in opportunity. These factors are the building blocks of mindless violence (see Rwanda), not in America you say (see civil war) they never thought such events could occur too, till to late and had little to do with slavery save popular drum beating. More like forced child/cheap immigration labor vs captured slavery economic power warfare.
Skippy…Romantic history challenged is know as revisionist, decry-ed by the authors gaggle. Where history is but a theory constantly updated.
food stamps???
c’mon Yves, don’t use such a blunt language. it is called SNAP (supplemental nutrition assistance program).
Thanks Inapickle. Your words are so refreshing.
@skipppy, not sure what you mean by “big softie” but I appreciate your attention to my post. ;)
I tried the streets for about 10 years. I have had a strange life. Tremendous early success as a very young Wall Street analyst, quit in boredom and repetitive, money-obsessed stultification of the work at age 27 to pursue creative/artistic dreams, ran out of money after several years and then had to really work.
yes, the lower the wage, the harder the work in many cases. And not just enduring-the-8-hour-day hard, but navigating stupid, belligerent, incompetent, narcissistic assholes, inchoherent instructions, demeaning working conditions, abusive and inconsistent directives, miserably uninformed evaluations, soul-destroying, soul-stealing, life-wasting, physical-illness producing, exhausting misery.
George Orwell is a hero of mine. Down and Out in London and Paris is a must read. Probably as true today as then. Upton Sinclair too.
The fight just to survive is enough to kill you.
thank God that part of my life is over, and I was able to crawl back “above the ice” through years of hard work. I’m good now, more or less, back “inside” the white collar womb.
But I have a perspective born of real life. So when I hear about Wall Street “talent” it makes me want to vomit my soul up in a spray of mind/heart puke at the pathetically shallow misery of word in that context.
Those people with the alleged “talent” have no idea what their financial rape is doing to real people living real lives.
yes skippy, I’ve been on the streets, don’t worry.
@craazyman…Very sorry for the confusion, my inference was to your suggestion for economists.
BTW thank you for sharing your experience, FYI I have had parallel experiences and share your opinion on the gate keepers to the towers of power. I will probably suffer Dante’s prediction of ill-advised men regardless of my state of information at the time. One thought that helps me keep going in the light of all this garbage (GFC) is that I may become a task master too these individuals and that one little hope lifts me a bit.
Does the crushing weight of one mans dreams over other dreams validate its self upon success, I think not.
Skippy…”He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, and he who has one enemy will meet him everywhere” Ali Ibn-Ali Talib
The commentary on diets of the poor are yet another symptom of survival skill loss.
Curious about actually living off the food stamp allocation, I noticed this –> http://aboveavgjane.blogspot.com/2007/04/foodstamp-challenge.html
“‘I’m sort of stunned, it seems like a dire warning . . . that even the jobs people are retaining in this recession aren’t at the wage level and hours level that they need to provide for their families,’ said Heidi Shierholz, economist at the Economic Policy Institute….”
Stunned, why stunned? The phenmomenon of the working poor has only been known to exist for roughly thirty years now. If anyone’s stunned it me that someone charged with reporting on such things is stunned to learn of their existence. How much are they paying Heidi over there at EPI would you think?
When I listen to the mainstream news, it’s of detached people discussing polices, such as health care reform, in terms of political winners/losers. No humanity to it at all, just cold, heartless politico-speak. We’re just cogs and numbers.
I think instead of spending all of it on food, they should find a way to turn those coupons into cash and then invest that cash in the stock market. With the way things are going they will soon be rich.*
*Not really intended as investment advice.
While your comments for the most part make me sad for the state that this country finds itself in, I am relieved to find intelligent people who recognize and empathize with those of us who find ourselves choosing groceries over a Dr. visit or a dental visit over new clothes for our kids. For the most part, school lunches are horrid. My child is on the reduced program. She cheerfully eats what there is, knowing that to send lunch everyday with her would be a burden on our already stretched budget.We are not an anomaly, we are the real America, whether the media, Washington or anyone else cares to acknowledge it.