The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced employment figures for April 2013: 165,000 new jobs. No one knows exactly what that means, but one thing is certain: This number will certainly change. Does that indicate government ineptitude or political manipulation? No.
U.S. jobs grew by only 88,000 in March, less than half of recent monthly job increases, yet the unemployment rate was the lowest in four years, 7.6 percent. How come? People stopped looking, went back to school, or were otherwise no longer counted as unemployed. Was job growth a victim of austerity anticipation? Opinions differ.
“The billable-hour system is the way most lawyers in big firms charge clients, but it serves no one. Well, almost no one. It brings most equity partners in those firms great wealth. Law firm leaders call it a leveraged pyramid. Most associates call it a living hell.”
Will “ObamaCare” kill jobs? The new Affordable Care Act healthcare reform law is modeled after the Massachusetts healthcare law, “RomneyCare,” and the Urban Institute recently studied the situation there. So has RomneyCare killed jobs in Massachusetts?
“Will the Affordable Care Act Be a Job Killer?” Lisa Dubay, John Holahan, Sharon K. Long, and Emily Lawton, Urban Institute Health Policy Center
But beware. ObamaCare will affect your job if your boss is a lunatic, right-wing, GOP ideologue:
Ex-financier Mitt Romney in a conference call to corporate CEOs in June:
“I hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections. And whether you agree with me or you agree with President Obama, or whatever your political view, I hope — I hope you pass those along to your employees. Nothing illegal about you talking to your employees about what you believe is best for the business, because I think that will figure into their election decision, their voting decision and of course doing that with your family and your kids as well.”
Oaxaca, Mexico has installed 230 video cameras downtown and in the suburbs, and most of them are monitored by deaf police personnel. Oaxaca’s Deputy Secretary for the Ministry of Public Security noted that:
“…these police officers have a very strong … visual sense and can better detect what is happening in different places where the cameras are located; they can often remotely read the conversations of people, to the benefit of this security system that operates 24 hours a day.”
“Deaf Police Monitor Security Cameras,” Murray Page, Mazátlan Messenger
According to Vaughn Bell, “…there is good evidence that deaf people are better at noticing things in the periphery of vision and detecting movement.”
”This potentially makes them perfect for the job and likely better than their hearing colleagues.
So the project turns out to be a targeted way not of recruiting ‘disabled people’ into the workforce, but of recruiting the ‘super able’. In fact, turning the whole idea of disability on its head.”
“Deaf police to monitor security cameras in Mexico,” Vaughn Bell, Mind Hacks
“The population of undocumented immigrants in the US fell from 12 million to approximately 11 million during the height of the financial crisis (2008-09) …. And since then, Mexicans without documents aren’t migrating at rates to replace the loss, creating a net zero balance for the first time in 50 years.”
“Home again in Mexico: Illegal immigration hits net zero,” Sara Miller Llana, Christian Science Monitor (citing Douglas Massey, Mexican Migration Project, Princeton University)
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The December 2011 employment figures are out, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that last month saw an increase of 200,000 new jobs. At that rate it will be a mere 65 months before we get to full employment.
The BLS adjusts these statistics to account for seasonal variations so that temporary holiday jobs — evergreen salesmen, reindeer renters, maids-a-milking, department store Santas — don’t distort the figures. Some analysts aren’t sure the Bureau understands our 21st century retail supply chain, where orders on the InterWebz make temporary work for thousands of migratory warehouse gypsies and delivery drivers. Stay tuned for next month’s job numbers.
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“Around 800,000 veterans are jobless, 1.4m live below the poverty line, and one in every three homeless adult men in America is a veteran. Though the overall unemployment rate among America’s 21m veterans in November (7.4%) was lower than the national rate (8.6%), for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan it was 11.1%. And for veterans between the ages of 18 and 24, it was a staggering 37.9%, up from 30.4% just a month earlier.”
“Whatever the cause, this bleak trend is occurring as the last American troops leave Iraq at the end of this year, and as more than 1m new veterans are expected to join the civilian labour force over the next four years.”
–”A hard homecoming,” The Economist
Related: USA Leaves Iraq?
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