Unemployed? Donald Trump Just Cost You $300.

Lame duck President Donald Trump spent Christmas on his Palm Beach golf course, diligently dithering and refusing to sign the latest COVID economic relief bill, so supplemental payments to 14 million unemployed Americans expired. He finally was cajoled into signing on Sunday, but states could not begin cutting checks until he did, so the delay means January’s first payments could not be processed. Since the supplemental weekly support must end on March 15, Donald Trump trimmed the extension of benefits from 11 weeks to 10.

When unemployment benefits ran out, Mr. Trump was on his golf course with Lindsey Graham, Vice President Mike Pence was skiing in Vail, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin took a private jet down to his vacation home near Cabo San Lucas.

More:

“Trump just cost jobless workers one week of federal unemployment assistance after he failed to sign the relief bill by midnight on Saturday,” Kelsey Vlamis and Joseph Zeballos-Roig, Business Insider

“Extra unemployment benefits may take weeks to arrive. Fewer checks may be coming.” Greg Iacurci, CNBC

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The Real Unemployment Rate.

The U.S. Unemployment Rate is measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an arm of the U.S. Deparment of Labor, but BLS recognizes several joblessness measures. The one you read in the media is called U3, the percentage of unemployed civilian adults actively seeking fulltime nonfarm employment. Right now, the U3 rate is 7.9%. A broader measure, U6, includes those working part-time because they can’t find full-time jobs and people who want to work and have looked for jobs anytime in the past year. The latest U6 jobless rate is 12.8%.

But those aren’t the only — or most realistic — measures of unemployment. The Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, founded by Gene Ludwig, former U.S. Comptroller of the Currency, has a yardstick for U.S. functional unemployment, and it’s unnerving:

“A person who is looking for a full-time job that pays a living wage — but who can’t find one — is unemployed. If you accept that definition, the true unemployment rate in the U.S. is a stunning 26.1% ….”

“If you measure the unemployed as anybody over 16 years old who isn’t earning a living wage, the rate rises even further, to 54.6%. For Black Americans, it’s 59.2%.”

“Only 46.1% of white Americans over the age of 16 — and a mere 40.8% of Black Americans — now have a full-time job paying more than $20,000 per year.”

— “America’s true unemployment rate,” Felix Salmon, Axios

More:

Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity (LISEP) website

What the US gets wrong about the minimum wage.

Alexia Fernández Campbell explains what the US gets wrong about the minimum wage. A Vox video.

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It Takes a Village of Undocumented Workers to Run Trump Golf Resorts

Candidate Donald Trump railed against U.S. employers who hire undocumented workers, but his golf resorts were built by them, including the “Summer White House” at Bedminster, NJ. Villagers from Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico and Guatemala were knowingly hired by Trump Golf managers as construction laborers, heavy equipment operators, landscapers, kitchen staff, and housekeepers for about two decades. After the Washington Post broke a story about undocumented workers at the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester NY, where Eric Trump lives, these long-time Trump employees were all swiftly fired, and other Trump resorts shortly followed suit.

The Trump Organization did not use the federal E-Verify system except in cases like the DC Trump Hotel, a GSA construction project that required it. Once in operation, the hotel apparently stopped using it.

More:

“‘My whole town practically lived there’: From Costa Rica to New Jersey, a pipeline of illegal workers for Trump goes back years,” Joshua Partlow, Nick Miroff and David A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post

“Trump’s own undocumented help highlights plight of many immigrants,” Paul Reyes, The Hill

“7 questions about Trump’s use of illegal workers at his golf courses,” David A. Fahrenthold and Joshua Partlow, Washington Post

Trump’s Driver Sues Him for 6 Years of Unpaid Overtime

Noel Cintron, Donald Trump’s personal driver for more than 25 years, says his boss didn’t pay him overtime and raised his salary only twice in 15 years, clawing back the second raise by cutting off his health benefits. Mr. Cintron is suing his former employer for the back wages.

More:

“Donald Trump’s former driver sues over unpaid wages,” Sabrina Siddiqui, The Guardian

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Age Discrimination at IBM

IBM is 94 years old, but the corporation has fired 20,000 employees ages 40 and over in the past 5 years. Those employees, even the ones with excellent performance reviews, had something that the company couldn’t abide: salaries commensurate with their experience and seniority.

More:

“Cutting ‘Old Heads’ at IBM,” Peter Gosselin and Ariana Tobin, ProPublica

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Equal Pay Day 2018

It’s Pay Equality Day, last of the 99 extra days into 2018 that American women worked to finally make the same amount of wages that men made by Dec. 31, 2017. The concept originated with the National Committee on Pay Equity in 1996 as a way to point out the economic injustice of  American women earning 82 cents when men are earning a dollar. Want to change that inequity? Look here.

In a timely decision, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday that employers can’t use workers’ salary histories to justify paying women less.

More:

“When Is Equal Pay Day? 2018 Is The Year Women Can Help Close It Once & For All,” Sarah Friedmann, Bustle

 

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Carrier

During his 2016 election campaign, Donald Trump won a victory when he convinced the Carrier company to keep 800 manufacturing jobs in Indiana instead of moving them to Mexico. But Carrier has laid off some of those Indiana workers due to outsourcing and automation.

A video from The Atlantic

More:

“Carrier Employees, Soon to Be Laid Off, Feel Betrayed by Donald Trump,” Charles Bethea, The New Yorker

Related:

“Labor seeks to break into the debate over robots,” Steve LeVine, Axios

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Job Deletion: A Feature, Not a Bug?

Happy Labor Day.

“We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come – namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.” — John Maynard Keynes, 1930

“Today we’re living in those years to come, and it’s hard to go a week without some story about how all the jobs will soon belong to artificial intelligence or machine learning or however else we’re describing the automatons. Keynes was right to see it coming, but he didn’t exactly nail the implications.” — Malcolm Harris, 2017

More:

“A Jobless Future Everyone Can Love,” Malcolm Harris, Pacific Standard

“AI, Robotics, and the Future of Jobs,” Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Pieria

“Jobs aren’t the solution to America’s problems—they’re the cause,” James Livingston, Quartz

“A robot tax rises from American center of tech industry,” Janie Har, Associated Press

“What the Industrial Revolution really tells us about the future of automation and work,” Moshe Y. Vardi, The Conversation

“Work In The Digital Society,” Social Europe

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Image (“John Maynard Keynes Blogging, after Duncan Grant”) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

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Energy Sector Jobs

Last year 1.9 million Americans were employed in electric power generation, mining and other fuel extraction activities, according to a Department of Energy report. In short, there are twice as many people working in solar energy than in coal:

Oil: 515,518
Natural gas: 398,235
Solar Energy: 373,000
Coal: 160,000
Bioenergy: 130,677
Wind: 101,738
Nuclear: 76,771
Hydroelectric: 65,554
Geothermal: 5,768

Another 2.3 million jobs were in energy transmission, storage and distribution (powerline and pipeline workers, etc.) and more than 900,000 retail jobs (gas station workers and fuel dealers, et al.). If workers involved in manufacturing and installing energy-efficient products are included, the total number of energy-related jobs totals 6.4 million.

More:

“Today’s Energy Jobs Are in Solar, Not Coal,” Nadja Popovich, New York Times

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