Category: employment

Good Monthly Jobs Report

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The Scariest Jobs Chart Ever


Workforce Participation Rate

There were 916,000 added to non-farm payrolls in March, which is a very good performance, though not anywhere near close to what it was during the before time. (See graph pr0n)

Note that NFP is still down over 8 million from its peak, and the employment-population ratio is lower than it has been since the depths of the 1981 recession, and that the percentage of women in the workforce has risen steadily since that time, so an apples to apples comparison (correcting for women in the workforce and an aging population) might still have us back to somewhere in the great depression.

We’re still in a hole, but it is not as deep:

U.S. hiring surged in March as the economic recovery accelerated, the start of what economists say could be a sustained run of job growth to industries, regions and workers hardest hit during the pandemic.

U.S. employers added a seasonally adjusted 916,000 jobs in March, the best gain since August, the Labor Department said Friday, and the unemployment rate, determined by a separate survey, fell to 6.0%, a pandemic low. Still, as of March, there are 8.4 million fewer jobs than in February 2020 before the pandemic hit.

The jobs rebound is gaining renewed momentum as more people are vaccinated against Covid-19, states lift restrictions on business activity, and consumers grow more comfortable dining, shopping and traveling outside their homes.

Note also that Covid numbers are spiking again, so we may see a reversal. 

………

Friday’s report showed hiring rose in most industries, led by a gain of 280,000 in the category that includes restaurants and hotels. Employment also rose sharply in construction, most manufacturing sectors and public and private schools. Temporary help and auto manufacturing, where a semiconductor shortage has idled assembly plants, were weak spots.

So a lot of the growth was in lo wage jobs.

………

Some economists project job growth will top one million in April. Further out, economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal project employers will add an average of 514,000 jobs each month over the next year, for a total of more than six million. That would mark the best 12-month stretch of job creation in decades but leave overall employment totals below where they stood before the pandemic.

I’ll always be a pessimist, which comes from the fact that the “experts” have consistently given an excessively rosy assessment of economic outcomes of recessions throughout my entire adult life. 

The levels of inequality in our society will weigh down any recovery.

And Back Up Again

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U.S. initial unemployment claims rose by 61,000 to 719,000 last week, which means ……… Hell, I don’t know.

The 4 week average fell though.

The weekly average for the before times was a little bit over 200K:

Filings for unemployment benefits rose last week but remained near their lowest levels since the pandemic’s onset, amid signs of a broader U.S. economic recovery.

Workers filed 719,000 initial jobless claims, on a seasonally adjusted basis, in the week ended March 27, the Labor Department said Thursday. The increase followed a downward revision to 658,000 initial claims the prior week, the lowest point since the pandemic hit in March 2020.

The four-week moving average, which smooths out volatility in the numbers, fell to 719,000, also a low during the pandemic.

I’m not sure what it all means in terms of trends, but until the weekly number drops below 300K, I would not take my foot off of the gas pedal.

The Glory that is the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment)

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Civis Analytics, one of the constellation of grifters sucking the life out of consultants for the Democratic Party, founded by Obama Alumni, purged their workforce of people because they were labor organizing.

Trouble found Sunny Rao early the morning of October 30. By the time the Washington State–based data scientist woke up, the group text she shared with several co-workers at the Democratic data firm Civis Analytics had already begun to buzz. “Someone said that they had been fired,” she recalls. Worried, Rao tried to log in to her work computer, only to find it locked. Then she checked her email, and there it was, the news she’d feared: She was terminated effective immediately. No one “even met with me to tell me that I was getting fired or why,” she tells Intelligencer.

………

Rao and Klem say the company gave them no explanation for their dismissals. The timing was odd, too: Civis was working on Joe Biden’s presidential campaign, and the election was only days away. On the Google Hangout meetings, managers did not give a reason for laying off so many staff members at once, according to the fired employees. With nothing else to do, the group text began to put the pieces together. By the end of the day, they’d learned that Civis had fired 11 people. All were vocal activists at work, known among co-workers for their willingness to question company practices in meetings. Instead of experiencing confusion, Klem and Rao began to feel betrayal.

………

Twelve current and former Civis employees say the company’s internal practices fell short of its public promise to be a progressive place to work. “We were working to make Civis live up to the values posted on their website,” says an employee who was fired on October 30. In December, seven of those terminated filed a charge with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging Civis had illegally fired them for organizing. Last month, the NLRB dismissed the charge. An official for the regional board said its decision owed to a Trump-era precedent, according the attorney who represented the Civis employees, that had raised the standard for workers to prove unlawful retaliation. The seven workers say they plan to appeal this week, placing their hopes in the same Biden administration they helped to elect.

………

Wagner said he was “shocked” by the NLRB charge. “Civis has worked with labor unions since we were founded, and we strongly support the rights of workers to organize. We had no knowledge of any potential union organizing efforts and no evidence of it – no emails, no request for meetings, nothing.”

Still, if Wagner is telling the truth, and Civis had no idea that anyone wanted a union, the firings could still violate the National Labor Relations Act. Workers have the right to organize, whether it’s for a union or for leading protests at work. Retaliation is unlawful, and the NLRB can order employers to reinstate workers and offer them back pay — as the company’s new attorneys could tell them. Civis retained Jackson Lewis, a law firm an AFL-CIO official once called “the devil incarnate,” to handle its case at the NLRB.

Because, of course they did.

Ethics, schmethics, there is grifting to be done.

The allegations against Civis sting more given its origins. Wagner, who was the chief analytics officer for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, built the company to put liberals in power. The pitch was simple. Democratic campaigns needed a network of reliable number-crunchers, and rather than build new analytics teams every four years, candidates could now turn to a single company. During the 2020 election cycle, the firm earned $8.5 million for work on the campaigns of Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, and Elizabeth Warren and on other Democratic ventures. While political campaigns still generate much of the company’s revenue, it also works in public health and for various government agencies and, yes, labor unions, like the American Federation of Teachers, to the tune of almost $1 million since 2014.

………

On its website, Civis makes a lot of promises to prospective workers with principles. “No a**holes,” reads its mission statement. But the former workers all say a banal reality lurked behind the buzzwords: Civis was not all that different from any other corporate employer. In a 2019 incident that still rankles former employees, Wagner announced a companywide pivot — and that meant layoffs — that he called a “CTRL-alt-delete moment” for Civis in a staff meeting. The flippancy infuriated workers, who cite it in conversations with Intelligencer as a sign that portended battles to come.

Kind of like how the Obama White House was a “Genuinely hostile workplace to women.” 

Talking the talk, but not walking the walk.

In March 2020, as the pandemic began and the Democratic primary hit its most frantic tempo, contract employees struggled with heavy workloads and waited for permanent jobs that had been promised but never appeared. Right after the pandemic hit and staff moved to remote work, the company introduced a controversial new policy. Members of its government team now had to hit a quota of billable hours, starting at an average of 37 and a half a week. Civis told staff the new policy would be more equitable than the status quo, which saw some employees billing at much higher rates than others. Quotas aren’t all that unusual for consulting companies, but Civis paired its quota with unlimited paid time off, which was. Workers also had non-billable job responsibilities to perform on top of the quota, and former employees say that when staff took sick leave, even in the middle of a pandemic, they had to make up the hours later. The company had several initiatives designed to improve Civis from within — like a diversity-and-inclusion working group — but, staffers grumbled, where was the time to participate?

37½ billable hours a week is the equivalent of at somewhere between 55 and 75 actual hours a week.

………

“I was the highest-level woman of color on the government team,” she says. In regular one-on-one meetings with a Civis executive, she says she repeatedly asked for anti-racism training for employees at work. The organization hosted implicit-bias trainings and donated money to five charities, but she felt that didn’t go far enough. Particularly galling for Rao was a summertime presentation by her managers, which singled her out as proof that Civis prized diversity. “When we hired Sunny, we met the Rooney Rule but only interviewed two people,” said one of the slides reviewed by Intelligencer.

………

Workers say they coordinated with each other via a private Slack channel and phone calls on how to press Civis for changes. They wanted better paid-leave policies, clearer career progression for contract workers, professional development, and an end to what they called “the progressive pay cut” — a below-market wage offered to young workers in search of jobs that don’t offend their principles. When they raised these issues in staff meetings or one-on-one conversations, three former employees say, managers thanked them for speaking up.

This is explicitly protected activity under the NRLA, and Civis CEO Dan Wagner knows this, because if he’s hired the biggest union busting law firm in the nation, Jackson Lewis, they have told him that it is explicitly protected activity, and how to evade the requirements of the law.

Around the same time, in late May, a senior Civis analyst named David Shor tweeted himself into trouble. Amid mass protests over the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Shor shared a link to research that showed a decrease in Democratic votes after similar unrest in 1968. Critics accused him of racial insensitivity. Six days later, Civis fired him, putting the company under a harsh spotlight. Former and current employees say Shor’s firing exacerbated unease with the way Civis managed employees. While commentators dissected the Shor case and its implications for free speech, Civis employees viewed it more as a labor issue, a sign that management was capricious and everyone was vulnerable.

By the fall, the resentment inside Civis came to a boil. Early in October, four former employees recall, a co-worker learned mid-meeting that her grandmother had died. Devastated, she left the call, then asked for bereavement leave in a one-on-one meeting with her manager. It didn’t go well, she later told co-workers who spoke to Intelligencer. The woman’s manager told her that she could take leave — but only if she made up the hours when she returned, her former co-workers recall her saying. Watching the billable-hours policy directly affect a co-worker and friend “made me personally angry and motivated to organize to affect change,” one co-worker tells Intelligencer. Within days of the incident, two employees reached out to a contact at the AFL-CIO for advice on the process of organizing a union.

Separately, Civis employees asked for greater transparency regarding the way the company chose its clients. As the presidential election approached, a Civis contract with Facebook worried a number of staff, including workers who weren’t involved in any conversations about unionization. The employees felt Facebook spread too much hate and had done too little to drive the violent far right off its platform. At an October 20 meeting open to the entire company, employees wanted to know how exactly Civis chose its clients, including Facebook: What good was the Civis litmus test if staff had no say in how it worked?

………

Ten days after that Facebook meeting, Sunny Rao, Sarah Klem, and nine other people were fired. Asked whether they believed their Facebook criticisms contributed to their firings, the workers would not comment. It’s certain, though, that they’d already been vocal company critics for months. Former and current employees tell Intelligencer that the 11 people who lost their jobs were all known internally for their activism at work, though only seven filed a charge with the NLRB.

………

Though the NLRB’s Chicago office, where Civis workers filed the original charge, didn’t deliver the finding the workers had hoped for, it may not have vindicated Civis either. The employees’ former attorney says the NLRB made it clear that Trump-era precedent had tied its hands: A divided 2019 ruling from the national board raised the bar for workplace activists to prove they’d been fired as retaliation. The case, Electrolux Home Products, Inc. and J’vada Mason, made it easier for employers to invent a pretext and still slide through the board’s review process, says Brandon Magner, a labor lawyer and the author of the Labor Law Lite newsletter.

Now that the seven who filed the NLRB charge have said they will go to the NLRB’s Office of Appeals, the Civis case could end up being more influential than they anticipated. Control of the national board is about to switch parties, as current appointees see their terms expire. “If everything goes the way it should, the ‘Biden board’ will be in place,” Magner explains. If the timing’s right, there’s “a chance” Civis could become a test case for overturning Electrolux, he adds.

If the NLRB overturns Electrolux on these assholes backs, I will be amused.

 

Jobless Claims Finally Fall Below Pre-Pandemic Record

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There were 684,000 initial claims, less than the pre-pandemic peak of 695,000.

Yes, this is unmitigated good news:

Jobless claims fell to their lowest level of the pandemic last week as stronger hiring and consumer spending drive a U.S. economic revival.

Worker filings for unemployment benefits, a proxy for layoffs, fell to 684,000 last week from 781,000 a week earlier. Claims are now at the lowest point since mid-March of last year, before lockdowns triggered millions of layoffs. They are also below the pre-pandemic high of 695,000, a threshold not crossed for 52 weeks.

“The recovery is really hitting full steam again, and all of the conditions will be in place for a real, explosive liftoff in the summer when hopefully we’ve reached a higher vaccination threshold,” said Julia Pollak, labor economist at jobs site ZipRecruiter.

………

Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal this month raised their average forecast for 2021 economic growth to 5.95%, measured from the fourth quarter of last year to the same period this year, from a 4.87% projection in February’s survey. The higher figure would mark the fastest such pace in nearly four decades, following a steep downturn last year.

If these predictions are accurate, this is a blistering pace of economic growth.

Headline of the Day

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Amazon Denies Workers Pee in Bottles. Here Are the Pee Bottles

—Vice

What a surprise, the PR department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Amazon lies through its teeth.

They claim that their workers are well treated, and are free to take pee breaks, which is belied by the pictures of pee bottles in Amazon trucks and warehouses.

Amazon claims its workers don’t pee in bottles; defenders say it’s an urban legend. But these photos sent to me by a former driver for a former @amazon contractor called Synctruck in a California facility suggest strongly otherwise. https://t.co/hp4zCqOxRO pic.twitter.com/StHNvV9B1x

— Ken Bensinger (@kenbensinger) March 25, 2021

A memo specifically telling workers to remove their urine bottles at the end of a shift

What’s more, Amazon actually has posted notices telling workers to clean up their urine bottles at the end of a shift. (See attached Tweet)

They demand a schedule that allows no time to pee, and it is impossible to make schedule unless you pee in a bottle, because it’s (at least) 15 minutes to find and use a bathroom and return to deliveries.

In a just world, Jeff Bezos would be sentenced to a life of working for ……… Jeff Bezos.

One of the responses to that tweet is telling:

And yes, I know, that Crassus did not actually die in this manner, though he was almost as contemptible as Bezos:

The first ever Roman fire brigade was created by Crassus. Fires were almost a daily occurrence in Rome, and Crassus took advantage of the fact that Rome had no fire department, by creating his own brigade—500 men strong—which rushed to burning buildings at the first cry of alarm. Upon arriving at the scene, however, the firefighters did nothing while Crassus offered to buy the burning building from the distressed property owner, at a miserable price. If the owner agreed to sell the property, his men would put out the fire; if the owner refused, then they would simply let the structure burn to the ground. After buying many properties this way, he rebuilt them, and often leased the properties to their original owners or new tenants.

This is an attitude toward public service that I am sure Jeff Bezos would admire.

And Unemployment Goes Up

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Initial jobless claims rose by 45,000 to 770,000 last week.

Not good news:

Worker filings for jobless benefits are hovering near the pandemic’s lowest levels, adding to evidence of recent economic improvement.

Jobless claims rose last week to 770,000—still elevated above the pre-pandemic peak of 695,000—but have declined since January. The four-week moving average, which smooths out weekly volatility, fell last week to about 746,000, near November’s pandemic low.

An increase in Texas accounted for about half of last week’s overall rise in jobless claims, which could reflect delayed effects from last month’s winter storm, some economists said.

More broadly, declining jobless claims are one sign of economic improvement. U.S. employers added 379,000 jobs in February, and the unemployment rate ticked down to 6.2%. The U.S. manufacturing industry has exhibited steady signs of expansion. JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s tracker of credit- and debit-card transactions showed consumer spending climbed in early March.

Economists expect widespread distribution of vaccines and a fresh round of government stimulus to fuel growth in the first half of this year.

They are predicting that economic growth this year will be about 6.5% in the US, largely because of government stimulus.

Me, I’ll take the under, but the fact that people are lauding fiscal stimulus, as opposed to waiting for monetary stimulus to eventually do its thing, is a nice change in the conventional wisdom.

 

Better, But Still Not Good, Initial Claims Data

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Initial claims fell from 754,000 to 712,000 last week, indicating an improving, though still dismal, job market:

New filings for unemployment benefits last week neared their lowest level since the pandemic fueled a surge in layoffs last March, adding to evidence of renewed labor-market growth.

Jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, fell to a seasonally adjusted 712,000 in the week ended March 6, down about 200,000 from an early January peak and close to a pandemic low point reached last November.

The four-week moving average, which smooths out volatility in week-to-week numbers, was 759,000 for the week ended March 6, slightly higher than the previous pandemic low recorded last November. The weekly average in 2019, the year before the pandemic started, was 218,000.

The recently passed $1.9 Trillion stimulus bill should lead to further improvements. 

It should be noted though that the employment population ratio is still crap, and improving VERY slowly.

I Missed This on Friday

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The Return of the Scariest Job Chart Ever


Workforce participation is still at a 45 year low

Largely because we changed cell phone providers, and my attempts to BYOD have been ineffective. (Not having a cell phone right now is a major drag).

The February employment report came out on Friday, and it was generally positive from a month-to-month perspective, but the job numbers are still worse than they were at the depths of the 2007-2012 recession.

As Calculated Risk observes: (They are also responsible for the graph pr0n)

The current employment recession was by far the worst recession since WWII in percentage terms.

At the worst of the Great Recession, employment was down Down 6.29% from the previous peak.

Currently employment is down 6.21% – the current unemployment situation is about the same as the worst of the Great Recession (and there was no pandemic to contend with in 2009).

I think that saying that we, “Are not out of the woods yet,” is too week a metaphor.

I don’t think that we have even reached the halfway point in Mirkwood.

When You Follow a Defeat with an Own Goal

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Following years or organizing, progressive Democrats in Nevada took 4 of 5 of the leadership positions in the state Democratic Party, out organizing the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) there.

The Nevada Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) then shot itself in the foot by convincing the entire staff of the party to quit. 

You see, you want your people there, picking up the mail, conducting polls, and managing the budget, because they are the ones best placed to sabotage the new leadership, as evidenced by the years long campaign of sabotage against Jeremy Corbyn by the professional staff of the Labour Party in the UK.

Not only will the new leaders be able to hire people that they trust, but should they refuse to resign when there is a change of power, they will be difficult, or at least embarrassing, to fire: 

Not long after Judith Whitmer won her election on Saturday to become chair of the Nevada Democratic Party, she got an email from the party’s executive director, Alana Mounce. The message from Mounce began with a note of congratulations, before getting to her main point.

She was quitting. So was every other employee. And so were all the consultants. And the staff would be taking severance checks with them, thank you very much.

(Emphasis mine) 

As an aside, make sure that the consultants stay resigned.  They are useless.

On March 6, a coalition of progressive candidates backed by the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America took over the leadership of the Nevada Democratic Party, sweeping all five party leadership positions in a contested election that evening. [I have gotten conflicting reports on this, it appears that the party Treasurer might be the old guard candidate] Whitmer, who had been chair of the Clark County Democratic Party, was elected chair. The establishment had prepared for the loss, having recently moved $450,000 out of the party’s coffers and into the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s account. The DSCC will put the money toward the 2022 reelection bid of Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a vulnerable first-term Democrat.

Again, asking for unity, and when your side does not win, sabotage the winners.

Democrats never do this for Republicans, but false Democrats always do this to real Democrats. 

………

Despite the pushback, Whitmer ultimately won the election, in which the state party’s governing members voted. In the certified election results, she received 244 to Segerblom’s 214; Jacob Allen won first vice chair by 101 votes; Dr. Zaffar Iqbal, on Whitmer’s progressive slate, was reelected second vice chair by 127 votes; Ahmad Adé won secretary by 39 votes; and Howard Beckerman won treasurer by three votes. [Again, note, the Las Vegas Review-Journal story has Beckerman losing.]

After the results, Mounce sent the email making clear that everyone on the small staff had resigned, including the party operations director, communications director, research director, and finance director.

An interesting coda to this is that, “The Democratic National Committee hired Mounce as their new political director last month.”

The final word on all of this is a reworking of Lyndon Johnson an old Lyndon Johnson quote:  “It is better to have them outside the tent pissing in than it is to have them inside the tent pissing in.”

Reid’s machine will try to take power back, and they will do so until the sun collapses into a cinder, but with all of their inside people gone, it will become much harder for them to do so.

A Good Start

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The White House has announced that anti-monopoly and net neutrality activist Tim Wu will be appointed to its National Economic Council.

I hope that this means that the Biden administration will take concrete steps to reign in the monopoly power of big tech and the telecommunications incumbents, but I fear that this is just window dressing:

Longtime tech critic Tim Wu is joining the Biden administration as an adviser on technology and competition, a signal that the White House is likely to push for policies that rein in Big Tech.

Wu will be serving on the National Economic Council as special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy, the White House said this morning. Wu confirmed the news in a tweet.

Wu is best known in tech circles as the man who coined the term “net neutrality” in the early 2000s. He has held several positions at the federal level before, including advisory roles with both the Federal Trade Commission and the National Economic Council. He has also been a full professor at Columbia University law school since 2006, where he teaches First Amendment and antitrust law.

His 2010 book The Master Switch argued that the open Internet as we knew it was barreling toward a closed-off, walled-garden future. In 2018 he published another book, The Curse of Bigness, in which he argued that US regulators’ failure to enforce antitrust laws had led to “a new gilded age” and all its attendant problems. 

The rubber hits the road in two places, DoJ enforcement and Congressional legislation.

Hopefully, we will see some action there.

It’s Unemployment Claim Thursday

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And in a REMARKABLY circuitous headline, the Wall Street Journal announces that, “U.S. Jobless Claims Hold Nearly Steady,” because they rose only 9,000 from the (revised upward from 730,000 to 736,000) jobless claims of the week before.

It is a remarkably awful headline, and you know that if claims had fallen by 9,000 it would have been called a drop:

Filings for unemployment benefits in the latter half of February reached their lowest level in nearly three months amid signs of slow labor-market improvement.

The Labor Department said jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, rose slightly to 745,000 for the week ended Feb. 27, from a revised 736,000 the prior week. The four week moving-average, which smooths out week-to-week volatility in claims numbers, was just under 800,000, its lowest level since early December.

So the numbers went up, and are still higher than they were in early December.

Screwing with headlines to minimize this is not a good look.

Tomorrow’s job numbers should be interesting.

FWIW, I don’t think that the Texas energy f%$#-up had much to do with this number, while there were certainly many people in Texas unable to work because of their delusional free-market energy dystopia, it is abundantly clear that none of them could file, because there was no power to run the unemployment offices.

Politics Tweet of the Day

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A 15 dollar min wage won 60% of vote in Florida in 2020. A political reporter thinking this some kind of risky vote is equivalent of doctor recommending you balance your humors. https://t.co/eqtuFPX6ib

— Alex Hazanov. (@alexhazanov) February 26, 2021

It really is remarkable just how dedicated the socalled “moderates” in the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) are to opposing policies that would get them massive support.

If You Have Neither on Your Side, Pound the Table

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With prospects for both a minimum wage hike and Neera Tanden’s becoming head of the Office and Management and Budget (OMB) dimming, the Biden administration has decided to ignore the minimum wage and go all in on the (rather unqualified and genuinely horrible person) Neera Tanden and ignore the plight of roughly 48 million people working for less than the proposed $15 per hour.

In their desperation, an old lawyer’s adage applies, “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.“

In this case, pounding the table means, ignoring the reasons for the opposition, as venal and corrupt as they and playing the “Race Card,” which in this case means getting Americans of South Asian extraction riled up about this simply because Tanden is of South Asian extraction:

President Joe Biden’s aides are urging Asian American groups to mount a last-minute campaign to try to rescue his budget chief nominee, Neera Tanden, as her prospects for Senate confirmation dwindle.

Those groups are calling and sending letters to Senate offices and advocating for Tanden on social media to try to combat what they are calling “structural racism” and “institutional racism.”

Their efforts have been actively encouraged by the White House and presidential transition staff, which remains in place to help with Senate confirmations, along with the Democratic National Committee, according to two people familiar with the conversations.

The opposition to her comes from two real, though stupid and corrupt, sources, Republican butt-hurt over her mean Tweets (as if there is any other kind of Tweet), and Joe Manchin’s decades long project to use his power as an elected official to benefit his daughter. (Manchin is lying about his being disturbed by the Tweets)

This is not an issue of Race.  If it were, Deb Haaland would have never gotten the nod, as indigenous Americans have always been further down in the racial hierarchy than pretty much everyone but Blacks and Hispanics.

Invoking racism is stupid and counter productive because it will not work and because it “wears out the batteries” on the tactic.

Keep your powder dry, because Tanden is all wet.

Another Thursday, Another Unemployment Report

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And this time, initial claims went up:

Worker applications for unemployment benefits rose during the first half of February, pausing a downward trend that pointed to an improving labor market amid other signs that the economic recovery is picking up.

The Labor Department on Thursday said the increase to 861,000 last week was accompanied by a 55,000 upward revision of claims in the prior week, on a seasonally adjusted basis. That put the four-week moving average, which smooths out week-to-week fluctuations, at 833,000, slightly lower than the prior week and near the top of a roughly 750,000 to 850,000 range since last October.

Jobless claims—a proxy for layoffs—have remained above the pre-coronavirus pandemic peak of 695,000 since the start of the pandemic last March.

Joe, get those f%$#ing checks out the f%$#ind door, and $2000, not the f%$#ing ridiculously means tested $1600 you are trying to sell right now.

Of Course They Are

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Despite the Pandemic, despite the new variants spreading across the nation, despite the fact that sick workers coming into work further spread the disease, Republicans are still trying to kill paid sick leave, because if your employer cannot exploit you, they want you dead:

Pennsylvania state Rep. Seth Grove introduced legislation last month to block cities and municipalities from imposing paid sick leave requirements on businesses, even as COVID-19 cases are raging throughout his state and the country. Last week, local news media reported that the Republican lawmaker was now quarantining after exhibiting coronavirus symptoms and awaiting test results.

Grove’s preemption bill is the latest salvo in an ongoing war over stripping worker protections that continues to be fought in statehouses and Congress, even as the coronavirus pandemic spirals out of control. With Democrats in Washington preparing to drop paid sick leave from President Joe Biden’s first COVID relief bill, potentially leaving 87 million workers without protection, the responsibility for providing the benefit to workers now falls squarely on states — the very place the war has been waged for the last decade.

Paid sick leave statutes require businesses to provide employees with medical leave for ailments and injuries. Grove has been pushing for legislation to bar localities from imposing such requirements since 2013. His latest bill, reintroducing the measure, would be retroactive to 2015 — the year Democratic strongholds Philadelphia and Pittsburgh passed laws mandating paid sick leave.

 F%$# them, and the horse they rode in on.

Once Again, It’s Called Money

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Once again, we have someone writing about a skills shortage, and suggesting that the solution is to sex it up:

Because hiring manager Jim McKeown was talking to an audience, he wasn’t sitting at a desk, his head in hands, but he may as well have been.

 “I don’t know where we are heading with manufacturing,” he said, clearly discouraged. “The last 10 years have been difficult.”

 McKeown wasn’t talking about sales, or business, or the supply chain, or the cost of raw materials – all important to such companies as Kingsbury Inc., which manufactures bearings in Philadelphia and Hatboro.

 For him, and about 30 area manufacturers attending Tuesday’s meeting of the Manufacturing Alliance of Bucks and Montgomery Counties, the issue is manpower.
There’s not enough of it – and what there is is not young.

 ………

 But, he said, manufacturers need to romance them – to show them how their work on a product makes a difference, maybe keeping a jetliner aloft or a heart beating.

 ………

 When interviewing millennials, make sure there is someone close to their age on the interviewing panel, suggested audience member John Trainor, staffing manager at Javan Engineering Inc. in Fort Washington

 ………

 For a quick fix, update a stodgy website so its text and photos tell a compelling story about the company, its products and people, said audience member Clara Console, a human-resources consultant.

 ………

 “Millennials want to see their future,” which does not include working on tools “their grandfathers might have used.”

(emphasis mine)

The word for this self absorbed delusional cluelessness is “bullsh%$”.

One only need look at history:  Until auto workers pay was essentially doubled in 1914, they had trouble recruiting and keeping workers:

At the time, workers could count on about $2.25 per day, for which they worked nine-hour shifts. It was pretty good money in those days, but the toll was too much for many to bear. Ford’s turnover rate was very high. In 1913, Ford hired more than 52,000 men to keep a workforce of only 14,000. New workers required a costly break-in period, making matters worse for the company. Also, some men simply walked away from the line to quit and look for a job elsewhere. Then the line stopped and production of cars halted. The increased cost and delayed production kept Ford from selling his cars at the low price he wanted. Drastic measures were necessary if he was to keep up this production.

Henry Ford had a 371% turn over rate.

He solved it with money.

If you cannot find skilled machinists, or tool makers, or bull semen collectors, Econ 101 gives you the answer: pay them more.

If the author of this article were a journalist, instead of a stenographer, they would have known that.

H/t Atrios.

Ummm ……… the Solution Here Is Straightforward. Better Pay and Benefits.

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Over at Aviation Week, there is much hand wringing over the fact that their workers are retiring, and they can’t find replacements:

There are two statistics that haunt the U.S. aerospace and defense (A&D) industry when it comes to its workforce: 10% and 2.6%.

 The first, according to Aviation Week’s 2016 Workforce Study, is the percentage of the overall workforce who were qualified to retire in the past year. The second is the percentage that actually did.

 Industry faces a potential crisis in its workforce, just not the one that formerly predominated. For sure, defense prime contractors, OEMs and top-tier suppliers continue to fear the mass departures possible as the baby-boom generation begins reaching the traditional retirement age—65—en masse. At the same time, employers would like a little more actual turnover because they are eager to staff their companies with the new and younger talent offered by technology-oriented “millennials” because they fear losing those Gen Y workers to the lure of Silicon Valley.

 “While retirements are of concern, so too is attrition,” the study says. “As the industry comparison illustrates, the attrition rate for A&D is low, with only the chemical industry coming close to a comparable rate.”

 ………

 But the business risk of seeing so many skilled, experienced workers leave in a relatively short time remains a deep concern, and for good reasons that have been widely documented. According to a National Bureau of Economic Research July working paper by Nicole Maestas, Kathleen J. Mullen and David Powell, economies face a double whammy of lost productivity and lost labor capacity as working populations exceed 60 years old.

Gee you need something in short supply, if only there were some medium of exchange that would allow you to adjust the value that you assign to it based on that scarcity.

If you are losing skilled staff, then you need to set pay or benefits or job security at a level that will attract a sufficient number of skilled replacements.

How Many Times Does This Lie Have to Be Disproved?

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Time and time again, when arguing for outsourcing and skill based immigration programs like H1B and L1A programs, business argue that there are simply not enough skilled workers in the US.

Time and time again, these claims have proved to be complete fabrications:

For years, employers, pundits and policymakers alike have bemoaned the lack of qualified workers available to fill vacant manufacturing jobs in the U.S.

Despite the prominence of the skills-gap debate, a new paper co-written by a University of Illinois expert in labor economics and workforce policy finds that the demand for higher-level skills in U.S. manufacturing jobs is generally modest.

Three-quarters of U.S. manufacturing plants show no sign of hiring difficulties for open positions, says new research from Andrew Weaver, a professor of labor and employment relations at Illinois.

“Not a week goes by without someone declaring that a huge skills gap exists in the U.S. workforce,” he said. “A lot of ink has been spilled on this topic, but it’s frequently without evidence. The popular sentiment encourages people to think that employers have high skill demands, but U.S. workers just aren’t up to snuff, and that’s why manufacturing work is being outsourced overseas.”

However, the results show that U.S. manufacturers are generally able to hire the skilled workers they seek.

“We estimate an upper bound of job vacancies due to a potential skills gap of 16 to 25 percent of manufacturing establishments – a finding that sharply contrasts with other surveys that have reported figures of more than 60-70 percent,” Weaver said.

It’s not that business cannot find appropriately skilled employees, it’s that they don’t want to pay them a fair market wage, and so they try importing workers and exporting jobs.

Not a Surprise………

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Three top officials at the Democratic National Committee are now former officials of the DNC:

Three top officials at the Democratic National Committee will leave their posts this week amid the controversy over the release of a cache of hacked emails from the committee.

Chief executive Amy Dacey, Chief Financial Officer Brad Marshall and Communications Director Luis Miranda will leave the DNC just days after a new leader took the helm.

A trove of nearly 20,000 emails were posted on WikiLeaks last month. They included some emails that raised questions about the faith of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s primary rival, Sen. Bernie Sanders (Vt.), and others that seemed to disparage donors.

This is not a surprise.

Dacey and Marshall had the now infamous email exchange about targeting Sanders on his religion, and Miranda was hired by Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and functioned primarily her personal publicist.

The organization needs to be fixed, and this will mean more than just getting rid of DWS toadies at the organization.

I’m Doing a Happy Dance Here

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Roger Ailes has left the building:

In the dark for days, Fox News staffers finally got word on Thursday about the future of their network.

The news was delivered in person by Rupert Murdoch, the 85-year-old media mogul who started Fox News with Roger Ailes 20 years ago.

It was an unexpected visit, and with stunned employees listening in Fox’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters, Mr. Murdoch announced that Mr. Ailes was out as chairman and chief executive. Mr. Murdoch himself would be taking over Fox News in the interim.

Mr. Ailes was not there. Mr. Murdoch had barred him from the building starting on Wednesday, according to one person briefed on the matter. The person said Fox News’s parent company, 21st Century Fox, had learned Mr. Ailes was trying to get some of his on-air stars to criticize those who cooperated with investigators looking into accusations of sexual harassment against him.

………

Mr. Murdoch will assume the role of chairman and will be an interim chief executive of the Fox News channel and Fox Business Network until a permanent replacement for Mr. Ailes is found. His interim role is intended to ensure stability during the rest of the presidential race, and to be taken as a signal that the network is not on the verge of a wide-ranging overhaul, said a person briefed on the matter. Mr. Murdoch plans to be “extremely engaged” and had already been attending some news meetings because Mr. Ailes has had health issues recently, the person said.

I think that a lot of this is also driven by the fact that Fox News has horrible demographics, the average age of a viewer is 68, which means that the audience is literally dying off.

To change this, the network needs an extensive rework, and Ailes was clearly not the man for the job.

My guess is that they will stick with the current format and lineup through the elections, and then they start rearranging the deck chairs.