Tag: employment

US unemployment rate falls to 7.9% in last look at jobs market before elections | Business | The Guardian

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Scariest jobs chart ever, H/T Calculated Risk

The monthly jobs numbers came out, and it missed expectations.

This is not surprising. The stimulus ended 2 months ago, and there is not a lot to move the economy along:

Hiring gains slowed sharply heading into the fall as more layoffs turned permanent, adding to signs that the U.S. economy faces a long slog to fully recover from the coronavirus pandemic.

Employers added 661,000 jobs in September, the Labor Department said Friday. The increase in payrolls showed the labor market continued to dig out of the hole created by the pandemic, but at a much slower pace than over the summer.

The U.S. has replaced 11.4 million of the 22 million jobs lost in March and April, at the beginning of the pandemic. Job growth, though, is cooling, and last month marked the first time since April that net hiring was below one million.

………

Other signs of a slowing U.S. recovery include a drop in household income at the end of the summer and smaller gains in consumer spending, the economy’s main driver.

The unemployment rate fell to 7.9% in September from 8.4% the prior month. Though the jobless rate is down sharply from a pandemic high of near 15% in April, last month’s drop partially reflected an increase in permanent layoffs and more people leaving the labor force. That could stem from more workers quitting their job searches due to weak employment prospects or child-care responsibilities.

………

Large corporate layoffs are sweeping across the U.S. Walt Disney Co. earlier this week announced permanent layoffs for 28,000 theme park workers who were previously on temporary furlough. American Airlines Group Inc. and United Airlines Holdings Inc. will proceed for now with a total of more than 32,000 job cuts after lawmakers were unable to agree on a broad coronavirus-relief package.

The recent layoff announcements aren’t reflected in the September jobs report, which includes data gathered in the first half of the month.

………

The number of unemployed individuals saying their layoffs were temporary declined in September, which could reflect more people returning to work. Meanwhile, the number of workers who saw their layoffs as permanent rose for the month, a sign workers may be in for long spells of unemployment.

One of the reasons that the unemployment rate is down is that the denominator is shrinking, as people become discouraged, or leave the market because of the unavailability of child care.

To my mind, the employment-population ratio shows a better picture, and the picture is less rosy.

This is the last monthly jobs report before the elections, and I’m pretty sure that both sides will claim that the numbers support them.

Another Thursday, More Bad Economic News

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Unemployment claims remained largely unchanged in the last week, which is to say that it’s still about 30% more than any other report that was not in 2020:

New applications for unemployment benefits in the U.S. fell slightly last week but remained between 800,000 and 900,000 for the fifth straight week, reflecting a labor-market recovery that is losing momentum.

Weekly initial claims for jobless benefits fell by 36,000 to a seasonally adjusted 837,000 in the week ended Sept. 26, the Labor Department said Thursday. In a positive sign, the number of people collecting unemployment benefits through regular state programs, which cover most workers, decreased by 980,000 to about 11.8 million for the week ended Sept. 19. That was the lowest level since March.

The totals for unemployment applications and payments remain well above pre-pandemic peaks but are down significantly from this spring, when the coronavirus pandemic and related shutdowns caused both measures to rise to the highest levels on record back to the 1960s.

………

Thursday’s data was complicated by California pausing the processing of new claims for two weeks. State officials said last month they needed to clear a backlog of nearly 600,000 Californians who have applied for benefits more than 3 weeks earlier, and about 1 million cases where individuals received payments but subsequently modified their claim and are awaiting resolution.

The U.S. Labor Department said Thursday that this week’s national report reflects California’s level during the last week before the pause. Data will be revised at a later date, the government said.

Of more significance, it appears that household income is cratering, which means that the reason that the drop in unemployment claims are flattening out might be that the much touted “recovery” is running out of steam:

A drop in household income and persistently high layoffs are threatening to further slow the U.S. economic recovery, which already appears to be losing momentum as the pandemic continues.

Personal income—what households received from salaries, investments and government aid—fell 2.7% in August as enhanced unemployment checks shrank, the Commerce Department said Thursday. Meanwhile, another 837,000 workers filed for unemployment compensation last week after being recently laid off, the Labor Department said. In total, nearly 12 million workers are receiving unemployment compensation through regular state programs.

The level of weekly jobless claims shows layoffs remain persistent in some industries, and more companies announced cuts this week. American Airlines Group Inc. and United Airlines Holdings Inc. told employees they will go forward with more than 32,000 job cuts Thursday, after lawmakers were unable to agree on a broad coronavirus-relief package. Insurer Allstate Corp. on Wednesday said it planned to lay off 3,800 employees. Walt Disney Co. on Wednesday announced permanent layoffs for 28,000 theme-park workers who were previously on temporary furlough.

The economy up to now has rebounded more quickly than many economists thought. But with federal aid fading and job growth slowing, consumer spending—the key driver of economic activity in the U.S.—could weaken. Economists believe the recovery is entering into a modest and more grinding phase.

We are coasting on the now expired stimulus and supplemental unemployment payments.

Friday’s jobless rate will be interesting, as will the next few weeks of economic data.

Least Surprising News of the Day

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Is anyone surprised that Amazon has been systematically deceiving its workers about safety? 

If you are surprised, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

This is a company that prides itself on abusing its workers at all levels, and their lies, both to regulators and their employees, are a core part of company culture:

On Cyber Monday 2014, Amazon operations chief Dave Clark proudly unveiled the company’s new warehouse of the future in Tracy, California. Behind him, tall yellow racks packed with vitamins, toy rockets and paintball gear zipped across the floor, lugged by the powerful, squat orange robots that would help catapult the company toward world domination. In a checked shirt and with neatly parted hair, Clark looked more the part of a high school teacher than a corporate executive, as he cheerfully called himself “head elf of Santa’s workshop around the world.”

………

The following July, Amazon rolled out another innovation: Prime Day. The holiday-shopping season was already an intense pressure cooker of warehouse activity known as “peak” inside Amazon. Now the company had just manufactured a second peak in the middle of the year: a brand-new holiday that would become pivotal to the company’s growth.

………

In fact, as senators have fired off letters to the company and workers have led walkouts over health and safety, Amazon has engaged in an unapologetic public relations campaign. Robots, Amazon insists, are good for workers. “They make the job safer,” Jeff Wilke, one of two CEOs under Bezos, told PBS FRONTLINE last September. And Prime Day and the holiday rush are so well orchestrated, Amazon has claimed, that injury rates stay flat or even go down during these buying frenzies. Thanks to “diligent record-keeping,” Amazon told Business Insider, “we know for a fact that recordable incidents do not increase during peak.”

But a new cache of company records obtained by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting – including internal safety reports and weekly injury numbers from its nationwide network of fulfillment centers – shows that company officials have profoundly misled the public and lawmakers about its record on worker safety. They reveal a mounting injury crisis at Amazon warehouses, one that is especially acute at robotic facilities and during Prime week and the holiday peak – and one that Amazon has gone to great lengths to conceal. With weekly data from 2016 through 2019 from more than 150 Amazon warehouses, the records definitively expose the brutal cost to workers of Amazon’s vast shipping empire – and the bald misrepresentations the company has deployed to hide its growing safety crisis.

………

Amazon often points to the tens of millions of dollars it has invested to enhance safety practices. Yet Amazon’s injury rates have gone up each of the past four years, the internal data shows. In 2019, Amazon fulfillment centers recorded 14,000 serious injuries – those requiring days off or job restrictions. The overall rate of 7.7 serious injuries per 100 employees was 33% higher than in 2016 and nearly double the most recent industry standard.

………

And for years, the internal data show, injury rates have spiked during the weeks of Prime Day and Cyber Monday, contrary to Amazon’s public claims. Those two weeks had the highest rate of serious injuries for all of 2019.

Monthly bulletins from Amazon’s environment, health and safety team show that the famously data-obsessed company is well aware of its safety problems. Each month, company officials sent out detailed updates – marked “Privileged & Confidential” – to warehouse safety managers across the country with data, charts and FAQs. They set safety goals and monitor progress closely. But the internal documents show that the company has failed to hit these targets. In 2018, Amazon aimed to lower its injury rate by 20%. Instead, injury rates went up. The next year, the goal was more modest: a 5% decrease. But the rate rose again.

………

Yet her email didn’t say how the company justifies its claim that these initiatives are working, while injury rates have continued, year after year, to rise.

Notwithstanding is protestations, Amazon does not care about its workers.

Even now that they are effectively a monopoly, they continue to build an empire on the blood of their employees.

They just don’t care.

Initial Claims Remain at Horrific Levels

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Initial unemploument claims rose by 4,000 to 870,000. 

So, still above any weekly claims level that was not in 2020.

If you are wondering why the steep drop and then a flattening out, probably because the aid programs stopped:

The number of applications for unemployment benefits has held steady in September at just under 900,000 a week, as employer uncertainty about the economic recovery six months into the coronavirus pandemic continued to restrain hiring gains.

Jobless claims increased slightly to 870,000 last week from 866,000 a week earlier, according to Thursday’s Labor Department report. The totals remain well above pre-pandemic peaks but are down significantly from nearly seven million in March.

The labor market has added jobs in the prior four months after steep declines in employment at the beginning of the pandemic, helping bring down the jobless rate to 8.4% in August from near 15% in April. But the pace of gains has slowed recently, and persistently elevated jobless claims in September point to continued cooling in the jobs market.

This is not a good economy.

Unemployment Numbers out Today

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This is not a recovery

Initial claims were unchanged at 884,000, which is still really awful:

The number of people seeking and collecting unemployment benefits has remained at historically high levels in recent weeks, a sign the labor-market recovery is losing steam six months after the pandemic struck the U.S.

 Unemployment claims were unchanged at 884,000 last week, the Labor Department said Thursday. Claims fell steadily for weeks after hitting a peak of about 7 million in March, but the pace of descent has slowed and claims remain above the prepandemic record of 695,000.

The number of workers collecting state unemployment benefits also has dropped from highs reached earlier in the pandemic, but is still elevated. So-called continuing claims increased to about 13.4 million at the end of August.

………

The increase in the number of job postings, a real-time measure of labor-market activity, has markedly slowed since late July, and last week stood about 20% below 2019 levels, according to data from job-search site Indeed.com.

And remember, the pump priming of the original aid bill has ended, and Mitch McConnell has no interests in passing another bill, he just want to score political points, and as the heating season begins, and internal becomes drier, Covid will be more contagious.

We are f%$#ed.

If You Cannot Do Your Job with Slave Labor, You Are Doing Your Job Wrong

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Clearly this is a matter of fact, but there is an underlying issue here that is being ignored, which is that California’s fire-fighting infrastructure is dependent on prison labor at $1.00/hour.

I understand how this is convenient, but it is also profoundly evil:

As a historic set of wildfires sweeps across California, sparked by lightning and stoked by record heat and drought resulting from climate change (Mercury News, 8/19/20; Scientific American, 4/3/20), many news outlets have drawn readers’ attention to an additional problem the state faces in fighting the fires: shortages of the prison labor that it normally relies on for firefighting crews.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection — known as Cal Fire — “has roughly half as many inmate fire crews than it originally had to work during the most dangerous part of wildfire season,” thanks to prison quarantines and Covid-related early-release programs, reported CNBC (8/21/20), and “rotating out firefighters isn’t an easy option because there’s already a significant shortage of workers available.” Insider (8/20/20) wrote that “the coronavirus pandemic is creating a shortage of inmate fire crews to battle the wildfires,” noting that California has “relied on incarcerated firefighters as its primary ‘hand crews’ since the 1940s.” The New York Times (8/22/20) declared that losing inmate labor “has been the difference between having the manpower to save homes from wildfires — or not,” and that “hiring firefighters to replace them, especially given the difficult work involved, would challenge a state already strapped for cash.”

It’s a gripping story, certainly, of a state unable to respond sufficiently to one disaster because of steps taken to ward off another. But the coverage all danced around a key problem with framing this as a labor shortage: There are plenty of workers available in a state with 2.5 million people currently unemployed — no doubt including many of the fire-trained inmate workers who were released early by Gov. Gavin Newsom in order to free them from the threat of getting sick in California’s Covid-ravaged prisons. The main difference: Unlike prison laborers, regular citizens have to be paid more than pittance wages.

There are far too many people and institutions profiting from the carceral state, and one of them is the state of California.

Unemployment Rate Falls

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The Scariest Job Chart Ever

The official U-3 unemployment rate fell by 1.8% to 8.4% and the number of unemployed fell by 2.8 million to 13.6 million.

It’s undeniably good numbers, particularly since the employment/population ratio, which is hard to rat-f%$#, has risen as well.

Note that the numbers are from 2 weeks ago though, just 2 weeks after the $600 unemployment supplement ended.

From a political perspective, both sides are going to try to make political hay over this, and the media, being what it is, will absolutely represent it as a “Both Sides” thing.

New Initial Claims Today

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Unemployment claims fell to below 1 million again, but the actual adjusted number rose by 8000.

The fall is because the DOL changed its seasonal adjustment formula for this report.

Also note that Pandemic Unemployment Assistance(PUA) initial claims for self-employed and gig workers, rose by over 150,000 to 759K.

I know that people dismiss the possibility that eh “Professionals” at the Department of Labor are bending to the political winds blowing from 1600 Pennsylvania avenue, but every one of these adjustments seems to favor the Trump administration:

Note: The DOL has changed their seasonal adjustment method, so to compare to the previous week, we need to use the NSA data.  See Technical Note on Weekly Unemployment Claims

The Not Seasonally Adjusted (NSA) claims increased to 833,352 from 825,761 the previous week. These are directly comparable since the Seasonal Adjustment Factor was identical for both weeks.

The DOL reported:

In the week ending August 29, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 881,000, a decrease of 130,000 from the previous week’s revised level. The previous week’s level was revised up by 5,000 from 1,006,000 to 1,011,000. The 4-week moving average was 991,750, a decrease of 77,500 from the previous week’s revised average.
The previous week’s average was revised up by 1,250 from 1,068,000 to 1,069,250.


emphasis added

The previous week was revised up.

This does not include the 759,482 initial claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) that was up from 607,808 the previous week.

I’m not saying that the DOL is juicing the numbers, the seasonal adjustment needed to be  ……… well ……… adjusted, but it does seem that the DOL is spinning the numbers.

Only Took 43 Years

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The Federal Reserve has been required to place equal weight on full employment and prices stability since the passage of the Humphrey-Hawkins act in the late 1970s.
It hasn’t. Instead, it has gone for real unemployment while fighting imaginary inflation.

It only took a few decades, but now the Fed has decided to change its policy, and so will no longer engage in monetary tightening just because unemployment is low, they will wait for actual inflation to show up:

In a historic break with decades of policy, the Federal Reserve announced Thursday that it will no longer deliberately keep millions of Americans unemployed at all times.

America’s central bank has a dual mandate — to promote full employment and price stability. These two aims were long presumed to be in tension: If unemployment fell too low — such that there was no slack in the labor market (i.e., no reserve of jobless workers for employers to draw on) — then workers would gain the upper hand on their bosses and demand wage gains in excess of their own productivity, which would force companies to raise the prices of their goods to keep up with their labor costs, which would then cause workers to demand still-higher wages to keep up with prices, in a vicious inflationary cycle.

For this reason, the Fed defined “full employment” as an unemployment rate significantly above the level one would expect from mere job-switching frictions. And when the labor market tightened beyond the level the Fed deemed conducive with price stability, it would start raising interest rates — to choke off credit creation, slow growth in the money supply, and thus, deliberately keep Americans out of work — even if inflation had not yet exceeded its official target.

………

In the aftermath of the Great Recession, the inequity of the central bank’s longtime prioritization of avoiding theoretical inflation — over the certain unemployment of millions of workers — became more conspicuous. The Fed’s official inflation target is 2 percent. But for a variety of reasons — among them, the tepid pace of the recovery and the weak bargaining power of American workers in an age of trade-union decline — price growth remained stubbornly below those levels, even as the central bank kept interest rates near zero. Nevertheless, despite the absence of any hint of excessive inflation, the Fed began raising interest rates in 2015, on the grounds that the U.S. could not sustain an official unemployment rate of below 5 percent without triggering a wage-price spiral.
………

Progressive (and a few growth-oriented conservative) economic-policy wonks pushed back on this move. Then, when a Republican president with a penchant for easy money came to power — and the GOP’s inflation hawks went dutifully silent — Trump’s appointed Fed chair, Jerome Powell, adopted a more accommodative stance. And America proceeded to learn that its economy could not only abide a 3.6 percent unemployment rate without suffering runaway inflation, but that such a rate wasn’t even sufficient to bring inflation to its target level of 2 percent. The theorized hard trade-off between unemployment and price stability did not appear to exist, which meant that America’s finest economic minds had been slowing growth and killing jobs for no good reason.

………

(1) The Fed will no longer presume that it knows what the maximum level of employment in the U.S. economy is, and will therefore refrain from raising interest rates until there are clear signs of excessive inflation.

(2) The Fed will not treat its 2 percent inflation target as a maximum, but rather as the average rate it wishes to promote over an extended period of time. Which is to say: If inflation runs a bit below that target for years on end, then the Fed will tolerate inflation a bit above that target for a few years after.

I am not surprised that the Fed Chair who did this is not an economist.

Still Over 1 Million

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Initial unemployment claims fell by 98,000 to 1,006,000 last week.

I expect the employment to population levels not to reach where they were in February for at least a year.

Also, I expect the effects of the termination of the supplementary unemployment payments sooner rather than later, which will further slow down the economy:

Unemployment claims fell slightly last week but remained historically high, signaling layoffs continue as the coronavirus continues to hamper the economic recovery.

New applications for unemployment benefits ticked down to one million in the week ended Aug. 22, the Labor Department said Thursday. Initial unemployment claims remain well below the recent peak of about seven million in March but are far higher than pre-pandemic levels of about 200,000 claims a week.

The number of people collecting unemployment benefits through regular state programs, which cover most workers, edged down to about 14.5 million for the week ended Aug. 15. So-called continuing claims, which are released with a one-week lag, hit a high of nearly 25 million this spring but have declined in recent weeks, a sign companies are bringing back workers.

“We’re seeing gradual improvement, but we really need to underscore the word ‘gradual’ here. We’re only inching along in terms of the labor market’s recovery,” said Sarah House, senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities.

In a separate report released Thursday, the Commerce Department revised its estimate of second-quarter economic growth, saying gross domestic product fell at a 31.7% annual rate, slightly less than its earlier estimate of 32.9%, due to the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

Those numbers are not just catastrophic, they are apocalyptic.

Over 1 Million!!!!!

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Initial jobless claims rose to 1,106,000 last week, up from 971,000 the week before.

This is the first increase in initial claims since the Covid shutdown began.

This is not going to be a short duration recession.  We have over 15 million continuing claims, up from about 2 million before the shutdown, and an increasing number of the layoffs have become permanent.

Then we have something like 30 million Americans facing foreclosure or eviction.

This will not be a “V” shaped recovery:

New applications for unemployment benefits rose last week after a series of declines, another sign the labor market’s recovery is cooling amid continuing disruptions because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Weekly initial claims for jobless benefits rose by 135,000 to a seasonally adjusted 1.1 million in the week ended Aug. 15, the Labor Department said Thursday.

The report followed others from the government and private firms showing that job gains slowed in July from June, job postings fell this week for the first time since April and several companies are planning more layoffs.

Still, the data show the job market is improving, though more slowly than in the spring.The number of people collecting unemployment benefits through regular state programs, which cover most workers, fell to about 14.8 million for the week ended Aug. 8. That marked the lowest number on benefit rolls since April. And nationally, new hiring is more than offsetting job cuts.

………

In addition to regular state claims, Thursday’s report showed the number of people applying for special federal pandemic assistance also rose in the week that ended Aug. 15. That program is open to self-employed and other workers who aren’t eligible for state programs. In early August, more than 11 million people were receiving benefits through that program.

These numbers are catastrophic, and unprecedented in post war labor statistics.

There are way too many people, and this coverage, are whistling past the grave yard.

Under 1 Million

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The Trend is Encouraging

Initial jobless claims fell below 1 million for the first time in five months.

The number is bad, it’s no longer twice than the pre-Covid record:

U.S. unemployment claims fell below one million last week for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic struck in March, as the deeply wounded labor market continues to regain some footing.

New applications for unemployment benefits dropped to a seasonally adjusted 963,000 in the week ended Aug. 8, the Labor Department said Thursday, marking the second weekly reduction in filings. The number of people collecting unemployment benefits through regular state programs, which cover the majority of workers, also decreased to about 15.5 million at the beginning of August.

 But both figures remain well above even the worst figures before the pandemic struck, with the number of people receiving benefits more than double the 6.6 million reached in 2009.

Unemployment remains elevated as other measures of the economy, including consumer spending, also lag behind levels from before the coronavirus hit. An increase in coronavirus infections across much of the country continues to threaten economic gains as states put in place new restrictions aimed at containing the pandemic.

………

The drop in claims could also reflect waning fiscal support by the government, Ms. Pollak said. The late-July expiration of an extra $600 a week in federal jobless benefits—added in March under a virus-relief package—puts much less money in unemployed individuals’ pockets, possibly discouraging them from seeking benefits.

Without the $600 weekly boost, payments dropped to the level set by states, which averaged about $330 a week for the 12 months through June, according to the Labor Department.

The downside to all of this is that more places, and businesses, are backing off from reopening because of new outbreaks, and the programs that cushioned the impact, notwithstanding Donald Trump’s bullsh%$ executive orders, have shut down.

The countervailing winds are strengthening.

Still Over 10%

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Obviously, this is movement in the right direction, though there are still indications that the BLS survey has not handled the unique circumstances of the pandemic. (There are also some more tinfoil hat possibilities, but Very Serious People don’t discuss such things)

Hiring increased in July for the third straight month, though overall gains have yet to restore half of the U.S. jobs lost due to the coronavirus pandemic.

July’s addition of 1.8 million jobs and a lower unemployment rate of 10.2%, after a peak of nearly 15% in April, showed the U.S. economy continued to mend during the summer coronavirus surge. It also reflected how far the economy has to go to overcome the shock from the pandemic and related lockdowns.

The U.S. now has about 13 million fewer jobs than in February, the month before the coronavirus hit the U.S. economy, the Labor Department said on Friday. Unemployment remains historically high. Before the coronavirus drove the U.S. into a deep recession this year, the unemployment rate was hovering around a 50-year low of 3.5%.

“We’re in a pretty strong rebound,” said David Berson, Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. chief economist. “But the downturn was so big—the hole that was dug was so deep—that it will still take probably at least a couple of years to dig ourselves out.”

It might take longer than that, since supplemental unemployment benefits have ended, and eviction moratoriums are coming to an end.

Still anyone who calls double-digit unemployment good news need their head examined.

Unhorrible News on Unemployment

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At least to the degree that 1.19 million initial unemployment claims can be called not horrible, because by the standards of before this March, such a number would be considered catestrophic.

I’m wondering what’s going to happen with the unemployment rate tomorrow:

Applications for U.S. unemployment benefits unexpectedly fell last week to the lowest since March, offering a ray of hope for an economy still battered by the pandemic.

 Initial jobless claims in regular state programs fell by 249,000 to 1.19 million in the week ended Aug. 1, Labor Department data showed Thursday. That was the largest improvement in almost two months. Continuing claims — the total number of Americans claiming ongoing unemployment benefits in those programs — decreased to 16.1 million in the week ended July 25, the lowest since April.

 Even with the drop, initial claims were more than five times pre-crisis levels. Analysts have cautioned that it could take some time to confirm a sustainable trend in improvement — especially if the expiration of the weekly $600 in federal benefits discouraged some from filing claims. With cumulative job losses numbering in the tens of millions, it will take not just steady improvement in the number of weekly claims, but also in hiring, for the labor market to rebound to any semblance of its pre-pandemic state.

………

The labor market had been showing signs of stalling in recent weeks as a resurgence in virus cases, beginning in mid-June, led a slew of states to halt or even reverse reopenings. That surge has begun to ebb, potentially supporting hiring, but the outlook could deteriorate once again as businesses exhaust funds from the Paycheck Protection Program.

Meanwhile, the extra $600 in weekly jobless benefits that have helped keep incomes and spending afloat in recent months has expired, threatening the fragile economic rebound.

If we don’t see the $600/week coming back soon, we’re going to see massive knock-off effects.

The Single Best Point about Cancel Culture

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In all the back and forth about Cancel Culture, a central issue is that as-will employment makes the effects of publish shaming far more dire than they should be.

Being an asshole on Twitter should not be a firing offense, no matter how much it might justify shame and approbrium:

You know what should be canceled? The legal right of most bosses to fire you for a “good cause, bad cause, or no cause.”

That status quo is so widely accepted that some progressives don’t think twice about appealing to the authoritarian power of bosses in the pursuit of social justice: Many high profile social media campaigns have been employed to get people who are caught on video committing racist acts in their everyday lives fired from their jobs. But the desire to hold racists and sexists accountable—or the related struggles against sexism, homophobia and fascism—need not be in conflict with the principles of workplace rights.

So-called “cancel culture” is not well-defined, but its critics frequently use the moniker to refer to an activist program of making individuals who harm their neighbors or coworkers with acts of racism, sexism (and worse) accountable through exposure and de-platforming—including attempts to get them fired. Liberal critics have been more likely to raise free speech concerns than any about workers’ rights, while leftists are likelier to argue that free speech doesn’t mean freedom from the consequences of speech.

………

Three years ago, we published an op-ed in the New York Times explaining how U.S. workers lack a basic right to their jobs that many workers in other countries enjoy as a legal standard. As a solution, we proposed a just cause “right to your job” law as a badly needed labor law reform. Since then, we’ve been encouraged to see the issue turn up on many progressives’ agenda.

In the debate between a right to your job and the need to de-platform bigots, some have raised concerns that without the boss’s right to fire an employee for any reason, racists and sexists would get more of a free pass at work. But this argument misses what “just cause” means. It doesn’t mean that employees cannot be fired, it means they can’t be fired for a reason that’s not related to work. Racism, sexism, harassment and other forms of conduct in and out of the workplace that make other employees feel unsafe and violate policies around respect and equity are grounds for discipline and termination—but are also subject to due process. When you look at how “just cause” plays out in areas where it exists—in the public sector, under many union contracts, or in other countries—it’s clear that racists, sexists and harassers are, in fact, disciplined.

Indeed.

Not Enough Bullets

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Silly rabbit, sacrifice is only for the little people:

When the pandemic prompted companies to furlough or lay off thousands of employees, some chief executives decided to show solidarity by forgoing some of their pay.

But it turns out that their sacrifice was minimal.

A survey of some 3,000 public companies shows that the cuts — which, so far, have come in the form of salary reductions — were tiny compared with their total pay last year. Total pay includes things like bonuses and stock awards that typically make up the bulk of what corporate bosses take home.

Only a small percentage of the companies cut salaries for their senior executives at all, which is surprising given that the pandemic has crushed profits and sales for many companies, forcing large layoffs. But even among businesses that did cut the boss’s pay, two-thirds of the chief executives took reductions that were equivalent to only 10 percent or less of their 2019 compensation, according to an analysis by CGLytics, a compensation analysis firm.

………

“These salary cuts were more window dressing than anything else,” said Liz Shuler, secretary-treasurer of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. The labor federation on Wednesday released a report showing that companies in the S&P 500 stock index last year paid chief executives on average 264 times as much as median employees, down from 287 times in 2018.

I so want the guillotine concession when the revolution comes.

Jobless Thursday, and………

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Not only did initial jobless claims go up for the 2nd week in a row, but the 2nd quarter GDP numbers show an annual 32.9% decline.

These numbers are not just the worst for the US since modern statistics started being collected after World War II, these numbers are, “US investors are assisting with privatizing the economy,” bad:

The economy contracted at a record rate last quarter and July setbacks for the jobs market added to signs of a slowing recovery as the country faces a summer surge in coronavirus infections.

The Commerce Department said U.S. gross domestic product—the value of all goods and services produced across the economy—fell at a seasonally and inflation adjusted 32.9% annual rate in the second quarter, or a 9.5% drop compared with the prior quarter. The figures were the steepest declines in more than 70 years of record-keeping.

Meanwhile, the Labor Department’s latest figures on unemployment benefits suggested the jobs market was faltering. The number of workers applying for initial unemployment benefits rose for the second straight week—by a seasonally adjusted 12,000 to 1.43 million in the week ended July 25—after nearly four months of decreases following a late-March peak. The number of people receiving unemployment benefits increased by 867,000 to 17 million in the week ended July 18, ending a downward trend that started in mid-May.

This is unbelievably grim.

Drip, Drip, Drip

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This means that the Gypsy cab companies may have to start paying for yet another societal cost that they foist on the rest of us.

The order is directed at the New York unemployment office, but it appears that it will likely force these companies to report earnings, and (eventually) pay the unemployment insurance premiums that they have been evading:

A federal judge has ordered the state of New York to quickly pay unemployment benefits to four Uber and Lyft drivers who have been waiting for the payments since March or April. The New York Taxi Workers Alliance, which filed a lawsuit over the issue back in May, says that the ruling could ultimately help thousands of drivers in similar situations.

Uber and Lyft have long argued that its drivers are independent contractors, not employees. That stance has come under increasing pressure. Since 2016, the New York Department of Labor has held that ride-hail drivers were employees for purposes of unemployment insurance. But Uber and Lyft have dragged their feet, failing to provide wage data that would enable the agency to calculate unemployment payments for each worker.

As a result, when Uber and Lyft drivers forced out of work by the pandemic applied for unemployment benefits, some were told that they weren’t eligible because state data showed them with zero earnings. Workers continued to be denied benefits even after they submitted 1099 tax forms showing their earnings.

………

In her Tuesday ruling, Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall sided squarely with the drivers. She acknowledged that Uber and Lyft bore some of the blame for failing to supply the state with necessary data. But she said the state still had an obligation to pay benefits promptly—using data supplied by workers themselves if necessary.

Assuming that Andrew “Rat Faced Andy” Cuomo is not in the gig companies’ pockets, (a big if) collecting wage data, along with pursuing payment of premiums, should occur as a matter of basic bureaucratic imperative.

Stupid and an Asshole to His Staff

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PLAYBOOK PM: After we reported that @replouiegohmert was positive, we got an email from a Gohmert aide. pic.twitter.com/x31CSOdkLf

— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) July 29, 2020

The big news is that Louie Gohmert has tested positive for Covid-19, and the distinguished gentleman with nothing between his ears but a shock absorber is blaming the few times he wore a mask for catching the disease.

This guy is stupid. Really stupid. Really, really, really, really stupid.

That’s not what matters in Congress.

Hubert Humphrey was generally considered to be one of the smartest men, if not the smartest man, in the Senate during his tenure there, and he was also known to be hamstrung by low quality staff.

In comparison, Teddy Kennedy was known for his ability to recruit and sustain an absolutely first rate staff, and arguably got a lot more done, despite generally not being considered a particularly noteworthy intellect.*

A significant portion of Louie Gohmert’s staff HATE him.

If they didn’t, you would not see leaks like this.

If his staff views him with this level of hostility, he cannot deliver, either on the national level, or in his district.

While this does not make him vulnerable to a Democratic Party challenge in the general election, TX-1 has a PV of R+25, it does mean that an enterprising Republican could successfully challenge him in the primary.

H/t Atrios.

*My father mentioned this in his recollections of discussions with Alaska Senator Ernest Greuning now and again.