Prometheus 6

It's that you need the truth if you're going to vote to support your interests, whatever those interests may be.

Quote of note:

While job displacement has gradually increased during the 23 years covered by the surveys, the unemployment rate has trended down. For some labor economists - Mr. Farber and Jared Bernstein at the Economic Policy Institute, for example - that makes the rising layoff rate even more striking.

"If you plot the displacement rate in relation to the unemployment rate, it is a staircase going up," Mr. Bernstein said. "You are more likely to be laid off now than in similar levels of unemployment in the past."

Related link of note:

Kerry's `Quality of Jobs' Argument Gains Wall Street Support

July 19 (Bloomberg) -- Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry's assertion that the U.S. has been creating mainly low- paying, "second-rate'' jobs during the past year's expansion is starting to resonate on Wall Street.

"The vast majority of net new jobs created have been in the low-wage sectors of the economy, and income growth has been disappointing,'' David A. Rosenberg, chief North American economist at Merrill Lynch & Co., wrote July 9. Lagging incomes may cause "consumer spending to slow in coming quarters.''

Stephen S. Roach, chief economist at Morgan Stanley & Co. in New York, reached a similar conclusion: "While there has been some improvement on the hiring front in recent months, the quality of such job-creation has been decidedly sub-par,'' Roach wrote the same day. "Unless that changes, the risks to a sustainable economic recovery will only intensify.''

Recent Layoff Rate Was Highest Since Early 1980's
By LOUIS UCHITELLE

Layoffs occurred at the second-fastest rate on record during the first three years of the Bush administration, a government report has found.

In the government's latest survey of how frequently workers are permanently dismissed from their jobs, the layoff rate reached 8.7 percent of all adult jobholders, or 11.4 million men and women age 20 or older. That is nearly equal to the 9 percent rate for the 1981-1983 period, which included the steepest contraction in the American economy since the Great Depression.

Recession and weak economic growth characterized most of the period from 2001 to 2003, and millions of jobs disappeared. But while layoffs normally rise in hard times and fall in prosperous years, the new survey published Friday by the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics added to the statistical evidence that layoffs are more frequent now, in both good times and bad, than they were in similar cycles a decade ago.

The anecdotal evidence is abundant on this point, but the statistical evidence is only beginning to tell the same story. "It appears there is more displacement now; this latest number is quite high," said Henry S. Farber, a Princeton University labor economist who has challenged the anecdotal evidence, wondering whether it overstated the case.

The layoff rate over the last three years, for example, was greater than in the 1990-1991 recession, the displacement survey found. The rate was also higher in the late 1990's boom years than in the late 1980's, a parallel period of strong economic growth.

"No one should be surprised by the increasing frequency of layoffs," said James Glassman, senior United States economist for J. P. Morgan Chase. "It is the echo of globalization. Companies are shifting production around more frequently to take advantage of low-cost centers."

A Bush administration spokeswoman, Claire Buchan, asked for comment, responded with a statement that focused on the surge in job creation in recent months and made no mention of the worker displacement report. A Kerry campaign economist, Jason Furman, said the survey showed that jobs in America were increasingly insecure.