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Strategies & Market Trends : Heinz Blasnik- Views You Can Use -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LLCF who wrote (4000)	1/2/2004 11:08:00 AM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 4909

It's just as silly to add part time workers to the unemployment figure in an attempt to make things look worse than they are. Part time isn't equivalent to self employed, although I'm sure it would be nice to be able to sort it all out properly, it isn't done. I didn't say it was, I said it wasn't equivalent to unemployed. The number that the government gives for unemployment is accurate according to their definition of unemployed. Seems to me, the argument is in how they define unemployment. While anyone can see that a person who has a part time job when they really want a full time job is unhappy and a growing number of these people may in fact signal a social problem, I think you'd have a hard time including these people in the official definition of unemployed or even in a casual discussion of unemployment. There is a structural shift in employment. The jobs that were lost aren't like the jobs that were lost in previous cyclical downturns. In the old days when we had more of a manufacturing economy, people would be laid off when the boom went bust and then rehired by their old employers when things picked up again. If you were an auto worker or a steel worker you didn't necessarily think you had to go out and train for some new profession, you waited out the downturn. At least they did this until it became abundantly clear that some of those manufacturing jobs weren't coming back and no amount of union power or government protection could keep them here. Now we have far more awareness that there will be jobs that won't come back and a lot less willingness on the part of the government to protect whole industries like they did the Steel industry. This is a good thing because all they did was support their various inefficiencies and allow them to simply die a slower death. It was a gross misallocation of resources to protect jobs in an industry where technology improvements are constantly destroying jobs with productivity gains. While it's painful for people on a personal level to have to retrain for new jobs, it's the new reality that it is unlikely that most people will be able to train and keep one profession their whole life. They will have to continually train for new ones throughout their lives if they want to maximize their earnings. Some of those people who still don't have a "job" are in fact self-employed. They are creating their own job. A great many of them will work for their old employers, but as outside contractors. Almost everyone I know who was laid off in 2000-2001 is working like this. Most would rather have a job, but the companies would rather not have employees. This is the natural outcome of continually socializing costs that used to be born by individuals, the attaching to employment of various living expenses. Needless to say, when profits have been under fire as they have been in the last ten-fifteen years jobs will migrate to countries without these socialized costs or they migrate to outside contractors who take responsibility for paying their own healthcare, disability and child care costs.