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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hope Praytochange who wrote (164621)	3/12/2010 2:41:57 PM
From: Kevin Rose	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 173976

Two Job Markets, Worlds Apart by Laura Rowley Thursday, March 11, 2010 Yup, the rich are really hurting... The economic outlook is rosy, at least for people at the top of the ladder. The number of U.S. millionaires rose 16 percent in 2009, according to a new report by Chicago-based research firm Spectrum Group. Some 7.8 million households had a net worth of more than $1 million, excluding the value of their home. Part of the reason is that higher-income households typically have more exposure to the stock market, and the S&P 500 has risen about 70 percent since hitting bottom on March 9 of last year. Moreover, in terms of employment, there was no recession for the highest-income households in the fourth quarter last year. The unemployment rate for people in the top 10 percent of income -- those earning more than $150,000 a year -- was just 3 percent, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University in Boston. For the bottom 10 percent of earners -- workers who bring home less than $12,500 annually -- the unemployment rate was 31 percent. "For the most part it is driven by increasing skills and earnings at the top and decreasing skills at the bottom," says Carol Graham, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. "Technology and high-skill jobs have driven our growth in a global economy, not low-skilled jobs. It plays out in the economic crisis in unemployment in terms of who is getting laid off." Mechanization and outsourcing also play a role, says Cornell University economist Robert Frank, who studies income polarization. The manufacturing sector has lost 5.6 million jobs since 2000. "The more vulnerable you are to your job being outsourced, the higher the unemployment rate will be," Frank says. "Even though the correlation is not perfect, the tendency is that the more education you have, the more likely you are to be doing a job that's complicated and involved, making it harder to outsource or mechanize." Roxanne Baird, 49, of Chattanooga, Tenn., is one American buffeted by labor trends. She says she took home $2,200 last year working for a temporary help service that offered factory and warehouse jobs on an as-needed basis at $7.25 an hour. Baird refused one assignment because she couldn't find a reliable daycare center to take her 6-year-old early enough to get to work by 7 a.m. She missed a few days at a warehouse job while her son's father had open-heart surgery. And she made the mistake of calling a warehouse supervisor directly at the woman's request, she says, which violated the rules of the temp service. The service terminated her last August, and she was denied unemployment compensation. She appealed and lost. A decade earlier, before a divorce, Baird was a middle-class homeowner, working occasional part-time jobs in factories and for the U.S. Postal Service. "When (my husband) and I split up the only thing I came out of marriage with was what I had when I went in -- my furniture, books, record albums." finance.yahoo.com