There's an eloquent diary on the wreck list explaining why too much blame can't be laid at Obama's feet for the big-picture problem with our jobs sector.
The author sums up by arguing that we must rebuild the engine of our economy by "raising the bottom." That means meaningful health care, investing in renewable energy, re-regulating the financial industry, and reconfiguring trade.
Yes. This piece is a "hear hear," with an additional challenge to the old adage that "going [back] to school" will make a person more hirable in this broken economy.
College has been both a status symbol and a sign (and presumed guarantor) of success since the advent of the university system. It's not surprising that one of Obama's touted programs is one that encourages "moms" (and other nontraditional students) to go back and get that college degree.
A university education is wonderful for hundreds of reasons. In general, it helps us to be more well-rounded, more disciplined, more confident, more erudite, more civic-minded, and often more focused. Unfortunately, unless the goal is a traditional high-demand, recession-proof job (in the medical field, for example), or a job in the (hopefully) growing renewable energy sector that requires new specialized training, there's no guarantee that students will find the job hunt any less brutal after graduation.
It's not just that a university education can leave a person 50-75 thousand dollars in debt, and consume years that could have been spent developing a business, or apprenticing a trade, or climbing the ladder in an organization or company.
The problem is bigger than that, as RenaRF described so well in her diary. Most of us already know that the 'mojo' that a college education used to carry has been severely weakened by the fact that we have a glut of graduates competing for a shrunken pool of jobs.
"More education" works when a jobs sector is shaped like a pyramid, with a generous number of low-skilled, manual and service positions forming the broad base, more-skilled positions in the tapering middle, and much more specialized professional positions (doctor, lawyer, professor, executive) being far more rare, and forming the capstone at the very top.
Half a century ago, this is how our jobs economy functioned, and we seldom saw a college grad having trouble finding work, or working "beneath" his/her potential or training, let alone someone with a Masters degree or Ph.D in that position.
Half a century ago and earlier, low-skilled work was comparatively easy to find. Steel factories, mineral mines, highway maintenance operations, sawmills, auto plants, fisheries, oil rigs, small farms and construction companies were almost always hiring. Still, after World War 2, the Rosie the Riveters who'd been conscripted to work on the wartime assembly lines (because the men were off fighting), found themselves pressured to return to the kitchen. The men demanded unimpeded access to the job market.
Even back then, under much more abundant labor conditions, women were viewed as competition for a scarce resource. The hostility that women (and nonwhite citizens) often faced in the mid-century workplace was powerfully exacerbated by the perceived dearth of enough good jobs.
We all know what happened after that. Nearly all women entered the workforce--at first because they chose to, and eventually, because they had to. Growing technology replaced a lot of jobs. Our steel plants and sawmills shut down as resources became more scarce, our mines tapped out or could no longer compete internationally, our oil started to tap out, we systematically overfished our rivers and shorelines, we polluted our waterways, deforested our domestic wildlands, and consolidated our farming into a giant, gluttenous industry owned by a subsidized few.
Reagan discovered that the quickest path to a plutocracy was to ignore anti-trust regulations, which allowed corporations to balloon in size, and use vertical integration and undercutting to drive out competition and squeeze suppliers. Reagan also busted unions by turning a blind eye to his own laws against the illegal hiring of immigrants. (Sure, such "libertarians" didn't mind migrant workers being intimidated, as long as employers that hired illegally to skirt labor laws weren't actually punished.)
Then the Berlin Wall fell, and globalization kicked into high gear. "Free Trade" became the new mantra, and "buy American" and "made in America" became quaint, provincial-sounding relics. NAFTA, CAFTA, and offshoring escorted our manufacturing jobs to China, India, and Latin America. Reagan's legacy of using undocumented immigrants as a source of cheap, ever-exploitable, never-organizing labor expanded beyond farms and slaughterhouses and found its way into the construction industry, hotel and restaurant chains, janitorial services, airport food services, phone banking, and is now moving into the trucking and transportation industry. "Libertarian" entrepreneurs have complemented illegal hiring practices and the offshore-outsourcing of customer service work with "onshoring" of IT service workers--a legal way to get around those pesky wage and labor laws.
Then W came along. Goodbye public sector jobs. Every conceivable government agency was either gutted or filled with Orwellian cronies. Even military positions for our trillion-dollar elective wars were de-funded and stressed to the limit to make way for corrupt, ravening contractors. Hurricane Katrina cleanup and build-back were expensively outsourced to contractors, who hired migrant labor at bottom dollar, and pocketed the rest. The ticking time bomb of the banks, having been de-regulated as a final act of the GOP Congress under a distracted Clinton, exploded just in time to demand a bailout--or what was left of the taxpayer's money.
Now there is no money left to build back the public sector. We've sold our crushing debt to China, so re-instating trade barriers as a way to protect domestic products and jobs is a good way to get the Chinese to dump the already-weak dollar on the international market.
The infrastructure is crumbling, our schools and universities are in shambles, and the states are bankrupt. A huge percentage of the stimulus money (and jobs) is being sent overseas, because that's where the "Green Economy" manufacturing is.
People with Masters degrees and Ph.D's are having to compete with less-educated but (obviously) more experienced retirees who are going back to work, because their nest egg was lost in the market crash. People with Bachelors degrees are competing fiercely for low-paying manual labor, waitstaff and counter positions.
Meanwhile, universities are cutting back enrollment, courses, and doubling fees to try to fill in the shortfall.
And folks are being urged to "go back to school" to become more "hirable." Because if there's anything we need, it's more in-debt, highly educated, pissed off graduates with no job prospects.
As an educator, allow me to be the first to say that our jobs problem won't be solved with more education. It will only be resolved when we can "raise up the bottom." How or whether we will find the resolve to do that is another question.