Ever since it became obvious to rank-and-file Americans that the economy was in recession, much attention has been paid to the jobs report issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics each month.
The details behind the BLS's so-called "headline numbers" have been dissected and compared every which way and back to those of previous recessions. Seasonal adjustment formulas have been slammed and defended. Data from the two surveys that underpin the analyses of the monthly report — of 60,000 households and of 140,000 business establishments — are called contradictory. Upward and downward revisions of data from previous months, as well as previous years, are offered as prima facie evidence that the numbers simply can't be trusted.
All this past criticism, however, will not stop the report from getting plenty of megamedia ink and air time when the February numbers are announced Friday morning. As has been the case for more than a year, expectations are high that the report will finally show hope of the break-out that economists say is necessary if millions of jobless Americans are soon going to start drawing a paycheck again.
The consensus of experts surveyed by Bloomberg puts February job growth at 180,000. But you don't want to know how many times and how badly that consensus has missed the mark in the past two years. In January it missed by 77 percent. Assuming job growth actually does come in at 180,000 for February, and keeps doing so steadily month after month, it will take until September 2014 before as many Americans have jobs as had them in December 2007 when the Great Recession began. Just in time for the next recession to start.
As grim as that prospect is, a report by the National Employment Law Project contains worse news. Of the 8.84 million jobs that were lost in the recession, 1.3 million have been regained. But what kind of jobs? According to the NELP study, conducted by Annette Bernhardt and Christine Riordan:
In the private sector, there is a striking imbalance between where the recession’s job losses occurred, and where the growth of the past 12 months was concentrated:
• Lower-wage industries constituted 23 percent of job loss, but fully 49 percent of recent growth
• Mid-wage industries constituted 36 percent of job loss, and 37 percent of recent growth
• Higher-wage industries constituted 40 percent of job loss, but only 14 percent of recent growth
The current recovery looks worse than the “jobless” recovery of the 2001 recession, on several fronts:
• After a year of positive job growth, the private sector after the 2001 recession had recovered almost half (47 percent) of the jobs it had lost. By contrast, to date the private sector has recovered only 14 percent of the jobs it lost during 2008 and 2009.
• The early job growth following the 2001 recession was more balanced than the early job growth following the 2008 recession, with significantly more growth in higher-wage industries.
Some of these trends are specific to the causes of the Great Recession (the collapse of the housing bubble and the financial crash). Others reflect long-standing shifts in the economy (such as the overall decline of manufacturing), as well as standard cyclical behavior (such as the surge in temporary jobs early in recoveries).
A sustained analysis of the dynamics driving core sectors of the economy will be critical in the months and years ahead.
More than three years since the Great Recession began and 20 months after it ended — according to the arbiters of such matters — the U.S. is still afflicted by all the chronic problems it faced before the acute crisis struck, including wage stagnation and off-shoring of jobs as well as still-growing inequalities of income and wealth. On the one hand, government intervention saved the domestic car industry and hundreds of thousands of jobs that would have been otherwise lost, but on the other hand, new workers in that industry are being hired at far lower rates and receive far lower benefits than their predecessors.
The questions raised by the NELP report are crucial. Are the disturbing trends it has uncovered just blips that will disappear in a year or two? Or are we seeing yet another element in a race to the bottom that squeezes everybody but the top tiers of society ever tighter?