Jobs Up
The economy added 163,000 jobs last month, 172,000 in the private sector (25,000 alone in manufacturing) while the public sector lost 9000 jobs.
It would have been 171,000 added, except ConEd did some union busting and fired 8500 workers for not promising to not go on strike. Damn those people trying to get better wages and decent benefits! Don’t they know that wealthy people have gone weeks without another tax cut?!
Now that the jobs report is better than expected, will conservatives continue to focus on that?
Of course not! Not with a 0.1% uptick in the unemployment rate! Who cares if it’s a lagging indicator and reflects what was happening 6-9 months ago, we can use it to make things look worse than we have ma–er, than Obama has made them by obstructing all of Obama’s jobs prop–er, by, um, by being Socialist! Yeah, that’s what it was!
Tell me again, what were all the “jobs” bills forwarded by Republicans? I remember the “jobs” bill in which they said they could “create” a lot of “jobs” by doing away with regulations that would allow companies to pollute heavily without any controls (I guess in the medical care sector, or perhaps funeral homes), but what else did they do? Are we counting all those proposals to slash more taxes for rich people as “jobs” bills?
Anyway, the Republican whiplash reversal on jobs/unemployment in, wait for it, three….
Yeah, I know, 162,000 (or even 171,000) is not fantastic, but again, it’s not like Republicans didn’t do most of the work to bring us this low…
I got one. Or so it appears, beginning Wednesday, If I can keep it. I have to develop Access databases for a division of Sprint that is real estate intense and therefore, legally intense, though the data bases will be tracking technology. I haven’t done that since 2000. So I’m busy this weekend teaching or re-teaching myself Access. This is a newly created position, but I’ll be employed by a staffing firm that specializes in legal staffing (apparently Sprint outsources most, if not all, of it’s lawyers).
I’ll be at the very bottom rung of what passes for the middle class – below my minimum target wage of roughly $26 an hour (servicing law school loans and what not)- but that’s a BIG step up from where I am now. If I can hold the position for six months, I should be able to market myself in technology markets, which are doing okay these days, or move up within Sprint’s framework in a legally related role, or market myself in the legal market. In the mean time I will have health insurance of some type, of which I will probably have to pay a hefty amount, but also dental and optical care insurance. I very dearly need dental care.
This is an incredible event for me. I’m 52 years old (though when I told my coworkers at the call center that I work at that I was that age, they couldn’t believe me – they thought I was 10 years younger than that, I had to show them my driver’s license for them to believe it, so I guess I don’t look or act 52).
I haven’t been gainfully employed in the United States since March 2005. I spent nearly 4 years teaching English in Korea, and the last two working at call centers while living at a friends house in suburban Kansas City.
I did manage to pass the Kansas bar exam last winter. So I finally completed the accrual of my law credentials. Ultimately I need to make more money than this but I think I’ll be able to do this once things get rolling.
If I make it through the first month, I suspect I will be back in the middle class to stay. Times like these, that’s all that matters.
But imagine the credentials I have: I designed state of the art manufacturing (and other) systems for over 14 years. Some were vastly complex yet they almost always worked perfectly when installed, and besides, they were designed for easy maintenance. I’m a talented system designer. In the past, I could normalize a database to 3rd normal form in my head, intuitively (I’ve forgotten how to do that, but hopefully it will come back to me very quickly, and its not the first time I’ve forgotten how to do that). I’ve got above average communications skills, I’ve had users tell me they never understood the requirements statements they were signing off on until I started writing them. I am a natural born project manager. I’ve taken over failed projects and implemented them on shoestring budgets in half time time frames without sacrificing team moral. I have a law degree from a tier one university and am a licensed Attorney. I’m in the top 5% of educated people on the planet.
All those credentials and I’m just barely able to find employment at the middle class level in this economy. I am truly grateful for this development. My gaining employment is a small milestone for this economy. But I wonder and worry about the masses of people who are older than 45, or 40 for that matter, and don’t have the massive credentials that I carry into the job search. Meanwhile, unemployment insurance is falling away for many, Republicans want to repeal Obamacare, and they are stripping food stamps out of the Farm bill, and I wonder how people will survive.
In some ways, ideologically speaking and concentration of wealth speaking, these are perhaps the worst times in America. We have half the population seemingly truly uncompassionate for those fellow citizens that are struggling.
Some of this took place back in the 1930s. Yet when the war came, those people who were too immoral to get a job, somehow were fit to be employed as soldiers or to build armaments. Afterwords, a grateful nation passed the G.I. bill. Does it really take a World War to get half of America to appreciate the struggling working class?