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No Rest for the Working Class
By Brett Bogus
Jul 10, 2013
One
of the interesting things I
find about any given week is the news media's obsession with
unemployment
figures that come out on Thursdays.
If
the number is lower, then we hear proclamations about a recovery and
how well
everything is progressing. If
the number
is higher or the same, we hear about how it could be worse or about how
there
was some mitigating circumstance and to wait for the better number the
next
week. While first
time unemployment
claims are important, I think there's an equal amount of weight and
concern
that should be placed on the already employed, the newly employed, and
the
state of their employment.
While
the unemployment rate hovers
steadily over 7.5%, the increased job numbers we continue to see come
across
are a result of a few different situations occurring.
First, some corporations are seeking to
avoid
paying for Obamacare, so they're splitting up their workforce. The full time employee at
one location might
now be asked to work twenty hours at one place and fifteen at another,
effectively keeping them as part time for the purposes of insurance
coverage. This also
inflates the job
numbers: this person isn't doing a new job, nor did they get hired into
a
second one, but the corporation reports it as a new employee when it
isn't. Second, some
places are reducing
their full time employees with layoffs or cuts to hours in an attempt
to curb
costs. Worse, some
places are foregoing
hiring employees at all for lower level positions, choosing instead to
hire
temporary workers.
More
depressingly for the working
man, wages have only barely kept up with CPI increases over the last
several
years, leading to cuts in leisure and luxury spending and potentially,
in some
cases, to cut backs in important areas of personal spending, such as
food or
auto maintenance. This
simply reinforces
the news stories about how little access the American middle class has
to
emergency funds and how precarious it can be to live check to check. This also explains why
fewer Americans are
holding individual stocks, stock mutual funds, or stocks in their
401(k) or IRA
than at any time since the turn of the century.
This, in turn, is why Americans are so
drastically behind on getting set
up for retirement - to the tune of half a million dollars short, on
average...
Read
the rest of the article at
Townhall Finance
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