Employment – Page 8 – The Wrongologist

The Pant Suit vs. the Pant Load – Jobs, Part Infinity

We are in a time when a presidential candidate’s personality counts for more than the candidate’s policies. Candidates obfuscate on most policy issues and the media lets them get away with absolutely outrageous declarations of near-facts or outright half-truths.

One policy we must make them nail down explicitly is their jobs policy.

The key to making America great again is adding more jobs. Wrongo is a pest on this subject, but without more jobs, growth in GDP is harder to achieve. Tax revenues are more difficult to grow. People who are idle get into trouble.

The Pant Suit and the Pant Load know this, so they will talk from here to November about adding manufacturing jobs back to cities that lost them starting in the 1970’s. Those jobs are never coming back, but both of them are working hard to convince you they can do it. Consider this, from Parallel Narratives:

We’re now being told by folks who know better that all we need to do to bring those jobs back, to resurrect a future we can believe in, or make America great again, is to elect the outsider politician who is not beholden to elite interests like banks, CEOs and politicians. Unfortunately, that horse has left the barn, those jobs are gone for good…

A great example of a politician braying the “I can bring jobs back” mantra was in Sunday’s NYT business section’s column, “Preoccupations.” In it, a young couple had the option to work from home, so they moved from Austin, TX, that hot-bed of tech, to South Portland ME, not so techie. They work for two different firms from two home offices. Then, they are invited to attend a funds-raiser for a gubernatorial candidate: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

The candidate raising campaign funds was a hard-working lawyer who seemed genuinely well meaning, but no one had told him that his economic platform of protecting manufacturing jobs and Maine’s traditional industries wasn’t going to fly with an audience of health care professionals, programmers, web designers and researchers…We muttered to each other that this guy didn’t have a place in his platform for people like us, many of whom worked for employers in other states. Our checkbooks stayed in our pockets.

If you hear this kind of BS from the Pant Suit or the Pant Load, your checkbook should also remain hidden.

While the low-wage jobs problem has been around for more than 40 years, America’s politicians are still peddling the same solutions. In fact, a new analysis from the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) released Monday shows that only 88% of men ages 25 to 54 are participating in the US workforce. The CEA reports that the US has the third-lowest labor-force participation rate for “prime-age men” among the world’s developed countries. We have done so well that, on a percentage basis, Greece, Slovenia and Turkey all have more men working than the US does. Greece! The decline is concentrated among less educated. Here is a chart:

Male Labor Force Part by Edu

More than 95% of men used to work in 1964, regardless of their educational attainment. Today, you better have at least a bachelor’s degree if you want to be sure you will get a job. But it is worse than that. The CEA said:

In recent decades, less-educated Americans have suffered a reduction in their wages relative to other groups. From 1975 until 2014, relative wages for those with a high school degree fell from over 80% of the amount earned by workers with at least a college degree to less than 60%.

Clinton and Trump would have you believe that the problem is bad trade deals with China, the TPP, or immigration. Trump in particular, is saying that the political elites have knowingly caused this all at the expense of the American worker. There is a modicum of truth to that, but it is the American corporation and the American tax code that is closing out US jobs, and hammering the middle class. American corporations now pay about 11% of our total US taxes, down from about 30% of US taxes in 1960, as jobs (and markets) have moved abroad.

What are the Pant Suit and/or the Pant Load going to do in the face of advancing automation now facing us not just in manufacturing, but also in the service and knowledge industries?

It is time to make the candidates talk about this on the campaign trail.

The basic policy choice we have is to put people to work, or to continue to allow the profit motive to dominate. If the profit motive remains supreme, we will continue our relentless drive to reduce labor costs — by eliminating jobs, or by paying workers less for the same work.

To date, our leaders have chosen the latter path, and we have reaped the results. We have become a land of spreadsheets and flags.

Can the GOP Edge in the Primaries Carry Over?

(Note: There will not be a Sunday Cartoon post again this week. Wrongo and Ms. Right will be in Santa Barbara CA for our granddaughter’s college graduation. Blogging will resume on Tuesday, 6/14)

In 2008, the Republicans turned out a total of 20.8 million votes in 45 Primaries. In the 2016 primaries, the Republicans grew that total to 28.6 million votes.

The Democrats have 27.7 million primary votes in 2016, before the DC primary. When Clinton and Obama ran against each other in 2008, they had 37.4 million votes.

So the GOP is up 7.8 million votes or a 37.5% increase over 2008. The Democrats are down nearly 26% or, 9.7 million votes. The parties were separated by only 900,000 votes by the end of the 2016 primary season, and the GOP was on top.

The question to ask the pundits: What does the Republican increase in primary voter turnout by almost 8 million, and the Democrats’ vote shrinking by almost 10 million mean for the general election?

We could talk about the populist turn in 2016. The electorate is rebelling against the establishments of both parties. We could point to the insecurity about jobs, social security and pensions for the 98% of America who know these things are no longer certain in today’s America, and are even less certain in tomorrow’s America. These have made the Bernie promise of free education, Medicare for all, and a break-up of the banks very popular with Millennials. Trump has understood the economic fears of the white middle and lower classes, and has added fear of Muslims, fear of Mexican immigrants and a longing for a simpler world where America was unchallenged, and the 40-hour work week was nearly a right, to be the aspirational standard for tomorrow’s America.

We could talk about Hillary Clinton and the enthusiasm gap. In 2016, Hillary has garnered 15.7 million votes, and she will win the nomination. In 2008, she received 18.1 million votes, 2.4 million more than she got in 2016, and lost. This time around, she was not facing one of the best retail politicians of the last 100 years in Barack Obama, and no one thought that Bernie was real competition, until he was.

So, America is now at a point where, for the Pant Suit vs. the Pant Load, these numbers really begin to matter. Let’s remember that primary turnout doesn’t necessarily translate into a reliable indicator of the turnout in the general election.

Also, over half of the GOP turnout was for candidates other than Trump. Voter preference may change significantly for the general election.

This election will be true to previous form and will be decided in just a few states: Ohio, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Virginia and Pennsylvania will likely decide the outcome. Obama won all but NC in his 2012 race against Mitt Romney.

Assume that Hillary will win the majority of blacks, Hispanics, other ethnic minorities and many white women. The biggest question is: What percentage of women will vote for Hillary? If Trump peels off enough, he may be able to win in a few of those states.

So, turnout will be key. As an example, Charlie Crist would be the current governor of Florida if just 50% of the African American voters who were registered Democrats, had voted in the last gubernatorial election. In just in one (populous) Florida County.

The gap in the primary voting numbers are a good indicator that the GOP primary voters were more enthusiastic than were Democratic voters in 2016. However, the Democrats were very good at “Get out the Vote” programs in 2008 and 2012. Can Donald Trump match that in 2016?

Hillary starts with better odds of winning since the Democrats have an Electoral College advantage. Romney won 206 Electoral College votes. He lost Colorado, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia each by between 150,000 and 250,000 votes. So, it’s conceivable that the enthusiasm for Trump in these states combined with less enthusiasm for Hillary could give him an Electoral College victory.

OTOH, Trump can’t change who he is. He’s not going to go toe to toe with Hillary on wonky policy details. So, he’ll continue the campaign that won him the primary in the general.

Will Pant Load fatigue set in? It hasn’t yet.

The Pant Suit vs. the Pant Load – Jobs

The 90% know they’ve gotten the short end of the stick for way too long. Now, with the bad May jobs report that came out last Friday, there is concern that our seven-year recovery, which has not helped everyone, may not last a lot longer.

So, a quick review of the numbers: The BLS reported that the economy had added 38,000 jobs in May, the lowest since September, 2010. Furthermore, the April job gains of 160,000 were cut by 37,000, while the March job gains of 208,000 were cut by 22,000.

So, with 59,000 jobs revised away, and with only 38,000 jobs “created” in May, the net total in today’s report was a net loss of 21,000 jobs in the last 3 months. We haven’t seen this since the 2008 Financial Crisis. And the labor participation rate dropped for the second month in a row, to 62.6%, which doesn’t bode well for the future either.

But the true bad news was that the number of temporary jobs also fell by 21,000. Temporary employment is a predictor of future employment trends, both on the way up, and on the way down.

The temporary-help sector has been the best thing about the economy; we reported in March that more than 100% of the jobs created in the US since 2005 were temp or contracting jobs. The temporary jobs sector peaked in December 2015 at 2.94 million, and has lost 63,800 jobs since then:

Temp Jobs 2006-2015

Wolf Richter thinks that the decline in temporary workers isn’t just a one-month statistical blip, but a five-month trend, and that the sector has become a warning sign that the labor market could be heading towards deeper trouble. From Richter:

This also happened in 2007, when the temporary help sector started shedding jobs even as the overall economy was still adding jobs until right up to the official beginning of the Great Recession. And it happened in 2000, before the 2001 recession kicked in.

We lost nearly 8 million jobs in the Great Recession. Since 2009, the economy has added 14.5 million new jobs. But if we subtract the 8 million jobs lost during the recession, our net job growth was 6 million added, while our population grew by 16.5 million.

Now, not all of the growth in population is a person currently looking for a job. The big contributors are immigrants (both legal and otherwise), and births. Most of the immigrants want work, but they are the smaller fraction of our population growth, while infants, toddlers, and young children do not need access to employment just yet. The Boomers are trying to stay employed and not retire, while Millennials have moved into the workforce.

All of these groups are jostling for jobs. If US job growth can’t accommodate them, their individual situations will get worse, even while the overall numbers might look acceptable on paper.

So the questions for the Pant Suit and the Pant Load are:

Do they think that the lack of GDP growth and our lack of jobs growth is politically sustainable? How long could it go on without seeing pitchforks in the streets?
Where are the jobs going to come from?
What will they do if the jobs fail to materialize?

Hillary Clinton has the bigger problem, since she is presenting herself as the heir of Obama’s (and earlier, Bill Clinton’s) economic policies. She has to play defense on the economy. Trump can jump on the bad data, saying he can fix it, and many people will accept that uncritically.

But don’t count on hearing either candidate say anything that you think is useful. They will look for, and fail to find, “market” solutions to this dilemma created by the “market.”

And market solutions are what they will tell us we must wait for.

Pant Suit vs. Pant Load, Part III

(Note: this week there will be no Sunday Cartoon Blogging, since Wrongo will be visiting MA and PA through Sunday, returning on Monday.)

Wrongo and long-time blog reader Terry engaged in a short email dialog on how to “fix” the US political system. We were concerned that there is no individual Congressperson accountability. A backbencher can follow an agenda that can imperil our nation (and a few have done just that) without consequence.

But in America, accountability is managed by election district. Your only alternative is to round up enough votes to replace poor representation. So, if you wanted to reform the impact that money has in our politics, or the way the filibuster works in the Senate, you have to reform Congress.

Yet, under our Constitution, only Congress can reform Congress. And today, there are three parties vying for control of it, and since they rarely are willing to work with each other, not much gets done. So you can completely forget about Reform.

And the parties have not been willing to deal with the not-so hidden desperation in America that shows up in statistics like increasing opioid addiction and suicide rates. The political class ignores how lethal the US economy is for the less fortunate: The New York Times reported this week that US death rates have risen for the first time in a decade.

The increase in death rates among less educated whites since 2001 is roughly the size of the AIDS epidemic. One reason is the use of opioids. And, despite Mr. Obama’s speech in Elkhart, IN where he said our economy is doing well, there has been a spike in suicides to levels higher than during the 2008 financial crisis.

The little people know that the economic policies followed by both parties have brought income inequality to Gilded Age levels. They know that all of the post-crisis income gains have accrued to the top 1%. Unlike in China which continues to grow, our economic expansion has brought with it high unemployment and underemployment, particularly among the young.

As a result, people feel powerless. In fact, a RAND survey in January found that 86.5% of GOP voters who strongly identified with the statement “people like me don’t have any say about what the government does” were Trump supporters.

And, since so much of politics is about corralling money into the bank accounts of our politicians, your Congresspersons have no intention of listening to you unless you have given at least $10,000 to their campaign fund, or are the CEO of a major employer in their district or state. In US politics, money=speech. But, there is little meaning to free speech without free access to influence the political process.

Many of us feel nihilistic about our politics and our government. So the Pant Load’s support seems a lot like a form of public political vandalism where The Donald is the can of spray paint.

Most people can see that a large portion of Americans are poorer with each new election cycle. After all, the reason Trump (and Sanders) are doing well is because many, many workers are seeing their job security, income security, and retirement security all go up in smoke. That’s no mystery, just the natural outcome when the government fails to represent the people in favor of the rich who fund their campaigns. It’s no wonder the Pant Load is easily corralling the frustrated.

But can the Pant Suit reverse the Democratic Party’s abandonment of the working class in America?

We know that she needs to focus on drawing more potential working class and young supporters, but so far, Democrats are content to run only in their municipal strongholds, following a strategy of stitching together interest groups, largely in states with big urban populations.

Energizing people around the fact of our corrupt political system is both a way to get higher turnout, and a way to elect members of Congress and state legislatures to fix the corrupt system. That is Bernie’s message, what he calls a “political revolution.” But Sanders is not the person to bring this about. Consider Sanders just the messenger.

Strategically, the Pant Suit needs to figure out how to get folks energized enough to vote for her and against Trump for reasons that don’t so paralyze them with fear that they stay home. If she is successful, it could be the start of re-establishing the New Deal coalition, and a re-installation of the principles of the civil rights movement.

That’s a huge job that will not be completed in one election cycle.

This threat is the GOP’s worst nightmare. They have worked for 40 years to eliminate these ideas, so expect the GOP to unanimously support the Pant Load:

COW Never Hillary

The Bernie Dems will rally behind Hillary for similar reasons.

Trump/Arpaio 2016: Because immigrants are the greatest threat to the nation.

Will Take-Home Pay Grow?

One of the big questions that we must force Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to address is: Where will growth in take-home income come from?

If we look at pay, despite recent improvements, real average hourly earnings have declined since the 1970s:

Real Hourly Earnings 2016

Source: Advisorperspectives.com

At the same time, the average hours per week have trended down from around 39 hours per week in the mid-1960s to a low of 33 hours at the end of the last recession. It is 33.7 hours today. After eight years of economic recovery, it is only up by 42 minutes.

So, take-home pay has stagnated (or worse) for the average American since the Nixon administration. People have coped by having both spouses work, by borrowing under a Bank of America heloc, and by refinancing mortgages when interest rates declined.

But, by 1995, spousal participation in the job market had peaked, at about 60%. Borrowing under home equity lines of credit peaked in 2005 at $364 billion. These loans that were used to pay for remodeling, education costs, or new Ford F-150s were less than half of that amount in 2015, at $150 billion.

After the Great Recession, The only remaining way to boost household cash was mortgage refinance. There were windows to refinance a mortgage in 2009, and again in 2013. The reason was that mortgage interest rates stayed very low. In fact, US 10 year treasuries were at a 60 year low in 2013 at 1.50%, and mortgage rates are tied to the treasury rate. Refinancing mortgages can happen to many people, this is where companies like Polar Mortgage come in to help homeowners out. Homeowners also have the ability to get financial help from the government through the use of federal credit union home loans in order to refinance their homes.

As an example, a 1.5% decline in a mortgage payment on a $250,000 house would save $3750 a year, or a little over $300 a month added to the pockets of the average hourly worker. Taking income tax into consideration, it would take an additional 17.5 hours of work at the $21.45 rate to equal that amount. But that’s not practical. It would require a 52% increase in hours, if you are working the national average number of hours, which isn’t going to happen.

So, if the Federal Reserve raises interest rates, as they seem set to do this month or next, mortgage refinance will no longer be helpful to the vast number of working people. CoreLogic tracks the interest rates on outstanding mortgages, collecting data from mortgage servicers. Their data track the volume of outstanding mortgages by interest rate level for both the number of mortgages, and the unpaid principal balance on those mortgages (UPB).

Their analysis says that few mortgages will be refinanced if rates go up: Most borrowers have mortgages with rates below 4.50%, with 62% of mortgages and 72% of UPB in this range. There are an additional 14% of borrowers and 13% of UPB with mortgage rates between 4.5 and 5.0%.

Since refinancing has costs (legal, title search and insurance, and points), a simple rule of thumb is to add 1% to the current mortgage rate to get a rate at which borrowers would have a financial incentive to refinance. The current Freddie Mac mortgage rate is 3.57%, so the point of indifference for a borrower would be ~4.5%. CoreLogic estimates that only about 28% of the UPB of America’s outstanding mortgage loans are worth refinancing today. And should the Fed live up to their plan, and increase rates by ½% in 2016, an additional 5.5 million borrowers will lose their incentive to refinance.

So, if mortgage rates rise in 2016 as predicted, refinancing won’t improve the financial situation for very many of us.

New Deal Democrat sees all of this and says:

So the bottom line is, we are already in a period…where real gains by average Americans won’t be available from financing gimmicks, but must come from real, actual wage growth. At the moment I see little economic or political impetus to make that happen, even though average Americans understand via their wallets the issue all too well.

We’ve killed our economy.

You’d think after 8 years where most US job growth was in part-time jobs, where hourly income is at the same level as in the Ford administration, where we have the most people ever in poverty, where student debt exceeds credit card debt and automobile debt, people would catch on.

Maybe, but not unless we demand real answers of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and not let the candidates say the plan is to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Are Underwater Car Loans Sustainable?

The auto industry has had a spectacular run since we bailed them out in 2009. We saved it because the auto industry is crucial to the US economy and jobs. Auto sales have accounted for 21% of total retail sales so far in 2016.

The trickle-down effect is huge, from transporting new cars via truck and rail to financing and insuring them, and collecting the tax revenue they generate for state and local governments, sales of cars generate lots of jobs and money for our economy.

But the seven-year boom may be near its top.

Take underwater car loans: Bill wants to buy a new car. His current car has a trade-in value of $20,000. But he owes $25,000 on it because when he bought it new a few years ago, he financed it for 84 months to keep the monthly payment low. He also asked the dealer to roll the amount for tag, title, and license fees into the loan, along with the $2,000 he was upside down on his trade. So he buys a new $30,000 car that now costs $35,000. He may consider financing this with car title loans near me, or he may have other options he can take.

The car is financed with a 4% interest rate loan. If Bill took a five year loan, he would start accumulating positive equity-where the car’s market value becomes greater than its loan balance-midway in the fourth year. However, there are loans that might be able to help for example those that are similar to Ikano Bank VISA as well as looking loans before they take them out. If he took an eight year loan instead, he would be $9000 underwater at the same time, and won’t start accumulating any positive equity until the end of the seventh year:

Positive Equity

Source: Money Sense

So just how big is the problem of negative equity? Since 2011, the number of vehicles traded in with negative equity has ballooned by 37%, and underwater auto loans now account for a record 31% of all vehicles traded in:

Underwater Car Loans

(Chart by Chad Champion, at Bonner & Partners):

One reason negative equity is rising is that lenders have extended the duration of car loans to keep monthly payments affordable. If a customer has a lower monthly payment, she/he’s likely to owe more than the vehicle is worth for a longer period. Bloomberg reported that the percentage of car loans that are longer than six years was 29% in 2015, up from just 9.6% in 2010.

Growth in loans to subprime borrowers is also driving growth in auto sales. Experian Automotive reported last month that poor credit consumers (subprime) now make up a record 20.8% of the new auto loan market – more than one in five new auto loans are going to subprime borrowers. We remember subprime from the housing fiasco of 2008. Subprime is back, but not yet causing alarm bells to ring.

Subprime borrowers pay higher rates: Average rates for subprime loans were 10.36% in the fourth quarter of 2015 while the poorest subprime borrowers averaged 13.31%. At the same time, new car buyers with excellent credit paid 2.7% interest.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has noticed the problem. In its most recent Semiannual Risk Perspective, the banking regulator warned: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Underwriting practices and weak loan structures in auto lending are most concerning in banks with high concentrations to try Auto Finance Online. Strong auto loan growth alone does not pose systemic risk…Even as banks have increased capital levels, auto loan portfolios represent greater than 25% of capital at about 15% of banks.

The OCC worries that the rapid growth of auto loan balances are not a problem per se, but the “extended durations of loans caused by lengthening maturity schedules” and the rising loan-to-value ratios are a concern. Together, they “create a longer period of time that banks and consumers are in a negative equity position.”

This is what happens when the players in the auto sales game, both the manufacturers and financiers game the system to front-load sales and profits, thus paving the way for an eventual reckoning.

And here is the other issue: When we export manufacturing jobs to places such as Mexico (who now manufactures for Ford, Chrysler, GM, VW, Toyota, Nissan, Mazda, and Honda and exports 70% of the cars it manufactures to the US), we lose the purchasing power of all those people who used to have jobs in the US auto industry. So corporate America’s solution is to make credit cheap and easy so that working stiffs can leverage themselves even more in order to buy a new car. Obviously, some loans are needed at certain times in peoples lives, if you are looking at how to get a loan there are many websites that can give you a guide.

To be sure, the car buyers are culpable, but the system relies on foolish people to go deeper into debt in order to fuel the system.

Impressive boom to possible bust ? this show is brought to you by corporate America, with support from the Federal Reserve.

The Revolution WILL Be Televised

There is a lot of talk that the 2016 election is the start of a political rebellion in the US. We see the large, enthusiastic Sanders/Trump crowds, and the candidates’ relative success with winning primary elections, and have to ask:

Will it remain a political rebellion, one that expresses itself through the electoral process?
Will it continue beyond the 2016 election, assuming an Establishment candidate wins?

It began with the failure of the US economy to add permanent jobs for the middle class, and the lower classes after the Great Recession. Our column outlining that all jobs created since 2005 were temporary or contractor jobs showed that people are living paycheck to paycheck, but fewer have benefits, and all are afraid that they could be out of work with any personal or economic hiccup.

And wages are not rising the way corporate profits are, as this chart shows:

Corp Profits to HH income

So, fewer jobs as an employee, and no change in household income. More risk, no more money. Life for the average person in the US is harder and more frightening for a large group of people. Maybe they are not yet a critical mass of voters, but there are enough angry people that the Establishment political machines may be disrupted.

Since many see the worsening of the life of the middle class to be permanent, there is little reason for hope if you are on the fringe of our society. So, we’re watching that play out in the 2016 electoral race. People are finally getting tired of one or the other of these two campaign pitches:

We are the greatest nation on earth, but only if we elect candidate X, because candidate Y will ruin us
Or, you can’t have a good job with dignity, or good schools, or ask us to address any other of our serious problems, because we can’t afford it and people won’t pay more taxes

And as Gaius Publius says, there’s no other way to see the Sanders and Trump insurgencies except as a popular rebellion, a rebellion of the people against their “leaders.” On the Sanders side, the rebellion is clearer. Sanders has energized voters across the Democratic-Independent spectrum with his call for a “political revolution,” and that message is especially resonant with the young. From The Guardian:

Analyzing social survey data spanning 34 years reveals that only about a third of adults aged 18-35 think they are part of the US middle class. Meanwhile 56.5% of this age group describe themselves as working class.

Fewer Millennials (who number about 80 million in the US) are describing themselves as middle class. The number has fallen from 45.6% in 2002 to a record low of 34.8% in 2014. Ms. Clinton will need to rely on Sanders supporters falling in behind her – and faced with the prospect of a Trump presidency, many may do so. She also intends to try to win over “moderate” Republicans, assuming that the Bernie voters have nowhere to go.

That might work, since as Benjamin Studebaker says, Clinton is arguably closer to the Republican establishment than are Trump or Cruz. In fact, the Democratic and Republican establishments are both closer to each other than either is to its own anti-establishment wing. Consider that Clinton and the Republican Establishment both:

Support the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership (TPP)
Support immigration reform
Support foreign aid
Oppose Medicare for all
Oppose tuition free college
Oppose a $15 minimum wage

It would not be unreasonable for moderate Republicans to conclude that Clinton is closer to their ideological needs than are Trump or Cruz. Clinton may play for the other team, but at least she’s in their league.

The Establishments of both parties have no vision when it comes to solving income stagnation for the 99%, or solving our crippling health care cost increases, the trade treaty fiasco, and the military establishment’s continued sucking of more and more money from our budget.

These cumulative burdens will break people’s belief in a better, more secure future. Either policy changes are enacted by the next Establishment president and Congress, or things could start to come unglued.

Which means that for almost every one of us, this could be the most consequential electoral year of our lives.

So, the Establishment wings of both parties need a Monday wake-up call. Here to rouse them from slumber is Iris DeMent with “Livin’ in the Waste Land of the Free”:

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

100% of Jobs Created Since 2005 Were For Contractors or Temps

And that’s why so many Americans are scared. Neil Irwin in the NYT’s Upshot brought us the bad news that 9.4 million new jobs created during the period from 2005-2015 were temp jobs or contracting jobs.

What’s worse is that those jobs add up to more than 100% of the jobs created by the US economy during that period. That means there was an overall decline of about 400,000 in people working as employees for an American corporation during those 10 years.

The news is based on a study by labor economists Lawrence F. Katz of Harvard and Alan B. Krueger of Princeton that found that the percentage of workers in “alternative work arrangements” — including working for temporary help agencies, as independent contractors, for contract firms, or on-call — was 15.8% of total employment in 2015, up from 10.1% a decade earlier. More from Irwin:

By contrast, from 1995 to 2005, the proportion had edged up only slightly, to 10.1% from 9.3%. (The data are based on a person’s main job, so someone with a full-time position who does freelance work on the side would count as a conventional employee.)

This raises bigger questions about how employers managed to shift much the burden of providing our social safety net to workers, and about the economic and technological forces driving the shift.

The change has profound implications for social insurance. More so than in many advanced countries, corporations in the US carry a large share of the burden of providing their workers with health insurance and paid medical leave when employees are sick. US corporate employers pay for workers’ compensation insurance, and for unemployment insurance benefits for those who are laid off.

These are part of the government-sponsored safety net in other countries.

In addition, US employers help fund their workers’ retirement, formerly, through pensions, but now more commonly, through 401(k) plans. These are also part of the government safety net elsewhere.

While the Affordable Care Act has made it easier for independent contractors to get insurance, there’s little doubt that these workers are now carrying more of the financial burden of protecting themselves from misfortune than they would have shouldered with a more traditional company-employee relationship.

Perhaps most significant, the implicit contract between an employer and an employee is that there is a relatively high bar for firing employees. If the economy turns down or business slows, a contract worker is far more likely to be out of a job or out of the job faster, than a conventional employee.

This is a large factor in the growing job insecurity we see since the Great Recession.

Moreover, the study shows it was likely that companies caused this shift in terms of employment, not employees who were looking for more freedom and flexibility. If 2005 to 2015 had been a period when workers had a lot of power in the job market that might have been plausible, but it wasn’t. More from Irwin:

The unemployment rate was above 7% for nearly half of the period, from the end of 2008 to late 2013. Employers had the upper hand. That suggests it’s more likely that employers were driving the shift to these alternate arrangements.

So, companies took advantage of the weak job market since the Great Recession. In addition, improvements in technology have enabled the shift. New technology allows remote measurement of how successful each worker is, regardless of their location, and it allows the employer to monitor contractor progress, giving the company the power it needs to move to contracting, or to a temp workforce.

Making employees into contractors benefits only the employers, not the workers, and it may help explain the disconnect between the anger and insecurity we see on the 2016 presidential campaign trail, and the clearly positive employment and economic news we’ve seen each month for the past few years.

Both are true, and that has profound implications, both politically and economically, for the next 10 years. A big question for the next decade is whether the rise in temp employment was a one-time shift, or whether it will continue in the years ahead, even in a tightening labor market.

At risk is whether employer-provided social insurance that has been a backbone of the 20th-century American middle class economy will still be with us in the 21^st century.

And if the shift to contracting continues,and we become more of a 1099 nation, it is a certainty that we will see a growing populist, anti-corporate electorate.

Free Trade’s Double-Edged Sword

The Bernie Sanders win in Michigan is chalked up to his attacks on trade agreements, in particular, the Trans Pacific Partnership that resonated with a broader audience than his attacks on Wall Street. Along the way, Donald Trump has been plowing the same ground, talking about how America is losing jobs to Mexico and Asia.

So the question is, are we seeing a political backlash against trade? Can Sanders or Trump gain sufficient political traction to win with this issue? And can we blame trade for losing jobs to China and elsewhere?

Jared Bernstein in Monday’s New York Times made an excellent point: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

The economic populism of the presidential campaign has forced the recognition that expanded trade is a double-edged sword. The defense of globalization rests on viewing Americans primarily as consumers, not workers, based on the assumption that we care more about low prices than about low wages.

When you hear politicians speak about free trade, they talk about cheaper products. They sidestep the terrible impact on American jobs, they sidestep the concern that many, many jobs have been lost through free trade agreements. The free trade deals have also exacerbated the loss of union power, which means fewer (and lower paying) jobs, fewer hours, and poorer benefits, including pensions.

The trade topic is obviously a huge driver of Trump’s and Sanders’s appeal. It is a problem for Hillary, since she was for the Trans-Pacific Partnership before she was against it.

Despite being on opposite ends of the political spectrum, the two populists are using the same message: The government, both political parties, and business are working at cross-purposes with the needs of the American people. In a democracy, populism is a warning sign that government has been disconnected from its citizens. Consider that while Americans lost at least 4 million jobs, corporate profits are up, and the 1% has gotten much wealthier.

It’s true that off-shoring is good for the global economy. Chinese people working to make iPads are richer than they were, but it’s not a win-win situation. It’s more of a win-lose, where Chinese workers win relatively big, while American workers lose medium.

Another problem is that workers directly impacted by trade have little power or influence in their firms or the country as a whole. In the US, exports only make up about 13.5% of GDP. But in Sweden, Denmark or Germany, exports are north of 40% percent of GDP. And these countries, with far fewer natural resources, have robust social safety nets in addition to high wages. And as Bernstein says:

The real wage for blue-collar manufacturing workers in the United States is essentially unchanged over the past 35 years, while productivity in the sector is up more than 200%.

Why? Because governments in these other countries stress building high-skill industries that compete based on producing high value-added products, while low-skill industries that compete based on exploiting their employees are discouraged. This is called having an industrial policy, which encourages business to meet government priorities. In America, we are against having industrial policies, because it sounds like socialism.

Bernstein points out that the free trade negotiation process has been captured by investors and corporate interests:

According to the Washington Post, 85% of the members of the outside committees advising the administration on the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership were from private businesses and trade associations (the rest were from labor unions, NGOs, academics and other levels of government).

And that’s the world we live in. Business is driving most of the decisions that our politicians make, ensuring that whatever is enacted is primarily good for business, and secondarily, if at all, for We, the People.

And in the world we live in, free trade has significantly boosted wages and quality of life for overseas workers and has helped lift millions of Chinese and other Asian citizens out of poverty, while our middle class, a prerequisite for our stable society, has been hollowed out.

Yet, America’s plutocrats and politicians push for even MORE free trade.

The current election cycle may horrify the “political establishment,” of both parties, but it was preordained by their bought-and-paid-for politics.

Americans have a real gripe. They don’t see, or care about the benefits to Chinese and other third world workers that lower or stagnant wages at home help to provide. The Bernie win in Michigan and Trump’s success in the GOP primaries show people are super pissed off.

Our political parties better start coming up with ways to mitigate the trade and wage problem before someone like DonDon actually succeeds in becoming president.

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Employment