Category Archives: Economy

Community, Economy, Infrastructure, unemployment

We Have Unemployed Workers, a Need for Public Works, and Money at the Top to Pay For It. Now We Need Political Will…

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Decaying infrastructure costing families $3,100 a year, engineers warn

By Jon Schmitz 

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Jan 16, 2013 – A leading organization of engineering professionals issued another warning Tuesday about the condition of the nation’s infrastructure, saying that current investment trends threaten millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in economic activity.

A report commissioned by the American Society of Civil Engineers said under-investment stretches across the spectrum of American infrastructure, including roads, bridges, power lines, water and sewer systems, ports and waterways.

"Deteriorating infrastructure has a cascading effect on our nation’s economy," said Gregory DiLoreto, ASCE president. "If we don’t invest now, all Americans will wind up paying more in the long run."

While the report, "Failure to Act: The Impact of Current Infrastructure Investment on America’s Economic Growth," was filled with figures in the millions, billions and trillions, one smaller item might resonate more: The spending deficiency will cost the typical household $3,100 a year by 2020 if present trends continue, it said.

Continue reading We Have Unemployed Workers, a Need for Public Works, and Money at the Top to Pay For It. Now We Need Political Will… →

budget crisis, Economy, Green Energy, Green Jobs, unemployment

The Myth of the Job Creator

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[Editor’s Note: Not only is increased demand in the form of increased purchase orders the real spur to new hiring, it’s also important that the demand be targeted. Increasing demand for goods produced in China at Walmart, for example, will create jobs in China. But if we increase demand for domestic goods and services by building local infrastructure such as the ‘Smart Grid’ and other clean and green energy projects, then much of the demand will be for increased local labor and local goods.]

By RP Watkins
Beaver County Blue via Daily Kos

The popular notion of the so-called “Job Creator” is a myth. Yet the very idea of Job Creators represents the most basic argument in the Supply Side story, a concept which postulates that economic growth requires expanding the means of production. The term Job Creator has been repeated and spun so frequently on Capitol Hill and across America, almost exclusively from Conservatives, that it has become accepted wisdom that job growth is determined by the means of production, the supply-side of the economy. It is not.

The reason is so stunningly simple and basic that it’s almost entirely invisible by politicians and pundits alike. This is because contrary to the supply-side mantra, most businesses are unwilling to expand hiring unless the new jobs are justified by sufficient Market Demand. It is for this reason that the popular supply-side policies of tax cuts and credits have done little to stimulate domestic hiring. If anything businesses have converted the government largesse of lower taxes into enhanced profitability, with little in the way of new jobs materializing.

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Economy, labor, unemployment, Youth and students

Snapshots of Ourselves, the Working Class

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Who are the 23 Million ‘Underemployed’ Workers?

By Heidi Shierholz
Beaver County Blue via EPI.org

Nov 28, 2012 – The number 23 million is often loosely used in public debate to mean the number of people “looking for work.”

But who does this number count and not count? First, it includes 12.3 million people who meet the official definition of unemployment: jobless workers who are actively seeking work.

Second, it includes the 8.3 million workers who are working part time but who want and are available for full-time work (“involuntary” part-timers).

Third, it includes the 2.5 million people who want a job and are available to work, but have given up actively seeking work (“marginally attached” workers). These three groups together—23.1 million strong—make up the group commonly referred to as the “underemployed.”

Who is not counted in that 23 million? Workers who are underemployed in a “skills or experience” sense (e.g., a mechanical engineer working as a barista). Unfortunately, there is no official measure that counts people who are underemployed in this way.

The figure below shows how the number of “underemployed” workers has evolved since 2000. The number of underemployed workers increased over the weak business cycle of 2000–2007 from 10.0 million in the fourth quarter of 2000 to 13.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2007. It then shot up in the Great Recession to a peak of 26.9 million in Oct. 2009 before modestly improving to its current level.

Economy, Environment, fair trade, Green Energy, Marcellus Shale, Wall Street

Exporting Gas And Oil Will Not Erase The Trade Deficit

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Western PA as a Case in Point

US trade deficit 2012

By EMS News
Beaver County Blue via Culture of Life News

The US continues the program of selling commodity raw materials while importing manufactured goods.  This futile trade deal is also not working because always, the value-added labor that goes into production is lost when a country trades this way.  If a country has a small population and lots of raw materials, it can get rich doing this but not a country with 350 million people.  Even Saudi Arabia, due to making birth control illegal, has a rapidly growing population that is eating into oil export values and soon will erase it entirely.  Japan, with half the population of the US, is seeing its trade decline, too.  While importing energy due to Fukushima.

The trade deficit was hardly mentioned during the last election.  It is as if it doesn’t exist.  Even though it is the core problem within our economy, one that has been papered over, literally, by the US printing trillions of extra dollars.  Inflation has been kept down due entirely to trade partners holding excess US dollars in FOREX accounts overseas.  But the US is desperate to generate some funds to cover the river of red ink flowing through our economy so of course, we do this by exporting lumber, gasoline, gas and oil as well as other primitive commodity products.

Naturally, this doesn’t plug the giant hole in our economy! Nonetheless, DC pundits and politicians tell us gravely, we must do this more and more and eventually it will fix things. Here is the latest delusional story from DC misleading people about the trade deficit: Natural gas exports: A boon to the economy – The Washington Post

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Economy, Green Jobs, Manufacturing, unemployment

Worker-Owned Businesses Might Be Answer to Unemployment in City of Reading, PA – and Elsewhere

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Street scene in Reading

Concept means employees have stake in success of companies

By David Mekeel
Reading Eagle

Oct 27, 2012 – With poverty high in Reading, city officials are willing to try just about anything to create decent-paying jobs.

Friday afternoon, they heard a pitch for an idea that has worked elsewhere and might be just right in Reading.

Seattle-based filmmakers Melissa Young and Mark Dworkin, in town for the Berks Arts Council’s seventh annual Greater Reading Film Festival, were the featured guests at a lunchtime roundtable session focused on employee-owned businesses.

Young and Dworkin have created a documentary on the subject titled, "Shift Change: Putting Democracy to Work," which will be screened during the festival.

The film, and Friday’s discussion, centered around the concept of community-first businesses, in which employees have a real stake in the company.

"If the business does well, they do well," Dworkin said. "There’s an incentive to work hard, not to shirk off."

Employee-owned businesses can take many forms, Dworkin and Young said.

Some have no management structure at all, with decisions being made by consensus. Others have professional management, with an elected board of employees overseeing their decisions.

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Economy, Green Energy, Green Jobs, Infrastructure, unemployment

So You Want to Create Jobs? Study This…One Graphic, 10,000 Words

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Jobs are created by enhancing DEMAND, not cutting taxes. Study this for starters…

Economy, Environment, Green Energy, Green Jobs, Manufacturing, trade unions

PA Gamesa Worker on Tour Calling on Congress to Save Clean Energy Jobs

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Area Leaders Join Touring Worker Facing Furloughs to Call for Renewal of the Production Tax Credit to Save 37,000 American Jobs, Ensure U.S. Can Compete in Global Clean Energy Industry

By Blue-Green Alliance

PITTSBURGH (September 25, 2012) Local labor and environmental leaders today joined a furloughed worker from wind turbine-maker Gamesa at the Energy Innovation Center in Pittsburgh to call on Congress to support an immediate extension of the Production Tax Credit. The lack of action on the 2.2-cent per kilowatt-hour tax incentive for wind energy — set to expire at the end of the year — was directly blamed by Gamesa for their decision to institute furloughs at two plants in Pennsylvania, including the plant of Ryan Motel, a United Steelworkers Local 2635 member who is currently on furlough.

“My job is at stake, but so are the jobs of many others,” said Motel. “If companies aren’t building wind farms because they’re not sure what their return on their investment will be, they aren’t buying our blades. My message to Congress is simple: end this uncertainty, save my job, and save the jobs of thousands of people like me across the country.”

Gamesa employs approximately 900 workers in the U.S., with 800 of those jobs in the state of Pennsylvania. Earlier this summer, 165 workers at two plants — in Fairless Hills in Bucks County and Ebensberg in Central Pennsylvania — were given notice that they were being furloughed due to lack of demand and the company attributed that directly to lack of certainty on the fate of the Production Tax Credit

Motel will join other workers in the wind industry in Ohio, Virginia and Michigan to call on Congressional leadership to bring the Production Tax Credit up for a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The American Wind Energy Association estimates that the Production Tax Credit will allow the wind industry to grow from the current 75,000 jobs to 500,000 jobs by 2030. Extending the Production Tax Credit through 2016 would increase total wind-supported jobs to 95,000, with total wind investment growing to $16.3 billion. However, without an extension, America stands to lose 37,000 jobs.

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2012 Election, Economy, Manufacturing, trade unions, unemployment

Obama Auto Bailout Saves More than Auto Jobs in Our Region

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It’s Not Just About Cars

When President Obama took the bold step of saving the U.S. auto industry, he didn’t just save auto assembly jobs. He saved American manufacturing, including 350,000 USW jobs that are part of the auto supply chain.

All About Jobs

The auto rescue helped millions of Americans and Steelworkers from all over: the single mom making axles in Indiana. The lifelong paperworker in Wisconsin making high-glossy paper used in auto catalogs. The kid just out of high school hired into the tire plant in Ohio. The police officer in small town Pennsylvania. The list goes on and on.

Change Delivered

Mitt Romney says he would have let the auto industry fail — let us fail. President Obama believed in us. Saving the American auto industry was courageous. It was politically unpopular. But it was the right thing to do.

Economy, Right Wing, unemployment

What Romney Economics Means: Working Class Men’s Wages Have Plummeted Over the Past 40 Years

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By Kevin Drum
Beaver County Blue via Mother Jones

July 31, 2012 – Dylan Matthews says a bit more today about something I mentioned briefly a couple of weeks ago: among men, wages haven’t just stagnated over the past few decades. They’ve plummeted: [1]

    As you can see on the black line in the above graph, median earnings for men in 2009 were lower than they were in the early 1970s. And it gets worse. The decline shown above is actually too mild, because it doesn’t take into account the massive exodus from the workforce of men since that period. Between 1960 and 2009, the share of men working fulltime fell from 83 percent to 66 percent, and the share not making formal wages tripled from 6 percent to 18 percent. When you take all men, not just those working fulltime, into account, the slight decline in the second graph becomes a plummet of 28 percent in median real wages from 1969 to 2009. ‘

    ….High school dropouts’ earnings have fallen 66 percent since 1969, and people with some college – the median level of education in the US – have seen earnings fall by a third. Reasonable people can disagree about what caused this massive decline and what should be done to fix it. But it’s a major crisis….

This decline in both male employment and male wages has been going on for 40 years now, and as Dylan mentions, it’s far worse at the bottom of the ladder than at the top. Male high school grads working full time earn 25% less than they used to, and if you account for those not working or working only part time, aggregate wages are down by nearly half.

Half! And that’s for high school grads, not dropouts. (And the picture changes only modestly if you add health benefits to the wage picture.) These are men who basically played by the rules, got their diploma, and then went into the workforce. Or tried to, anyway. But they’re finding it far harder to find steady, full-time work than their fathers did, and when they do they earn dramatically less than their fathers did. So I’ll repeat what I said the last time I wrote about this: if you want to understand why marriage has declined among the working and lower middle classes, you have to understand what’s happened to male wages. It’s not the whole answer, but there’s simply no way that it’s not a big factor.

Source URL: http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/07/working-class-mens-wages-have-plummeted-over-past-40-years

Links:
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/31/wages-arent-stagnating-theyre-plummeting/

Economy, GOP, Infrastructure, Right Wing, safety net, social security, unemployment

A Sensible "Deal for All" Challenges the Dreaded "Simpson-Bowles" Cutbacks

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Photo: Cardboard image of Jamie Dimond, JP Morgan’s ‘Simpson Bowles’ Advocate.

By Carl Bloice
Beaver County Blue via Black Commentator

‘The real losers would be seniors, sick poor people, the unemployed, and people with disabilities.’

July 26, 2012 – A highly placed journalist spoke up boldly over the weekend on behalf of the country’s serious people, "those of us who crave a little common sense," who are feeling a bit of "despair," right now because the nation’s capital has become "a sludge pit of dysfunction." This state of affairs, wrote New York Times former executive editor. Bill Keller, could be attributed to "Republican cynicism, Democratic fecklessness or presidential disengagement."

"Talk to any credible economist, wire any serious politician to a polygraph, and you will hear at least 80 percent agreement on what is to be done: investment to goose the lackluster recovery and rebuild our infrastructure, entitlement reforms and spending discipline to lower the debt, and a tax code that lets the government pay its way without stifling business, punishing the middle class or rewarding sleight of hand," wrote Keller in the Times July 21. The problem, he asserted, is the failure of the responsible people to come up with a "grand bargain," the outline of which is pretty much summed up in (a little drum roll here) our old friend, the magic elixir; "Simpson-Bowles."

It just won’t go away. Its promoters continue to use a nonexistent "Simpson-Bowles" report from the failed Presidential deficit reduction commission as the code for what a powerful group among the nation’s political and economic elite want to enact by hook or by crook, whether we the people want it or not.

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