Opinion: Job market not so much to brag about

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January 13, 2022

Volume XXIX, Number 23

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Job market not so much to brag about

by Ken Bonetti

Noticing all the rosy accolades about the job market in the commercial media, one would think the economy is on cloud nine and workers are in hog heaven: “ e job market added a stunning 531,000 jobs last month. e unemployment rate ticked down to 4.6 percent—a new pandemic-era low.”

And:

“Employment gains were particularly strong in restaurants and bars, which added nearly a hundred and twenty thousand jobs.” ese are just a couple of examples of the ecstatic media pronouncements of workers’ deliverance from the COVID doldrums. We all should be popping the champagne corks.

Yet, as many might suspect, reality exists in a di erent universe. First, restaurants and bars are among the lowest paid professions, nowhere near what manufacturing used to pay before millions of those jobs were shipped to China and Mexico under various bipartisan trade agreements since 1994, as low wages, lax environmental and workplace regulations and currency manipulation have priced U.S. workers out of the global market or forced them to accept much lower pay. If we’re gauging the economy on the lowest-wage jobs, we’ve certainly reached the lowest common denominator.

Another job market reality not presented by the corporate media is the true state of “unemployment.” Statistics reported to portray the situation are cherry-picked to paint the brightest possible picture so struggling workers won’t see a systemic problem, but blame themselves instead. e statistic almost exclusively quoted in the media is the U-3 unemployment rate that now stands at a seemingly respectable 4.6 percent. But this measure paints a distorted picture. It excludes discouraged job seekers who stopped looking in the past four weeks and part-time workers who want full time work. It also excludes those toiling at a below subsistence wage. Another measure, U-6, which includes the rst two groups, is almost never reported. Adding workers who don’t earn a living wage, pegged at $20,000, to U-6, the real un-and-under-employment rate was 25.1