3189040620_a689df6da2.jpg?v=0The US Labor Department figures released today indicate that US employers have cut another 467,000 jobs in the month of June. For all the talk about ‘green shoots’ and ‘turning a corner’, employers are basically taking the position that they are going to survive by cutting personnel costs….again.

Since the ‘official’ beginning of the current crisis in December 2007, the economy has lost a net total of 6.5 million jobs. The unemployment rate is now at 9.5% and the average workweek is now down to 33 hours, the lowest level since records started being kept on this figure in 1964.

labor force figures

“Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the Economic Policy Institute, said that the loss of 6.5 million jobs since the start of the recession combined with the growth of the workforce means that the gains of the previous business cycle have been completely blown away.
"This is the only recession since the Great Depression to wipe out all jobs growth from the previous business cycle, a devastating benchmark for the workers of this country and a testament to both the enormity of the current crisis and to the extreme weakness of jobs growth from 2000-2007," said Shierholz in a statement.”

What the figures mean

Just a couple of days ago, Michael Mandel of Business Week published an article showing that the last ten years have basically been one of job losses, not gains.

Decade into the toilet

“Between May 1999 and May 2009, employment in the private sector sector only rose by 1.1%, by far the lowest 10-year increase in the post-depression period.
It’s impossible to overstate how bad this is. Basically speaking, the private sector job machine has almost completely stalled over the past ten years.”

Here is what he says about today’s Labor Department report:
“1) Manufacturing jobs are falling at their fastest rate since 1946, down -12.2% over the past year.
2) Private sector jobs outside of manufacturing are also falling at their fastest rate since 1946, down -4.0% over the past year.
3) Manufacturing jobs are falling much faster than the rest of the private sector. In fact, the ‘excess’ job decline in manufacturing (the difference between -12.2% and -4.0%) is the largest since 1975.
4) The ten-year job growth in the private sector is down to only 559K jobs. At this rate, we will hit zero ten-year private job growth next month or the month after.”4 unfortunate facts

Let’s see now. If we basically have wiped out all the jobs that were created over the past ten years…and if there really wasn’t any true private sector growth during that period anyway, then we are truly in the s**tter. Krugman is right; if something big, bold and JOB stimulating is not done really fast, we will spend the next decade dribbling along, dying by inches.

When people don’t have jobs, then they don’t have money to spend. If they don’t spend money, the economy falls further. People who have jobs but who are afraid of losing them, won’t spend money either.

I’d like an effective stimulus package, please, because what’s been done so far (as has been discussed here many many times), has been pretty much..worthless – except for pumping money into banks that are now hoarding it. What we needed was a bold package – what we got was a bank bailout package, tax cuts (who spends tax cuts?), and the same crowd that got us into this mess in the first place running the program.

I’m talking to you, Paulson, Bernarke, Summers and Geithner.