Category Archives: Labor

Writing as Microcosm, Part One: Publish and Perish, by John Michael Greer

Posted on November 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

It’s become very difficult to make much money as a writer, and unfortunately, that statement applies to a lot of other professions and occupations as well. From John Michael Greer at ecosophia.net:

’m not sure how many of my readers have noticed the massive realignment going on right now at the foundations of the industrial economy. Venture below the towering abstractions of notional wealth that fill business websites, all the way to the base, and you’ll find that the whole gargantuan structure rests on certain relationships between individuals and the economy. Most people in the industrial world participate in economic activities in two ways: selling their time and labor to businesses as employees, and buying goods and services from businesses as consumers. That’s the base from which the whole tottering mess rises.

What we’re seeing now is that a growing number of people have lost interest in continuing to fill those particular roles. Intractable labor shortages are becoming the norm in today’s industrial societies. Part of that is a function of the soaring number of people who are struggling with bad health just now—no, we don’t have to get into why that’s happening—but not all of it. At the same time, the consumer side of the equation is also collapsing, and stores are floundering as inventory builds up and sales slump. Quite a bit of that is a function of the wicked blend of inflation and recession that’s got the global economy in its grip, but again, that’s not all of it.

You can catch a whisper of what else is going on if you listen to the frequent rants heard from the managerial class these days about how young people just don’t want to work any more. Talk to the young people in question and you’ll find that quite a few of them are working very hard on projects of their own. What they’re not willing to do is waste their lives working in abusive and humiliating environments to make someone else rich, in exchange for rock-bottom wages, no prospect for advancement, and no benefits worth mentioning. That their reaction comes as a surprise to anyone is a good measure of just how detached our society’s comfortable classes have become from the reality their preferred policies have created.

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A Frank Letter to the Homeless Man Under the Bridge, by Paul Rosenberg

Posted on October 31, 2022 | Leave a comment

There may be no more cursed position in American business than having to hire employees. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:

This is a re-post from eight years ago. I still feel the same.

I see you standing here, asking for help, about once a week. You are always polite, and I respect that. I’d like to do something for you… something that would matter long-term. Giving you a few notes or coins now and then may be fine, but I’d really like to improve your situation more permanently.

In other words, I’d like to give you a job.

I used to hire people, and I especially liked hiring people who had been denied breaks. I did that whenever I could. If you and I could be transported back in time, I’d hire you. And I’d feel good about it, because I think having a job would do you a lot of good.

That fact is, however, that I can’t hire you, and I’d like you to know why.

I used to run my own contracting firm. I enjoyed the work and I liked being able to drive past a building and say, “I made that.” Having employees, however, was torture. I liked having them in some ways, of course – I liked the guys and it made me happy to see them take care of their families with paychecks that I signed. That was very gratifying. But it wasn’t enough, and there are three reasons why:

#1: Making Payroll

My first problem was simply cash flow. I was solely responsible for having enough money in the bank every week, and that could be nerve-wracking, especially when customers weren’t paying their bills on time. It’s not fun to think that a family won’t be able to buy groceries if you can’t collect your invoices.

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Posted in Business, Government, Labor, Taxes, Uncategorized

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Thanks to the Fed, You’ll Work More This Year to Keep Last Year’s Standard of Living, by Ryan McMaken

Posted on October 14, 2022 | Leave a comment

Do you have that running-in-place feeling? Having trouble making that last pay check stretch to the next payday? You’re not alone. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:

According to the establishment survey of employment, released last week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, total employment increased, month over month, by 263,000 jobs. The “job market stays strong,” reads one CNBC headline, and the new jobs print was hailed as a great achievement of the Biden administration by MSNBC pundit Steve Benen.

Yet the employment data is possibly the only data that looks good right now, and that’s not much comfort, since employment is a lagging indicator of the economy’s direction. In fact, if we look beyond the employment survey, what we find is an economy where real earnings are falling, savings are falling, and more people are taking on second jobs to make ends meet.

The first indicator of this is the fact that while total jobs have shown some relatively strong growth, the total number of employed persons has been nearly flat for months, and only last month (September 2022) did it finally return to precovid levels. In fact, the jobs recovery in employed persons took thirty-two months to return to the previous peak. The fabled “V-shaped recovery” promised by advocates of covid lockdowns never materialized. Had there been a V-shaped recovery, employed persons would have recovered to previous peaks by mid-2021. It ended up taking about eighteen months longer than that.

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Posted in Banking, Debt, Economics, Economy, Government, Labor

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Opioids @ Work: Hidden Scourge Sapping the Economy, by James Varney

Posted on October 1, 2022 | Leave a comment

It’s hard to hold a job, or to be productive if you do hold a job, if you’re whacked out on opioids. From James Varney at realclearinvestigations.com:

Strung out on drugs half her life, Brandi Edwards, 29, said the longest she held a job before getting sober four years ago was “about two and a half months.”

“I worked at an AT&T call center, a day-care center for a month, fast food places, but I had to take drugs to get out of bed in the morning and when I did show up, I wasn’t productive,” the West Virginia mother of three told RealClearInvestigations. “The first paycheck came along and I was out of there.”

In jail for the ninth time on drug-related charges, and separated from her children, Edwards had an awakening in “looking hard at what I’d lost.” Now clean for four years after rehab, she is married and back in her children’s lives with a home in Princeton, W. Va., and a steady job.

But such success stories are too infrequent to offset the massive cost of the opioid epidemic to the American workforce. Only a couple of people in her former addict circle have returned to productive life, she says, while most are dead or incarcerated.

That toll on labor, haunting America’s working present and future probably for years — if not decades — to come, is largely invisible and underreported because it is difficult to measure, according to physicians, counselors, economists, workers and public officials. But its staying power is suggested by other lasting national challenges, including the porous southern border — a major conduit for smuggled, Chinese-made fentanyl — and economic and social traumas set in motion by the coronavirus pandemic.

In addition to untold years of productivity lost from fatal overdoses, the nation’s labor participation rate has shrunk steadily since 2000. Precise correlation is elusive, but any graph of that decline would stand in sharp contrast to the rise of opioid addiction in the U.S. And while it is difficult to calculate just how much drug use has caused absenteeism, tardiness and stretches of disability, the connection is strong, as Brandi Edwards’ experience suggests.

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Posted in Crime, Government, Labor, Medicine

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Stock Selloff, Collapse of Cryptos, Meme Stocks & SPAC/IPO Zombies Bringing Day Traders Back into the Labor Force? By Wolf Richter

Posted on September 3, 2022 | Leave a comment

The Wall Street party is over and some who thought they had gotten rich quickly are now looking for real work. From Wolf Richter at wolfstreet.com:

Interesting stuff happening in the labor market, suddenly.

Employers added 315,000 workers to their payrolls in August, and 1.13 million over the past three months – solid growth.

Households reported that the number of working people in regular jobs or self-employed jumped by 442,000 in August, after having been essentially flat for months. There have been indications that aggressive hiring by employers pulled some self-employed workers out of self-employment and onto regular payrolls. Hence the sharp increase in payrolls and the more slowly growing overall number of working people.

Wages rose again, but a tad less sharply. The number of unemployed people actively looking for work ticked up from July, but July had been the lowest level since the year 2000 at the peak of the dotcom bubble.

The biggest movements were the jumps in the labor force, in the labor force participation rate, and in the prime-age labor force participation rate, a welcome turn in a labor market pressured by demand for labor and labor shortages.

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Posted in Business, Financial markets, Government, Labor

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Why the Labor Shortage Isn’t Going Away, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on July 20, 2022 | Leave a comment

A lot of people are finding meaningful lives by stepping off the corporate treadmill. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

It’s getting hard to fill toxic low-pay jobs, and that’s not going to change.

The nature of work and the labor market are changing in ways few discern or perhaps are willing to discern because these changes are disrupting the exploitive system they want to remain unchanged. But refusing to discern change doesn’t stop change. It just leaves us unprepared to deal with fast-changing realities.

There are multiple systemic reasons why work and the labor force are changing: demographics, the rigged economy, extremes of inequality, limits of technology and “garbage in, garbage out” lifestyle / health issues.

Demographics. Take a glance at the chart below showing how the population of the U.S. changed between 2010 and 2020. (Chart courtesy of @Econimica). America’s population expanded by 22.5 million, but of this net increase only +1.2 million were under the age of 55; the vast majority– 21.4 million –were 55 or older.

Young people enter the workforce, the elderly retire. The smaller the population of young people, the smaller the workforce. The wrinkle here is that a great many more people 65 and older are continuing to work rather then retire in the U.S., extending their working life. This has stabilized the size of the workforce (around 160 million) even as the population has aged.

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The Strangest Recession Of Our Lifetimes, by Jeffrey A. Tucker

Posted on July 17, 2022 | Leave a comment

There’s a shortage of workers with real hands-on skills and a surplus of Zoomers. The recession will hurt the latter far more than the former. From Jeffrey A. Tucker at The Epoch Times via zerohedge.com:

The evidence of economic weakness and decline fill the headlines day by day, with major banks reporting lower earnings, big box stores with excess inventories, home sales skidding, and consumer sentiment crashing.

Meanwhile, inflation in all sectors is raging so high and hot that it has overtaken every other issue that polls say matter in the lives of average Americans.

This inflationary recession—also called stagflation—is an odd beast in any case. The combination of both purchasing power declines and falling productivity violates not only every modeling presumption made since the Keynesian revolution of the 1930s but also just plain intuition. Higher prices are supposed to signal higher demand and/or tighter supply, not lower demand and higher supply.

So yes, this is strange. We are going to have to get used to it. It’s what happens when the money itself loses its integrity. The whole point of money in the first place—the essence of its economic utility—is to provide a common tool of measurement to facilitate trade and enable accounting. Its emergence permits investors, producers, and capital owners to assess the economic rationality of their actions.

When money blows up and no longer serves as a reliable guide to economic realities, various degrees of chaos ensue. You can feel like you are getting richer when you are really getting poorer. What can seem like profits are really losses. What seems like a hopeful environment can quickly switch to the other direction and become despair.

This is why inflation induces such fear in every sector of life.

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Farm equipment is scarce and pricey. The John Deere strike has farmers worried. By Phil McCausland

Posted on June 29, 2022 | Leave a comment

This is a representative instance of what’s going on out there in the real economy. From Phil McCausland at nbcnews.com, h/t Hardscrabble Farmer at The Burning Platform:

Farmers say they sympathize with the desire for better wages, but they face equipment and parts shortages. A long strike could affect the food supply chain and their bottom lines.

Joel Everett said he was astounded when a lightly used 2009 John Deere tractor sold at his last auction in Strawberry Point, Iowa, for tens of thousands of dollars more than it had cost fresh off the production line more than a decade ago.

Bought new for $109,000, the tractor sold for $143,000 at auction, he said. It’s not an isolated incident, said Everett, who has run Joel’s Tractor and Auction since 1992. A lot of farm equipment, particularly used tractors, is selling for 30 percent to 50 percent more than it was two years ago at his auction house.

“It’s been unreal,” Everett said. “Our last sale was the biggest dollar sale we ever had, and we’re fixing to have another in three to four weeks that’s going to blow that one away.”

Quality farm equipment is getting hard to find amid the supply chain shortage, many farmers and experts said, and its scarcity is driving up prices and raising questions about whether farmers’ harvests and next year’s planting season could be affected.

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Posted in Business, Collapse, Government, Labor, Politics, Technology, Trade

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France: Dangerous for Jews, by Guy Millière

Posted on June 19, 2022 | Leave a comment

In a few decades France will be more Islamic than anything else. From Guy Millière at gatestoneinstitutue.org:

  • [T]he attitude of the French judiciary to [Hadjadj’s] murder is similar to how it has regarded all murders of Jews in France, for decades.
  • First, the authorities always say, as quickly as possible, that the murder of the Jew was not at all motivated by antisemitism. When evidence to the contrary accumulates and becomes impossible to deny, the antisemitic motive may reluctantly be recognized — as with the abduction, torture and murder of Ilan Halimi in 2006; the murder of Sarah Halimi in 2017; and the murder of Mireille Knoll in 2018.
  • That the murderers are generally Muslim further encourages the French judiciary not to speak of antisemitism. In fact, it is almost taboo to speak of any Muslim antisemitism in France: Muslim antisemitism is supposed not to exist. All organizations dedicated to fighting antisemitism target only the “far-right.”
  • The French authorities and mainstream media describe crime, but do not explain it — meaning that crime is rising but not being fought.
  • The French government has declined to document the religion or race of people charged with crimes. Although the refusal may be well-intentioned, it prevents any understanding of what is taking place and consequently any the means of addressing or preventing it.

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Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Crime, Economy, Government, Immigration, Labor, Law, Politics, Propaganda, Religion

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Social Security: Whistling Past The $96 Trillion Graveyard, by Lance Roberts

Posted on June 11, 2022 | Leave a comment

By traditional pension accounting Social Security isn’t just flat broke, it’s deep in the hole. From Lance Roberts at realinvestmentadvice.com:

Social Security has a problem. As Democrats push to expand entitlements to include free preschool and subsidized child care, little attention is getting paid to Social Security is a financial trainwreck.

“The program’s payouts have exceeded revenue since 2010, but the recent past is nowhere near as grim as the future. According to the latest annual report by Social Security’s trustees, the gap between promised benefits and future payroll tax revenue has reached a staggering $59.8 trillion. That gap is $6.8 trillion larger than it was just one year earlier. The biggest driver of that move wasn’t Covid-19, but rather a lowering of expected fertility over the coming decades.” – Stark Realities

Note the last sentence.

When President Roosevelt first enacted social security in 1935, the intention was to serve as a safety net for the elderly. However, at that time, life expectancy was roughly 60-years of age. Therefore, expectations were that participants would not be drawing on social security for very long from an actuarial basis. Furthermore, roughly 16-workers paid into social security for each welfare participant.

Of course, given that politicians like to use government coffers to buy votes, additional amendments got added to social security to expand the participation in the program. Such included adding domestic labor in 1950 and widows and orphans in 1956. They lowered the retirement age to 62 in 1961 and increased benefits in 1972. Then politicians added more beneficiaries, from the disabled to immigrants, farmers, railroad workers, firefighters, ministers, federal, state, and local government employees, etc.

While politicians and voters continued to add more beneficiaries to the welfare program, the number of workers steadily declined. Today, there are barely 2-workers for each beneficiary.

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Posted in Debt, Government, History, Labor, Pensions, Politics, Propaganda

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