Bush/Clinton Economy Adds More Slave Wage Jobs

Note, growth is concentrated in jobs as servants to the wealthy. Excerpt:

. . . manufacturing jobs, which tend to pay more than average, fell by 5,000 in March, after declining in February. Over the past year alone, factories shed 56,000 positions. Construction, another high-wage industry, added only 7,000 jobs in March after gaining an average of 40,000 jobs in the two previous months.

The biggest gains last month were in the lowest paying sectors. These include such categories as restaurants and hotels, retailing, health care, and state and local governments.

Then there's global competition. Because companies in most industries are unable to raise their prices because of the influx of low-priced goods from abroad, they try to hold down their costs as much as possible -- and labor is most firms' biggest cost.

Advances in technology, including the rise of the Internet, have enabled many companies to outsource a number of their jobs, as you know.

[ . . . ]

Finally, there's the shadow labor force. These are the people who have officially dropped out of the workforce over the past six years, bringing the labor force participation rate down from a peak of nearly 68% of the over-16 population, to 66% today.

When you count these folks in, and those who are either working at jobs beneath their skills, or part-time when they would prefer full-time, you can see that there's still lots of competition for jobs.

So, adding into the unemployment rate those who either stopped collecting unemployment and are no longer counted, and those who are working low-paying and/or part-time jobs which can't sustain them, the unemployment rate (or more precisely, the underemployment rate) can then be considered to be rising instead of falling. What is a more important figure than the unemployment rate is the average workers buying power, income relative to cost of living adjusted for inflation. The average U.S. workers buying power has declined for decades, now to the point where the average American would consider the U.S. economy in poor condition even if the official unemployment rate were zero. Meanwhile, the rich are getting richer at an unprecendented exponential rate.