Labor Day Without Jobs: Exposing the "Job Creator" Fraud

Monday, September 3, 2012 by Common Dreams
by Paul Buchheit

With cunning and contempt and catechismal fervor the super-rich have argued that all money should move to the top, where it will be used to stimulate the economy and create jobs. But they ignore the facts that prove them wrong. And it doesn't take much to prove them wrong.

1. First, a look at the success of the super-rich: Money has quickly moved to the top
Based on IRS figures, the richest 1% nearly tripled its share of America's after-tax income from 1980 to 2006. That's an extra trillion dollars a year. Then, in the first year after the 2008 recession, they took 93% of all the new income.

Wealth is even more skewed. The richest 10% own 83% of financial wealth, which they've skillfully arranged to be taxed at just 15%, ostensibly because they pump that money back into job-creating ventures. More on that misconception later.

Conservatives claim that wealth inequality has remained steady for the richest Americans. But data from Edward Wolff shows that the excess wealth was simply redistributed among the rest of the top 5%, who saw their share of America's net worth increase by 18 percent from 1983 to 2007. It was also noted by Sam Pizzigati that much of the top-level wealth was socked away tax-free overseas, a fact largely confirmed by a Tax Justice Network study.

2. Corporations are just as successful: profits have doubled, taxes cut in half
While corporate profits have doubled to $1.9 trillion in less than ten years, the corporate income tax rate, which for thirty years hovered around the 20-25% level, suddenly dropped to 10% after the recession. The biggest firms basically said "We're not paying."

That's a half-trillion dollars a year unpaid by the very companies who have successfully convinced much of America that their tax rates are too high.

The tax they actually pay is very low relative to other countries. U.S. corporations paid a smaller rate of income taxes than all but two of the OECD countries analyzed by the Office of Management and Budget and the Census Bureau. A Treasury report agreed, noting that the Tax/GDP rate for U.S. companies was 35% lower than the OECD average from 2000 to 2005.

Corporations even pay less than low-wage American workers. On their 2011 profits of $1.97 trillion, corporations paid $181 billion in federal income taxes (9%) and $40 billion in state income taxes (2%), for a total income tax burden of 11%. The poorest 20% of American citizens pay 17.4% in federal, state, and local taxes.

3. Some Non-Job-Creation Facts
The Wall Street Journal noted in 2009 that the Bush tax cuts led to the "worst track record for jobs in recorded history." 25 million people remain unemployed or underemployed, with 30 to 50 percent of recent college graduates in one of those categories. Among unemployed workers, nearly 43 percent have been without a job for six months or longer.

For the jobs that remain, most are low-paying, with the only real employment growth occurring in retail sales and food preparation. A recent report by the National Employment Law Project confirms that lower-wage occupations (up to about $14 per hour) accounted for 21 percent of recession losses and 58 percent of recovery growth, while mid-wage occupations (between $14 and $21 per hour) accounted for 60 percent of recession losses and only 22 percent of recovery growth.

The minimum wage is shamefully low, about 30% lower than the inflation-adjusted 1968 figure. And the tiny pay can't be blamed on small business. Two-thirds of America's low-wage workers, according to another National Employment Law Project report, work for companies that have at least 100 employees.

All these job woes persist while productivity has continued to grow, with an 80% increase since 1973 as median worker pay has stagnated.

4. So what are the "job creators" doing with all their money?

Over 90% of the assets owned by millionaires are held in a combination of low-risk investments (bonds and cash), the stock market, and real estate. Business startup costs made up less than 1% of the investments of high net worth individuals in North America in 2011.

Perhaps, instead, they're building businesses on their own? No. Only 3 percent of the CEOs, upper management, and financial professionals were entrepreneurs in 2005, even though they made up about 60 percent of the richest .1% of Americans. A recent study found that less than 1 percent of all entrepreneurs came from very rich or very poor backgrounds. They come from the middle class.

That deserves repeating. Entrepreneurs come from the middle class.

Not surprisingly, then, since the middle class has been depleted by the steady accumulation of wealth at the top, the number of entrepreneurs per capita has decreased 53% since 1977, and the number of self-employed Americans has decreased 20% since 1991.

5. Big business is even worse at job creation

First of all, the cash holdings for non-financial U.S. firms increased to $1.24 trillion in 2011, with about 57 percent of it stashed overseas. Commerce Department figures show that U.S. companies cut their work forces by 2.9 million from 2000 to 2009 while increasing overseas employment by 2.4 million.

The top holders of cash, including Apple and Google and Intel and Coca Cola and Chevron, are also spending their money on stock buybacks (which increase stock option prices), dividends to investors, and subsidiary acquisitions. According to Bloomberg, share repurchasing is at one of its highest levels in 25 years.

6. The Big Fraud: Tax us less, and the jobs will come

Despite their unwillingness to invest in jobs, and even in the face of damning evidence against their tax myths, the super-rich fight like wildcats at any suggestion that they support the country that provided their wealth. Way back in 1984, right after the Reagan tax cuts, theU.S. Treasury Department came to the obvious but belated conclusion that tax cuts cause a loss of revenue. A 2006 Treasury Department study found that extending the Bush tax cuts would have no beneficial effect on the U.S. economy. Other sources have confirmed that economic growth was fastest in years with relatively high top marginal tax rates.

Ample evidence exists to show that no relationship exists between the capital gains tax rate and investment. As noted in the Washington Post, "The top tax rate on investment income has bounced up and down over the past 80 years - from as high as 39.9 percent in 1977 to just 15 percent today - yet investment just appears to grow with the cycle, seemingly unaffected." In fact, the low rate may even have a negative effect on growth. A Congressional Research Service report states: "Capital gains tax rate increases appear to increase public saving and may have little or no effect on private saving. Consequently, capital gains tax increases likely have a positive overall impact on national saving and investment."

7. So what becomes of the jobs?

Corporations are hoarding over a trillion dollars. The richest 1% take a trillion dollars a yearmore than productivity-based earnings since 1980. Over eight trillion untaxed dollars is being hidden overseas.

That's a present value of ten trillion misdirected dollars. Just 1/10 of that would create 25 million jobs, one for every unemployed or underemployed worker in America. Or a $45,000 a year job for every college student in the United States.

But the people who call themselves "job creators" do nothing to make that happen.

Happy Corporation Day!

September 5, 2011

Faked Stats, No Jobs

by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

It is Labor Day, 2011, but labor has nothing to celebrate.  The jobs that once gave American workers a stake in capitalism have left and gone away.  Corporations in pursuit of near-term profits have moved labor’s jobs to China, India, Indonesia, Taiwan, South Korea and Eastern Europe.

Labor arbitrage, that is, the substitution of foreign labor that is paid less than its productivity for American labor, has enriched Wall Street, shareholders and corporate CEOs, but it has devastated American employment, household incomes, tax base, and the outlook for the US economy.

This Labor Day week-end’s job report, announced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on Friday, September 2, says zero net new jobs were created in August, a number 250,000 less than the amount of monthly job creation necessary to make progress in reducing America’s high rate of unemployment.

The zero figure is actually an optimistic number. As John Williams (shadowstats.com) has made clear, problems with the BLS’s seasonal adjustments and “birth-death” model during the prolonged downturn that began in December 2007 result in the BLS over-estimating new jobs and underestimating lost jobs.

Seasonal adjustments and the “birth-death” model were designed with a growing economy in mind and result in miscounts during downturns. For example, the “birth-death” model estimates new jobs that are created from new start-up companies that are not yet reporting, and it estimates the job losses from companies that have gone out of business. In a growing economy, start-ups exceed jobs losses, but the situation reverses during downturns or during periods of sub-normal job growth. For the past forty-four months, the “birth-death” model has overestimated the number of new jobs created. When the annual revisions are made to the job reports, the excess jobs are taken out, but it is seldom headline news.

The reason that nearly four years of economic stimulus, consisting of large federal budget deficits and near zero interest rates, hasn’t revived the economy is that the jobs that Americans once had have been moved offshore. Stimulus cannot put Americans back to work in jobs that have been given to foreign countries.

Post-World War II Keynesian economists, such as Paul Krugman and Robert Reich, think that if the federal government would add more stimulus by enlarging the already massive federal deficit, new jobs would somehow be created to take the place of those that have left.  This is a delusion. Not only have the supply chains necessary to support US economic activity been disrupted and broken by offshoring, but also the same incentive–excess supplies of foreign labor that produces more value than it is paid–that sent jobs abroad is still operative.

In a word, the US economy has been de-industrializing, moving from a developed to an underdeveloped economy, for the past two decades.  It has been the case for many years that when the US economy manages to eke out new jobs, they are in non-tradable domestic services, such as health care and social assistance, waitresses and bartenders, retail clerks. Non-tradable employment consists of jobs that do not produce goods and services that could be exported to reduce the large US trade deficit.

The long-term deterioration in the US economy has been covered up by “reforming” the official measures of unemployment and inflation.  The U3 measure of unemployment, the current 9.1 per cent  unemployment rate, only measures unemployment among those who are actively seeking a job. Those who have become discouraged by the inability to find a job and have ceased looking are not counted as being among the unemployed, and the U3 measure makes no adjustment for those who are forced into part-time jobs because there is no full-time employment.

The government knows that the U3 “headline” unemployment rate is seriously understated and provides a broader measure known as U6. This measure, which is seldom reported by the financial media, includes short-term discouraged workers (those who have not looked for jobs for six months or less) and an adjustment for those who wish full time employment but can only find part time work.  Currently, this measure of unemployment stands at 16.2%.

Add long-term discouraged workers. No official unemployment rate includes long-term (more than six months) discouraged workers as unemployed.  John Williams estimates this number and adds it to the U6 measure to produce a current rate of US unemployment of 22.7%, an unemployment rate 2.5 times higher than the official rate.

Similar understatement exists in the measure of inflation known as the Consumer Price Index. In order to reduce cost-of-living adjustments to Social Security checks and to hold down other inflation adjustments, the “progressive” Clinton administration accepted the Boskin Commission’s recommendation to introduce substitution into what had been a fixed, weighted, basket of goods used to measure the cost of a constant standard of living. In the new “reformed” measure, if the price of an item increases, say New York strip steak, the index assumes that consumers switch to a less expensive cut, such as round steak. Thus, the price increase doesn’t show up in the CPI.

Consumers, or a number of them, do tend to behave in this way. However, since the basket of goods comprising the CPI is no longer constant, but changes with price changes, the CPI has become a variable measure of the cost of living that reduces the inflation rate by measuring a lower standard of living.

John Williams estimates the CPI according to the previous official methodology that used a fixed basket of goods. He finds the rate of inflation to be much higher than is reported by the substitution-based methodology.

The understatement of inflation serves to boost real Gross Domestic Product growth. In order to compare how much larger (or smaller) the economy is this year compared to last year, the GDP figure has to be adjusted for inflation.  If the economy grew 5 per cent in nominal terms and inflation was 3 per cent, then GDP grew 2 per cent in real terms, that is, real goods and services, as opposed to mere price rises, increased 2 per cent over the year.

When John Williams  adjusts US GDP with the former or traditional measure of inflation, he finds that there has been no growth in real GDP for several years. In other words, during the period of “economic recovery” the economy has actually been declining.

American economic decline began with offshoring during the Clinton administration. Instead of addressing this threat, the Clinton administration launched the neoconservative program of American Empire with American and NATO aggression against Serbia, sending the Serbian leader off to be tried as a war criminal for resisting the dissolution of his country.

The Bush/Cheney regime elevated the pursuit of American Empire under cover of “the war on terror.” Based entirely on lies and falsified intelligence, Bush/Cheney launched wars against the Taliban, who were unifying Afghanistan, and against Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

In the 1980s Hussein was used by Washington to launch a war against the revolutionary government in Iran that had overthrown the American puppet government, headed by the Shah of Iran.  Ever since Washington lost its puppet rule over the Iranians, Washington has refused diplomatic relations with Iran. In the place of diplomatic relations, Washington demonizes Iran in order to set the country up for another attack a la Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan, and Yemen.  Syria is next.

Saddam Hussein’s service to Washington was overlooked when it became more important to eliminate support for Hamas and Hezbollah, two barriers to Israel’s expansion in the Middle East, than to maintain Washington’s gratitude to an Iraqi pawn.

Despite unequivocal reports from arms inspectors that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and most certainly had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11, top Bush/Cheney regime officials demonized Iraq as the greatest threat to America. The imagery of mushroom clouds from nuclear weapons was evoked, A war was launched entirely on false pretexts that destroyed a country and left over one million Iraqis dead and four million displaced. What Washington did to Iraq is what the Nazis were tried and executed for at the Nuremberg Trials.

Obama was elected in order to stop the illegal and senseless wars.  Instead, Obama both continued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and expanded the wars into Libya, Pakistan, and Yemen. Since the deregulation of the financial system under the Bush/Cheney regime and the “war on terror,” the entire economy of the US has been sacrificed for the benefit of the financial sector and the military/security complex.

Labor Day is an anachronism. It should be renamed Corporation Day or War Day to celebrate the success of Bush/Obama in eliminating labor unions as a countervailing power to corporate power and the elevation of War as the highest goal of the American state.

Labor Day 2011: What Are We Celebrating? The Lack Of Jobs In America?

The Economic Collapse
Monday, September 5, 2011

If you still have a good job, you certainly have something to celebrate on Labor Day 2011.

So far you have survived the decline of the U.S. economy.  But your day may be coming soon.  This weekend, there will be millions of Americans that will not be doing any celebrating.

They are not enjoying a break from their jobs because they don’t have any jobs.  In fact, it seems kind of heartless for the rest of us to be celebrating while so many of our countrymen are destitute.  What are we celebrating on Labor Day 2011?  The lack of jobs in America?

At this point, the U.S. economy closely resembles a gigantic game of musical chairs.  Every time the music stops, even more good jobs are pulled out of the game and even more workers are added.  Once upon a time, if you really wanted a job in America you could get one.  But now the competition for even the most basic jobs is absolutely brutal.  If you gathered together all of the unemployed people in the United States, they would constitute the 68th largest country in the world.  It would be a nation larger than Greece.  All of those unemployed people are not going to be taking trips with their families this holiday weekend.  Instead, most of them are going to be trying to figure out what to do with their shattered lives.

With the economy in such a mess, you would think that someone out there would be suggesting that Labor Day 2011 should really be a day of mourning.  This economic downturn has shredded the lives of millions of American families.

Is there any other crisis in recent years that has had more of an impact on a national level?

On Friday, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that no new jobs were created during the month of August and that the official unemployment rate remained steady at 9.1 percent.

Wait, aren’t we supposed to be in the middle of an economic recovery?

Actually, we need at least 150,000 new jobs or so each month just to keep up with the growth of the U.S. population.  So it seems odd that the economy would add zero jobs but the unemployment rate would not increase.

But that is what the government is saying.

In any event, things don’t look good.  According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the civilian employment-population ratio was at 58.2 percent last month.  This is an incredibly low figure.

In a recent article, John Mauldin explained what would have to happen to return the employment-population ratio to where it was in the year 2000….

The US has roughly the same number of jobs today as it had in 2000, but the population is well over 30,000,000 larger. To get to a civilian employment-to-population ratio equal to that in 2000, we would have to gain some 18 MILLION jobs.

Does anyone have an extra 18 million jobs laying around somewhere?  The following is a chart showing what has happened to the employment-population ratio over the last several decades….

What makes this chart even more startling is that the number of women in the workforce was constantly rising for most of the time period reflected in this chart.  So when you take that into account our current situation is far worse.

For example, back in 1969 95 percent of all men between the ages of 25 and 54 had a job.

Pretty much any man in his prime working years that wanted a job could get a job.
In July, only 81.2 percent of men in that age group had a job.

But that is only part of the story.  Another significant trend has been how flat wages have been.  Average hourly earnings fell 0.1% in August.  Meanwhile, the prices in the stores continue to go up.

In this column, I write a lot about how the middle class is being destroyedin this country.

When you look at the ratio of employee compensation to GDP, it is now the lowest that is has been in about 50 years.  In other words, U.S. workers are taking home a smaller share of the pie than at any other time in modern U.S. history.


But at this point those that still actually do have jobs consider themselves to be the lucky ones.

Tonight, there will be millions of desperate unemployed Americans that will blankly stare at their televisions as they try to figure out how their dreams got flushed down the toilet.

Remember how I mentioned at the beginning of the article that unemployed Americans would constitute a country larger than Greece?  Well, 42 percent of all of those unemployed

Americans have been out of a job for 27 weeks or longer.

What would you do if you lost your job and you were unemployed for half a year?
Would you be able to survive?

In America today, the longer that you are unemployed, the harder it is for you to get another job.  If you have been unemployed for at least one year, there is a 91 percent chance that you will not find a new job within the next month.

Out of sheer desperation, many Americans have taken jobs that they never even dreamed that they would take.

Only 47 percent of the U.S. workforce is “fully employed” at this point.  Right now there are hordes of Americans that are waiting tables, flipping burgers or stocking shelves at Wal-Mart because that is all that they can find right now.

Sadly, this is all part of a long-term trend.

Back in 1980, less than 30% of all jobs in the United States were low income jobs.

Today, more than 40% of all jobs in the United States are low income jobs.

This middle class is being pummeled out of existence, and most Americans don’t even understand what is happening.

It certainly does not help that both the Republicans and the Democrats have stood by as millions upon millions of our jobs have been shipped out of the country.

It also certainly does not help that both the Republicans and the Democrats have stood by as millions upon millions of illegal immigrants have taken jobs away from American citizens.

It also certainly does not help that both the Republicans and the Democrats have stood by as U.S. businesses have been absolutely crushed by mountains of nightmarish regulations and have been taxed into oblivion.

The decade that just ended was the worst decade for job growth in America since the Great Depression.  In fact, even though thirty million people were added to the U.S. population during the decade, there was essentially zero job growth.

Sadly, things look like they are going to continue to get even worse.  For example, the United States Postal Service is in such trouble that it is asking Congress to allow it to lay off 120,000 workers. Overall, the Postal Service wants to eliminate 220,000 positions by 2015.

So is this big speech that Obama is going to give on Thursday going to solve anything?
Of course not.

The reality is that if Obama or any of his advisors had any grand ideas for fixing our situation they would have implemented them by now.

And what is the big deal in making us wait until Thursday to hear these “new ideas”?  Why not just tell us now?

Sadly, the truth is that everything that our politicians do now is about setting themselves up for the 2012 election.

Most likely, Obama is just going to take a bunch of tired ideas that do not work and “spin” them into a grand new plan.

Millions of Americans will actually buy into it.

But it is not as if establishment Republican candidates have anything to offer either.

You know, if Obama wanted to do something substantial, one place to start would be to order the Federal Reserve to stop paying banks not to make loans to individual and small businesses.

But just like all of our other weak-minded recent presidents, Barack Obama is not going to confront the Federal Reserve.

In fact, everything that Obama actually does “for the economy” only seems to make things worse.

As I have outlined before, we know exactly why our economy is losing jobs and we know things that we could start doing right now to reverse the long-term trends that are absolutely killing us.

But Barack Obama is not talking about real solutions and neither are the establishment Republican candidates.

So things are going to continue to get worse.  The number of Americans on food stamps has increased 74% since 2007.  Every month we have been setting a new record.  The middle class is going to continue to disappear as the number of good jobs continues to decrease.

So, no, there are not too many reasons to celebrate on Labor Day 2011.  Our economy is dying and millions upon millions of our fellow citizens are deeply suffering.

Urgent action is required in order to prevent our situation from rapidly getting worse, but right now the vast majority of our politicians are asleep at the switch.

So instead of celebrating this Labor Day, why don’t you say a prayer for America instead?

We really could use it.

Labor Day Needs Protest Marches Rather than Parades

Thursday, August 25, 2011 by RobertReich.org

by Robert Reich, Reich's Blog

 

Labor Day is traditionally a time for picnics and parades. But this year is no picnic for American workers, and a protest march would be more appropriate than a parade.

Not only are 25 million unemployed or underemployed, but American companies continue to cut wages and benefits. The median wage is still dropping, adjusted for inflation. High unemployment has given employers extra bargaining leverage to wring out wage concessions.

All told, it’s been the worst decade for American workers in a century. According to Commerce Department data, private-sector wage gains over the last decade have even lagged behind wage gains during the decade of the Great Depression (4 percent over the last ten years, adjusted for inflation, versus 5 percent from 1929 to 1939).

Big American corporations are making more money, by creating more jobs outside the United States than in it. If corporations are people, as the Supreme Court’s twisted logic now insists, most of the big ones headquartered here are rapidly losing their American identity.

CEO pay, meanwhile, has soared. The median value of salaries, bonuses and long-term incentive awards for CEOs at 350 big American companies surged 11 percent last year to $9.3 million (according to a study of proxy statements conducted for The Wall Street Journal by the management consultancy Hay Group.). Bonuses have surged 19.7%.

This doesn’t even include all those stock options rewarded to CEOs at rock-bottom prices in 2008 and 2009. Stock prices have ballooned since then, the current downdraft notwithstanding. In March, 2009, for example, Ford CEO Alan Mulally received a grant of options and restricted shares worth an estimated $16 million at the time. But Ford is now showing large profits – in part because the UAW agreed to allow Ford to give its new hires roughly half the wages of older Ford workers – and its share prices have responded. Mulally’s 2009 grant is now worth over $200 million.

The ratio of corporate profits to wages is now higher than at any time since just before the Great Depression.

Meanwhile, the American economy has all but stopped growing – in large part because consumers (whose spending is 70% of GDP) are also workers whose jobs and wages are under assault.

Perhaps there would still be something to celebrate on Labor Day if government was coming to the rescue. But Washington is paralyzed, the President seems unwilling or unable to take on labor-bashing Republicans, and several Republican governors are mounting direct assaults on organized labor (see Indiana, Ohio, Maine, and Wisconsin, for example).
So let’s bag the picnics and parades this Labor Day. American workers should march in protest. They’re getting the worst deal they’ve had since before Labor Day was invented – and the economy is suffering as a result.

Ways to Solve the Jobs Problem

Imagine a no-holds-barred "summit" that comes up with ideas to solve both our job and environmental problems. What might it come up with?
by Fran Korten | Friday, September 3, 2010 by YES! Magazine

As the midterm political season heats up, one word on every politician's lips is "jobs." And for good reason. People are hurting-they can't pay their mortgages, send their kids to college, pay their dental bills. Young people are wondering if they have a place in the work world.

So the economic pundits cheer when car sales go up, housing starts rise, consumer confidence strengthens. But as the oily ooze in the Gulf tars yet another beach, we all sense something is terribly wrong. We can't keep tearing up the planet to keep ourselves employed. There must be another way.

So-imagine a no-holds-barred "summit" that comes up with ideas to solve both our job and environmental problems. What might it come up with? Here is my starter list. You can add your own ideas in the comments to this article on the YES! website.

1. More farms, less agribusiness. Agribusiness substitutes chemicals and machinery for labor and employs remarkably few people. Small organic farms are far more productive per acre and bring the people back.

2. More repair, fewer products. Instead of tossing those shoes, that toaster, that computer, let's fix them-and employ repair people in the process.

3. More recycling, less mining. Ray Anderson of the Interface flooring company says we already have enough nylon to meet the world's carpet needs forever. The same may be true for aluminum, steel, copper, and other easily recyclable materials. We just need good systems for recovering them.

4. More renovations, less construction. Our nation has 129 million housing units. We build new ones and let old ones deteriorate. How about renovating what we have and in-filling our cities to use existing sidewalks, gas pipes, water mains, and roads?

"What if we stopped subsidizing advertising with tax breaks and focused on educating people to lead satisfying lives?"

5. More restoration, less destruction. Whether it's forests, Superfund sites, or oil-laced wetlands, it's time to restore. Some restoration can even pay for itself, as in restoration forestry where folks make products from the fire-prone, small-diameter trees normally considered too small to market.

6. More bike paths, fewer highways. They both cost money, but one is good for our health and good for the planet. What's not to like?

7. More local businesses, fewer megastores. Locally owned stores employ more people per goods sold and you can often talk to a decision-maker about your purchase.

8. More dishwashing, fewer throw-aways. What if we got rid of all the disposable containers in fast food restaurants? At my friend Ron Sher's Crossroads Shopping Center near Seattle, the food court vendors share a common crockery supply. No trees needed. It works.

9. More education, less advertising. Let's face it. Advertising is about making us feel inadequate for something we don't yet have. What if we stopped subsidizing advertising with tax breaks and focused on educating people to lead satisfying lives?

10. More clean energy, less fossil fuel. Here we do need new stuff-wind turbines, solar panels, insulation, passenger trains. Politicians are providing some-though not enough-funding for these sources of "green jobs." It's the other items on this list they're not even talking about-but need to.

You may be thinking that my list isn't realistic because these options cost more or depend on government funding. But that's partly because governments subsidize oil, agribusiness, nuclear plants, ports, highways, advertising, and other unhealthy choices.

So the next time you hear a politician talk about jobs, try comparing the solutions offered to this list. By breaking out of the narrow range of options that keeps policy discussions stuck, we can create jobs that not only sustain families, but also build community and restore the living systems of our planet.

Labor Day in a Time of Recession

The Hands-On Workers
By RALPH NADER

What does Labor Day mean anymore other than another day off, another store sale and, in some cities, parades ever smaller and more devoid of passion for elevating the well-being of working people?

Philosopher/mechanic Matthew B. Crawford, in his recent, embracing book, Shop Craft as Soulcraft has a thoughtful consideration. He deflates the high-prestige workplace and makes the case for millions of Americans who still make and fix things with their hands.

“I want to suggest we can take a broader view of what a good job might consist of, and therefore what kind of education is important. We seem to have developed an educational monoculture, tied to a vision of what kind of work is valuable and important — everyone gets herded into a certain track where they end up working in an office, regardless of their natural bents.

But some people, including some who are very smart, would rather be learning to build things or fix things. Why not honor that? I think one reason we don't is that we've had this fantasy that we're going to somehow take leave of material reality and glide around in a pure information economy.”

Dr. Crawford has a PhD in political philosophy and is a mechanic who runs Shockoe Moto, an independent motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Virginia. This gives him a deep sense of skill and broader perspective with which to evaluate these ways of satisfying one’s value of locally-rooted work. He contrasts these traits with the deadening assembly line and computer focused office work, both of which can be outsourced on the whims of a boss.

The Winsted, Connecticut Deck’s Fix-It Shop, operated joyously by an aunt and her nephew, until they retired last year, would have been exhibit A for Dr. Crawford. They fixed hundreds of different products brought to them by the townspeople. Their small shop was filled horizontally and vertically with items donated, about to be fixed or were unfixable by the manufacturers’ design. They could have charged a museum entrance fee for browsing if their shop had more room. Oh, what pride they regularly took in their work.

Electricians, plumbers, carpenters, painters, tailors, car and bike repairers, restorers of stoves, refrigerators, air conditioners, furnaces, locks, windows, sidewalks and streets enjoy a special kind of personal job gratification that is alien to the pre-designed, robotic labors of their friends who come home every day with clean clothes.

I’ve often wondered why the knowledge of tradespeople about the best, middling and worst brands of equipment, products and materials they work with or have to install (such as furnaces) isn’t collected by some magazine or consumer group. After all Angie’s List is surveying what their customers around the country think about the quality of the service.

Along with the repairers, we should recognize the inspectors—millions of them working for government agencies and companies to assure that health and safety laws are observed and quality controls are maintained. They are the meat and poultry inspectors, OSHA and Customs inspectors, sanitation inspectors of food stores and restaurants, motor vehicle inspectors, nuclear, chemical and aircraft inspectors, inspectors of laboratories, hospitals, clinics, building code inspectors and the insurance inspectors assigned to loss prevention duties.

The more conscientious of these inspectors are vulnerable to being over-ridden by their less committed superiors (such as meat inspectors for the U.S. Department of Agriculture) or harassed (inspectors for the U.S. Forest Service on corporately exploited federal timber land.) Sometimes inspectors so commit their conscience to their work that they become whistle-blowers about safety hazards or hanky panky, which too often invites career-ending retaliation.

How little attention we devote to those inspectors who are sentinels for the well-being of the American people. As a result, the courageous are not honored—if only to motivate the young to choose these careers. Moreover, a culture of corruption, that can erode their alertness or burdens them with weak standards to enforce, escapes exposure.

Then there are the near invisibles—the cleaners who do their thankless but essential jobs in hotels, airports, bus and train stations, office buildings, factories, schools, libraries, museums, streets, restaurants and homes.

Strange how we don’t react to cleaners—rarely thanking them or greeting them with salutations. Notice how airline passengers rush past them on the jetway while they wait to clean up the messes under severe time pressure. People who babble incessantly at airports or bus and train stations, while waiting for their departure, ignore the sweepers and dusters, automatically averting their eyes, and almost never acknowledging their work.

Taxi drivers are often tipped and thanked. How many hotel maids, who clean twelve or more soiled rooms and toilets a day, receive any thanks or tips by the guests? Cleaners are among the lowest paid workers, often handle not the safest of chemicals, and receive very little respect or recognition. Their lowly status has to affect their morale and maybe their performance.

Yet what would we do if these workers went on a general strike from the nursing homes to the garbage trucks? We’d feel it a lot more than if the overpaid Wall Street traders went on strike.

One day I was at BWI airport and went to the crowded men’s room. As I entered, the elderly cleaning man erupted in frustration. “I’m sick of this job,” he shouted to no one in particular. “Hour after hour I clean up, come back, see the crap, clean up some more. It never ends,” he wailed. The men who were wiping, flushing, washing, drying and zipping were stunned and silently shuffled out, as if he wasn’t there. I thanked him for his work and candor, calmed him down and gave him a gratuity. The others looked at me blankly as if I was dealing with a ghost they never see as a human being.

Cultures can be astonishing. The hands-on workers who harvest our food, clean up after us, repair our property, look out after our health and safety conditions and serve as nannies to our children receive few honors, status or anywhere near the compensation of those who gamble with our money, entertain us or drive us into wars they don’t fight themselves.

Shouldn’t Labor Day be a time to gather and contemplate such inverted values and celebrate those who toil without proper recognition?

The Stimulus Complex

Hit Me With Your Best Shot
By MARK WEISBROT

This is the worst Labor Day for American labor in decades, maybe since the Great Depression. Unemployment is at 9.5 percent (as of July), and if we add in the people involuntarily working part time or who have given up looking for work, we get 16.5 percent of the labor force. This means that unemployment plus underemployment has risen by about 14.6 million people since the recession began.

How bad does it have to get before the Congress (and the president) decide that we need another stimulus to get this economy moving? The collapse of home sales in July to the slowest pace on record was a reminder that the market for housing is likely to be depressed for years to come. Home prices have another 15 percent to fall to get back to pre-bubble trend levels. Add that gloom to the labor market and no wonder consumer spending has been weak in this recovery.

You know things are bad when the Chairman of the Federal Reserve – trying to calm the markets, as he attempted last week - makes a speech to his fellow central bankers assuring the world that the Fed has more tools in its toolbox of monetary policies if things get more desperate.

But compared with the elected branches of our government, the Fed has done a lot to counteract this recession. It can and should do more – such as raising its targeted rate of inflation - but right now we need Congress and the president to act.

Fears of a double-dip recession, which is a real possibility, are only part of the story. If the economy limps along at the growth of the last quarter – 1.6 percent – or less, and therefore job creation does not keep up with the growth of the labor force, it will still feel like a recession to most Americans. Even people who are employed will be reluctant to spend because of job insecurity. And businesses will hold back on investment; business investment (not including inventories) is still down 15 percent from its pre-recession peak. The technical definition of recession will not matter, except to the National Bureau of Economic Research. Employment is what matters.

Republicans have successfully promoted the idea that we already tried a stimulus and it didn’t help. There are few, if any, economists who would agree. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that between 1.4 and 3.3 million more people were employed by mid-2010, because of the stimulus.

The problem is that there is no stimulus any more, as state and local spending cuts outweigh what little impact remains of federal stimulus on growth. The results of these local budget cuts can be tragic, as on July 20 in San Diego, when a two-year-old child died after a response from emergency medical services was delayed because of fire department cutbacks.

What is the argument against another stimulus? Simply that it will add to our national debt. But what is another few percentage points of debt compared with leaving millions of Americans unemployed, indefinitely, and the risk of a downward spiral that could sink the economy even further? It is better to err on the side of caution – and yes, the side of caution is avoiding the more serious risks.

A national grass-roots non-profit group called Jobs with Justice is organizing a nationwide effort on Sept. 15 to pressure Congress to act. It makes sense to me. Maybe voters should make it a “litmus test” for every Congressional candidate in November: no new stimulus, no vote. If they don’t care enough about our jobs to make a simple commitment like this, they don’t deserve to have a job either.